A Cathedral of the Modern Age

Leningradsky Station, on Moscow's so-called Ploshchad Tryokh Vokzalov, or Three Stations Square, might not leap to mind as an architectural landmark. But along with Moskovsky Station in St. Petersburg, Leningradsky Station is Russia's oldest. It turns 150 next week.

Konstantin Ton (1794-1881), one of the most controversial figures in the history of Russian architecture, designed Leningradsky (originally, Sankt-Peterburgsky) and Moskovsky stations as a pair. He built Leningradsky Station on Kalanchyovskaya Ploshchad in what were then the distant outskirts of Moscow.

Ton is perhaps best known for his churches, particularly for his behemoth Christ the Savior Cathedral in downtown Moscow, razed in 1931 by Stalin, then rebuilt in the mid-1990s. Ton was never a favorite of Russia's liberals. His building projects were seen as promulgating state ideology, summed up in a famous slogan ?€” "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality" ?€” coined by Sergei Uvarov, education minister under Nicholas I.

This ideology, considered reactionary by much of the intelligentsia, consisted of loyalty to dynastic rule and the Russian Orthodox Church, and glorification of the Russian motherland. As a result Ton came in for harsh criticism from the left, but he was little troubled by it. He let his buildings do the talking.

Ton received his education at the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts, from which he graduated with distinction. From 1819-28, Ton resided abroad, mostly in Italy, where he studied classical architecture and undertook several restoration projects. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Ton was invited by Alexei Olenin to work for the tsar. Thanks to Olenin, Ton received his first commissions, building churches for the garrisons in St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo.

These churches Ton built in a new style, which he dubbed "Byzantine with traditional Russian elements." But in fact, this new style was manifested only in the decorative elements of Ton's creations, which all observed strict neoclassical rules of composition and proportion.

During his career Ton built more than 20 churches, mostly in and around St. Petersburg. But he undertook his most ambitious project in Moscow in 1838, when construction of Christ the Savior Cathedral began. At the same time Ton was building the immense Bolshoi Kremlyovsky Dvorets, or Great Kremlin Palace, and the Oruzheinaya Palata, or Armory, in the Kremlin.

Christ the Savior Cathedral was finished in 1883, two years after Ton's death. Many Muscovites complained that the huge church disrupted the old Moscow skyline.

One aspect of Ton's work was little criticized, however. He introduced a new genre in Russian architecture: the railway station. And his most famous stations ?€” Leningradsky and Moskovsky ?€” stood at the termini of Russia's first rail line connecting the two capitals.

The railroad line itself was built by Nikolai Kraft, Dmitry Zhuravsky and Pyotr Melnikov over 11 years, and the first train arrived in Moscow from St. Petersburg on Aug. 16, 1851. On board were the emperor and two regiments of his royal guard in four cars. The journey took 21 hours and included only one unforeseen incident. An overzealous railway worker painted a stretch of the rails with white paint, considering that the color of bare metal was unseemly for the emperor's train. When the train became stuck on the wet paint, the soldiers actually had to push the train until it cleared the painted section.

These two stations consist of a rectangular neoclassical building and tower, decorated with elements taken from various epochs. Leningradsky Station features baroque elements that remind passengers arriving in Moscow of the city they left in the north, St. Petersburg. Dominating the whole are Gothic/Renaissance double arches that line the ground floor, which Ton "rediscovered" as a "traditional Russian feature" in the 1830s. In fact, the double arch belongs to the late-Gothic period and traveled to Russia with the Italian architect Aristotle Fioravanti, who deployed it at the end of the 15th century in the entrance to the Kremlin's Assumption Cathedral. The double arch soon became a familiar feature of Russian buildings. Ton was the first to marry neoclassical norms with traditional Russian features.

As time passed, the old station proved inadequate to handle increasing traffic. In the 1960s Soviet architects modified it, adding unsightly structures of brick and glass to house a new passenger hall and, inevitably, a bust of Lenin, erected here to commemorate the arrival of the first Soviet government in Moscow on March 11, 1918.

Similar changes were made to Moskovsky Station at the same time, including the bust of Lenin. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Lenin was replaced by Peter the Great.

Sergei Nikitin welcomes readers' comments at postmodernidze@imail.ru.