The plans to renovate these two public spaces share a single underlying idea: to take a Soviet-era icon, milk its nostalgic potential and turn it into a space for young progressive types. Gorky Park still bears the marks of its Soviet architectural grandeur — like its massive colonnaded archway of an entrance and sculptures of sporty Soviet youngsters, including the restored Girl with an Oar — and likewise still bears the name of the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky. Nonetheless, its hybridisation is more or less complete: Soviet-era tunes on the ice-skating rink coexist with free wifi; old-school funfair favourites like strength testers and cotton candy compete for customers with bike rentals, Asian take-out and open-air screenings of edgy European films. The overhaul at VDNKh, now again known by its Soviet-era name, is just beginning. The grand Stalinist pavilions — this was once the Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy, after all — have been cleared of the cramped shops that mushroomed unchecked in the 1990s, but what will happen next is unclear. Which proportions of Soviet to hipster will win out? The answer seems elusive even to two of the men tasked with designing VDNKh’s new “concept” — Ilya Tsentsiper and Yury Saprykin, leading figures behind the influential lifestyle magazine Afisha and major contributors to the transformation of Gorky Park. Some liberal-minded Russians have gone so far as to reproach the pair for conjuring up a non-existent Soviet paradise and fuelling a “phantom nostalgia” among young people — making them pine for some “wonderful” country they’ve never seen.

Cheap comfort food: Kamchatka Bar

Moscow has so many eateries with USSR-nostalgia themes that the local version of TimeOut publishes overviews of new “Soviet” establishments at least once every six months. Today’s Russians seem to have forgotten the days of universal shortages, but vividly remember the taste of the Stolichny potato salad their mothers used to make for holidays. This quirk of memory about the era of so-called developed socialism is used to great effect by today’s food-business capitalists. The recipe for success is relatively simple: an unmistakably Soviet interior, which visitors associate with familiar home cooking and casual get-togethers involving vodka, and menus based on The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food — the wildly popular, official culinary bible of the USSR (10 editions, over 8 million copies sold, published under the supervision of Stalin’s trade minister Anastas Mikoyan).

Of particular note among the general run of neo-Soviet establishments is the reasonably priced Kamchatka Bar, opened by Arkady Novikov, owner of Russia’s largest restaurant syndicate, right across from the fashionable TsUM department store in the very centre of Moscow. The Soviet aesthetic of riotous drunkenness, accompanied by “tasty and healthy” snacks, has found favour with the first post-Soviet generation. Every night, crowds of hipsters come to Kamchatka to get sloshed and, if they’re lucky, trade blows with someone as well, honourably continuing the traditions of their fathers and grandfathers.

Disappointed dissidents: Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent

In 2010, Russia’s most famous female writer published a novel about Soviet-era dissidents — she had been one herself — and about the generation of the late 1970s and early 1980s more broadly. In the book, set for release in English in April, Lyudmila Ulitskaya argues that the Soviet government had a corrupting influence on all of society, including its adversaries.

It is largely for this reason that the dissident movement as a whole — leaving aside the heroism of specific individuals, like the handful who went out onto Red Square in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — turned out to be powerless and consequently useless when circumstances changed. In the 1990s, and especially under President Vladimir Putin, dissidents lost all their influence in society and were unable to inspire a sufficient number of young followers for whom democratic values were truly important.

Ulitskaya’s position amounts to a complete rejection of Soviet rule — not only in its totalitarian and imperial manifestations, but also in its “socialist” aspects, like free (albeit not the best) medicine and education, and its state backing of culture. Hers is a stance that gets less and less popular with every day.

Illusions have their limits: Dark Side of the Moon vs Life on Mars

In 2011, state-run broadcaster Channel One Russia decided to undertake a bold experiment, commissioning director Alexander Kott to make an adaptation of the popular British TV show Life on Mars. (The Russian version takes its name from the Pink Floyd album, wildly popular in Russia, instead of the song by David Bowie, who is far less known here.)

The British original delves into the now popular idea of a “new past”. The premise is simple: for those of us alive today, the middle of the 20th century (even the 1970s) is as full of relics as the middle of the 19th. And not just in terms of technology but, above all, in terms of people’s views about life and morals and their general understanding of what’s acceptable and what’s not. In the show, a modern, politically correct police officer — burdened with rules and perhaps slightly naive notions about equality under the law, presumptions of innocence, refraining from physical force and the like — finds himself in the brutal world of the 1970s police force, where anything is fair play.

Transferring this conceit to the Russian-Soviet reality proved impossible: the reputation of Russia’s modern-day police — cruel and corrupt — more closely resembles notions about the British force of the 1970s, while their precursor, the Soviet militsia, seems quite law-abiding by comparison. In other words, to achieve an effect comparable to its British prototype’s, the Russian adaptation would have had to switch eras in the opposite direction: an “exemplary” Soviet officer finds himself in the cut-throat world of today’s Russia.

As a result, the clashes at the heart of the show were reduced to purely technical differences — forensics, equipment, etc. The programme didn’t prove too popular.

Life imitating art: Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt’s Daughter Russia

In 2008, the Kandinsky Award — one of Russia’s most prestigious art prizes — went to painter Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt for a series of works entitled Daughter Russia: 15 sizeable canvasses in red and black paint on gold leaf with images of shaven-headed athletes marching on Red Square, a Kremlin star, a sniper on the Ivan the Great Bell Tower (the Kremlin’s tallest), the Parthenon, the Coliseum, a Soviet fighter jet. Belyaev-Gintovt is known not only as an artist whose work idolises imperialist Stalinist aesthetics, but also as the stylist of the Eurasian Movement, a political-ideological grouping headed by Alexander Dugin, as extreme-right traditionalist. The awarding of the prize to Belyaev-Gintovt sparked a public outcry. People in the audience shouted “Disgraceful!” and a slew of art critics penned outraged articles. But it turns out the jury had been right to award the prize to Belyaev-Gintovt: after all, even in the prosperous and relatively liberal years of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, he was able to predict the neo-Soviet course — with its great-power ambitions and imperial aesthetics — upon which the country would embark with Putin’s subsequent return to the Kremlin.

“For the first time in my adult life I am in agreement in almost every respect with the policies being carried out in my country and I have no desire to resist anything or to thumb my nose behind anyone’s back. On the contrary, I am ready to come to the aid of the state,” the artist declared in an interview in 2008. Six years later, Russia’s policies have reached complete agreement with a series of Belyaev-Gintovt’s posters in which a young woman wearing a traditional Russian kerchief and armed with an axe and a Kalashnikov rifle confidently declares: “Sevastopol is a Russian city!”, “Our boots are sacred!”, “We will take back everything!”

Phantom nostalgia: Ksenia Buksha’s Freedom Factory

This year, the National Bestseller prize was awarded to Ksenia Buksha for her novel Freedom Factory, which one might call a declaration of today’s phantom nostalgia. This is genuine Soviet-style “industrial prose”. The story of a large Soviet factory, the work is permeated by bitter sorrow for a lost Soviet universe.

Meanwhile, the author of the book is 31 years old. In other words, this nostalgic industrial novel was written by a person whose own Soviet past was limited to her preschool years, and who is quite deeply involved in a completely different — capitalist — economy (Buksha started out as a business reporter).

One cannot say that the author of Freedom Factory uniformly idealizes the Soviet government: she never lets her readers forget that the “freedom” proclaimed in the context of the “Soviet project” is actually coercion. But, she writes, it was something one could come to love and to live in as one’s only home — that same kind of home you leave in childhood and never stop missing.

Marketing memory: Soviet brands