Severnoye Chertanovo

There are thousands of Belyayevos, but there is only one Severnoye Chertanovo. You can tell something is different as soon as you get off the metro here; while the stations in Belyayevo and Cheryomushki are as standardised as the housing, Chertanovskaya station is a return to the strange, opulent dreamworld created under Moscow during the Stalin era. Architect Nina Alyoshina’s hall is a moodily-lit expressionist cathedral that speaks of arrival at somewhere special, not of departure to the centre.

Outside, apartment blocks spread around a large lake. Half of these are standardised in the Belyayevo mould, but the other half are mid-rise buildings arching around artificial hills and valleys, connected by glazed skyways. Looking closely, you can see they’re also made of standardised panels, but arranged in such a way to give variety to the buildings; this is the first of the mikrorayons where you can really speak of “architecture” rather than just engineering.

Photographer Yuri Palmin has lived in Chertanovo for 18 years — first in what he calls the “bad”, standardised blocks; then in the more prestigious, bespoke blocks opposite. He points out that the area not only looks unlike the other mikrorayons, it has a totally different layout. Rather than the interchangeable units for nuclear families, there are “42 different kinds of single- and double-level flats, with winter gardens in the ground floors” within these long complexes.

New apartment blocks built into the interstices of the mikrorayons since then are still industrialised; still pieced together from concrete panels

This was a late attempt under Brezhnev to show that “developed socialism” could have room for different kinds of families and lives: “a sign of hope, a training ground and a lab”. After getting the population out of overcrowded, subdivided communal flats and into purpose-built apartments with their own front doors, the planned economy could finally move from “quantity” to “quality”. Except that this transition never happened on a large scale, and the standardised apartment blocks were being rolled out to the edges of Moscow up until the end of the 1980s.

It is often assumed that standardisation was ended by the capitalist “shock therapy” that was applied to Russia’s planned economy in the early 1990s. Yet new apartment blocks built into the interstices of the mikrorayons since then are still industrialised; still pieced together from concrete panels — albeit with silly decorative roofs to give a shallow impression of individuality. Even the Orthodox church built near the lake in the late 1990s is standardised in its thin, tacky application of old Russian details.

What has changed, however, is two things: space, with communal areas now regarded as parcels of land ripe for development, and speculation, with a vibrant property market in the capital generating fortunes for a few and insecurity for most.

Dominating Severnoye Chertanovo today is a 40-storey monolith called Avenue 77. According to Palmin, this giant apartment block limits light for many residents here for much more than “a few hours in summer”. It tries to break up its enormous grid of standardised flats via a Koolhaas-like “iconic” shape, but nobody could be seriously fooled; this is form following speculation, an image of public space and equality being crushed by speculation.