Hotel Rossiya, Moscow, 2005

 

I photographed Hotel Rossiya in 2005, shortly before its closure and demolition. By then the building was already in decline, but its scale still communicated the ambitions of the system that had produced it. Completed in 1967 beside the Kremlin, it contained 2,722 rooms and could accommodate around 5,000 guests. With kilometres of corridors, restaurants, cafés, cinemas, a concert hall and extensive service areas, it functioned less like an ordinary hotel than a vast state institution. It was built to house delegates to Communist Party congresses and sessions of the Supreme Soviet, as well as official and foreign guests visiting Moscow.

 

The site itself had already undergone several acts of erasure. Zaryadye was one of Moscow’s oldest districts, historically dense and mixed in character. Large parts of it were demolished in the late 1940s for a planned Stalinist skyscraper that was never built. The Rossiya Hotel later occupied this cleared ground. After the hotel itself was demolished, the area passed through another long period of uncertainty before being transformed into Zaryadye Park, which opened in 2017. The site has therefore repeatedly been rewritten by successive political and urban visions.

 

When I entered Rossiya in 2005, however, I did not experience it primarily as an architectural monument. I experienced it through recognition.

 

I had grown up in the Soviet Union, and the interiors immediately activated a visual memory that was difficult to separate from childhood. The carpets, furniture, corridors, materials, signage and particular organisation of space belonged to an institutional language I knew intimately. There was something deeply familiar in these interiors, even when I could not connect that familiarity to a specific remembered place.

 

That familiarity produced a strong nostalgic response, but the nostalgia was constantly interrupted by what was physically in front of me. The hotel was worn, partially renovated, commercially adapted and visibly deteriorating. Some areas seemed almost untouched since the Soviet period; others had been modified for international tourism or converted to offices. The enormous structure was still there, but the world that had given it meaning had disappeared.

 

This contradiction became central to the work. I was attracted to the building because it seemed to offer access to something from my own past, yet what I encountered was not the past itself. It was its residue: damaged, repurposed and already on the verge of disappearing.

 

Photography intensified this tension. The camera could record the condition of the walls, furniture, corridors and rooms with precision, but it could not recover the experience I associated with them. The more closely I photographed the hotel, the clearer the distance between memory and material reality became.

 

Looking back, I see Hotel Rossiya as a project about transition rather than ruins. In 2005 the building existed between several systems: Soviet institutional architecture, post-Soviet commercial adaptation and imminent demolition. My own response was caught in a similar tension—between recognition and estrangement, nostalgia and deterioration.

 

The later transformation of the site into Zaryadye Park makes this instability even more visible. What appeared permanent had already been replaced once before and would be replaced again. The photographs preserve one brief moment in that sequence, when the ideological structure of the past was still physically present, but already losing its authority, function and form.

​