Scattered throughout the city’s outlying neighborhoods, Moscow’s Soviet-era cinemas have for decades served as the center of communities.

With names like “Mars” and “The Diamond,” the cinemas were mostly built in the 1960s and 70s during a Soviet film boom and were popular even after the collapse of the USSR, offering cheaper tickets than their counterparts in shopping centers.

Now — as part of a wider plan changing the face of the Russian capital — almost 40 of them are being turned into modern glass complexes.

Developers say the project will brighten up dreary suburbs and bring more life to dormant residential districts.  

But it has faced a backlash from activists and residents, who say it will deprive locals of community focal points and destroy important architectural heritage.

The plan is part of a major city redevelopment program led by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin that has included the construction of a multi-billion-dollar park and the demolition of Soviet-era pre-fab apartments.

Real estate company ADG Group bought 39 Soviet-built cinemas from the government and plans to turn them into what it calls “neighborhood centers.”

‘There is nothing there’

Grigory Pechersky, ADG Group’s founder and co-director, said the majority of the cinemas were in “extremely poor” condition when his company bought them in 2014.

“Around half of them were closed since the 1990s,” he told AFP in the group’s central Moscow office.  

Pechersky said the project aims to “recreate the historical function of the cinemas, which is for residents to spend their free time comfortably.”

Moscow’s infrastructure in residential areas is limited, he said, and Muscovites tend to travel to the huge city’s center for quality entertainment and shopping.  

“Those areas are very densely populated but in many cases there is nothing there,” he said, adding that around 10 million people live between Moscow’s two main beltways where the cinemas are located.

All but three of the cinemas will be completely torn down and rebuilt.

One of those surviving is the 1938 Rodina (Motherland) cinema, a Stalinist landmark in northeastern Moscow with huge pillars and Soviet mosaics, where ADG Group plans to reopen the building’s original rooftop terrace.  

‘Little architectural value’

The rest of the cinemas were built in the brutalist style — a utilitarian form of architecture popular in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century.  

Built in the shape of simple squares, some are on local high streets such as Almaz (The Diamond), a 1964 cinema painted turquoise in southern Moscow’s leafy Shabolovka district.

Others — like the Angara, which is named after a Siberian river and already under reconstruction — are surrounded by typical late-Soviet housing blocks.

According to ADG Group, they have “little architectural value.”

The company hired the British architectural firm run by Amanda Levete — who has worked on London’s V&A Museum and Lisbon’s MAAT contemporary art center — to design a concept for the new cinemas.

The group’s main architect Alexei Belyakov said the cinemas will be reconstructed in a similar style, to form a recognizable “network” across the far-flung districts.

In drawings seen by AFP, they will all have a glass front and will be considerably larger, to make room for retail space and cafes.

All they will retain is the logos of their original names — taken from cities and rivers of the Soviet Union, planets, mountains and precious stones.

Belyakov said that while the cinemas “were built in the spirit of the time, they are not practical anymore.”  

‘Our favorite cinema’

But many Moscow architects disagree.

Ruben Arakelyan, who runs a Moscow-based architectural bureau, said that while it’s “right” to revive the cinemas, the brutalist buildings could have been preserved.

He said some of the cinemas began “dying out” when people increasingly started to travel to the city center for work after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Local activists worry the cinemas will be turned into regular shopping malls — of which Moscow already has an abundance.

“They tell us that these are depressing places that need to be torn down,” said Klim Likhachev, the head of a residents’ group to save the Almaz cinema.  

“But this is our favorite cinema. Nobody asked the residents,” Likhachev said. “By reconstruction they actually mean demolition. They are calling it a ‘neighborhood center’, but it will in fact be another banal shopping center.”  

Activist Pyotr Ivanov said the problem with the plan was that it assumed each neighborhood where the cinemas are based had the same needs.

“All of them are different. You could only make universal decisions like that in a command economy like the Soviet Union,” he said.

Two Metro stations away from Almaz, residents have also been fighting to preserve the Ulaanbaatar, named after the capital of once Soviet-friendly Mongolia.

Another of the movie theaters, the Baku Cinema in northwestern Moscow, has served as a community center for the Azerbaijani diaspora since the Soviet era.

ADG Group’s Belyakov brushed aside criticism, saying it was important for the Russian capital to look to the future.

“Moscow is moving forward,” he said.
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Carmaker Rolls-Royce called on the British government to avoid a disorderly Brexit and said it was building up some stock, expanding warehouse capacity and training suppliers for customs changes in case Britain leaves the EU without a deal.

Britain, the world’s fifth largest economy, is due to leave the globe’s biggest trading bloc in under 80 days but a Brexit agreement looks set to be voted down by lawmakers next week, making a no-deal and potential trade barriers more likely.

The BMW-owned brand, which reported record 2018 sales, said that despite the steps it was taking to prepare for Brexit, it was impossible to predict what would happen if there is not a managed transition after March 29.

“We are highly dependent on a proper, working frictionless chain of goods and this whole company hinges on just-in-time deliveries,” Chief Executive Torsten Mueller-Oetvoes told reporters.

“We urge the government to avoid any hard Brexit,” he said.

Asked whether Rolls-Royce, which builds all of its roughly 4,000 cars per year at its Goodwood factory in southern England, would ever make some models overseas, Mueller-Oetvoes said: “This is a no-go,” he said. “Rolls-Royce belongs to Britain, we are committed to Britain.”

Sales at the 115-year-old company, which employs just over 2,000 people, rose 22 percent to 4,107 cars last year, boosted by an over 40 percent rise in demand from China, which accounted for one in five purchases.

The numbers reflect similarly buoyant sentiment from Aston Martin, suggesting that luxury automakers might buck an apparent slowdown that has hit the likes of Apple and prompted China’s most successful car firm Geely to forecast flat sales this year.

“You see more and more self-drivers in the Chinese market, people being behind the wheel particularly over the weekends in the luxury sector … and that made (models) Wraith and Dawn quite successful in China last year,” he said. “I can’t comment yet on how 2019 will pan out for us in China but so far we haven’t seen dents in our success over there.”

Mueller-Oetvoes also said that tax cuts made by U.S. President Donald Trump also helped the business.

“This was really fuel for our business last year in the United States,” he added.
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Fears are mounting for Paul Whelan, the former U.S. marine seized last month in a Moscow hotel after being accused of espionage. Western intelligence officers and analysts fear he may remain in detention in Russia for a long time and are casting doubt on the likelihood of a spy exchange.

Kremlin officials are dismissing the idea he’d be a candidate for a prisoner swap. Their U.S. counterparts say there can’t be any kind of exchange, as he’s not a spy. Kremlin officials Wednesday dismissed a claim by British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt that Russia might use the former Canadian-born U.S. citizen as a pawn in a diplomatic game.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “In Russia, we never use people as pawns in diplomatic games. In Russia, we conduct counterintelligence activity against those suspected of espionage. That is done regularly.”

Hunt last week said the British government was “extremely worried” about the well-being of 48-year-old Whelan, who also holds British citizenship, as well as Irish and Canadian passports, suggesting the Russians might try to use him as leverage for the release of Russia’s Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty to infiltrating America’s conservative political movement as a Kremlin-directed agent. Butina was convicted of acting as a foreign agent in the United States.

Whelan was arrested Dec. 28 in Moscow. According to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), he was detained while “on a spy mission” and had been caught “during an act of espionage.”

The Washington Post reported Whelan was arrested in his room at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow after he had accepted from an unidentified man a flash drive containing a list of employees for a clandestine Russian agency.

Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman was allowed to visit Whelan, who reportedly is being held at the notorious Lefortovo prison, which was used during the purges of the 1930s by Josef Stalin’s NKVD agents and which once housed dissidents such as writer and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Whelan’s family says he’s innocent and was in Russia, which he has visited several times, for a wedding. Speaking to Euronews television this week, his brother, David, also worried about the length of time he may be held.

“It clearly could take months, and unfortunately, maybe even years before we get him home,” he said.

Whelan could receive a 20-year jail term if he is convicted of espionage.

Comparisons with 1986 case

Analysts and former intelligence officials are comparing Whelan’s case with that of journalist Nick Daniloff, who in 1986 was arrested by the then-KGB and accused of espionage after having been handed an unsolicited package of confidential documents.

The Reagan administration said the Soviets arrested Daniloff without cause in retaliation for the arrest three days earlier of Gennadi Zakharov, a physicist at the Soviet U.N. Mission in New York. Zakharov had received classified documents about U.S. Air Force jet engines.

After 13 days and intense diplomacy, Daniloff was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without charge, along with Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov. Zakharov was permitted to leave the U.S. But the affair also triggered rounds of expulsions by both sides of dozens of diplomats and suspected spies.

The time Whelan spends in jail may not be as brief, some observers fear. U.S. intelligence officials say they would be loath to agree to a swap for a self-confessed Kremlin agent such as Butina for an apparently innocent American, as this could invite the Russians to organize other setups of U.S. civilians, creating an open season.

Ned Price, a former Obama administration State Department official, said he thinks the Kremlin may be seeking to swap Whelan for Butina.

“The Russians may calculate that Whelan, a military veteran who has said positive things about President Donald Trump on Russian social media, constitutes the perfect quo for their quid,” he wrote in an opinion article.

Former U.S. intelligence officials say it is highly unlikely that Whelan, who has had a checkered past and left the U.S. Marines with a dishonorable discharge, and was found guilty of attempting to steal $10,000 worth of currency from the U.S. government while deployed to Iraq in 2006, could have been working for a clandestine U.S. agency.

The picture that has emerged of Whelan is complex. Since 2007, he has traveled regularly to Russia both for pleasure and business. He works in corporate security for the automotive industry. He has a fascination for Russia, was trying to learn the language and had an active profile on the Russian social media platform VKontakte.

The Whelan case could be further complicated by the arrest on the Northern Mariana Islands on Dec. 29 of Russian citizen Dmitry Makarenko by U.S. authorities.

Makarenko was moved to Florida after being detained by FBI officers allegedly for conspiring with another man to export U.S. defense articles, including night-vision scopes, to Russia without U.S. approval.

Kremlin officials have accused the U.S. of detaining Makarenko in retaliation for the arrest of Whelan, but the case against Makarenko goes back to 2017, according to court papers filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

 
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With the March deadline approaching for Britain to depart the European Union, there are concerns that Britain’s exit could undermine Western sanctions against countries like Iran, Syria and North Korea. Analysts note that Britain has been influential in persuading the EU to take action, saying there are risks Britain will seek a different path as it carves out new economic and strategic partnerships.

“Some estimates hold that up to 80 percent of the EU’s sanctions that are in place have been put forward or suggested by the UK,” said Erica Moret, chair of the Geneva International Sanctions Network.

She says Britain’s future absence from EU meetings will impact the bloc’s future relations. “The UK is also a very important player of course as a leading economic and political power, a soft power player in the world. Also the City of London means that financial sanctions are rendered much stronger through the UK’s participation.”

Britain was quick to coordinate expulsions of Russian diplomats among EU allies following the nerve agent attack in the city of Salisbury last year against a former double agent, an incident London blamed on Moscow.

Through EU membership, Britain enforces common sanctions against several other states and individuals, such as Syrian officials accused of war crimes.

After the Brexit deadline day on March 29, Britain will be free to implement its own sanctions.

“I wouldn’t see this happening in the short term, especially because again both sides have said they are committed to EU sanctions and they are also committed to projecting some political values that both EU and UK agree to,” says Anna Nadibaidze of the policy group Open Europe.

Britain, however, could seek a competitive advantage over Europe by diverging its sanctions policy, says Moret.

“It’s very unlikely that the UK would deliberately seek to gain commercial advantage over EU partners. But when you think about the tensions that will come into play post-Brexit, when it comes down to trying to negotiate new trade deals, seeking new foreign investment into the country. There will be pressure, a balance to be made between alignment with EU sanctions and domestic interests.”

That pressure could be felt first over Iran. Alongside European allies, Britain backs the 2015 Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, which lifted some Western sanctions on Tehran in return for a suspension of its atomic enrichment program. U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the deal last year, saying Iran has violated the spirit of the agreement.

Britain urgently wants a trade deal with the United States after Brexit. Will the price be alignment with Washington’s policy on Iran?

“That is a key risk and it’s a very important one that will be in the forefront of policymakers’ minds,” adds Moret.

Britain was among EU nations backing sanctions against an Iranian intelligence unit this week, accusing Tehran of plotting attacks and assassinations in Europe. Both Brussels and London say they will continue to work together to counter common threats through a range of policy tools including sanctions.

 

 

 

 
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