Moscow knocks down tourists' heartbreak hotel
FROM MICHAEL BINYON IN MOSCOW
A MONUMENTAL slab of Soviet history came to a much delayed and unlamented end yesterday. The Intourist Hotel, one of the most reviled buildings in Moscow that symbolised decades of sleaze, sloppiness and surly suspicion, closed its doors.
Today the demolition squad move in. The 22-storey glass, aluminium and concrete hotel, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, was the brainchild of a President Khrushchev determined to have a skyscraper like those he saw in America.
Opened in 1970, the brutalist building came to embody everything that made the Soviet Union one of the most unwelcoming destinations. Rooms were small and spartan, food cold, bands raucous and service appalling.
Moscow city authorities announced three years ago that the hotel would be demolished and a Western-style luxury one would go up in its place on the prime site at the lower end of Tverskaya Street (formerly Gorky Street), two minutes walk from Red Square.
After much bickering about the plans and haggling with international hotel chains, the Intourist was sold in 1999 for £15 million to Superior Ventures Ltd, a French offshoot of the British investment company Rathbone Brothers.
The Intourist was a forlorn sight yesterday. Even the two scrawny Christmas trees outside the entrance were almost bare, strands of bedraggled tinsel falling off. Off the lobby, once near impassable for elaborately coiffured prostitutes, one heavily made-up woman in a short skirt was chatting to the barman, for old time’s sake. The leather sofas, where pimps watched their wares, were torn and ragged, the travel bureau stripped and empty.
The last 46 guests checked out yesterday morning. In the bar — still stocked with half-empty bottles of gin, whisky, Martini and brandy — a few hotel employees were getting quietly drunk. What would they do with it all? “What do you think? Drink it, of course!” the barman said, grinning.
Nostalgic traces of Soviet life were still there. In the souvenir shop the assistant was as boot-faced as all her forebears, and refused to bargain for the remaining matrioshka dolls, fur hats and reproduction posters of Stalin; he was not to be knocked down in price.
The old doormen who stopped as many people as possible entering the restaurants were still wandering around malevolently. A few toughs in leather jackets gave a faded imitation of the mafia kings who did their deals in the hotel.
The Intourist was the starting place for thousands of cheap holidays, where Westerners were introduced to officious guides, suspicious staff and black marketeers ready to change money or buy jeans.
The rooms were reputedly bugged and the bar full of informers. Cockroaches were common in bathrooms, leaks in the lavatories and rats in the cellars. Showers and chandeliers were often on the blink. One Westerner had a nasty moment when she stepped in the main lift and it fell three storeys to the ground.
Demolishing the hotel will take time: too close to the historic and recently remodelled National Hotel and other landmarks to blow up, it may have to be taken apart floor by floor.
