Falshfasad: Disavowed Infrastructure and Everyday Mate-realism in Wild Capitalist Moscow

How can an architectural or infrastructural project be “fake”? How, in particular, does the (un)reality of architecture play out in Putin-era Russia, a society which critics (both scholars and commentators) frequently caricature as suffused with “post-truth” artifice and devoid of substantive foundations? This article explores the above questions with primary reference to Zaryadye Park – nicknamed “Putin’s Paradise” by its detractors – an extravagant landscaping project-cum-multimedia attraction, designed by fashionable American architects and opened in the shadow of Moscow’s Kremlin in 2017. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, this article navigates the complex web of hybrid and contradictory aesthetics, technologies, ideologies, subjectivities and economies populating Putin’s Paradise; juxtaposes Zaryadye with other hybrid quasi-public parklands, or “public-private paradises”, which have proliferated globally during the second decade of the 21st century (most notably Manhattan’s High Line); and interrogates the puzzlingly self-same manner in which both Zaryadye’s ideologues and adversaries characterize it – whether in a positive or negative valence – as an ethereal terrain where affect and spectacle do not merely permeate infrastructure, but where they displace it altogether. Attempting to make sense of Zaryadye’s disavowal of its own infrastructure, this article peers beyond the “false facades”, the ubiquitous, Potemkin-village-like plastic banners, which have sprung up around Moscow in recent years to camouflage the gritty reality of construction work. Probing for ways to make sense of fuzzy boundaries between fact and fantasy, truth and falsity, appearance and essence, it borrows insights from the “everyday Marxist” categories employed by Zaradye’s migrant construction workers to describe their alienation from the fruits of their own labour.