The Reconstruction of Moscow

ooit early, arid the streets were plunged into pitchy jdarkness, thus coonpleting the picture of patriarchal Moscow." Old Moscow was built ichaotically. There were no plans whatever; buildings were erected . wherever and whenever fancy dictated. But in this haphazard erection of buildings, soine sort of system appeared. This was what is usually called the radial and circular system of Moscow. It is called radial because Moscow streets are radial lines diverging from the centre in all directions. On the other hand, this system follows a circular plan also: all these long radial thoroughfares are intersected at various points by circular thoroughfares, which have formed on the sites of former fortresses. The Boulevard Circle is located on the site of an old white stone fortress, the Sadovoye Circle — on the former site of earthen ramparts. Hence the names of fortress gates— Arbatskiye Vorota (Gate), Sretenskiye Vorota, and also the street named Zemlyanoy Val (Earthen Ramparts), and so oh. That barbaric Russian capitalism not only did not improve, but, in ja number of cases, iactually rendered the old feudal plan of Moscow worse, is borne out by the following facts. Tverskaya, once called Tsar Street (now Gorky Street) from a straight street became crook- ed at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning- of the eighteenth centuries as a result of the sihameless filching of land by private owners. Bolshaya Dmitrovka, which at one time formed one straight thoroughfare with Malaya Dmitrovka, changed its direction at the end of the seven- teenth cfentury as a result of the (erection of a church and a number of merchants' houses at the junction of these two streets. Petrovka was made narrower and crooked because at the end of the eighteenth century one

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