Moscow Day Trips: VDNKh
Russia's VDNKh Exhibition Center: Stalinist Monuments and More
Located a short metro ride from the city center, this collection of pavilions and exhibition halls is an outdoor museum to the Soviet Union's grandeur and excess.
Originally opened in 1939 as an exhibition dedicated to Soviet Agriculture, VDNKh (Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnovo Khozyaystva) or "Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy" is a monument to Soviet Gigantism, Stalinist Architecture at its most extreme. By 1989 VDHKh had 82 pavilions and occupied an area of 700,000 square meters. It is an outdoor museum to a bygone era. For fans of Soviet kitsch and Stalin's Massive-scale Empire buildings, this place is well worth a day trip from the center. It also contains some of the best Soviet-era monuments to be found in the city, including:
- The giant Worker and Kolkhoz Woman Statue at the North Entrance (currently disassembled for restoration) reached 25 meters into the sky, and originally crowned the Soviet exhibit of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) in Paris, directly across the square from the pavilion for Nazi Germany, who secretly got a hold of the Soviet plans and designed their pavilion as a riposte to the Soviet one.
- The Fountain of the Friendship of Peoples, a grandiose faux gold-leaf fountain surrounded by 16 female worker statues representing the 16 ethnic republics of the former USSR.
- The Stone Flower Fountain (Why? Don't ask)
- The Space Obelisk, (1964) certainly one of Moscow's coolest and most retro-futuristic monuments, with a soaring 1950s style rocket blasting into space atop a titanium parabola of exhaust, atop the Memorial Museum of Cosmonauts(where you can try on a replica of Yuri Gegarin's space Suit!)
- The fantastic architecture of the Ukraine Exhibition House
- The Vostok rocket in front of the Space Pavilion, just like the one Yuri Gegarin rode to space, with its paint peeling in season after season of inclement weather.
On weekdays and in the winter, VDNKh has a sad, abandoned look to it, of melancholy decay and lost empire. Most of the pavilions lay empty or are occupied by exhibitions they were not designed for, dwarfed by spaces that are much too large for them. In the summer, the place livens up, filling with strolling couples,inline skaters and bicyclists. Bicycles can be rented for 100 rubles, or around US $4, an hour, people riding the outsized Ferris wheel and other amusement park rides suitable for children, and some more interesting exhibitions in the cavernous halls. When the fountains are on and the flowers are in bloom, it is an excellent place to stroll on a sunny day.
The VDNKh is easily accessible from the VDNKh Station of the Moscow Metro on the orange line. There is also a monorail that runs between the VDNKh and the gray line of the Moscow Metro.
