A few weeks ago we read, in Caroline Brooke’s Moscow, about the Khodynka Tragedy, in which a crowd of some 50,000 trampled 1,389 in a mad dash to try to get free goods celebrating the coronation of Nicholas II. We’ll let you be the judge of whether that was a bad omen for his rule. Brooke also wrote that the Khodynskoe Field (where the tragedy occured) was near the Petrovsky Palace, a grand old building that Napoleon escaped to after his defeat in Moscow. It’s a hotel now, but it’s still nice to look at from the outside and is by some parks.
Moscow’s grown since then, and the field was supposedly turned into an airfield that served as an aviation museum for a few years before it was shut down. Regardless, we wanted to see the field where the tragedy occurred. Sticking mostly to the areas around Red Square and the university, we hadn’t made it into the outer edges of the city yet and we decided this was a perfect opportunity to just that. It took two trains and a transfer above ground to get out to the station from which we could walk to the Khodynskoe Field, Dinamo. The station is named in honor of the team that plays in the stadium that looms over its exit. In the coming months, Dinamo’s stadium will host several World Cup matches and when we left the subway we were in the shadows of cranes that were doing work on the stadium.
The Petrovsky Palace is right near the station and we were content to just walk by it and see it from the outside. Compared to the vast amounts of concrete structures and the high-rise apartments littering the surrounding area, Petrovsky Palace was hard to miss. A few strangers pointed us in the direction of Khodynskoe Field, giving us vaguely quizzical looks as they did. The walk there took us past another hotel and through a sports complex. Mostly maintained by CSKA, the Russian Army’s sports group (CSKA’s soccer stadium is also in the neighborhood), it wasn’t clear that it wasn’t an industrial park until a later visit to the same neighborhood for the IFSC Climbing World Cup, held on a monstrous turf field inside what resembled, from the outside, a warehouse.
When we arrived to where the field was supposed to be, according to our maps and a few notable buildings that we’d seen in photos of the field online, there was nothing but a new construction site and a huge mall next to a Metro station. In fact, the construction taking place where the field used to be is so new that Google Maps still shows the area as a park covered in green. Later on when we asked some people passing by about the construction taking place, they responded that the construction was only happening due to the World Cup. Although no games will be played at CSKA’s stadium, it was still deemed necessary to tear up a historic park and add onto the seemingly endless concrete jungle.
Hungry, we went into the mall and wound up four floors’ worth of escalators , ending up at a burger store in section dubbed “Trend Island.” We had been trying since we left Dinamo station to find a bite to eat, yet it seemed the only restaurants for a few kilometers were bundled up in the mall. Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones” played while we ate our burgers. Afterwards we trekked back downstairs and got on the train home.
For a city that was founded as long ago as Moscow was, it shifts temporally at a breakneck pace. The Kremlin has a ballet theater, massive and modern, sitting behind an ancient brick wall. Little bars sit in back alleys off of streets with glowing billboards that wouldn’t be out of place in Times Square. We’d seen those places and taken them as they were but there was something more surreally tangible about going a place that we’d read about in a relatively recently published book, that we’d seen on the internet, and seeing that it had been swallowed by the maw of Moscow’s growth.
Pictured above is the current state of the park.
Written by: Owen Yager and Calle Erich
