The Arkhangelskoye estate—often referred to as Russia’s Versailles—is under pressure once again, according to preservationists. They suggest that a 2015-2019 development plan that is supposed to improve tourist facilities on the estate grounds will benefit the businesspeople with interests in the property, including the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, the chairman of Renova Group. Arkhangelskoye is a state museum that includes the Yusupov palace and parklands around it as well as other buildings.
The Yusupovs, famous for their art collection and a scion, Felix Yusupov, who was involved in the murder of Rasputin, built the estate in its present form in the 19th century. The new plan was commissioned by the museum from Moscow’s Poshvykin architectural group and provided to The Art Newspaper by the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIK).
Andrei Busygin, a former deputy culture minister, became the director of the Arkhangelskoye museum in 2013. The museum is controlled by the ministry, which has been promoting museum modernisation across Russia.
Preservationists and some local residents say that the area around the estate has already been ruined by the construction of a branch of Leroy Merlin, the French home-improvement retailer, across the road.
Among the proposed new on-site features at Arkhangelskoye are a car park; a visitor centre in Modernist Scandinavian style designed to merge with the landscape; and a 100-room hotel, spa and fitness centre. According to text accompanying the Poshvykin Group’s plan, “Today the Arkhangelskoye estate is lacking an important option—an entrance ensemble that includes an information cluster and a cluster providing for the comfort of visitors (fast-food stations, toilets, souvenir and book stores, etc).”
Yevgeny Sosedov, the chairman of the Moscow region VOOPIK, says that he is troubled by the state of existing buildings and other construction plans set forth in the document, for example the re-creation of structures that once stood near the estate’s 17th-century Church of St Michael the Archangel.
The plan, says Sosedov, “cloaks some of the new construction under the guise of re-creation of historical sites”, but “in striving to maximise the number of square metres (and correspondingly the budgetary funds to be spent), they have taken this idea to the point of total absurdity”.
Hraniteli Nasledia, a website devoted to architectural heritage, noted that a larger portion of the almost 3.1 billion rubles ($60m) in expenditure planned for the project until 2019—with a majority of funds coming from the government—will be spent on new buildings rather than the restoration of old ones.
The Ministry of Defence, which has a sanatorium on the estate, controls parts of the grounds. Sosedov has been embroiled in a battle with Renova Group over its lease of some of the parklands, warning that the company will irrevocably transform the property. Vekselberg has been regarded as an art patron since he bought Malcolm Forbes’s collection of imperial Fabergé eggs in 2004.
Busygin recently told the Kultura television channel that the culture ministry is working on a plan to categorise Arkhangelskoye as a “noteworthy place” rather than a “monument”, which would make construction on the site possible, although Vladimir Tsvetnov, a cultural heritage official at the ministry, denied this.
Yuri Vedenin, a leading expert on pre-revolutionary estates, told Hraniteli Nasledia that if the construction plans for Arkhangelskoye go through, “instead of a magnificent palace and park complex, we will end up with a giant cultural-recreation and shopping centre”.