New Monsters

When the Russians threw the gates of Russia slightly ajar to tourists three years ago, they were amazed at the flood of tourists that flocked in to see for themselves (150,000 last year). But they were shocked to discover that their Western visitors considered their best hotels none too good, and their second-best downright deplorable. The rooms were stuffy, the beds hard, the service sluggish, and there were no stoppers for the bathtubs, grumbled the European and U.S. visitors.

Last week, intent on proving that whatever capitalists can do, they can do better, the Russians announced plans for building a glass-walled annex to Moscow's 100-year-old National Hotel on Gorky Street, long considered by visitors to be one of Russia's poor best. This was just the beginning. Scheduled to rise beside the onion domes and red walls of the Kremlin is a huge, twelve-story block surmounted by a 20-story tower which, say the Russians, will be the largest hotel in Europe. It will contain 3,400 air-conditioned rooms, four lobbies, two cinemas, a concert hall, a shopping center and a 300-car garage. Structures surrounding the monster hotel will be reconstructed to fit its monolithic architecture. Buildings of "little value'' will be torn down to make a new square.

A committee of prominent Russian artists and writers has already protested that the "senseless dissonance" of a modern hotel would ruin the "harmonious Kremlin ensemble." But the traditionalists have been put to rout by the erection inside the Kremlin itself of a vast meeting hall in the glass-and-chromium tradition of the U.N. itself.

About the only consolation for the defeated traditionalists is the possibility that the new hotels and halls may suffer the same fate as a recently built steel institute in Kharkov. Last spring, according to the Economic Gazette, cracks began to appear in the institute's walls, and panels slid off the facade. Workmen hastily shored up the damaged section. Then, last month the right wing of the institute collapsed. Investigators belatedly discovered that the builders had forgotten to install drainpipes. Rain seeped into the walls and pillars, froze solid in a cold spell and turned to water again in a thaw, thus bringing down the wing in a cascade of bricks, concrete and glass.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.