Between 1698-1699, the rich merchants Sharovnikov and Verkhovitinov donated money to build a modern building on Varvarka Street — the Church of St. Maxim the Confessor. This was the last church built in the Zaryadye neighborhood in before the Peter the Great era, and is classified by a characteristic type of Russian orthodox style — quadrangular, tri—apsidal, with two tiers of windows on a raised ground floor and a vaulted ceiling, and onion domes on top.
Old Muscovy — what Europeans called Russia before Peter the Great — was now a thing of the past. Moscow had slowly adopted European scientific and technical innovations, yet the city remained vastly underdeveloped. Not counting several public and administrative buildings such as Gostiny Dvor (in Russian, “Guest Courtyard”) and other government-ordered structures, the vast majority of stone stalls in Kitay Gorod (China Town) didn’t face the street but instead the inside yard and were surrounded by wooden pastures and fences.
In the beginning of Peter the Great’s reign, Moscow’s main streets were still covered in unwieldy logs. This wooden pavement from the 17th century was recently discovered by archaeologists during the excavation of Velikaya Street and later Mokrinsky Lane. The wooden pavement was done quickly, was seldom repaired, and sometimes newly laid logs were stolen by poorer residents of the capital city. When it rained in the autumn and spring, the area surrounding the wooden planks was covered with a thick layer of wet, impassable mud that straw shoes, boots, wheels, and carriages would get stuck in. The slush was accompanied by ubiquitous garbage and improvised land fills that no one cleaned. At this time, there was no street lighting — at night pedestrians carried lanterns, and coach carriages were led by servants carrying torches.
In 1698, Peter the Great returned from his “Grand Embassy” journey to Europe, where he was exposed to the advanced infrastructure and urban development of European cities. After this voyage, the tsar made considerable efforts to transform the wooden capital into a European city.
In 1700, he disbanded the ineffective Stone Housing Decree and transferred the order’s responsibilities and functions to the tsar’s newly-established Moscow City Hall. At the beginning of the 18th century, decrees on new construction and improvement of city spaces were passed one after another: in 1704, a decree was issued for stone houses in the Kremlin and in Kitay Gorod to be built along the streets and at an intersection, and no longer inside the courtyard. In 1705, a decree to construct the city’s bridges from cobblestone — at the expense of townsfolk — was issued, as well as orders to clean up garbage and tree brush from the streets. In the following years, ordinances were issued to use tiles as building siding, to replace roofs of old and new homes with new iron-plated covers, to install oil lamps in the streets, etc., etc.
The decrees had to be reissued several times, as they were often either lost or forgotten amongst other acts and mandtes. That, or their rapid implementation proved technically impossible, especially due to the lack of skilled labor. The administrators charged with carrying out the orders, as well as other “renegades” perceived to be slowing down the projects, were threatened with severe punishment: “He who has a wooden structure to this date, let it be. And he who, from this time on, considers building a wooden instead of a stone structure on the Moscow River Embankment or Zaryadye; for this, he should be severely punished.”
From 1708 to 1709, the Kremlin and Kitay Gorod walls were fortified with chains in anticipation of the Swedish invasion of Moscow by Charles VII. What are now
the present-day
streets of Moskvoretskaya embankment in Zaryadye and Kitaygorodsky were covered with trenches.
At the same time, the Kitay Gorod, Varvarka, and the Kosmodemyanskaya gates were fortified with brick. These fortification measures essentially isolated residents of Kitay Gorod and Zaryadye from the rest of Moscow. Bastions along the Moscow River blocked both natural and man-made drains for rain and meltwater to reach the river. This resulted in mud, waste, and infestation of humidity in the Zaryadye neighborhood.
Administrative confusion and a lack of skilled labor prevented Peter the Great from realizing all his urban planning and improvement initiatives. In one of his decrees, Peter vehemently demanded that any new construction in Kitay Gorod be drafted and approved by the city administration. He ordered that every structure built without approval to be torn down. But the masons and bricklayers continued to build without blueprints or even basic architectural knowledge. Instead, trade knowledge was passed down from generation to generation and based on observations an intuitive grasp of the laws of psychics. Chambers were erected with thick walls below arches using in a fairly simple and solid formation. In 18th century Russia, flat ceilings were almost never constructed.
Peter the Great’s legislative efforts to improve Moscow continued up until the decision to move the capital to St. Petersburg was made, after which all construction resources and labor were mobilized to construct a new, European capital city.
Towards the end of his reign, Peter abolished the ban on the construction of stone housing in Moscow and established the Stone Housing Decree, an architectural bureau that operated under the Moscow police and consisted of one architect and several apprentices, or “Gazelles”, as Peter the Great called them. However, the authority of the new institution wasn’t enough to effectively perform the duties of a town planning regulator. In 1725, the founder of the Russian empire died, his reign was followed by an era of various palace coups. But Peter’s attempts to modernize Moscow’s urban spaces were continued by his successors.