St. Petersburg capital.
After two years of writing back and forth, the petition of church elder Archimandrite Nikolay to repair and refurbish the neglected and dilapidated Znamensky Monastery was finally honored in 1762. After the monastery, the next building to be renovated was the Criminal Investigation Department building on the Moskvoretskaya embankment.
Several decades after the death of Peter the Great, Moscow residents and traders finally embraced and began to comply with city planning regulations established by the great reformer. In 1755, illegally built squatter merchant stalls near St. Basil’s Cathedral at the top of Varvarka street were torn down. In 1763, the rich Moscow merchant Ivan Medovikov was forced by the city’s Architectural Bureau (which operated under the Police Department) to build his shop at the corner of Varvarka and Moskvoretskaya streets instead of in the traditional stone trading stall building. The new building was constructed in the Rococo architectural style under Elizabeth Petrovna.
Following her ascension to the throne, in 1762 Catherine the Great established the “Commission on stone construction in Saint Petersburg and Moscow”. The new Empress understood there was a serious need for urban development in Moscow, but initially, urban projects in the former capital were not acted upon by the Commission.
in Moscow in 1771 — the last plague epidemic in European history — which claimed several thousand lives per day.
Mad with fear, people began to congregate near Zaryadye, at the Varvarka gates in Kitay Gorod, to visit the revered Byzantine Blessed Virgin Mary icon by Andrey Bogolyubsky. Per ancient tradition, a venerated shrine was erected near the gates. Thousands of people convened for prayers at Varvarka Square, believing the icon had a supernatural healing power and would end the epidemic. The tone of the crowd was set by Old Believers — who had radically split with the official Russian Orthodox Church. The city’s noble and religious authorities ordered the groups to disperse and for the removal of the icon, out of fear that the disease would spread further in large groups of people. This triggered a civilian riot. For two days, the city center was at the mercy of the crowds being led religious fanatics. The rioters seized the Chudov Monastery inside the Kremlin and killed the Moscow Archbishop Ambrose. Meanwhile, the rioters raided and looted shops and the homes of nobility and merchants. The plague-stricken riot was only suppressed with the help of additional troops ordered to Moscow. Then, the epidemic slowly began to subside. Since the plague and the riot, the Empress began to pay a lot more attention to questions of supplies, infrastructure, and public amenities.
Daily life in Zaryadye was greatly affected by the Empress’s administrative orders after the riots. For example, there was a ban on burying the dead in city church cemeteries, and all cemeteries were moved outside of the city center to Kamer-Kollezhsky, a ring of streets in the outskirts of town. This development changed the economic structure of churches in Zaryadye, which had small cemeteries for parishioners.
By the middle of the 18th century, all that was left of the official church in Russia were monasteries that controlled commercial real estate in cities, rural areas with peasants, and farmland. The majority of church ownership in Zaryadye was in the form of large farmsteads, which were used as inns and provided revenue to the churches. As a result of Catherine the Great’s secular reforms in 1764, several church properties were transferred to the government to be held or sold to a private owner. An example of such a transaction is the “Old English Court”. Owned since 1696 by the Nizhny Novgorod diocese, after the reform, it came under the possession of the merchants Pavlov and Kalinin, who completely redesigned the buildings to their fit their own needs. Many households in Kitay Gorod and Zaryadye experienced similar transitions.
From there on out, only stone buildings in accordance with “standardized projects” approved by the Commission were allowed to be constructed in Kitay Gorod. As early as 1769, the Empress was ratifying permits for merchants and traders to have their shops in the buildings along the street, and not just in the designated stall areas and public squares. After this development, Moscow began to develop mixed-used standardized two and three-story buildings: stores and small workshops would operate on the ground floor, and housing occupied the upper floors. Moscow was surely, but slowly, becoming a European city.
While the implementation of the “Project Design Plan” was very important for the residents of Zaryadye, the initiative went unnoticed by contemporaries, who were preoccupied with other major reforms at the time. In 1782, in order to reduce Kitay Gorod’s isolation from the rest of Moscow, a passageway through the Kitay Gorod wall was constructed to connect Pskov Lane and the Moscow River embankment. For the first time in several years, Zaryadye citizens could comfortably access the Moscow riverbank. By the time Catherine the Great passed away in 1795, for the first time in history the Kremlin and all the homes in Zaryadye, as well as the Kremlin and Moscow river embankments, were stone-covered. The stone riverbanks were built under the direction of military engineer Ivan Gerard.
