‘Regulated life has won’ Fifteen years ago, Alexander Gronsky photographed Moscow’s unruly outskirts. Now he says they’re disappearing.
Fifteen years ago, Russian photographer Alexander Gronsky released Pastoral, a series of landscape photos taken on the outskirts of Moscow that depict the fragile boundary between the ever-expanding city and the nature surrounding it. Since then, the Russian capital’s area has more than doubled, and its population has increased by nearly 2 million people. After returning to capture Moscow’s new outskirts a decade and a half later, Gronsky spoke to journalists from the independent cooperative Bereg about what he found there.
— Both now and 15 years ago, when you were working on your series Pastoral, you spent time walking around the outskirts of Moscow. Were your impressions different this time?
— The outskirts have changed dramatically, of course. Back then, even beyond the Ring Road and surprisingly close to the city center, you could stumble upon all kinds of pockets of a completely different life. You’d turn a corner, head down a little path, and suddenly find yourself in a totally different world — almost like a jungle, overgrown and wild. Teenagers would set up their hideouts there, and homeless people built shelters. In Ramenki, there was literally a Roma camp.
Exploring the outskirts, you could discover entirely different landscapes. Sometimes it was like stumbling upon ancient human settlements: here’s a fire pit, some stones, scraps of food. It felt more unsettling than it does now, but also more mysterious.
The changes we’re seeing in the city — and I’m generally in favor of them, all these parking spaces, sidewalks, streetlights, benches — have taken over those empty lots and overgrown areas. They’ve become safer, more livable, and more patrolled. They’ve been absorbed into the unified urban environment. But that sense of romantic, unexpected encounters with the mysterious, that’s gone. Now, everywhere you look, you feel the guiding hand of city planning.
— It’s interesting you mention safety. Because if you think about the bigger picture, it’s hard to say that Moscow — or anywhere in Russia, really — has become safer overall.
— Of course. We have to understand that this feeling of safety comes at a cost. I mean, if you read any of those Telegram channels about city news and local incidents, the stories are often like this: someone leaves a bag on a bench, someone else picks it up, but they’re immediately detained and the bag is returned. Or a stolen bicycle is quickly recovered. You probably wouldn’t see stories like that in Europe.
To make that possible, a city has to be saturated with surveillance — facial recognition cameras everywhere, and so on. On the level of everyday comfort, it’s incredibly convenient. But you constantly feel like you’re being watched. There are cameras in parks, even deep in Bitsa Park. There are also streetlights everywhere.
So what’s happening is a trade-off: basic comfort and a sense of safety in exchange for a kind of extreme discomfort and an extreme lack of real freedom or security.
— Is it still possible to get lost in Moscow?
— It makes me happy when that happens. If I get the feeling of “I wonder what’s around that corner,” if I find myself wandering without any planned route, just chasing an image or a mood, that’s a joyful feeling.
— Are your routes through Moscow’s outskirts spontaneous, or is there an element of planning involved?
— I’ve been photographing Moscow for so many years that a kind of map has come together in my head. But every now and then, of course, I still stumble upon something unexpected, like the Grad Moskovsky neighborhood. I ended up there for the first time just because I saw a bus with that destination and I realized I absolutely had to go check it out.
— When you were on the outskirts this time around, did you get the feeling that the city’s borders are disappearing?
— The boundaries have become very blurred. Where Moscow technically ends, its satellite towns begin, and then you get satellites of those satellites. Visually, it’s almost impossible to tell whether you’re still in the city or already in the suburbs. The same things are happening out there: riverfronts are being developed with the same granite embankments, the same standardized park architecture.
It’s a mix of new high-rises and metro stations that seem to pop up right in the middle of the woods, and yet you realize that in five or 10 years, the forest will be gone, replaced by more construction.
Yes, the sense of a boundary is slipping away. And the territory I’m most interested in is precisely that edge — where this polished, master-planned cityscape starts to break down. That’s why I look for footpaths people use to cut across to the metro, holes in fences… It’s an attempt to find the disappearing edge of the city. Because inside that edge, everything is gradually starting to look like a 3D render.
— Speaking of rendering, do you ever feel like a new visual code of urban life is emerging? For instance, with the renovation program, entire Soviet-era neighborhoods are disappearing, replaced by new districts of mass-produced housing that already look very different.
— For me, that “rendered” feeling comes from the scale and speed of the transformation. New Moscow feels like they’ve built several entirely new cities in just a few years — with their own town squares, metro stations, boulevards, and highway interchanges. The pace is staggering. As far as I know, for several years now, the construction rates in Moscow have actually surpassed those of the Khrushchev era.
Maybe if you live in one of these buildings, the changes feel slower, more natural — maybe even long overdue. But if you’re just observing from the outside and dropping in every six months, the speed of change feels unreal. It creates this strange impression that none of it can possibly be real.
And since so much of it is being built at the same time, everything looks brand new, all at once. The city starts to feel like it just came out of a showroom — fresh off the shelf. There’s a slightly eerie, stage-set quality to it.
But I think that will fade pretty quickly. I love to be critical, but credit where it’s due: a lot of these new neighborhoods on the outskirts of Moscow are actually quite livable and well-adapted to everyday life.
On the other hand, when a city becomes purely a tool carrying out a function, something feels lost. Everything becomes too rational. I know it’s kind of a silly complaint, but that feeling is there. As if a city should also have something irrational about it, something a little neglected, as if it should have layers.
Still, I’m genuinely glad that more people now have access to housing. For many, getting an apartment is a major life event. And I really don’t want to talk about these new districts in a negative light. In fact, my wife and I were just saying the other day that, hypothetically, living in one of those new neighborhoods in New Moscow could actually be pretty nice.
Sure, there’s probably a gap between those words and my photographs — photos of fences, empty lots, and muddy slush. But for me, there’s no contradiction. People often message me on Instagram saying, “This isn’t my Moscow.” They think they’re criticizing me. But actually, I completely agree with them. My photography is just a record of my own path, my own trail through that space.
— Your photos show people trying to slip through fences and reclaim empty parking lots to turn them into places for leisure. The empty parking lots, in these cases, aren’t really empty. What kinds of space are they?
— I’ve been trying to put it into words — maybe empty parking lots are islands of freedom. And the symbol of that freedom is the picnic. People light fires on empty lots, because you can’t make fires in parks. Parks are for “civilized” recreation. Even though now many parks have little barbecue huts. Everything’s neatly arranged; there’s an official grill zone.
— So the empty parking lot is an unregulated space.
— Exactly. But we also have to admit that these unregulated spaces seem to be less and less in demand. I would have thought the opposite — that with such a high population density, people would be fighting over these last little anarchic corners. But it seems the opposite is happening. Everything’s ready to follow the rules and relax the “proper” way. It feels like regulated life has won.