Super-Duper Wacky n' Tacky Euro Adventure

…but far from pretty. Some might know this saying referring to something else, but I think it is a perfect idiom to describe an interesting little anomaly that greets every student attending the National Economics Academy as they exit the Yugo Zapadnaya Metro; including all fifteen Stanford students abroad in Moscow.

Besides the cold blast of air from a hyper-changing climate, one is greeted by a gorgeous, Oz-like building as soon as they step out of the south entrance of the Metro at Yugo-Zapadnaya. Being escorted by my host parent Iosef on my first day of school, I immediately commented to him how beautiful I thought the building was. And it still is. Among the 60’s and 70’s era mass-population apartment buildings in this neighborhood that have an affinity for beige colors, the modern design and brilliant color jump out at any passer-by. By quick deduction, I was able to imagine when it was probably built: The building is much too modern to be more than twenty years old and the USSR was much too broke and inefficient to be building anything of this nature in the 80’s so it must have been a post-communism wonder of the early to mid nineties. “Yes it is. And it is part of your school.” My heart nearly skipped a beat upon hearing this news. I imagined taking classes in Moscow’s finest technological institution; complete with flat-screen TV’s in every room and a skyline view of the Moscow suburbs to accompany lectures. Surely Stanford students are rightly entitled to such amenities, even 4,000 mi. away from home! Boy, could my imagination have been farther from the truth! “It is currently under ownership dispute,” Iosef relays to me.

Dispute is quite the understatement. This building is down-right abandoned. It is indeed part of the National Economics Academy in that it is on the same property, but that’s about where the acquaintance ends. Only by actually stepping foot on the academy’s property, and seeing it up close, does one get a true sense of this building’s relative destitution: rotting pillars, abandoned construction vehicles, piles of trash that have no doubt been accruing for over a decade now. If one is forced to view this building from outside the academy’s fences, they are spared by only 42 stories of dirtied window panes, that is, if the windows are still there. I am almost embarrassed for the students of this academy as they forced to deal with this grandiose garbage can and attend classes in two soviet-style buildings that are under eternal renovations. But the embarrassment seems to stop with me, as they walk around in their seven jeans and drive home in Audi coops; I honestly get the feeling they really don’t mind that their campus looks fit for a Hollywood set created for a doomsday movie.

I might be spoiled by the fact that Stanford would never let such an occurrence happen on their campus, where I get the feeling half of their revenue is from Asian tourists snapping away at the pristine architecture and landscaping. However, I think it is simply more the case that the emerald green eye-sore is yet another in a thousand tales of extreme post-soviet optimism, and later demise. Talking about the situation with my fellow students, we realized that most building demolitions in the US are a first step in the creation of a newer, bigger, better building appropriate with an economy that can support a population to patronize services there. Even at Russia’s “premier” economic institution, I think one part of that equation still seems to be missing. Much like the lesson Muscovites have long known about with the USSR’s Hall of Economic Achievement (BДNX), this intriguing eyesore teaches us that feigning prosperity doesn’t quite make up for its absence.