Metro station in marble and granite recalls great victory

RUSSIA: Rocking slightly on 79-year-old legs, Vladimir Demyanovich strides along the grey and white polished granite of the deepest metro platform in the world.

"It's long overdue, a station at Victory Park," says Mr Demyanovich, absentmindedly touching the medals that cluster on one side of his dark blue jacket.

He stops to watch the headlights of an arriving train streak past, and listen to the diminuendo whine of the slowing carriages echo between walls of pinkish marble.

"And it's a decent station," he says, "a nice simple one. Nothing fussy." In most other cities, the station at Victory Park - Park Pobedy in Russian - would be considered either a spectacular work of art or an act of wanton civic largesse.

But Muscovites are used to descending to grand colonnaded halls where people sell newspapers and beg money, to seeing the drunk and destitute slumped against stunning murals and mosaics and to bustling off trains alongside the city's metro-savvy stray dogs onto platforms of coloured marble and granite.

The system's palatial stations were Josef Stalin's grandest architectural project and immortalise his capricious shifts of aesthetic and ideological mood.

The builders used rare stone from across the Soviet Union to create a beautiful and functional system that moves nine million around the city smoothly every day.

Victory Park is Moscow's 166th metro station, and the world's deepest at 97 metres.

It will have the world's longest station escalator, at 125 metres, and its opening this week ended a 16-year effort to extend the metro to an area of parkland, museums and monuments dedicated to the 27 million Soviet citizens who died in the second World War, as well as those who, like Mr Demyanovich, survived.

"I am meeting friends, other military men, later, but I had some spare time so I came up here to have a look around," Mr Demyanovich says, nodding occasionally at other old men wandering the gleaming station wearing medals and uniforms.

Mr Demyanovich was going to meet fellow veterans gathering early to commemorate Victory Day, the annual May 9th national holiday here when Russia celebrates the Red Army's defeat of the Third Reich.

"It was a glorious victory - and with such huge losses - we should do more to commemorate it," said Mr Demyanovich, a sergeant who fought for three years on the Belarussian front.

"We never do enough in Russia to mark our achievements, not like the Americans, for example. We never seem to have the time or money to do it properly.

"I suppose this station is a start, but it has been a long time coming."

Work on Victory Park station and extending the rail line - the dark blue one on Moscow's metro map - began in 1987, but a cash crunch halted construction in 1992.

The pugnacious Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who has pushed through several extravagant building projects, restarted the Victory Park plan in 2000 and threw tens of millions of dollars at completing a station that one metro official called this week "a return to the traditional, monumentalist style of construction".

If the description conjures images of brutal, monolithic Soviet architecture, then it does Victory Park no justice.

The first passengers arriving at the gleaming station this week stepped hesitantly on to platforms of grey, white and pinkish-brown granite. They moved as if slightly dazed between the two white-domed main halls, along passageways with black and white stone floors and pink marble walls; many Moscow stations are beautiful, but none sparkle like the newest one.

You enter and leave Victory Park through a passageway of polished, pale grey stone, studded with round white lights like glowing portholes.

The only off-note comes from the garish military murals at the end of each hall. They display the signature and trademark kitsch of Zurab Tsereteli, a favourite of Mr Luzhkov's but an artist widely derided here for several very costly and very ugly efforts created at taxpayers' expense.

One mural commemorates the Soviet victory in 1945, with a man holding a baby and a bloodied sword as peasants celebrate beneath Moscow's Kremlin.

In the other hall, rheumy-eyed Russian generals contemplate their victory over Napoleon in 1812. They stand around their leader, Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, in whom several visitors saw more than a passing resemblance to Mr Luzhkov.