Bolshoi rebuilding project falters as Putin cuts budget
It was supposed to be the mother of all makeovers — a £492million reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theatre to put it on a par with Covent Garden and La Scala.
But a month after the Bolshoi closed for the three-year project, the Russian Government has refused to foot the bill.
German Gref, the Economy Minister, has accused the theatre’s management of extravagance and told it to cut the budget to nine billion roubles (£163 million).
Nikita Shangin, the Bolshoi’s chief architect, says that he will walk out if the original budget is not restored.
He said: “This project cannot be realised with nine billion roubles. It would be enough to do a little bit of restoration, but not complete reconstruction. I won’t take part in such work.”
Built in 1824, the Bolshoi is Russia’s oldest theatre and houses the Bolshoi opera and ballet. But after almost a decade of post-Soviet neglect, the building’s colonnaded faÁade is crumbling, its foundations are sinking and its antiquated backstage machinery often grinds to a halt.
Anatoly Iksanov, its general manager, says that the building is a danger to the actors and the audience.
The original plan was to completely reconstruct the building, installing new stage apparatus, cloakrooms and escalators and enlarging underground storage space. Mr Shangin said that it took more than six years to prepare the paperwork — due largely to bickering between traditionalists and modernists. He said: “We worked very hard on it.”
President Putin endorsed the plans in March and a start date was set with warnings not to overspend.
But Mr Shangin said that he was shocked when Mr Gref questioned his budget at a meeting in July. Mr Gref was apparently angry that the Bolshoi had not given a breakdown of its budget in comparison with renovations of other major theatres, such as La Scala in Milan.
Mr Shangin said: “Gref was prepared for our meeting by his entourage. I wasn’t prepared to talk about statistics because I wasn’t ready for an argument. It seems like he’d made a decision before our meeting.”
Mr Shangin said that it was unfair to compare the project with the relatively cheap restoration of La Scala. He said: “We have to preserve a monument, and create a functional modern building.”
During the tender for the Bolshoi work, one firm had proposed doing the work for nine billion roubles, but the estimate proved unrealistic, he said.
He added: “Now that the results of our six years’ work could be destroyed, I have to explain to everyone that we’re not stealing money and everything is seriously accounted for,” he said.
There was no comment from the Economy Ministry.
The dispute is the latest to hit the Bolshoi. Earlier this year, pro-Putin youth activists protested against the theatre’s first original opera in 25 years, Rosenthal’s Children.
The libretto was written by the avant-garde author Vladimir Sorokin, whom the youth activists said promoted pornography and homosexuality in his 1999 novel, Blue Lard. The novel depicted a sadomasochistic encounter between the clones of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.
Last year Anastasia Volochkova, one of the Bolshoi’s leading ballerinas, sued the theatre after she was dismissed for being too heavy for other dancers to lift. She lost the case.
From Jeremy Page in Moscow