WORLD: Developers ripping heart out of Moscow'

The architecture of Moscow is under "immediate, extensive and overwhelming threat" from ruthless developers, a report says today.

It claims the city is being subjected to a "demolition derby" by which its "cultural heritage is being destroyed".

Famous buildings are endangered, including the Bolshoi Theatre. Some of the palatial stations of the city's metro system are at risk. The "most elegant" of these, Mayakovskaya, "could be deprived of most of its good looks", due to water damage and botched repairs.

The 300-page report, Moscow Heritage At Crisis Point, has been prepared by the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society, with the support of SAVE Europe's Heritage and other organisations. It notes that while some progress has been made, such as making public a list of protected buildings, for the most part the threat is as great as ever.

While there are laws in place to protect historic buildings, "widespread corruption means that these laws are rarely enforced".

Despite extensive illegal demolition and damage to protected buildings, there has "not been a single successful prosecution".

The report blames the damage on developers, keen to maximise profits by destroying old buildings and in some cases moving out residents, and on inadequate control by the city government and mayor Yuri Luzhkov

Major losses include the destruction in an unexplained fire of the 200-year-old Imperial Riding School, and its replacement with a much-criticised replica. The 1930s Moskva Hotel, famous as the building on the Stolichnaya Vodka label, has been destroyed and replaced with a "less than faithful" imitation.

According to Marcus Binney, chairman of SAVE Europe's Heritage, the danger is to buildings from many periods in Moscow's nine centuries of creating "imposing, beautiful and fascinatingly bizarre buildings". The report condemns the practice of creating "sham replicas" . Mr Binney calls them "architectural mongrels that make a mockery of Russia's great past".

The document claims that Moscow is making the same mistakes that other cities, including London, made in the Sixties, by destroying its past and making the city subservient to cars.

Conservationists face an uphill task. One Moscow developer has said that "70 per cent of the buildings in the centre are of absolutely no interest" and is "in favour of clearing all this old rubbish out of the city".