A corner of Moscow fights to keep history from being built over, literally

For the past two decades, the technocratic leadership of Moscow has remade the face of the city under development priorities set by a partnership between big business and the authorities. And while that has resulted in many widely acknowledged achievements, officials have moved ahead without paying much attention to public input.

Activists now want that to change, and the battle over the Badaevskiy Beer Plant could be the moment.

A coalition of small-business people, local residents, and newly elected opposition deputies of the Moscow City Council is uniting to stop a mega-development project in a picturesque corner of central Moscow, whose plan calls for building a vast luxury housing complex on stilts atop a rare and protected gem of 19th-century industrial architecture. It’s the sort of apolitical, grassroots civic movement that may be

“We are dealing with a whole system”“This place is not a wasteland”