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Location: Red Square
Tel. (495) 788 4343
Subway:
Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Okhotnyy Ryad
Open: 10am- 10pm daily
www.gum.ru
The department store GUM (Russian Торговый Дом ГУМ,
transcription Torgowy Dom GUM; abbreviated from Главный
универсальный магазин, Glawny uniwersalny magasin, to German
main department store) is a former department store and today a
shopping center in the Russian capital Moscow. With an area of
around 75,000 m² and a history spanning more than 100 years, it
is one of the best-known trading companies and, according to the
old concept, was the largest department store in Europe.
The GUM building is located in the heart of Moscow on Red
Square, opposite the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin. It was
built in 1893 to designs by Alexander Pomerantsev and Vladimir
Shukhov as the Upper Commercial Rows (Верхние торговые ряды,
Verchnije torgovye rjady) and today represents an important
monument of Russian historicist architecture of the late 19th
century. It was closed for decades in Soviet times and later
became a state department store (Государственный универсальный
магазин, Gossudarstwenny uniwersalny magasin), the GUM also has
a very checkered history.
The GUM department store is located on the western
outskirts of the old business district of Kitai-Gorod in the Central
Administrative District of Moscow, right in the historical core of the
city. The department store building occupies an approximately
rectangular area between Red Square, Nikolskaya Street, Vetozhny Lane
and Ilyinka Street and has ten entrances on all four sides of the
building. In the immediate vicinity of the GUM are St. Basil's
Cathedral, the Ploshchad Revolyutsii metro station and the Moskvorezki
Bridge over the Moskva.
The interior of the building, 250 meters
long and 88 meters wide, accommodates around 200 separate shops of
different sizes on three floors along three glass-roofed longitudinal
passages (also known as lines) and three transverse passages as well as
the galleries on the two upper floors connected by bridges on both sides
. In terms of functionality, the GUM is therefore no longer a typical
department store, but rather a shopping center. Nevertheless, it is
still commonly called a department store today, as this term has become
firmly established since Soviet times, when trade was uniformly in the
hands of the state. Overall, the sales area of the GUM is around 35,000
m² with a total area of 75,000 m². The average number of visitors is
currently around 30,000 customers per day.
The GUM building is
owned by the City of Moscow and has been operated since 1990 by the
joint-stock company Warenhaus GUM, founded in the same year, which has
lease rights to the building until 2042. 75 percent of the GUM shares
are currently held by the Russian fashion house chain Bosco di Ciliegi,
the rest is in free float. In addition to GUM, the company also ran the
department store chain Stilny Gorod and a number of former state-owned
shops in Moscow until 2005. The operating company's net profit in 2006
was around 27.7 million US dollars on sales of 97.2 million dollars.
Due to the central location of the house and the resulting high
rents for the premises, most shops are now primarily aimed at wealthy
customers. This is especially true of the shops in the arcades on the
ground floor, which are mostly upmarket boutiques and specialty shops
for expensive branded clothing and shoes, as well as jewelry salons.
Several well-known German manufacturers are also represented with their
company shops in the GUM, including adidas, Hugo Boss, Puma and
Salamander. The third floor of the house is a bit cheaper and houses
several restaurants, including a Russian fast-food restaurant, in
addition to a few shops in the middle price range. In addition, the GUM
today includes perfume shops, souvenir, toy and household goods shops as
well as computer and multimedia shops.
The GUM building was built in 1890-1893 to a design by
architect Alexander Pomerantsev (1849-1918) with the assistance of
engineer Vladimir Shukhov (1853-1939). Overall, the building is assigned
to the so-called neo- or pseudo-Russian style, a style of historicism
for which a mixture of Russian-traditional architecture of the 15th and
16th centuries with neoclassical, Western European elements is typical.
The Old Russian influence is evident in the building's facades,
which Pomerantsev designed in reference to the architecture of the
surrounding neighborhoods, including the Kremlin and the neighboring
Historical Museum. Typical of this are the large arched windows,
stylistically based on Russian Orthodox church buildings, the two
pointed towers in the central area of the building, which are
reminiscent of some of the Kremlin towers, and shaped in the style of
the Terem Palace and similar noble residential buildings of the 16th
century roof sections. However, some elements of the European
Renaissance can also be seen on the GUM facades, such as the numerous
ornaments in the area of the windows and arcade-like portals at the
entrances. This is also characteristic of Pomeranzew's work, since he
lived and practiced in other European countries - including Italy - from
1879 to 1887 and was inspired by the architecture there. Around 40
million bricks were used in the construction of the entire building. The
outer walls were faced with granite, marble and limestone. The facade
facing Red Square was designed most elaborately, in the middle of which
is the central entrance to the department store: the first floor is
covered here with marble from Tarussa, which makes the facade appear
lighter in its lower part than in the middle and upper, and with a
massive cornice separated from the two upper floors.
In contrast
to the facades, which are primarily based on the traditions of old
Russian architecture, the interior of the GUM was created in a style
that was very modern for the end of the 19th century and was based on
European architecture and provided with numerous steel and glass
elements. The transparent, concave roof constructions over the three
longitudinal passages, each with a span of 15 m and a length of 250 m,
are unique for the time and are still striking today. They were created
according to the design of Vladimir Shukhov, who used around 60,000
panes of glass supported by metal elements with a total weight of 833
tons. A few years later, Shukhov designed a similar construction for the
Kiev railway station and a number of other public buildings in Moscow.
The floors of the building were connected by lateral stairwells,
which were only added to the transverse passages by escalators in the
course of building renovation work in the early 2000s. The galleries on
the two upper floors are connected by reinforced concrete bridges, which
were erected during the construction of the department store based on a
design by engineer Arthur Loleit (1868–1933). Storage rooms and visitor
toilets are located in the basement of the building.
Another
striking structure inside the GUM is the fountain, which is located in
the center of the building, at the intersection of the two central
longitudinal and transverse passages. It was placed there a few years
after the opening of the department store and originally had a circular
basin, which was replaced by an octagonal basin made of red quartzite
during the 1953 renovation. The focal point of the fountain is a
mushroom-shaped bronze construction, the tip of which extends to the
level of the first floor. The fountain is supported by special metal
pillars located just below it in the basement. Exactly above the center
of the building with the fountain, the glass roof construction assumes
the shape of a dome. The fountain still serves as a meeting place for
many Muscovites today.
As can be seen from various documents of the time, the
districts immediately east of Red Square were already characterized by
trade before the 17th century. Also on the square itself, which was
already the central square of the city at that time, there were many
sales stands. In places they reached up to the walls of the Kremlin,
which was the tsar's residence until the beginning of the 18th century.
As Moscow's population grew in the late 18th century, street trading in
the heart of the city also expanded; in the second half of the century,
the entire area between Red Square and the streets bordering on it to
the east resembled a huge marketplace. The term Upper Commercial Rows
(Russian: Верхние торговые ряды, Verchnije torgowye rjady) had come to
be used for the area directly adjacent to Red Square, while the
marketplaces of the two districts on the slope down to the Moskva bank
to the east of the Basilius -Cathedral were accordingly called Middle
and Lower Trading Rows. Some street names - such as Fish Lane (Russian
Рыбный переулок, Rybnyi pereulok) or Lead Crystal Lane (Хрустальный
переулок, Chrustalnyi pereulok) - are still reminiscent of the time when
only street trade was carried out in the area of Red Square and certain
goods were sold - besides Fish and lead crystal, for example vegetables,
butter, gold, silver or silk - formed their own rows of markets.
The first attempts to bring the disorderly trading activities around Red
Square under one roof were made in the second half of the 18th century.
In the 1780s, some particularly influential Moscow merchants managed to
obtain permission from the tsar to construct a two-story brick building
east of Red Square, so that it could be relieved of the brisk commercial
activity that also impeded access to the Kremlin. A few years later, the
first forerunner of today's GUM was the commercial building, which
continued to be known as the Upper Commercial Rows and united countless
sales booths behind its facade. At about the same time, the traders also
had a similar complex built on the middle trading rows. The conception
of both houses is attributed to the renowned architect Giacomo
Quarenghi, an exiled Italian who designed several buildings, mainly in
Saint Petersburg, that are still well-known today, including the Smolny
Institute.
However, the newly built trading houses did not last
long. Although they were not made of wood, as was usual in Moscow at the
time, but of brick, they burned down almost completely in 1812 when some
townspeople set fire to large parts of Moscow when French troops were
approaching in the war against Napoleon. After the war, however, trade
quickly flourished again and the trade lanes had to be rebuilt. The
architect Joseph Bové, who, like his predecessor, had Italian roots and
was best known for his decisive role in the reconstruction of Moscow
after the great fire of 1812, was commissioned with the reconstruction.
In 1814-1815 the Upper Trading Rows were restored to their original
location according to his Empire-style design and would henceforth be
the center of Moscow commerce for decades to come. This second GUM
precursor also essentially consisted of the representative facades,
which housed numerous and mostly chaotically arranged shop houses
inside. What the upper trading rows must have looked like from the
outside can still be seen relatively well today in the very similarly
designed former building of the middle trading rows, which stands
diagonally opposite today's GUM on Iljinka Street (location: ♁▼) and is
now called exhibition hall is used. The arcade-like portals that line
all four facades of the building served as entrances to the individual
shops behind them in the 19th century.
However, neither the now
massive construction of the upper trading rows nor the reputation of
their architect could hide the fact that the building showed structural
defects just a few years after its completion. Increasingly, this led to
water penetrating into the interior of the house during heavy rainfall
and damaging inadequately covered goods. Since the individual stalls
belonged to different owners, it was extremely difficult to coordinate a
thorough renovation of the building. By the middle of the 19th century,
the rows were in such poor condition that renovation seemed futile and
the building could only be maintained in a makeshift manner. The calls
for demolition became louder and louder in the population, so that
finally in 1869 the Governor General of Moscow also demanded a new
building.
However, it was initially very difficult to convince
the owners of the shops that the demolition was necessary; many of them
feared for their existence and initially put up massive resistance to
the closure plans. Progress only began in the 1880s, after a respected
merchant suggested building a new, three-story building complex in the
place of the old rows according to contemporary structural standards,
from the construction of which the previous owners would also benefit.
Since trading in the heart of Moscow has long been a very lucrative
affair, according to the plans it should not be a problem to find
sufficient financiers, i.e. shareholders, for the construction project.
And so, on May 10, 1888, a new joint-stock company was founded, which
received the name of the Company of the Upper Commercial Rows on Red
Square in Moscow.
In the first months after the establishment of the
company, the shares were issued, with a certain part of them being
distributed to the former owners of the trading rows according to
their respective shares in the old building. The remaining shares
could be purchased at a price of 100 rubles each. The sale went
extremely well: around ten million rubles were collected in the
first few days. After sufficient capital was available, the company
announced an architectural competition for the new commercial rows
on November 15, 1888. Almost at the same time, the old trading house
was closed and demolition work began immediately.
In the
tender, the chain trade company placed particular importance on fair
and neutral competition. In order to prevent collusion, preferential
treatment and similar incidents, the competition was carried out
anonymously; the names of the participating architects remained top
secret until the results were announced and were not accessible to
the jury. A total of 23 designs were submitted. After the jury had
appraised them, they announced their decision on February 21, 1889:
the first prize, endowed with 6,000 rubles, went to the design
submitted by Alexander Pomeranzew and Vladimir Shukhov. Pomerantsev
was a professor of architecture at the St. Petersburg Art Academy
and was therefore already a well-respected person in Russian
architectural circles, while the young engineer Shukhov was still
completely unknown at the time - his most famous buildings, such as
the Moscow radio tower, were not built until decades later. The
experts praised Pomerantsev and Shukhov's project as, literally,
"rational and economical" and at the same time architecturally very
well in harmony with the old Russian ensemble around the Moscow
Kremlin. The merchants involved in the company particularly liked
the glass roofing of the passages designed by Vladimir Shukhov,
which stylistically linked to similar commercial passages that were
just becoming fashionable in European metropolises such as Milan,
Paris or Vienna. In Russia, such a construction was completely
unknown until then.
The three winning designs finally went to
Saint Petersburg to be appraised by Tsar Alexander III. He praised
the jury's decision and then issued the building permit for the new
retail rows. The laying of the foundation stone took place on May
21, 1890, and was attended by almost all of Moscow's celebrities,
including the governor general. A commission set up specifically for
this purpose monitored the construction work over its entire
three-year course, paying particular attention to compliance with
the specified time and budget, as well as the structural condition
of the building being built and the quality of the building
materials used, which were supplied by well-known Russian
manufacturers. Great importance was also attached to the quality of
the workforce: when recruiting craftsmen from other regions of the
Russian Empire, the reputation of the respective profession in the
region was always taken into account. Meanwhile, the Moscow public
followed the construction work closely; the newspapers reported on
the construction almost every day, and even in other European
countries the Moscow construction site with its enormous dimensions
was mentioned in the print media. Around two years after the start
of construction, the building was complete with the exception of the
interior fittings and could be entered and viewed by its
shareholders. In the autumn of 1893, the trading series were finally
completed and inaugurated with a solemn ceremony on December 2 of
the same year.
The opening of the new trading house in the heart of
Moscow was a major event that resonated well beyond the borders of the
Russian Empire. In addition to the innovative glass roof, through which
a lot of daylight penetrated into the interior of the building, the new
retail aisles had interior fittings that were very modern for the time,
including central heating, several electrically operated freight
elevators - also an absolute novelty at the time - and even included an
in-house power station for power supply in the basement. After sunset,
around 7,000 electric light bulbs illuminated the passages.
Within a few days, the upper trading rows became a crowd puller and a
tourist attraction in Moscow, which at that time already had almost a
million inhabitants. Even those who couldn't afford to shop there came
to see the superlative new department store. The arcades on the ground
floor were like a covered promenade where it was summery warm even in
winter.
Above all, however, wealthy citizens got their money's
worth here. The range of products in the originally almost 350 shops,
which were spread over four floors including the basement, ranged from
sweets and delicatessen to various domestic and foreign perfumery
products, fashion items, furs, wristwatches and fine jewelry to
furniture and sanitary technology. For the first time in Russia, price
tags were used in the trading rows and thus initiated the transition to
a completely new trading culture, which stood out from the haggling in
street trades and smaller shops that had been common until then. The
most well-known Russian and foreign producers presented their goods here
and offered them for sale with a lot of advertising, which ultimately
paid off despite the extremely high rents for the shops (especially for
those on the ground floor). In addition to almost all possible goods,
customers of the trading series could use a wide range of accompanying
services, including porters for the transport of purchased goods,
several catering establishments, a bank branch, a post office, a
hairdressing salon and even a dentist's office. The upper floor of the
department store also housed an event hall in which concerts and art
exhibitions occasionally took place.
For more than twenty years,
from its opening until the end of the Tsarist Empire, the Upper Rows of
Trade was the center of economic and social life in Moscow and was
considered one of the best department stores in the world due to its
comprehensive, high-quality range and the exemplary service of the time.
For this reason, they attracted millions of visitors from Russia and
abroad.
A few months after the October Revolution of 1917 and
the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, the new rulers began to
nationalize the upper trading ranks. The shops in the building closed
one after the other, because even for smaller shopkeepers, who were
initially spared from the forced expropriation, trading in the rows that
were becoming increasingly empty was no longer worthwhile. However, the
state power used a large number of vacant shops as premises for newly
formed ministries and other state institutions; a former posh perfume
shop became the seat of the People's Commissariat for Food Distribution.
In 1921, trade in the upper echelons, which had come to an almost
complete standstill, revived for a few years when the New Economic
Policy initiated by Lenin permitted private trade. At the same time, the
department store received its current name GUM, which stood for
Gosudarstvenny Uniwersalny Magasin (Государственный Универсальный
Магазин), ie State Department Store, at that time and throughout the
period of socialism. Also, the range of GUM in the 1920s was not nearly
as rich and elegant as before the revolution; it was essentially limited
to everyday objects and propaganda needs such as red flags or portraits
of Soviet statesmen.
With the end of the New Economic Policy in
the early 1930s, however, trading in the GUM finally came to an end. The
shops were cleared and occupied by a number of other state
organizations; to this end, many former shops have been remodeled and
merged to create larger premises. In the 1930s, for example, a canteen,
a printing shop and even several communal apartments (so-called
kommunalkas) were built in the building, with the latter surviving there
until the 1960s. The building retained the name GUM even during this
period, although it was officially no longer a department store.
Largely spared the German bombardment of Moscow during World War II, the
GUM was nevertheless threatened with demolition for several years in the
late 1940s after leading Soviet architects of the time, commissioned by
Stalin, designed a plan for a huge sculpture commemorating the victory
over Germany had worked out. Since this was to be right in the heart of
the capital, i.e. on Red Square, but the square itself was to remain
free for military parades and celebratory demonstrations, the plan
envisaged the final closure and demolition of the department store.
Shortly after Stalin's death in 1953, not only was the demolition plan
rejected, but the USSR Council of Ministers also decided to reopen the
GUM as a department store. According to oral tradition, this happened on
the initiative of the party functionary and later head of state Nikita
Khrushchev, who wanted to revive the GUM as a model department store.
The renovation of the building and the conversion of the interior began
immediately, during which, among other things, a large number of smaller
shop cells were merged into large halls. The conversion work progressed
very quickly, so that the house was able to reopen on December 24, 1953.
From its reopening to the collapse of the Soviet
Union, GUM retained its reputation as the country's flagship department
store virtually unchallenged. While the shortage of goods that is
typical of socialist countries ensured that only an extremely poor range
of consumer goods was to be found in ordinary shops, department stores
and department stores of the Soviet Empire until the early 1990s, at the
same time there was a secret one in the GUM that was not available to
the public accessible department in which high-ranking civil servants
and their relatives could buy high-quality clothing, some imported from
the West, and other so-called deficit goods. Surplus stocks kept coming
back to the generally accessible departments, to the delight of ordinary
consumers. This in turn led to long queues forming in front of the GUM
entrances every morning, hours before it opened, as many ordinary
citizens – often traveling from other cities in the Soviet Union – hoped
to get hold of one or the other scarce commodity . The fact that such
scenes took place in the heart of the Soviet capital of all places,
directly opposite the Kremlin and the Lenin Mausoleum, was a thorn in
the side of conservative-minded statesmen in particular and even led to
renewed plans for the closure and demolition of the building in the late
1970s warehouse. According to a modern legend, the GUM owes its
existence only to the personal intervention of the head of state Leonid
Brezhnev, whose wife Viktoria was a regular customer of a tailor's shop
there.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent
privatization of state property in Russia ushered in new times for the
GUM. As early as December 1990, at the time of perestroika, the
operating stock company Warenhaus GUM was founded. The formerly
state-run sales area of the department store was gradually rented out to
various private retail companies. The name was adapted to the new
circumstances: The old, familiar abbreviation GUM remained, but since
1990 it has stood for Glawny Uniwersalny Magasin (Russian Главный
Универсальный Магазин), i.e. main department store instead of the
previous state department store. In June 1993, the now privatized
department store celebrated its 100th anniversary with a folk festival
lasting several days and a ceremonial procession on Red Square staged in
the style of the late 19th century. A little later, the central GUM
entrance from Red Square was reopened after around 40 years. In Soviet
times, it was closed to the public as the authorities wanted to prevent
crowds and queues from forming right on Red Square and spoiling the
image of the Soviet state in the eyes of foreign tourists.
In the
following decade, the GUM went through a development from a former
socialist department store to an elegant shopping temple. The building
itself was also extensively renovated from the late 1990s to the
mid-2000s and its interior redecorated. In addition to the installation
of escalators and lifts for the disabled and the renovation of the
fountain, shopping arcades were created on the second floor, which was
previously used exclusively for offices. There are also plans to remodel
the basement for future use as a retail space.
In 1963, the GUM department store was one of the scenes and locations of the well-known Soviet feature film Zwischenlandung in Moscow (also: I walk through Moscow, Russian Я шагаю по Москве) with the then 18-year-old Nikita Mikhalkov. In one scene, as a young worker, Kolja, he and his friend Sascha, who is about to get married, are looking for a new jacket for him. The GUM is also mentioned in a song by the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Wyssozki: A collective farmer who is on a business trip in Moscow writes to his wife in the village that he is going to the GUM - "It's like our barn, only with glass". - to buy a dress for her, "... because you can get boring to me with your sheepskin and gray dress with faded patterns".