Autumn at the station. Historical sketches with Vyacheslav Bondarenko

Every city starts from the station. Those that are larger are also from the airport, but the station is still “grounded”, it is tightly inscribed in the urban environment in contrast to airfields far beyond the outskirts. Here cross the paths of thousands of people who have just arrived and gathered to leave, here say goodbye and meet, give flowers and drag to the taxi suitcases, dive in the subway and hastily snack before boarding. Color shot, made not so long ago - but in fact in a completely different era - plunges us into this bustle of the station: so you can see how rushed people caught in a random frame of the photographer.

And it is no coincidence that the weather in the frame is rather nasty. October, cold, wet, puddles. No umbrellas, but someone's wearing hoods. However, in the 1990s, when this picture was taken, there was no such universal fashion for hoods, as now: very many preferred to walk in the cold or wear hats, or without hats. That's what we see in the photo. Where our photographer stands, it is easy to understand: this is Minsk Leningradskaya Street, which runs from the station inland into the city parallel to Kirov Street. The name is ancient, pre-revolutionary: St. Petersburg, Petrograd, then Leningrad. Leningrad has long been gone, but Minsk street, named in his honor, remained. However, in Russia too - St. Petersburg, and the region - Leningrad, and the zoo of the northern capital is also Leningrad.

On the left in the frame is seen a massive, richly decorated corner of the house on Kirov street, 1. We are used to calling the "Gateway of the city" two massive "Stalin" towers, which rise directly opposite the station, and somehow forget that the towers are not in themselves, but are parts of long residential buildings, whose "wings" stretch on both sides of the square. We can see the corner of the left wing. At the top of the sign "Products" - this store has existed there since the construction of the house. And at the very top adorned a huge slogan "We are friends, brotherhood, unity is strong!". The second house at the same time welcomed the visitors: "Sardechnya we ask from the gorad-hero Minsk." For a while, these signs held in the 1990s. Of course, the main character of this picture is the station. It is on him that everything is tied up here, around him the main fuss. Above the heads of people, above the trolley wires rises the frame of the building, to which we are already accustomed, which since 2001 is one of the symbols of modern Minsk. What else do you see in the photo? Of course, this is one of the main types of business of that decade - trading from trays. The man stuck to the wall of “Products” seems to be selling books, the hawkers on the right – something edible. On the one hand, it was convenient, on the other hand – not every product like this you can buy with your hands on the street (the same books that lay in the rain, in what form will they be?.). Then it seemed that such forms of trade, which appeared at the outset of the existence of the USSR, will remain forever, but time and the economy did not stand still, and already in the early 2000s such business looked archaic and strange, and now it is completely forgotten. I don’t know, maybe someone gets nostalgic for this, and I just shudder, remembering the “dashing” decade.

Easily recognized in the photo and brand kiosk Belarusian fast food "Hutka-lubricated". The golden age of this network is 1992-2002. There were such kiosks a lot of places: near the Okean store, on Nemiga, near the Vostok metro stations, the Institute of Culture, Mogilevskaya, near the Palace of Sports... Only 45 grand. They traded hot dogs, for which they came up with a separate name - Hadun, they cost a little more than 700 rubles. (Who remembers now, was it too much or too little?) In 2002, the number of kiosks “Khutka-lubchana” was halved, their competitors became much more, and by 2017 there were only two such points in Minsk, and in March 2021 the last one disappeared from Nemiga. On the kiosk near the station, it is easy to recognize the advertising of Coca-Cola, which peacefully coexisted with purely Belarusian food.

With transport in the frame is not dense, but he is also already a bygone nature. On the right is a cream minibus RAF-2203 of Latvian production, a standard Soviet minibus of the 1980s, the fare in which cost 20 kopecks (drived only sitting, standing passengers were not taken). The collapse of the USSR was the beginning of the end of the RAF plant: it lost old markets, but never found new ones, the EU was full of its own minibuses, and no one needed “rafiks” there. We have "rafiks" could be found on the roads until about the early 2000s, then they were replaced by Russian and European cars, and now such a minibus can be seen only in the movies. The same rarity is the trolleybus: it is ZIU-682 from the Volga city of Engels. The first such cars arrived in Minsk in 1972, and the last left the city lines in 2006. However, another four years were delayed outwardly indistinguishable from ZIU trolleybuses brand "Belkommunmash". 40 years on our streets! Remember, on the oldest ZIU there was a noticeable “hump” in the floor, if you pass from the rear deck to the middle of the trolleybus? And the seats were soft at first, "puffy", and then became rigid.

And then – construction, long, painful, causing quite understandable irritation and drivers, pedestrians, and passengers. And all the functions of the station were assumed by a modest suburban pavilion built in 1956 (architects S. Botkovsky, N. Spiegelman). I think everyone who used the railway at the time remembers the wild lines at his cash desk.

In general, the history of the construction of the new Minsk station was very long. Although the railway passed through the city in 1873, Minsk, in fact, for a very long time was content with the “remnants” of old, pre-revolutionary station buildings, more precisely, the capital renovated Vilna station in 1940 of the sample of 1893. The fact that such a station categorically does not meet either the status of the capital of the Union Republic, nor the many times increased passenger traffic, was clear back in the 1970s, because in 1974 an all-Union architectural competition for the project of a new Minsk station was held. Alas, none of the presented projects went to work, only the construction of a new service and technical building was implemented (now it houses the Express Hotel) and concourse (now this word is on the ear thanks to the eponymous food court, but in general the concourse is a covered waiting room, from where gentle ramps or escalators lead to the paths). It was until the collapse of the USSR. In 1991, the old station, which saw both the First World War and the Great Patriotic, was demolished, and Minsk did not have any station building at all - this situation was not in any of the former republics of the Union! A new competition was urgently needed, in which the project of architects Viktor Kramarenko and Mikhail Vinogradov won. It was eventually implemented, except for the fact that the old suburban pavilion remained on the fringes, retaining its independence (the project proposed to include it in the total volume of the station building).

Such a station square (or rather, the station corner) we see in the picture - the time of construction of a new station. How long did the Minskers wait for him? The project was adopted in 1992, construction began in 1995. But when the new building was inaugurated on December 30, 2000, everyone gasped. This station is now taken calmly, as something for granted, and then people for hours admired the facade, the panorama of the “Gate of the City”, which opened directly from the escalator. The station looked stylish and modern, it seemed to open a fundamentally new era in the life of the city and the country. I remember very well how my friends and I, shortly after the start of the station, just went there in the evenings to sit in a cafe - it felt like you were in a brand new, with a needle huge club.

But in this picture, the opening is still far away. Cold autumn of the second half of the 1990s. Maybe some of the people captured in the picture already have the latest novelty – a pager, and someone at work already has the Internet (I remember well the question printed then in one of the men’s magazines: “Recently connected to the Internet.” Can you tell me what’s interesting? Still living “rafik” and ZIUs are hurrying their routes, workers are working on a huge construction site in the depth of the frame... A moment of life, captured once and left with us thanks to film.