Volume 41, Number 21 · December 22, 1994
The Wonder of the Soviet World
By Jamey Gambrell
The Exhibition of the Achievement of the People's Economy, a six-hundred-acre park in the north of Moscow, just a half-hour by metro from Red Square, isn't on many tourist itineraries nowadays. But once VDNX (the Russian acronym, pronounced vway day en ha) was one of the wonders of the Soviet world, no less consecrated a site of pilgrimage than Lenin's Mausoleum. It was visited by over eight million people a year. Originally an agricultural exhibition when it opened in 1939, it combined the various characteristics of a theme park, a 4-H Club, a trade fair, and a World's Fair in one of the more spectacular Potemkin Villages—and some of the kitschiest architecture—the Soviet regime ever built. Federico Fellini, who once visited VDNX, called it 'the hallucination of a drunken pastry chef.' 'It's our totalitarian Disneyland,' Russians say.
Feature, 5834 words
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