Soviet Era Hotels Awaiting Capitalist Saviors

Moscow Times 4 June 2013
Hulking, bleakly grey and occasionally claustrophobia-inducing, Soviet-era hotels are ready to be spruced up — if investors will have them.
Many Soviet-era hotels in Moscow and other cities have undergone large-scale reconstruction in recent years and are now in the hands of international operators. The advantages of undertaking such reconstruction work versus demolition and starting from scratch, however, are debatable.
“If you got [the Soviet hotels] through privatization or bought them cheaply, then perhaps they can be reconstructed and the cost won’t be much,” said Sergei Kalinin, president of Hals Development. “But generally, with the exception of architectural gems, it makes more sense to start new construction.”
Hals Development plans to allocate more than $100 million to refurbish the Pekin Hotel near Mayakovskaya metro station, which first opened in 1956. The hotel is slated to close in December 2013 and re-open in 2017.
Among other notable reconstruction efforts are the transformations of the Hotel Minsk into the InterContinental Moscow Tverskaya, the Bucharest into the Baltschug Kempinski, the Leningradskaya into the Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya and the Mezhdunarodnaya into the World Trade Center Hotel.
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