Trying to Save a Concrete ‘Monument to Corruption’
The 17-story hotel, a giant and graceless gem of socialist modernist architecture cherished by aficionados of concrete, took four years to build in the 1970s and became a proud symbol of the Soviet Union’s embrace of modernity.
Reduced to a ruin in the more than 30 years since Moldova gained independence, the National Hotel in Chisinau, the capital, is today a study in the post-Soviet dysfunctions of one of Europe’s poorest countries.
Wealthy tycoons have wrangled over it, shuffling ownership between opaque offshore companies, while competing groups of graffiti artists have turned its facade into a huge tableau displaying their rival loyalties. One group daubed it with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, then a group opposed to Ukraine painted a Russian military symbol. In June, a new group painted the exterior with the colors of Moldova’s flag.
Prosecutors and preservationists have struggled to understand how what was once a prize piece of real estate has fallen on such hard times.
“It is a monument to corruption in Moldova,” said Valeriu Pasa, the head of WatchDog, a Chisinau research and anti-corruption activist group.
“It moved from one oligarch to another, but our justice system has for years failed to hold those responsible for the mess accountable,” he added.
Opened in 1978 as a four-star hotel whose size and modern design were intended to wow foreign visitors, the National is now a dystopian dive, its wiring, plumbing, windows and marble tiles all stripped by thieves, its lobby a dark cavern strewed with empty bottles and mattresses used by homeless people.
What to do with the formerly state-owned hotel, privatized nearly two decades ago in a series of murky deals, has been argued over for years without result.
“It seems that nobody can figure out how to clean up our system,” said Sergiu Tofilat, a former presidential adviser who has pushed in vain for prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into what went wrong.
Businessmen with a stake in the property, several of whom are now on the run outside Moldova to escape arrest, want it demolished to make way for office blocks or luxury housing, while preservationists and fans of modernist architecture want it preserved.
On a recent afternoon, the only person inside the ruin was an apparently intoxicated young man roaming the empty floors. He shouted that he was “looking for my girl” before wandering off past an open elevator shaft and then vanishing. Even the elevator call buttons on the wall have been stolen.
Anetta Dabija, a city councilor and a member of Save Chisinau, a group lobbying to protect old buildings from demolition by developers, said she would never enter the hotel alone out of safety concerns. Its entrances have been boarded up, and the police occasionally expel squatters and chase away graffiti artists.
But, easily accessible through a broken garage door, the building provides a safe space for amorous couples unbothered by the stench of urine and a lure for fans of urban exploration, which often involves visiting and taking photographs of derelict, creepy places.
Ms. Dabija said she had not been a fan of socialist architecture but decided the National was worth saving after a visit to Berlin, where iconic structures of the Communist era, like the Berlin Congress Center and Kino International, have been restored.
“People often hate modernist buildings, but that is not an excuse for demolition,” Ms. Dabija said.
Also dead set against demolition are the graffiti artists.
Dmitri Potapov, who with friends painted the Ukrainian flag on the facade to protest Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, said the hotel should be turned into a public art space.
Since it “gained its private status through dubious means in the 1990s,” he said, it must be returned to the state or turned over to squatters. “Our main concern should be to prevent its demolition,” he added.
In the Soviet era, the National was run by Intourist, a state company that operated a chain of mostly shabby hotels catering to foreigners across Moscow’s empire. The National, then called The Intourist, was one of its jewels.
Vladimir Paladi, 82, who lives in a nearby apartment block, said the hotel was mostly restricted to foreigners at that time but had a restaurant open to locals.
He said he could never afford to eat there, but had a friend working as a waiter who showed him around what he remembers as a place of unimaginable splendor, at least for Soviet Moldova.
All that remains of that is a collection of black-and-white photographs of the hotel kept by Moldova’s national archive. “It was so beautiful,” said Lucia Myrza, an archivist responsible for the collection, peering at fading images of a well-lit but hardly luxurious lobby and the hotel’s imposing spotless exterior.
“It was the proud symbol of our city,” she said.
Intourist pulled out of Chisinau after the collapse of Communism, when the Soviet Republic of Moldavia became the new state of Moldova. Ownership of the hotel passed to MoldovaTur, a Soviet tourism company taken over by the new nation. The Intourist became The National.
For a few years, the National continued receiving guests, but they became increasingly rare after a brief war broke out in 1992 in the mainly Russian-speaking Moldovan region of Transnistria.
As stability slowly returned and newly minted millionaires looked for investments — usually a euphemism for state-owned assets that could be grabbed for a pittance — Alfa Engineering, a company controlled by Vlad Plahotniuc, later the country’s most powerful oligarch, in 2006 bought a controlling share of MoldovaTur.
It paid around $2 million and promised to put more than $30 million into renovating and upgrading what was by then already a derelict concrete shell.
“Of course, they invested nothing,” recalled Victor Chironda, a former deputy mayor responsible for urban development. “Their plan from the start,” he said, “was to demolish everything and take the land for a new development.”
Mr. Tofilat, the former presidential adviser, said the hotel later ended up in the hands of Ilhan Shor, another tycoon.
Convicted of fraud in 2017 in connection with the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from Moldova’s banking system between 2010 and 2014, Mr. Shor initially fled to Israel and recently moved to Moscow.
Mr. Shor then sold the hotel through a series of convoluted offshore transactions that, according to Mr. Tofilat, ended up giving control of the property to Vladimir Andronachi, a former legislator close to Mr. Plahotniuc. In 2022, Mr. Andronachi was arrested during a visit to Ukraine and sent back to Moldova to face criminal charges in connection with that bank fraud and other crimes.
A year before his arrest, long-stalled secret plans to demolish the hotel had become public. Developers working with Mr. Andronachi in 2021 asked for permission to tear the building down and replace it with high-end office towers.
Mr. Chironda, who was still a deputy mayor at the time, rejected the idea, arguing that it was illegal because the hotel had been left to rot in violation of the original privatization deal.
Suffering from Covid-19, he took sick leave. When he returned, he discovered that another official had approved the demolition plan.
The city’s mayor, Ion Ceban, then fired Mr. Chironda but relented to public pressure and canceled the demolition plan. He declined to be interviewed.
With the demolition plan halted and no sign that anyone is ready to invest the tens of millions needed for restoration, the hotel is stuck in limbo. Its ownership has been frozen by a court order pending the outcome of the criminal cases against Mr. Andronachi.
“We have been waiting, waiting and waiting for someone to rescue this place,” said Mr. Paladi, the nearby resident, “but it just keeps falling apart.”
Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting.
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