Novoarbatsky Bridge

The Novoarbatsky Bridge links Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow’s Western Administrative Okrug with Novy Arbat Street in the city center, spanning the Moskva River between the Taras Shevchenko and Smolenskaya embankments. It was one of the first crossings in the country where metal and reinforced concrete in the span were joined by welding, and the deck slab was pre-stressed with high-strength reinforcement. The crossing was originally named Kalininsky, after the neighboring prospekt, and received its current name in 1991. Nearby stand the Russian White House (Government of Russia) and the former Comecon building; upstream is the Bagration Bridge, and downstream the crossing of the Filyovskaya metro line.

Construction of the bridge was already included in the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow, and design work began in 1939. The workshop of architect Alexander Vlasov proposed a three-span girder scheme, with the river span to be supported by arches made of concrete-filled tubes, without shore abutments. Leonid Polyakov, Andrei Burov, and Nikolai Kolli worked simultaneously on the architectural appearance: one envisioned pylons with bas-reliefs and obelisks on the piers, another a staircase to the embankment beneath propylaea, and a third giant sculptures symbolizing the unity of the Soviet peoples. Vlasov’s engineering solution together with Kolli’s design was approved for construction, but the war halted the project.

Design work resumed only in 1950, abandoning the pre-war groundwork. In March 1951 the Moscow architectural council considered two options: a reinforced-concrete arch with a 162-meter span faced in granite, designed by Boris Nadezhin, and a steel arch of the same span, 47 meters wide, proposed by Konstantin Yakovlev and Mikhail Rudenko. The steel option was chosen. Construction, based on the design of engineers Rudenko, Teryokhin, and Kryuchkov and architects Yakovlev and Dushkin, was carried out by Bridge Detachment No. 4 in 1954–1957; the planned columns with sculptures were never installed.

On October 4, 1993, the bridge found itself at the center of dramatic events: it was from here that tanks fired on the White House building, where opponents of the presidential decrees dissolving parliament were gathered — an episode that became one of the most recognizable scenes of that year’s political crisis.

Structurally the bridge is a three-span, steel-and-reinforced-concrete composite girder bridge: a continuous beam spans the riverbed and embankments with spans of 72.6, 108.0, and 72.6 meters, and the crossing itself lies at an angle of about 73.5 degrees to the current. The span structure is welded from M16S grade steel and consists of twelve girders joined by cross-frames every nine meters; the deck slab is pre-compressed with bundles of high-strength wire to work together with the metal.

By the early 2000s, inspections revealed serious wear — sagging of the span, corrosion of the metal, and failure of the waterproofing — so in 2003–2004 the bridge underwent its first major overhaul since construction: the sag was corrected, the deck slab and road surfacing were replaced, and the facing and railings were renewed. Traffic reopened on July 3, 2004, and today the bridge remains one of the main arteries between central Moscow and Kutuzovsky Prospekt.