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The city's avant-garde masterpieces are falling into ruin. It seems only the oligarchs' wives can save them

From the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Moskva river towards the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour you normally have a clear view of the Kremlin. But for several days last week its fairytale towers had disappeared behind an acrid grey pall. With the thermometer stuck at a record-shattering 40C and the smog hidden by smoke from the burning marshes outside the city, this was a hellish Moscow that none of its residents had ever seen before.

I was in the city to give a talk at a new school, the Strelka Institute of Architecture, Media and Design. Located just across the river from the cathedral, the Strelka occupies the garages of the former Red October chocolate factory, which until two years ago had been producing chocolate on that site since the late 19th century. The school only opened earlier this summer but already it's one of the liveliest nightspots in the city, with film screenings, clubs and a restaurant frequented by Moscow's glamorous media set. If you're thinking that this doesn't sound much like a school, then you'd have a point, but we'll address that later. In all other senses the sight of a former industrial complex being turned into a cultural hotspot is one that we've been accustomed to in Europe and the US for several decades. In Russia, however, it's a more recent phenomenon.

One reason is that the gradual switch from an industrial to a services economy didn't begin until the Yeltsin years. And it was only around the turn of the millennium that developers started to speculate on factories (the more unscrupulous ones earned the description "raiders"). The other factor in the slow speed of the post-industrial project is that the Russians appear to value new things more than old ones.

Any sightseers embarking on a tour of Moscow's avant-garde architecture from the early 20th century had better brace themselves for a catalogue of degradation. The more hallowed the building in the architectural history books, the greater its decrepitude. Take the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg with Ignaty Milnis in 1928 to house the workers of the commissariat of finance. This radical apartment block, which spearheaded the idea of collective living, is one of the most important surviving constructivist buildings. And it is literally crumbling – indeed it's in such a sorry state that I was amazed to find that people still live in it. Then there is another constructivist masterpiece, Konstantin Melnikov's Rusakov workers' club of 1929, with its muscular geometric profile. It's still as dramatic as ever but empty now except for an Azerbaijani restaurant that has attached its own folksy timber entrance (with lurid neon signage) to the unforgettable facade.

But it is not just the early modernist heritage of Moscow that is unloved. Even the pride of a more recent Soviet past is going to seed. The All-Russia Exhibition Centre (VDNKh), the expo site in the north of the city that was a town-sized advertisement of Soviet achievements, is today a rather seedy theme park. None of its grandiose pavilions still contain anything worth seeing. The grandest, announced by a Tupolev rocket in the forecourt, is the 1966 Space Pavilion. It now houses a garden centre that would embarrass your average parish hall, let alone this vaulted cathedral to the Soviet space programme. Under the dome, the giant portrait of Yuri Gagarin has a sheet draped over it. I asked a local why and he answered simply: "Shame." It would dishonour the legendary cosmonaut to look out over this mess.

This is the climate in which the Russian post-industrial project is taking shape. Preservation is not a major preoccupation here, which is ironic considering that much of the post-communist architecture has been built to look old (it's known unofficially as the "Luzhkov style", after Moscow's long-serving mayor). And yet one fifth of Moscow is made up of industrial sites – think of the impact that Tate Modern had on London's cultural scene and then imagine how much potential Moscow has. But destroy-and-rebuild is the model favoured here, with over 1,000 historical buildings knocked down in the last decade. There's no pressure from heritage bodies and no incentives to convert industrial buildings. Indeed, there tend to be disincentives, such as the regulation that only new buildings can qualify for class A office status. It's no wonder that developers have been either demolishing the factories to build luxury apartment blocks or turning them into business parks.

In the last few years, however, things have started to change. For one thing, the recession has put the brakes on developers, allowing nimbler entrepreneurs to slip in. The Red October factory, for instance, was meant to be turned into a luxury residential zone called Golden Island, with buildings by Norman Foster (much beloved of Russia) and Jean Nouvel. Only the credit crunch enabled the Strelka's founders to lease their site. But there is also a new player on the Moscow property scene: the oligarch's wife, who knows only too well from the international circuit how to turn defunct industry into cultural prestige. One such is Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich's wife, who two years ago turned Melnikov's temple-like Bakhmetevsky bus garage of 1927 into an art centre called Garage. Last week it was holding a Rothko retrospective, the kind of show that normally only major museums can handle.

On a grander scale, though less refined architecturally, are the cultural developments in the Kursky industrial area. Here there is Winzavod, a red-brick wine factory built in the 1860s. It was bought by Roman Trotsenko to turn into offices but again his wife, Sofia, saw the potential for a cultural centre. Today it's full of galleries, showrooms and creative studio spaces. And right next door to it is what used to be the Arma gasworks, which supplied the gas for Moscow's streetlights. Now its four brick gasometers are home to a clutch of nightclubs, creative agencies and publishing houses. In a strange hangover from Soviet bureaucracy, you have to show your passport to enter and you're not allowed to take photographs, which somehow is not quite in the spirit of the place.

Here's the question: is it to be left to the oligarchs' wives to deliver on all this potential cultural programming? One Muscovite I met referred to Garage and Vinzavod rather dismissively as "toys for rich people". "Still," he added, "they could just be buying more yachts."

Perhaps the Strelka offers a different model. The founders of this postgraduate design school, with a curriculum designed by Rem Koolhaas, are at least using their wealth to invest in the next generation. And one way that they are making the school's name (while recouping some funds) is as a social hotspot. In fact, the Strelka is the kind of hybrid that could probably only exist in the turbo-capitalist experiment of Moscow: one part ideology, one part philanthropy (the education will be free) and one part the place to be seen. If the school succeeds, then while Russia may have come late to the post-industrial party, it will have contributed something new to the rather predictable formats we know so well in Europe. Meanwhile, locals are paying it a classic Muscovite compliment: "It's so not like Moscow."

Architect brands Lenin-commissioned structure as a work of 'dazzling genius' and inspiration that must be saved

From a distance it looks a bit like an upturned wastepaper basket, soaring over the concrete skyline of southern Moscow.

The Russian capital's unique Soviet-era radio station was built in 1922 to spread the message of revolutionary communism around the world, but it is badly neglected and suffering from corrosion.

Now British architect Lord Foster has backed a campaign to save the 150-metre-high steel tower designed by the engineering genius Vladimir Shukhov.

In an open letter, Lord Foster describes the tower as "a structure of dazzling brilliance and great historical importance". Calling the structure Shukhov's masterpiece, Foster says it is the "first major landmark of the Soviet period".

Made up of a delicate lattice structure, the tower has five interlocking "hyperboloids", each smaller in size, giving the impression of an inverted telescope. The revolutionary design is an inspiration for several of Foster's own landmark projects including the Gherkin, or Swiss Re building, in the City of London.

Lenin commissioned the tower to adorn his new Soviet Union during a period of romantic optimism. It was built between 1919-1922. Nearly 90 years on, it is badly neglected and suffering from corrosion.

Russia's federal and local government are locked in dispute over which one of them should pay for repairs. Neither seems willing to stump up the cash.

In the meantime, Foster says, the structure is "neglected and dying" and without "faithful restoration" is doomed to fail. Several other leading European and US architects have backed Foster's letter, sent last month to the Moscow authorities. The art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon is another fan, and rode to the top in his recent BBC series on Russian art. Dixon-Smith hailed it as "one of the great monuments of the constructivist post-revolutionary period".

Today Shukhov's grandson, also called Vladimir, said the tower near Moscow's Shabolovskaya metro station was inaccessible and closed to visitors.

The idea was to restore it and turn it into a major Moscow tourist attraction, he said. Last year Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, expressed his support for the scheme, but since then nothing had happened, Shukhov said.

The steel framework had not undergone any anti-corrosion treatment for 20 years, he said, and was at risk of falling down. "We are in a very dangerous situation. There's been a lot of talk but no activity. You have the architectural equivalent of a diamond here, and yet nothing is being done to save it."

Under the headline "corroded masterpiece", Russia's Izvestiya newspaper contrasted official Russian indifference to the building's fate with Foster's vigorous campaign.

"Only foreigners care about its destiny," the paper said.

Russia's state TV and radio station – which owns the tower – had no money and even less desire to save it, the paper added.

Shukhov was one of the greatest structural engineers of the early 20th century and the leading engineer of his era in Russia.

He pioneered the use of new structural systems, creating hyperboloid structures of double curvature whose lightness and geometric complexity defy the imagination, even in the computer age. He also built Russia's first oil pipeline as well as numerous railway bridges.

Fury as mayor targets one of last green enclaves

It is one of Moscow's last green enclaves, a unique garden village built by the new Soviet Union for its revolutionary elite. In winter and summer, weary Muscovites flock here to escape the urban noise and to wander along peaceful avenues of birch trees and log-built cottages. You can even spot the odd woodpecker.

But the artists' colony in Moscow's Sokol district, founded in 1923 as a pioneering experiment in cooperative living, is now under threat. Three weeks after Moscow's mayor, Yury Luzhkov, declared war on residents in another suburb – the riverside area of Rechnik – he has indicated that Sokol village and its bohemian denizens are next up for the wrecking ball.

Luzhkov's decision to leave Rechnik's residents homeless has provoked a media storm, dominating Russian television news and radio talkshows. The latest attack on Sokol is front-page news in the papers, with Komsomolskaya Pravda asking: "Why has a demolition epidemic broken out?"

Since becoming mayor in 1992, Luzhkov has presided over the destruction of much of historic Moscow. Critics suggest that the flattening of Sokol's artists colony would be the crowning act in a long career of cultural vandalism. Officials insist that the mayor is simply taking drastic measures against rampant illegal development.

Oleg Mitvol, the head of Moscow's northern administrative district, told the Guardian he plans to demolish 30 of the village's 113 cottages. Mitvol claimed that the owners had knocked down the original properties, often replacing them with monstrously oversized bungalows. "You wouldn't allow this in London," he said.

Bulldozers have already arrived in the western suburb of Rechnik, which the city administration says was built illegally. Since last month, more than 20 houses have been controversially demolished, with their owners, including war veterans and wealthy businessmen, turfed out into the snow. In one garden, wrecking crews found a pet leopard.

Illegal development is rife across Moscow, however, and sceptics have queried Luzhkov's new and apparently selective enthusiasm for enforcing the law. Sokol's residents say they suspect the mayor plans to flatten the village and replace it with something else. "This is a beautiful place. Why he wants to demolish it is a mystery," said Nina Pavlovna, 78, standing in front a rustic green-painted dacha.

For more than 80 years the colony has been home to painters, sculptors and thinkers – and, more recently, the Guardian's Moscow correspondent. It was Lenin who came up with the idea of garden villages to adorn his expanding Bolshevik state. The architect Alexei Shchusev, who designed Lenin's tomb, mapped out the overall plan.

Sokol's roads are named after some of Russia's most famous artists, among them Isaac Levitan, Ivan Shishkin and KarlBriullov. Visitors have included Dmitry Shostakovich, Yuri Gagarin and Le Corbusier. Corbusier liked it so much he built a house here. Even the trees have been carefully selected: limes, birches and red sugar maples radiate from a central point to create the illusion of rural space.

The village shrugged off a previous threat to its existence in Soviet times. More recently and ominously, wealthy Russians have replaced many of the original log cabins with showy concrete palaces. In 2008, the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society warned that Sokol's "single plots" were being transformed into "grotesquely over-dimensioned and pretentious fortress-like bungalows".

Igor Tochkin, head of the Sokol village council, said today that all of the owners who had demolished their original properties and built new ones had done so with the permission of the authorities. "They've got all the documents," he said. Tochkin, who was born in the village in 1937 and has lived there ever since, said he was mystified as to why Mitvol wanted to knock the buildings down.

Mitvol does not deny that some city hall officials may have taken bribes in return for allowing construction. He said today that papers would now be sent to Moscow's prosecutor. He would ask the court to level the offending properties. "My job is to restore order. I'm carrying out my work in the hope that Russia becomes a law-based state," he declared. "I couldn't do this without Luzhkov's support."

Back in the village, several ladies walked their dogs past an English brick cottage festooned with rapier-like icicles. A couple of kids were whizzing down a slide in the playground next to the simple war memorial. "This is a fairy-tale place. We need to preserve it," Pavlovna said.

Luke Harding on Moscow's plan to demolish artists' village

Museum director whose bold leadership made him a key figure in Russian architecture

David Sarkisyan, who has died of cancer aged 62, was the charismatic director of the Russian State Museum of Architecture (MUAR). By using its resources for explorations of the past and present, he became one of the most significant figures on the Russian architectural scene.

A repository for hundreds of thousands of drawings, photographs and artefacts, the museum was founded in 1934, and until 2002 was known as the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, after Aleksei Shchusev, the architect of, among other buildings, the Lenin Mausoleum. In the post-communist era, major changes took place at the museum. First, a collection of 364 old master drawings looted in Bremen in 1945 by Viktor Baldin, the museum's head for 25 years, was brought to light amid great controversy. Then, the MUAR's massive archive was relocated from the suburban Donskoy monastery into the main museum premises in central Moscow where, in dire conditions because of a severe lack of funds, they continue to be kept.

Sarkisyan was appointed as director of the MUAR at the turn of the millennium. In its main galleries in the 18th-century Talyzin mansion on Vozdvizhenka Street, he presented Russia's architectural history, with particular emphasis on the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 30s. When lack of funds prevented the restoration of a dilapidated part of these premises, Sarkisyan made a virtue out of its ruinous condition. Unheated, windowless and using rough-sawn boards laid as a walkway across the exposed brick vaults, the appropriately named temporary exhibition space Ruina (The Ruins) was opened by Sarkisyan in freezing winter weather as a temporary exhibition space. It quickly became one of the most sought-after spaces in Moscow, hosting fascinating, edgy exhibitions visited by audiences wrapped in their overcoats.

In 2005, Sarkisyan also involved the MUAR in the First Biennale of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and developed a series of exhibitions introducing Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and other contemporary architects to the Russian public, thanks to shrewd alliances with western institutions such as Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts. In 2002, he was responsible for the Russian contribution to the Venice Architectural Biennale and, two years later, he curated the Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000 show.

Sarkisyan's flamboyant yet deeply committed leadership established the MUAR as a thriving centre for exhibitions and public events and ensured dedicated, high-profile advocacy for the preservation of historic architecture in Russia. With a group of fledgling preservationist associations active in efforts to protect Moscow's heritage, Sarkisyan led campaigns against the demolition of the 1960s hotels Intourist and Rossia, the Voentorg department store, and the gutting of the Detsky Mir store.

He was one of the main forces pushing for the restoration of Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin House, a landmark of constructivism which remains in a dire condition. Sarkisyan also adamantly opposed the erection of the Gazprom tower in St Petersburg.

His death is likely to have a significant impact on the fate of another modernist masterpiece, the house that the architect Konstantin Melnikov built for himself in Moscow in 1929. Sarkisyan was a passionate supporter of one of Melnikov's granddaughters in her fight against the oligarch Sergei Gordeev's project to create a private foundation in charge of the house and its collections, and, together with many intellectuals and architects, proposed that the house should be the focus of a state museum devoted to this unique building and the career of its architect.

Sarkisyan's outspoken criticism of the fate of buildings of historic significance in Moscow – from the demolition of the hotel Moskva, which was replaced by a wan copy camouflaging a new structure, to the insertion of a spurious historical fake within the uncompleted shell of the 18th-century Tsaritsyno palace – made him no friends within the municipality. An outspoken critic of the mayor Yuri Luzhkov's decisions concerning the fate of the city's built heritage, Sarkisyan had biting words to use against the transformation of Moscow into "a symbiosis of Disneyland, Las Vegas and a Turkish resort". It is reported that his burial in the Armenian cemetery of Moscow was barred by city officials, a clear indication that Sarkisyan's views could still upset the bureaucracy, even from beyond the grave.

Born in Yerevan, Armenia, Sarkisyan studied biology and human physiology at Moscow State University. His first career, in pharmacology, produced innovative treatments for Alzheimer's disease. He then moved on to the world of cinema, shooting close to 20 documentaries, including the acclaimed Comrade Kollontai and Her Lovers (1996). In 1991, he was first assistant director during the filming of Yuri Klimenko and Rustam Khamdamov's Anna Karamazoff, starring Jeanne Moreau. The end of that year saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then wrote film criticism for several Russian newspapers and, in 1994, founded the Nashchokin's House gallery in Moscow.

A visit to Sarkisyan in his office at the MUAR was an exotic experience. A dark grotto, filled beyond capacity with posters, movie memorabilia, piled-up books, Stalinist kitsch, children's toys, and works of art of all kinds, it hosted vibrant and frequently uproarious meetings of leading intellectuals and architects. Frequently sleeping on the premises, the director would often greet his guests in his pyjamas.

Sarkisyan was a brilliant museum director, an exceptional cultural entrepreneur, a gifted curator and a committed defender of true and just causes, fighting a desperate rearguard action for the preservation and professional restoration of many historical landmarks from both pre-revolutionary and Soviet times. The expression of feeling prompted by his death could prove to be a turning point in the public awareness of Russia's most creative recent past.

Sarkisyan had married a fellow student while at university. They were divorced in the 1990s.

• David Ashotovich Sarkisyan, pharmacologist, film-maker and architectural conservationist, born 23 September 1947; died 7 January 2010

Sokol Village, an old artist neighbourhood and Moscow's most famous Soviet-era garden village, is under threat of demolishion

Design experts protest at picturesque wooden dachas being cleared to make way for 'concrete giants'

The historic architecture of Russia's provincial towns is being destroyed at an alarming rate, with "delightful traditional wooden houses" being replaced by "ill-proportioned concrete giants", a group of international experts warned today.

A report by a panel of Russian and British architects says that the same depressing trends visible in Moscow are being replicated across Russia's "great European cities". The city of Samara on the banks of the Volga is under particular threat.

Classic wooden dachas with delicate "fretwork ornament to windows, doors, cornices and gables" are disappearing, says the report. A third of the wooden buildings in the old quarter have been bulldozed in the last seven years. "The situation gets worse every year," said Vitaly Stadnikov, one of the report's co-authors.

Samara, 400 miles south-east of Moscow, is home to other striking architectural monuments, including neoclassical, art nouveau, constructivist, industrial, and postwar buildings. The city also boasts an avant-garde masterpiece – a Soviet factory canteen in the shape of a hammer and sickle.

Samara was the city to which Moscow evacuated during the second world war. It was closed to the west during communism, when it was called Kuibyshev. Since the end of the Soviet Union, however, corruption in the city has led to the uncontrolled demolition of huge parts of it.

"The thrill of a visit to Samara is to discover a great European city that few in the west have heard of. Yet today both the older streets of the centre and the garden cities of the suburbs are threatened with a tsunami of destruction," says the report by SAVE Europe's Heritage and the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society.

"The promenade along the river in Samara compares with those of Cannes or Nice on the French Riviera … Now regulations have been relaxed and a rash of huge, ungainly blocks of apartments have appeared on the northern end of the riverfront."

Architecture experts say the same trend is visible in other provincial towns including Astrakhan and Nizhny Novgorod, Russia' fourth largest city, on the Volga, Tomsk in Siberia, and Yekaterinburg and Ufa in the Urals. "In the next 10 to 15 years our historical visual culture will have gone," Konstantin Mikhailov, an architectural historian, said last week at a press conference in Moscow.

The report says corrupt local officials and businessmen are responsible for knocking down historic buildings and replacing them with over-sized office blocks. In other cases monuments that are supposed to enjoy protected status mysteriously burn down. In extreme cases architects have even been killed, it says.

One of Samara's most celebrated art nouveau buildings, the Naimushin mansion, caught fire in 2007. The wooden property had been the home of the Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy and served as the 1941-1943 headquarters of the British military mission. It is now threatened with demolition.

In August this year Samara's administration secretly cut the number of listed buildings from 2,000 to 900. The city's picturesque Soviet courtyards have almost entirely vanished. Russian and British architects have now proposed saving a group of wooden houses in a pilot scheme of repairing and repainting.

"The task for Samara is to stop the haemorrhaging of its heritage. If the present rate of loss continues Samara will cease to be a European city and join those unplanned Asian cities which have become an urban jungle with no coherent sense of townscape or identify," warns the report.

"[It will be] no more than a sprinkling of old buildings left as a pathetic remnant of its once powerful Russian identity."

Moscow Architecture Preservation Society has published two previous reports on the threat to the Russian capital's diverse architectural heritage. The reports prompted a brief pause in demolition. Then the bulldozers continued.