Russia gets its Disneyland, a Cold War dream come true
MOSCOW — A young girl finds a magic necklace made of mushrooms, but then an evil gnome steals it. Adventure ensues. According to her creators, Alfreya, the hero of a new children’s book who was conceived for Russia’s first theme park, is “an ordinary girl 10 to 12 years old with large, thoughtful eyes.”
One thing she is not is a Disney character. Opening a real international Disneyland in Moscow would be out of the question amid the current political standoff with the United States.
But Russia’s decades-long quest to build a theme park, which began during the Cold War rivalry with the United States, is finally reaching its fairy-tale ending.
The $1.5 billion Dream Island, which opened last Saturday, may certainly remind some visitors of Disneyland. In place of Elsa from “Frozen,” there will be the Snow Queen, and in the Russian version of “The Jungle Book,” the jungle is populated by talking dinosaurs. Developers said the park will be inhabited by dozens of fairy-tale characters, all domestically produced.
Dream Island does not mind if you invoke Disneyland to describe the park but will point out that it has no connections to the Happiest Place on Earth.
“The word Disneyland is on people’s tongues,” said Alena Burova, a publicist for the site. “In Russia, we say Disneyland when we mean just a theme park.”
The park has been built only now because it will benefit from something more essential than snow queens and fairy princesses: a large pool of middle-class consumers in the Russian capital, something that was missing when two previous attempts failed.
So, some 60 years after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
first floated the idea of building an analogue to Disneyland, President Vladimir Putin stopped by to inspect the park last week.
For Amiran Mutsoev, a former shopping mall developer who is the park’s owner and director, the site is a major bet that middle-class purchasing power will hold up despite Western sanctions and low prices for oil, a major Russian export. That the opening coincides with the coronavirus outbreak, when some people may want to avoid crowds, is another concern.
“Will people come, or will they not come?” Mutsoev asked. “Of course we are worried.”
The park expects 5 million Moscow residents and 21/2 million tourists, mostly from elsewhere in Russia, to visit the animated dinosaurs and haunted houses each year, Mutsoev said. Tickets on a weekend cost 11,000 rubles, or about $163, for a family of four.
The average monthly pay in Russia last year was 46,073 rubles, or about $683. And it has been dropping in inflation-adjusted terms. The minister of labor recently proposed lowering the minimum wage — because the cost of potatoes had gone down. Overall last year, about 14% of the population lived on less than $160 per month, the official poverty line.
But Moscow and its 13 million residents are an exception. The average wage in the capital last year was about twice the national average. The trickle of oil money has already given birth to new businesses, some of the world’s largest malls and what sociologists see as pent-up demand in the Moscow middle class for better government services.
Nadya Soloyeva, a Moscow mother of two daughters, ages 8 and 4, said her job in public relations allowed her to afford the tickets, but she wondered whether the new fairy-tale characters would have an emotional draw like Disneyland’s.
“Everybody is comparing these prices with Disneyland,” which now run $200 per person, she said. “But will they sell emotions like Disneyland?”
Disney-like medieval towers rise at the entryway. But behind them lie gigantic, rectangular buildings recalling jumbo jet hangars, covering 74 acres. Glass cupolas enclose some areas. The developers said it is the largest covered park in Europe — and the only option for remaining open through Moscow’s long, grim winter.
The theme park has nine zones. Five were created by “Russian artists specifically for Dream Island,” according to a promotional brochure. The others are licensed attractions: Hotel Transylvania, from Sony Pictures; the Smurfs, from the Belgian company IMPS; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, from Viacom; and Hello Kitty, from Sanrio of Japan.