The City of Gradov

“In Moscow, the provincial leaders told the government that, although it’s hard to say exactly on what the five million roubles allotted to agriculture had been wasted, there must have been some good gained from these millions since, after all, the money had been spent in the Gradov province and not in some foreign place; somehow it’ll show up.”

Andrei Platonov, The City of Gradov

A little more than a year ago, a new shopping centre with a foreign-sounding name, the T1 Mall of Tallinn, was erected on the site of a former sausage factory in Tallinn, with a colourfully iridescent Ferris wheel on its rooftop. In the early 1990s, an amusement park with a Ferris wheel operated near the sea in Kadriorg, but poor visitor numbers, depreciating equipment and fierce competition from the Tivoli Tour forced it to close. On the former site of the amusement park there are now apartment buildings with a sea view. Shops and restaurants in Tallinn’s newest shopping centre are closing their doors one by one, yet the Ferris wheel built with millions of euros allocated by Enterprise Estonia keeps blinking cheerfully on the roof.