Sergei Romaniuk was the foremost historian of Moscow’s buildings and the people who inhabited or commissioned them. He was an authoritative voice on the city’s rich built heritage, much of which was vandalised or destroyed after the Russian revolution. He wrote more than a dozen acclaimed books on the city that restored its pre-1917 architectural treasures to their proper place in Moscow’s history.
Typical of the architectural historian’s fine detective work was his discovery in 1984 of an 1831 document that confirmed that a beautiful neoclassical house, No 53 Arbat, had once been rented by the poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin, who lived their for with his bride, Nataliya. After this discovery, the building was transformed into the house-museum of Pushkin.
A tall, handsome man with an old-fashioned courtesy that was unusual in Moscow, Romaniuk also researched the influence of Russian architecture on Britain’s built environment, even though it was difficult for him to travel there during the Soviet era. He was always fascinated by Britain and spoke fluent English. He said that British guidebooks, such as The Blue Guide to Moscow and Leningrad, were far superior to Russian ones on the city. In 1989, in his mid-sixties, he finally visited Britain. It was his first overseas trip.
Romaniuk gave a talk at the Museum of London in which he revealed that the iron used to support the staircase in the Monument to the Great Fire of London had been imported from Russia — he had noticed the imprint of a Russian manufacturer. His well-received book Russkiy London (Russian London), in which he includes not only the various Russian embassies but also notable Russians who lived in London over the years, was published in 1998.
Born in Leningrad in 1933, Sergei Romaniuk grew up in the Chistye Prudy district of Moscow. His father, Konstantin, a physicist, had visited the US before the First World War and then served in the tsarist army as an ensign. He lived in fear of the Soviet authorities discovering his past, but managed to keep it secret.
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Sergei’s mother’s family were of German origin and hailed from Odessa; being descended from foreigners could also have made things difficult for her, but she managed to register her nationality as Russian and escaped persecution. Her two sisters, however, did not; one was imprisoned and died, and the other was sent to Siberia with her family. The fear of the totalitarian regime marked Romaniuk for the rest of his life.
Both Romaniuk’s father and brother were physicists, but Sergei dreamt of studying history at Moscow university. His father dissuaded him, suggesting that history in the Soviet Union was nothing but lies and that he should study a science where the truth was clearer. So Romaniuk studied geography, but as positions in his subject were not easy to find, he took up a job in the university’s physics department as a radio engineer. His first marriage did not last long, but he soon met the beautiful Galina Ovchinnikova and they remained together until his death. They lived modestly in a block of flats near the cliff overlooking the Moscow River in the south of the city. He made a corner of the living room into his study — it was also the dining room and guest room. He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Natalya, who is a purchaser of medical supplies and lives in Moscow.
Romaniuk began to research the history of Moscow’s streets and its inhabitants in his spare time. He contributed chapters for books on Moscow, wrote articles on buildings and gave lectures. He became noted for the reliability of his facts and the lack of hyperbole in his writing. He avoided giving his personal opinion on the damage to the city caused by the Soviet regime, allowing the facts speak for themselves.
In one of his books, Moskva. Utraty (Moscow. What has been Lost), published in 1992, he lists in great detail the buildings deliberately destroyed during the Soviet era, having tracked down archival photographs.
In 1983, Romaniuk resigned from his job at the university to devote himself to his research on Moscow. His first book, Iz Istorii Moskovskikh Pereulkov(1988), was on the history of the small streets and the lanes that abound in the old centre of Moscow. The book was reprinted several times until its final edition in 2013; by then, it was three times its original size.
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He won several awards for his work, including the AI Komech Prize, which was named after a fearless campaigner against the pulling down of old Moscow in order to build tower blocks.
Romaniuk had a huge following in the Russian capital, and every book he wrote quickly sold out. He restored their pride and acted as a catalyst for the pent-up anger that had built up over the cavalier way in which their city had been treated. For Muscovites, their history had been returned to them.
Sergei Romaniuk, architectural historian, was born on August 6, 1933. He died on July 31, 2015, aged 81