Alexy II and Yury Luzhkov at the opening of the Moscow Ring Road after its reconstruction in September 1998

When it opened in 1962, the MKAD (the Moscow Ring Road) was considered a cutting-edge highway by Soviet standards. It had two lanes in each direction and a broad grass strip down the middle as a divider, and 33 cloverleaf interchanges were built along its length. It was said that no analogue of such a road yet existed in the USSR, though, interchanges and circular shape aside, the MKAD looked like an ordinary country highway.

By the end of the 1980s traffic had increased considerably, and it was decided to remove the grass divider, which added one lane to each side. The decision proved catastrophic: oncoming flows were now separated by nothing at all, and with no lighting and high speeds the cars were in effect hurtling straight at one another. Head-on collisions became so frequent that the highway came to be called the “road of death”. Every year about two hundred people were killed on the MKAD and hundreds more were maimed.

Nor were the problems solved from the point of view of traffic: capacity had scarcely changed compared with the original, and at rush hour the flow crawled along at up to 40 km/h.

All in all, reconstruction had become an urgent necessity. Work went on from 1995 to 1998 under Yury Luzhkov. At last the MKAD received a proper widening. The carriageway was widened to 50 metres, with up to five lanes added in each direction. All the underground utilities were relaid, and new bridges and flyovers were built. And yes, the MKAD was never closed completely during the reconstruction; the work was carried out section by section. The cost of the project was 24 billion roubles at 1995 prices, that is, a little over 5 million dollars. I think that today this would barely pay for 5 kilometres of a modern highway and its interchanges.