Muscovites Steamed Over Bathhouse : Russia: Threatened by developer, landmark meeting place is focus of protest.

They can cut back on vodka sales. They can ration cigarettes and fall short on potato supplies. But when city officials jeopardized the famous Sandunov Baths, the premier site for the steamiest of Russian pleasures, they went too far for some Muscovites.

Intent on defending the most luxurious and historic of Moscow’s public bathhouses, dozens of employees and clients demonstrated Tuesday in front of the Russian Federation government building, demanding that city officials reverse their decision to hand over much of the bath complex to developers of an arts center.

“These baths are sacred,” said Lev Gavrilin, the Sandunov’s director. “People say that closing them would be like destroying the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, like tearing down St. Basil’s, destroying Yeliseyev’s Grocery Store. You might as well tear down the Kremlin.”

A weekly session at a bathhouse, or banya, remains a beloved ritual for many Russians, who make a religion of the health benefits imputed to the furious wet heat of the steam room, accompanied by torturous whipping with fragrant birch branches.

Add a few old friends, some beer, salted fish and a heated discussion about sports and the bathhouse becomes the Russian equivalent of a men’s club. It’s the backbone of many a neighborhood’s social life.

“I go into the bath and I emerge at half my age,” said Abdullah Shakirov, 68, a protester who has frequented the Sandunov Baths for 30-odd years. “I come out ready to get married again. It lightens your soul--it’s true relaxation.”

For the many urban dwellers who live in communal apartments with shared bathrooms, and for millions of country folk with no indoor plumbing, the city-run public baths are a virtual hygienic necessity.

“With baths--health; without baths--epidemics,” one sign proclaimed at Tuesday’s protest.

Baths range from homemade huts up to urban giants that accommodate hundreds of clients a day; but in this progression, the Sandunov Baths, or Sanduny as it is nicknamed, stand at the very pinnacle.

Founded at the beginning of the 19th Century by Sila and Yelizaveta Sandunov, performers at the Imperial Court, the baths burned to the ground but were rebuilt toward the end of the century. Local lore has it that the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin “steamed himself” there.

Now, the bathhouse is an oasis of painfully dilapidated luxury. Its majestic columns around the dimly lit pool, its marble benches and ornately carved dark-wood dressing rooms with their stained glass and gilt-framed mirrors, still have the power to impress. But the physical plant is almost 100 years old and shows it.

The plumbing is largely wooden, employees said, the walls and roofs are crumbling and the yards surrounding the buildings in the winding streets of Old Moscow look like recent battle sites littered with rubble.

According to Gavrilin, the Moscow city administration agreed to turn over 60% of the complex’s space to a company called the Moscow Art Center. Although the bath sections--a large one for men and a smaller one for women--are not part of that package, he said, city inspection services have been leaning heavily on him to close the bathing facilities.

“When the bath is closed, the staff will be kicked out, and then there will be no one to defend it,” Gavrilin said. Among his staff of about 300 employees, all of whom declared a one-day warning strike Tuesday, are many who have worked at Sanduny for more than 30 years.

Moscow City Council officials repeatedly referred calls about the Sandunov Baths on Tuesday to other officials and departments, but none could say definitively who made the decision to transfer parts of the baths or why. Vladimir Budanov, deputy head of the Moscow Public Services Department, said only that he fully sympathizes with the strikers.

Protesters directed much of their anger against the chief of the Moscow Art Center and Yuri Luzhkov, the head of the city administration who reportedly signed the order on the baths’ transfer.

“They’re ignoring the demands of the people,” Boris Shevtsov, the premises’ manager, said of Moscow officials. “Those in power should care about the people and instead they spit on us.”

Sharkad Gimadev, 61, who worked in subway construction for 40 years, noted: “This is the last straw for the working class. They’ve taken away everything else. Now I’d sacrifice my pension just to keep the baths.”

Gavrilin and other staff members said they want the city to privatize the entire Sandunov complex by selling it to its workers, who would oversee its repairs themselves and then decide whether to lease it out or run it themselves.

In a sign that disputes over the fate of various pieces of Moscow property will increase as the city government moves toward the mass selloff of state-owned businesses in coming months, a conflict came to a head Tuesday over the capital’s central farmers’ market.

Workers in the spacious halls, normally crammed with fruits and vegetables grown in the private sector and sold at astronomical prices, went on strike Tuesday. They closed the market, complaining of plans by a local business to evict all the vendors and turn the market into a luxurious complex for foreigners.

Unless the City Council can solve the conflict, said a wizened pomegranate seller from Uzbekistan, “you will be left without the food, and we will be left without the money.”