With his neatly ironed suit and thick-rimmed glasses, Yevgeny Pashkin, 75, looked out of place in the hustle and bustle of the Mayakovskaya metro station. But in fact, he has known the metro station since he was a five-year-old boy and even attended its grand opening in 1938. Now a professor at the Moscow State University of Geological Exploration, he has been trying to raise the alarm about problems at the station for three years.

The Moscow metro is the most-used metro in the world, with 9 million passengers standing on the long escalators and shuffling through the sliding doors every day. Pashkin says the number of passengers is double what the metro was designed for — a problem that is exacerbated at stations like Mayakovskaya by unusual soil conditions. As a result of the overuse, water has been gently but steadily dripping through the station walls and ceilings for 30 years, and could be a sign of worse things to come.

Riding on the metro, Pashkin was nostalgic about the good old days. "We didn't need these signs," he said about text on a window asking people to vacate their seats for the elderly, behind a teenager who was sitting with no intention of moving for Pashkin. "Half the train wagon was divided by a chain which was for the elderly and mothers and their children," Pashkin sighed. "Sometimes the rest of the wagon was full but still no one would dare sit in those sections."

When the metro opened there were only four wagons on the trains, which ran at five-minute intervals. "We used to play football here every time we had to change train lines," he said at the long underpass between Teatralnaya and Okhotny Ryad, where these days the crowds make it impossible even to pause for thought. Now the length of the train has doubled, with trains often arriving every minute.

Pashkin's fondness for the metro is especially evident when he speaks about the Mayakovskaya station. "This was the station nearest to my house when I was a boy. Foreign experts consulted Russians on building the metro; the French, the Germans — everyone was invited here in the '30s to give the Russians advice, but they were put off [by the difficult conditions]. But Russian engineers prevailed and solved these technicalities," he said proudly.

Originally, it was thought that the ground under the station was firm, and engineer Sergei Kravots designed the station on that basis. His design featured metal supports as opposed to thick columns, an unusual achievement for a station that was so deep underground. Cracks started to show, however, and architect Alexei Dushkin was invited to see what he could do. Dushkin reduced the height of the main vault and redesigned the metal supports using steel that was engineered in an airship plant. Later, 35 delightful mosaics by Alexander Daneika, which are ordered by the time of the day, were added between the two support columns.

Vladimir Filonov / MT The Moscow Metro is the busiest in the world, with nine million passengers every day.

The Mayakovskaya station was opened on Sept. 11, 1938, after overcoming a series of problems. Shortly after its completion, the station was awarded the grand prix at the New York World Fair in 1938. During the war it was used as an air-raid shelter, but it remained untouched until relatively recently.

In the '90s it was decided that the old escalators needed to be replaced, and to achieve this, another exit was created. This was opened in September 2005 to the dismay of many preservationists.

Natalia Dushkina, the granddaughter of the architect of the metro station and a vocal preservationist, was dismayed when she saw the changes that accompanied this exit.

"They replaced some of the marble floor plates with granite. They saw how awful this looked and thankfully stopped, but 50 meters of it is still there," she said. Another problem was that rhodonite, a pink, semiprecious stone that used to adorn the station, was disappearing in chunks because of its value. At one point, the stone was completely stripped and replaced. "They have some new material in its place, but we have no idea where the original went," she said.

Dushkina said the whole project had not been approved by the Moscow Heritage Committee prior to the start of the renovation.

In an interview at the headquarters of the Moscow metro, the director of the metro, Dmitry Gayev, denied this. "When we were doing our consultation, there was a person there from the Moscow Heritage Committee checking us through every step."

It is not just the aesthetics that Dushkina finds problematic. In a widely circulated paper from 2002, she wrote of some of the problems at Mayakovskaya station: "The last investigation of its hidden construction (1996) revealed practically total destruction of the ventilation and drainage systems (both of vital importance for underground structures) leading to significant erosion of the metal skeleton."

"I wanted to take you here because it is in these specific places where the train accelerates and decelerates," said Pashkin, standing at the end of the platform. "The constant pressure means that cracks have formed on either side of the platform, and this is where the water leaks."

"Thirty years ago, they tried to fix the drain problem. It obviously didn't work," he said, pointing to a dribble of water. "There is a layer of water there, which under pressure will come out through the station."

"Pashkin should stick to geology," Gayev said. "Any underground structure that has been underground for a certain amount of time will leak," he continued, adding that the station's life span was 300 years.

"We have a project in place that will divert all the water away from the walls and columns and into the drains. If there are three buckets of water there then you are lucky. There is no more water. Apart from the hysterics of Mr. Pashkin, there is nothing else."

Pashkin disagrees, and says that without proper investigation it is unknown where the water has come from, where it has gone or the extent of the damage. "If the water is getting through to the steel columns they will rust. The station is deep underground and the columns are carrying a large load. I am not saying it will collapse, but it's not something we want to risk."

"Imagine you are a doctor and I have a high temperature and a headache. Instead of measuring my blood pressure or talking to me, you just give me an aspirin," Pashkin said. "That is what Gayev is doing, he is not looking at the cause of the problem."