“Since it says, ‘Who, whom?’, then let’s get him?”
“No,” countered the more experienced Petr, “We’re dealing with a state here, not a bunch of noodles. We should go higher.”
They were received higher up where there was a great longing for real people and authentic rank-and-file intelligence.
“We are class struggle members,” said Petr to the highest official. “We have accumulated intelligence. Give us power over the oppressive scribbling scum….”
“Take it, it’s yours,” said the highest one, and handed over the power to them.
After that, Makar and Petr sat down at some desks in front of Lev Chumovoi and began to talk with the visiting poor people, deciding everything in their heads on the basis of their compassion for the have-nots. But soon the people stopped coming to that department because Makar and Petr thought so simply that the poor were able to think and make decisions in the same way, and so the toilers began to think for themselves inside their own apartments.
Lev Chumovoi was left all alone in the office because he was never recalled from there in writing. And he remained there until the state liquidation commission was formed. Comrade Chumovoi worked in that commission for forty-four years and died in the midst of oblivion and the files which contained his institutional state intelligence.16
Back in the Swamp, the eternal house was still being built. The initial reaction of the Trans-Moskva District Party Committee was to welcome the construction of the House as “the first step in the creation of an important cultural center in the area,” but the scale of the project and the uncertainty of its form and function provoked some puzzlement. The newspaper Construction wondered if the House was being built without any plan at all, while the journal Building of Moscow complained that, contrary to Soviet legislation, the plan was being kept secret. “The design was produced without an open competition, in a nontransparent, unacceptable way. Was the completed design discussed by the wider public? Unfortunately, it was not. Was the design published anywhere? No, it was not. The editors tried to obtain a copy for publication, but their efforts proved unsuccessful. Someone, somewhere, somehow, produced and approved a 14-million-ruble project that the Soviet public knows nothing about.”
Iofan responded by saying that the design had been considered by fourteen professional experts, approved by a special government commission, and discussed by the Moscow Regional Engineering Bureau, with the participation of “all departments concerned.” He ignored the question about the required open competition and public oversight, but agreed to publish a detailed description of the project. Doubts regarding the wisdom of building an eternal house in the middle of the Swamp persisted for a while before dissipating in the face of the inevitable. When one of the delegates to the Trans-Moskva District Party Conference of January 1929 said that the project could easily “wait another five years, thus saving tens of millions of rubles that could be used for, say, steel production,” the committee secretary responded: “What can we do? Building on the house has begun; the foundation has been laid; and construction is going forward. In the future, we should probably learn from this experience and make sure that there are no more big, showy projects like this one.” In September 1929, in the wake of the discovery of the “outrages,” the head of the district Control Commission restated the obvious: “We cannot interfere, because the government has made its decision, and the higher authorities have given their approval. In other words, where to build and how to build—these things do not depend on us.”17
Iofan (third from the left) at the construction site
In November 1928, the State Office for Financial Control wrote to Rykov that, since the decision to build the House in an “unfit” location could “no longer be reversed,” some parts of the project would have to be scaled down in order to keep down the costs. Rykov disagreed and in his capacity as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars forced the People’s Commissariat of Finance and the State Bank to make up the difference. The government, he made clear to all departments concerned, could build its own house by lending itself money as needed. The chairman of the State Bank, Georgy Piatakov, pointed out that “it is very awkward when the debtor, namely the Council of People’s Commissars …, issues a decree extending its own payment deadline,” but complied without further objection. Between February and November 1928, the estimated cost of construction rose from 6.5 to 18.5 million rubles. Within two years, it would reach 24 million. The final cost would exceed 30 million (ten times the original projection). A special review committee appointed by the Council of People’s Commissars in May 1931 concluded that, in the foreseeable future, the Soviet Union could not afford another residential building of comparable size and cost.18
The main reason for the high construction costs, according to Iofan, were the “heightened quality requirements” demanded by the government for a project of “government importance.” “When it comes to the use of materials, the construction of the House of Government cannot possibly be compared to ordinary wood-framed residential construction because of the presence, in this case, of public buildings with reinforced concrete frames (a movie theater, theater, club, grocery store, etc.), which make up about 50% of the cubic capacity of the residential wings, and the heightened requirements concerning the structure of the residential wings and living conditions within them (passenger and cargo elevators, garbage chutes, etc.).”19
The use of reinforced concrete frames throughout the complex, and not just in the public areas, was dictated by considerations of hygiene and fire safety. The extra high (3.4 meters) ceilings were a matter of residents’ convenience; terrazzo window panes and granite paneling were choices made for aesthetic reasons. Marble steps were preferred to concrete ones because of their durability; the same was true of ceramic, as opposed to cement, tiles in the kitchens and bathrooms. The more expensive flat roofs were used because of the “necessity” to have solariums. Extra floors were needed in order to accommodate more apartments (505, instead of the projected 440), which were needed in order to accommodate more residents and service personnel. Some other expenses not listed in the original plan included the building of a post office, bank, and shooting gallery; the laying of radio and telephone cables, including a direct line to the Kremlin; the furnishing of all the apartments (at a cost of about 1.5 million rubles); the use of “special military guards and special fire brigades”; and the fighting of the 1930 fire and several floods. The effort to complete the work by the thirteenth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1930 required paying more workers to do more work. In April 1930, the construction committee decided to switch to two and possibly three shifts and employ two hundred to three hundred additional plasterers. In September, the committee introduced a ten-hour work day and asked for new technical personnel, as well as five hundred more plasterers, three hundred carpenters, and fifty roofers. The House was still not finished by November 1930. The first residents began to move into the wings closest to the Ditch in the spring of 1931. The wings facing the river, including the theater, were not completed until the fall of 1932. The work in the courtyards and on the embankment continued into 1933.20
View of Trans-Moskva from the cathedral. In the foreground is the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker. Behind it is the power station. The construction site is on the left.
Construction of the theater and club. In the background on the right is the Big Stone Bridge.
View of construction from the Kremlin
View of construction from the cathedral
Construction of the movie theater. A view from the Trans-Moskva side.
View of the nearly completed House of Government and movie theater from the Drainage Canal
Reconstruction of the Bersenev Embankment, with the Big Stone Bridge and Kremlin in the background and the theater facade on the right
House of Government construction nearly complete. Festive illumination marking the fourteenth anniversary of the Revolution
in November 1931.
■ ■ ■
The fact that socialism was inevitable meant that it needed to be built. The USSR had no choice but to become “a gigantic construction site.” The new structure was eternal but mysterious. “It was obvious that a house was being built, but not clear for whom.” Or rather, it was obvious that the House would contain socialism, but not clear what it was going to look like. In the process of fulfilling the Five-Year Plan, the Bolsheviks, according to Krupskaia, “had run up against the challenge, unforeseen by many, of building a residential shell for the socialist society of the future.” Or, as one architect put it, “we are giving shape to a new everyday life, but where is this life? It does not exist. It has not yet been created. We know it must exist, we can say what it should look like, but it does not yet exist, nor does any assignment that would correspond to it.” The task was to “design for the future, even if such designs are not feasible or even appropriate at present.”21
“The task of the architect of the coming era,” wrote the Gosplan economist, M. Okhitovich, “is not to build a house, but to ‘build,’ or shape, social relations and productive functions in the form of buildings.” This meant that “the only architect prepared for the current conditions is Karl Marx, whose ‘client’ is the general interest and whose ‘employer’ is today’s proletariat and tomorrow’s classless society. Up until now it has been impossible to build without capital. From now on it will be impossible to build without Das Kapital.” The fact that Das Kapital offered little guidance on how to “shape social relations in the form of buildings” was not a serious challenge because Karl Marx’s representative in socialist society was Comrade Stalin, and Comrade Stalin was, by (Radek’s) definition, “the architect of socialist society.” The fact that Comrade Stalin offered little guidance on how to shape social relations in the form of buildings meant that ordinary Soviet architects would have to do it themselves.22
The most popular plan envisioned “agro-industrial cities” encircling “production centers” and consisting of several “communal houses” or “residential combines” with twenty thousand to thirty thousand adult residents each. According to one much-discussed project, the “city of the near future” (five to fifteen years hence, according to different projections) would be covered by a large, green park crisscrossed by avenues lined with trees and bicycle paths and with a sidewalk along the perimeter.
Large residential buildings, their facades broken up by the wide, glass panels of windows and balconies, will be set off from the sidewalk by green lawns. The flat roofs of the buildings will be covered with terraces decorated with flowers and gazebos for shade. The buildings will be painted in light, joyous colors: white, pink, blue, and red—not in dull gray or black, but in harmonious, carefully chosen color schemes.
The first thing you will see when you enter a building is a large vestibule. To the left and right will be washrooms, shower rooms, and gymnasiums, in which residents, tired after a day’s work, can shower, change, and hang up their work clothes in special lockers if, for some reason, they were not able do so at their place of work or in the fields. Of course, each place of employment must guarantee total cleanliness.
Beyond the vestibule will be a reception area with an information desk, a kiosk for selling small items, a hair salon, and a room for shining shoes and washing and repairing clothes. Also here, tucked away in large alcoves, there will be comfortable furniture, to be used by residents for socializing or by the “welcoming committee” for receiving visitors from near and far. Farther along will be various rooms dedicated to cultural activities, including billiards, chess, photography, music, and many others, as well as larger rooms to be used for collective discussions and musical rehearsals and shops and labs for amateur radio technicians, electricians, and dressmakers to hone their skills while serving the needs of the residents.
An easy passage across a beautiful archway leading out to the park will bring you into a large American-style cafeteria. On the long counter, in pans and on electric burners, will be a great variety of dishes that can be served out in portions of different sizes. Visitors will be able to help themselves to any combination of dishes. Past the dining hall, or perhaps on the third floor, will be a large reading room with an adjoining rooftop veranda. The selection will not be large, but it will be possible to request any book from the central library by telephone. Next to the reading room will be small carrels for people who need to write reports for production meetings or speeches for rallies, or simply need a place to concentrate.
The upper part of the building will contain small rooms for each of the residents. In this compact, but comfortable space will be everything an individual needs: a bed or couch, a closet for clothes and other things, a convenient desk, a couple of comfortable chairs, some bookshelves, space for pictures and flowers, and, if possible, a door leading onto a balcony. The room should be around 7 to 9 square meters.23
As Lunacharsky put it, communal houses must “express their inner essence clearly, albeit in a variety of ways, with individual dwellings grouped around a common core: cultural clubs and other public spaces.”24
The idea was not novel. Most Russians, according to Krupskaia, were familiar with similar arrangements. “In conditions of exile and emigration, the need for cheaper and more rational meals led to the creation of consumers’ communes. Among workers, seasonal laborers often had communal eating arrangements, as did various rural work crews.” Those were not proper communes, however. “A dormitory becomes a commune only when the residents are united by a common idea, a common goal.” But this was not enough, either. “Monasteries used to be, in essence, communes,” but monks and nuns were united by the wrong idea and the wrong goal. Most important, their “religion-fueled intensity of effort” and “well thought-through organization of labor” were fueled by the practice of celibacy. The challenge was to create a true-believing, hardworking, coeducational monastery that permitted procreation and incorporated a day-care center. A common sectarian solution of having the leader monopolize or regulate access to all females was not acceptable. Fourier’s phalansteries were often cited as appropriate residential shells, but his ideas about matching residents by temperament were rejected as silly (individual psychology being, for orthodox Marxists, irrelevant to future harmony).25
The answer was contained in The Communist Manifesto:
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital….
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.26
According to N. A. Miliutin’s widely read commentary on this passage, “it is difficult to imagine a better answer to all the crusaders against the new forms of everyday life and against the creation of the material preconditions for the destruction of the family. It is amazing that the bourgeois ideology is still so strong among some Party members that they keep inventing, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, new arguments for the preservation of the double bed as a permanent, obligatory fixture of a worker’s dwelling.” As The Communist Manifesto made clear, the abolition of private property would make permanent bonds based on mating and child rearing unnecessary. “By creating public cafeterias, nurseries, kindergartens, boarding schools, laundries, and sewing shops, we will achieve a gen
uine radical break with the existing property relations within the family, thus creating the economic preconditions for the abolition of the family as an economic institution.”27
But was there anything else to the family? According to another communal house theorist, L. M. Sabsovich, “the question of a ‘natural,’ biological bond between parents and children, the question of ‘maternal affection,’ the possible loss of an incentive for women to have children, etc.—all these questions are usually raised not by workers or peasants, but by certain circles within our intelligentsia, strongly infected with petit bourgeois, intelligentsia prejudices. Exclusive love for one’s own children is, of course, based not so much on ‘natural,’ biological factors, as on socioeconomic ones.” Accordingly, “the principle of providing each worker with a separate room must be followed without deviation.” Any attempt to distinguish between single and married residents was “totally unjustified opportunism”:28
It is obvious that in the socialist way of life each worker can be considered both “single” and “married” at the same time because any of today’s “single” people may become “married” tomorrow, and any of today’s couples may tomorrow become two single individuals, and because those elements of compulsion, most particularly the shortage of housing and common raising of children, that today often force men and women to continue their relationship and cohabitation even when the inner bond between them is broken and nothing else keeps them together, will become increasingly irrelevant with the provision of communal satisfaction of private needs and public education for children.29
This did not mean that couples could not choose to live together for as long as mutual affection persisted:
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