All rooms in a residential combine should be connected with internal doors or movable partitions (which are much more expensive, but also much better). If a husband and wife wish to live together, they can receive two contiguous rooms connected by a door, i.e., something resembling a small apartment, or open the partition and transform the two rooms into one. But if one of the parties decides to have a separate room or end the relationship completely, the door or partition can be shut. If a worker’s family wishes to keep their children at first (although this is definitely irrational and can last for only a very short period of time), the children may be assigned to a third room, in which case the family will receive something like a three-room apartment.30
The period of time would have to be very short. Today’s children were tomorrow’s “new men and women.” “Children who are now five or six will enter what we currently call ‘middle school’ (at the age of around twelve) under completely new conditions—conditions of a totally or almost totally fulfilled socialism.” Under these conditions, “children will no longer be ‘the property’ of their parents: they will be ‘the property’ of the state, which will take upon itself the solution of all problems involved in child rearing.” Not everyone accepted Sabsovich’s timetable or his idea of separate “children’s towns” (along the lines of young Boris’s dream in Libedinsky’s The Birth of a Hero), but every Bolshevik assumed that, in the “near future,” the state would take upon itself the solution of all problems involved in child rearing.31
Sabsovich’s main opponents were the “disurbanists,” who believed that communal houses were too similar to prerevolutionary workers’ barracks. According to the architect Aleksandr Pasternak (brother of Boris, friend of Zbarsky, and, thanks to the latter, one of the designers of the first Lenin Mausoleum and the Karpov Biochemistry Institute),
Will a large army of people accidentally assembled in one building become a true commune? And, even if they do, will it be able to live normally in a communal house, whose most characteristic features (we have now seen some graphic renditions of the theoretical concept) are extremely long corridors lined with tiny cells, long lines to the most basic facilities (sinks, toilets, coat racks), and equally long lines to the cafeteria, where people have to gulp down their meals with the speed of a visitor to a railway-station café who is late for his train (you can’t detain a comrade who is waiting for his plate, fork, and knife, can you?).32
Sabsovich had compared capitalist urbanism to “life in stone cages.” Would not such “enormous, heavy, monumental, and permanent” communal houses produce more of the same? According to the main ideologue of disurbanism, Mikhail Okhitovich, all modern cities and their illegitimate “communal” offspring were Babylons and Carthages that “must be destroyed.” Under primitive communism, common labor had required common living. Modern communism was different. “Modern communism must unite, through a common production process, hundreds of millions of people, at the very least. If collective labor were always accompanied by collective living arrangements, it would mean building one house for several hundred million.” This would, of course, be absurd—as would the idea that “our whole planet should be equipped with one laundry and one cafeteria.”33
Human beings, according to Okhitovich, had always lived where they worked. The nomads’ herds moved around, and so did the nomads. The peasants’ fields were stationary, and so were the peasants. Cities were an aberration, “the result of the separation of artisanship from agriculture, the separation of processing from extraction.” The task of socialism was to overcome the inequality and irrationality of urban life, which inevitably resulted from the inequality and irrationality of capitalism. In Pasternak’s formulation, “the fulfillment of the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin—the elimination of the gap between the city (excessive concentration) and the countryside (idiocy and isolation) and the creation, in their place, of new forms of settlement that would be the same for everybody (i.e., the socialist, uniform distribution of working populations)—is the unique historical role that has fallen to our country, our Union.”34
The main hurdle, as usual, was the coresidential family. According to Okhitovich, the rural patriarchal dwelling housed four generations; the burgher’s dwelling, two generations; and the modern capitalist dwelling (a cottage or an apartment), one generation. Under socialism, all housing would be individual. Why does this not happen under capitalism?
Because husband and wife cannot end the division of labor between them, just as the capitalist is connected by the division of labor to his hired labor. Husband and wife are connected by common economic interests, common investments, and the inheritance of property. In the same way, the proletarian family is brought together by the common interest in reproducing its labor and by the hope that their children would support them in their old age.
Only socialism will allow society to confront the human producer directly, while allowing the human producer to confront social relations directly, without mediation.
For it will put an end to the division of labor between a man and a woman.35
The fact that Communism stood for the abolition of the division of labor meant that it stood for the abolition of the family and, ultimately, for the freedom of the individual “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (as Marx had put it). Collectivism did not represent monotony or anonymity. “Celebrating the collective while ignoring the individual is like praising the Russian language while banning particular Russian words.” In fact, wrote Okhitovich, “the stronger the collective bonds, the stronger the individuals composing that collective.” Private property would be gone,
but human beings will continue to be born separately, not collectively. They will always eat, drink, and sleep—i.e., consume—separately…. The disappearance of private property will be followed by the disappearance of the bourgeois, capitalist property and the bourgeois, capitalist individual, but personal property, personal consumption, personal initiative, personal level of development, personal hands, personal legs, personal heads, and personal brains will not only not disappear, but will, for the first time, become accessible to everyone, and not only to the privileged few, as was the case before socialism.36
Sabsovich was right that workers were entitled to their own separate rooms, argued the disurbanists, but surely there was no need to confine those rooms to awkward, inflexible, immovable buildings. The only dwelling fit for Communism was the kind that “could be improved, like clothing, by augmenting width and height, increasing size of windows, etc. But is this thinkable with the old technology? No, only prefabricated houses, easy to assemble, dismantle, and enlarge, will be able to meet the needs of each developing individual.” Such houses would be light, mobile, and connected to the world by radio, telephone, and constantly improving means of transportation, terrestrial or otherwise. And they would certainly fit the social needs of developing individuals much better than Sabsovich’s doors and partitions. As Pasternak explained, “No one will object if husband and wife, or two close buddies, or even several good friends place their houses next to each other and link them up; each unit will remain autonomous, with its own separate entrance and access to the garden. But if the couple separates, or friends have an argument, or one of them gets married, there will be no complications with ‘living space,’ since the units can, at any moment, be decoupled, enlarged, or reduced, or even dismantled entirely and moved to a different location.”37
Both the urbanists and disurbanists were disurbanists. The main point of contention was whether modern cities were to be broken up into economic and residential nodes consisting of a few communal houses surrounded by “green zones,” or “decentered” and “destationized” completely. No one wished to preserve city streets and blocks; the question was whether the individual “cells” were to be attached to long corridors in multistory communal houses or to endle
ss roads traversing the newly decentered landscape (or not attached to anything at all: Bukharin’s father-in-law, Yuri Larin, envisioned flying, floating, and rolling individual dwellings, with each human being behaving “like a snail carrying its own shell”).38
Both the urbanists and disurbanists were collectivists. Most human activities, with the exception of urination, defecation, and procreation, were to be conducted in public. Sleep was a matter of debate. Konstantin Melnikov designed giant “sleep laboratories” with mechanically produced fresh scents and soothing sounds. N. Kuzmin proposed two classes of bedrooms: “group bedrooms” for six people and double bedrooms “for former ‘husbands’ and ‘wives.’” Most planners preferred individual cells. The main question was how many people to assign to each shower room, laundry, or cafeteria or where to position oneself between the two poles of countless mobile cafeterias, on the one hand, and a single planetwide “factory-kitchen, on the other.”39
Both the urbanists and disurbanists were individualists. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,” proclaimed one of the most oft-quoted passages of the Communist Manifesto, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” “The stronger the individual,” wrote Okhitovich, perfectly uncontroversially, “the stronger the collective served by that individual.” Bourgeois individualism was a bad thing; the socialist individual was the measure of all things. In the absence of classes, any association of randomly assembled Soviet citizens could become a collective. Some Soviets were better prepared than others, but, except for the unmasked enemies who needed to be “reforged” before being reincorporated, all Soviets were ultimately interchangeable. A person was a member of a residential-building collective by virtue of residing in a building, a member of a kindergarten collective by virtue of being a kindergartner, and a member of an office collective by virtue of being an office clerk. Starting with the Stalin Revolution (the “great breakthrough”), most Soviets were assumed faithful until proven guilty. If a commune was a coresidential community of people “united by a common goal,” and if all Soviets, except for a handful of increasingly desperate enemies, were united by the common goal of building socialism, then the Soviet Union was one very large commune. Because there were no “antagonistic” differences within Soviet society, and no stronger commitments than the one to socialism, it did not matter which collective a particular Soviet belonged to. “Collectivism” stood for a direct connection between the individual and the state (Soviet universalism), or a willingness to see any group of Soviets as a community united by the common goal of building socialism.
“Bourgeois individualism” represented an attempt to surround the individual with an extra protective layer; a desire to belong to an untransparent community. Each Soviet belonged in his own cell, or shell. “This room,” wrote Lunacharsky, “is not only a place for sleeping…. Here begins the absolute right of the individual, which no one is allowed to violate.” Where the Soviet did not belong was in a “bourgeois-family” apartment, or “an autonomous, isolated unit that normally includes a separate entrance, one to three rooms, a kitchen, and other auxiliary spaces.” “It makes no difference,” wrote Kuzmin on behalf of all the architects of the future, “what the number or quality of such apartments is, or whether they are built as separate cottages or as units within multistory apartment buildings or so-called communal houses (called so in order to discredit a revolutionary idea), for what kind of ‘communal house’ is it, if it consists of apartments?”40
Bourgeois individualism, in other words, was “family individualism.” Soviet collectivism consisted of individuals; bourgeois individualism resided in families. Emancipation—primarily of women, but also of children and eventually of all—meant freedom from the family. The “residential cells” of emancipated men, women, and children would be homes free of bourgeois domesticity (meshchanstvo). As one instruction manual put it, “dwellings in which people spend most of their lives from birth to death must be hygienic, i.e., spacious, light, warm, and dry. They must not contain stale air, dampness, or dirt.” They must, in other words, be free of the swamp and everything associated with it: greasy dishes, primus stoves, and dark corners on the one hand, and “muslin curtains, potted geraniums, and caged canaries,” on the other. The Revolution’s last and decisive battle was to be against “velvet-covered albums resting on small tables covered with lace doilies.” Softness threatened suffocation: nothing was more dangerous than the down pillow and double bed. Functional furniture was to be provided by the state (so as to liberate the workers from enslavement to things); as many pieces as possible—desks, beds, trays, stools, closets, bookshelves, and ironing boards—were to be folded away into special niches. Rooms were to resemble ships’ cabins or train compartments. Everyone quoted Le Corbusier to the effect that “whatever is not necessary must be discarded” (or, in Mayakovsky’s version, “rid your room of all useless stuff: it will get cleaner and be big enough”). As Kritsman wrote in The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution, “the motto of organic eras, ‘it exists, therefore it is needed,’ is replaced by a very different one: ‘If it is needed, it exists, if it is not needed, it will be destroyed.’” What Kritsman had in mind was “the destruction of fetishistic relations and the establishment of direct, open, and immediate connections among various parts of the Soviet economy.” What the architects of the future were attempting to accomplish was the establishment of direct, open, and immediate connections among Soviet individuals—connections undisturbed by “useless stuff” or durable affections.41
Most of the architects of the future were not architects. Those who were did not get a chance to build very much. The disurbanists, in particular, had to wait for the decentralization of production, “destationization” of the population, and the “electrification of the whole country.” M. Ya. Ginzburg and M. O. Barshch designed a “Green City” on stilts to be built outside of Moscow, and two large teams proposed long “ribbons” of stackable dwellings for Magnitogorsk, but none materialized since there was no infrastructure. Communal houses were easier to create—by converting existing dormitories or building one house at a time. One such structure in Moscow was Ivan Nikolaev’s communal house for students, built in 1929–30. It was based on five fundamental principles: “The expulsion of the primus stove is the first step. Domestic collectivization and the organization of the learning process is the second step. The third step is the hygienization and sanitation of everyday life. The fourth step is the transition to full self-service and the mechanization of the cleaning operations. The fifth step is the collectivization of the children’s sector.” The building consisted of two parallel units connected by a “sanitary block.” The three-story day-use section included a cafeteria, gym, health center, solarium, children’s sector, library with a large study area, and multiple rooms for club activities. Passing through the sanitary block at the end of the day, residents were required to take a shower and change into different clothes. The eight-story nighttime section contained one thousand six-by-six-meter “sleeping cubicles,” organized along narrow two-hundred–meter corridors. Each cubicle contained two bunks, two stools, and a concrete windowsill that served as a desk. In the mornings, students would exercise on the balconies of the sanitary block before proceeding to their study areas. During the day, the sleeping unit was closed to residents for ventilation and “sanitation” purposes.42
Ivan Nikolaev’s communal house
What might work for university students did not—yet—work for workers’ families (“although this was definitely irrational and could last for only a very short period of time”). Most experimental housing built during the First Five-Year Plan was of the “transitional type,” in which residents were provided with collective services but allowed—for the time being—to live in family apartments. The most celebrated such building was M. Ya. Ginzburg’s and I. F. Milinis’s House of the Commissariat of Finance (
Narkomfin) on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow (1928–30). According to a report on the project’s completion,
The huge building is 82 meters long; in place of a ground floor are columns—slim, graceful columns that carry the heavy weight of the gray stone. If not for these columns, which endow the building with a certain lightness, it might be taken for an ocean liner. The same flat roof, terrace-style balconies, radio masts, and continuous horizontal windows. The tall ventilation chimney enhances the resemblance….
The building is traversed by well-lighted corridors, from which small stairways lead up and down to the residential cells. Each apartment consists of a tall, double-lighted room for daytime activities and low sleeping lofts which are an integral part of the interior space.
The only “problem” with all the apartments in the new building is that they have no room for that broad, solid chest of drawers and absolutely no space for a primus stove.
Every apartment has clothes closets, a tiny anteroom for changing, and solid, sliding windows. The so-called “kitchen element” is in a separate corner. This “unhealthy element” consists of a small cabinet with an exhaust fan, several gas burners, a small refrigerator, a cabinet for dishes, and a sink.
For the sake of fairness, it must be noted that this bow in the direction of the old domestic arrangements is moderated by the fact that, if desired, the whole kitchen element may be tossed out in favor of public nutrition.
The communal “barge” is attached to the residential unit by a heated bridgeway. It has an engine room (kitchen) below, a cafeteria for two hundred people with windows on the opposite walls on the floor above, and a library, reading room, and pool hall on the third floor. Next to the cafeteria is a well-equipped gym and shower rooms….
“A good house,” says an elderly seasonal worker, while planing a board. “Except you can’t live in it just any old way….”
The House of Government Page 48
