Indeed, one must know how to live in it. The trick is to be able to leave all kinds of domestic junk behind in the old house in order not to smuggle the spirit of the old stone boxes into the new apartment.43
The Narkomfin house was routinely represented as a prototype for the mass-produced—and, with a few adjustments, communal—housing of the future. The “ocean liner” was a common metaphor combining the two main attributes of the age: mobility and monumentality. Another one was the airplane (a new interpretation of the cross), with long and narrow residential wings attached to oval or square service units by perpendicular bridges or walkways. Ginzburg’s design, and the constructivist aesthetic in general, combated the dampness and softness of domesticity with light, air, transparency, and the pure lines of elementary (“industrial”) geometric forms. Each significant social function was encased within its own, rigidly articulated, but not self-contained, “volume.” Life inside consisted of “processes” that involved synchronized movements of people analogous to Podvoisky’s mass games. The dominant indoor theme was the assembly line (Miliutin’s “functional-flow principle”): furniture served as equipment; human flows obeyed specific “schedules of motion”; and the entire “residential shell” was characterized by what one architect called “plastic Puritanism and austere nakedness.”44
Narkomfin house
Human life began with work, could not be separated from work, and needed to be organized accordingly. Kerzhentsev’s “love of responsibility” was to be applied to the “process of everyday life” to produce Communism as “embodied harmony, where everything happens with accuracy, precision, and correctness.” Kerzhentsev’s “sense of time” was to be combined with the architect’s sense of space to produce harmonious men and women who love what they cannot escape. As Kuzmin put it, “There is no such thing as absolute rest. Human beings work all the time (even when they are asleep). Architecture influences human work with all of its material elements. The scientific organization of the material elements of architecture (light, color, form, ventilation, etc.), or rather, the scientific organization of work, is, at the same time, the organization of human emotions, which are a direct consequence of labor productivity.” The question was whether the workers could be trusted “not to smuggle into a new apartment the spirit of the old stone boxes.” Speaking on behalf of Ginzburg’s “transitional” approach, the head of the Art Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Alfred Kurella, argued that they could not. “If we build houses with only a communal kitchen, the worker is going to set up a primus stove in his room.” Citing the success of forced collectivization, Kuzmin argued that they could—and that Ginzburg’s not-quite communal “communal houses” were “an insult” to both Lenin’s ideas and the unfolding “socialist reconstruction.”45
It soon turned out that the question was not whether they could be trusted, but whether they should. The answer, according to a preview of the official position, written by Koltsov, was that they should not. In a Pravda article published on May 1, 1930, two months after Stalin’s “Dizzy with Success,” he hinted that the primus stove might be redeemable, that leftism might, once again, be infantile, and that the end of the socialist offensive might be in sight. Soviet architects, he wrote, were suffering from “intoxicating dizziness.” The urbanists were preaching the creation of “enormous barracks, where the children are totally isolated from their parents, all aspects of a worker’s life are strictly regimented, everything is done on command, and where the greatest virtue is visibility and the greatest sin is solitude, even for the purpose of reflection and intellectual work.” The disurbanists, meanwhile, were proposing to settle the worker and his wife in two separate cabins on stilts, with an automobile underneath. “When the welder Kuzma wants to see his Praskovia, he must climb down his ladder, get into his automobile, and drive down a highway built especially for the purpose.” These absurd projects discredited socialist ideas, provoked the legitimate indignation of the workers, and amounted to wrecking. “No one has the right, whatever the justification, to fight against the basic needs of human nature, including the desire to spend some time by oneself or the desire to be close to one’s child.”46
Within three weeks, Koltsov’s elaboration of the official position had been reformulated as the Central Committee decree “On Work toward Transforming Everyday Life”:
The Central Committee notes that, simultaneously with the growth of the movement for a socialist way of life, certain comrades (Sab-sovich, and to some degree, Yu. Larin and others) are engaging in totally unjustified, semifantastical, and therefore extremely harmful attempts to surmount “in one leap” those hurdles along the path toward a socialist transformation of everyday life that are rooted, on the one hand, in the country’s economic and cultural backwardness, and, on the other, in the need, at the present moment, to mobilize all available resources for the fastest possible industrialization of the country, which alone is capable of creating the true material conditions for the radical transformation of everyday life.47
The argument was consistent with the spring 1930 respite from the “dizziness” of collectivization. The utopian schemes of certain comrades were harmful because they cost too much money, put the cart before the industrial base, advocated things for which the culturally backward population was not ready, contradicted natural human desires, and discredited the project of a genuine and radical transformation of those desires.
The House of Government was lucky. By May 1930, its shape and structure had long been determined, its budget exceeded, and its walls completed. It had often been accused of being elitist and wasteful. The architect A. L. Pasternak had written:
A large residential complex for the employees of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars is being built in Moscow right now. It has a club, theater, cafeteria, laundry, grocery store, day-care center, and even a walk-in clinic. Here, one would have thought, is a model for a new socialist dwelling. However, the residential sector of the complex consists exclusively of apartments made to accommodate the family economy and the individual servicing of family needs, i.e., circumscribed, autonomous family life (the apartments have their own kitchens, bathtubs, etc.).
Here we find two negative facts of our housing policy: on the one hand, the spread of individual apartments, which predetermine the nature of our dwellings and, consequently, our urban life for a long time to come (in the case of stone buildings, no less than 60 to 70 years); and, on the other hand, an incorrect interpretation of the idea of a communal house, which results in the postponement, and perhaps the discrediting, of the introduction of new social relations into the masses.48
In May 1930, however, it turned out that it was Pasternak and his fellow utopians who were guilty of discrediting new social relations, and that the House of Government was a model building “of the transitional type.” Luck may not have been the only reason for Iofan’s vindication: some of the people involved in the writing of the decree were the House’s sponsors, and most were its future residents (including Koltsov, who had launched the attack). It is possible that they were not quite ready to part with their children or live in individual cells; it is certain that most of them, as good Marxists, believed that “industrialization alone was capable of creating the true material conditions for a radical transformation of everyday life.”49
The House was, indeed, “transitional” in Ginzburg’s terms: the public sector was designed to cover a wide variety of needs, while the residential block allowed for a “circumscribed, autonomous family life.” The club (still referred to as the “Rykov Club” in 1930 but soon to be renamed after Kalinin) included a cafeteria capable of serving all House residents, a theater for 1,300 spectators, a library, several dozen rooms for various activities (from playing billiards to symphony orchestra rehearsals), and, above the theater, both tennis and basketball courts, two gyms, and several shower rooms. There was also a bank, laundry, telegraph, post office, day-care center, walk-in clini
c, hairdresser’s salon, grocery store, department store, and movie theater for 1,500 spectators (the Shock Worker) with a café, reading room, and band stage. The residential part consisted of seven ten-to eleven-story units, with a total of twenty-four entryways (numbered, for unknown reasons, 1–10 and 12–25), two apartments per floor, 505 apartments altogether. Each apartment had three, four, or more furnished rooms with large windows; a kitchen with gas stove, garbage chute, exhaust fan, and fold-away bunk for the maid; a bathroom with bathtub and sink; a separate toilet, telephone, and both hot and cold running water. All apartments had cross ventilation and windows on both sides (including in the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet). Some apartments, particularly those facing the river (Entryways 1 and 12) were much larger than others. Some entryways had cargo, as well as passenger, elevators.
The “utopians” (both urbanists and disurbanists) seemed justified in arguing that the House of Government was functionally similar to bourgeois apartment buildings. As early as 1878, a New York court had formally distinguished between tenements, which housed several families living independently under one roof, and apartment buildings, which provided collective services to its residents. Most luxury apartment buildings in New York had public kitchens, restaurants, and laundries; some had play areas and dining rooms for children. The Dakota, on Central Park West between Seventy-Second and Seventy-Third Streets, had all those things plus croquet lawns and tennis courts. Expensive apartment-hotels were closer to communal houses in that they were designed for bachelors and did not have private kitchens.50
The House of Government was transitional in another sense: stylistically, it was both constructivist and neoclassical. The whole complex was in the shape of a triangle, with the base (the club) facing the river, the truncated tip (the movie theater) abutting the Drainage Canal, and the store and laundry buildings centering the east and west sides, respectively. Plain, rectangular residential blocks of uneven height connected these public units, which served as the nodes of the composition and flaunted their functions in their design. The continuous horizontal windows above the club entrance mirrored the length of the gymnasium; the semicircular rear of the club repeated the shape of both the theater auditorium and dining room; the commercial unit (which included the two stores and hairdresser’s salon) stood out for its relatively small size and large windows; while the movie theater, with its huge semicone sitting atop a square base, resembled a giant flashlight pointing toward the island’s Arrowhead.
Three-room apartment floor plan
Four-room apartment floor plan
Interior view of one of the stairway entrances
Apartment door on one of the floors. On the left is the elevator door.
Cafeteria
Movie theater foyer
Movie theater stairway
Movie theater reading room
Club stairway
The constructivist elements did not add up to a constructivist whole, however. Because of the domination of massive, bottom-heavy rectangular blocks squeezed into a small area bounded by water, the overall impression was of immobile, fortresslike solidity. The three thousand piles connecting the building to the Swamp’s bedrock were hidden from view, and the newly raised and reinforced embankment was clothed in granite. The island location suggested a continued use of the ship metaphor, but it was not easy to imagine the House of Government staying afloat. Most dramatically, the side bordering the embankment was designed as a solemn, palatial facade. Flat, grand, and symmetrical, with its three colonnades flanked by the huge towers of Entryways 1 and 12, it looked out across the river toward the Museum of Fine Arts, whose Ionic portico it attempted, in rough outline, to reflect.51
As Lunacharsky wrote, against fashion, while the House of Government was still being built, classicism was not one architectural style among many—it was a universal “language of architecture that fit many different epochs. Just as some geometric forms—the square, the cube, the circle, and the sphere—represent something essentially rational, subject to modifications that render them vital and flexible but always remaining the eternal elements of our formal language, so most classical architectural forms are qualitatively different from all others because they are correct irrespective of time periods.”52
The epoch of the First Five-Year Plan and great breakthrough, known to contemporaries as the “period of reconstruction” or the “period of transition,” was embodied in two iconic buildings completed at about the same time: the Lenin Mausoleum and the House of Government. One contained the leader-founder; the other his successors. One was a small structure designed to dominate a historic square; the other a huge fortress meant to fill a swamp. One represented the center of New Jerusalem; the other the first in a series of endlessly reproducible dwellings for its inhabitants. Both attempted to combine, and perhaps identify, the avant-garde’s search for the “eternal elements of our formal language” with the “classical architectural forms.” The mausoleum consisted of a massive cube supporting a stepped pyramid crowned with a portico. The House of Government resembled a Timurid mausoleum, with a tall, flat facade both shielding and advertising the tomb’s sacred contents.53
The mausoleum was carefully inserted into the hallowed space of Red Square. The House of Government resembled an island within an island. The tall archways leading into the inner courtyards were blocked by heavy gates; the two embankments framing the building from the north and south were Siamese dead ends conjoined at the Arrowhead; the Big Stone Bridge would soon be elevated, turning All Saints Street into another dead end; and the western side, mostly invisible to pedestrians, overlooked the Einem (now Red October) Candy Factory, with St. Nicholas and a few other remnants of the Swamp cowering in perpetual shadow in between.
View from the bridge
View from the Kremlin
View from the cathedral
View from All Saints Street
View from the Drainage Canal (Ditch)
Relocation of the Big Stone Bridge (for the purpose of improving traffic access)
■ ■ ■
The House of Government was not going to remain an island for very long: a second House of Government was to be built on Bolotnaia (Swamp) Square, and a third one, across the river, in Zariadye (a crowded artisans’ quarter east of the Kremlin). But the task was not to fight the Swamp one building at a time: the task was to rebuild the capital along with the rest of the country. As Koltsov had written after the introduction of NEP in 1921, old Moscow, “bareheaded and unkempt,” had “crept out from under the rubble and poked her head up, grinning her old hag’s grin.” Malevolent and apparently immortal, she “looked the new world in the eye and bared her teeth, wishing to live on and to get fat again.”54
It would take the great breakthrough to finish her off. In the words of a 1930 article, “The disorganized Moscow street has no face of its own, no perspective, no hint of any consistency of growth: from an eight-story ‘skyscraper,’ your eye slips down, with a sick feeling, into the gap of one-storyness; the street looks like a jaw with rotten, uneven, chipped teeth. Old Moscow—the way it is now—will inevitably, and very soon, become a serious brake on our advance. Socialism cannot be squeezed into an old, ill-fitting, worn-out shell.” Socialism required a new capital, and the new capital required a proper plan. “In this regard, we are lagging behind the capitals of bourgeois Europe. For several decades now, Paris has been built and rebuilt according to the so-called Haussmann plan. Australia has announced an international competition for the best design of its capital. But here, in the land of the plan, in the country that created the five-year plan, our capital, Moscow, continues to grow and develop spontaneously, according to the wishes of particular developers and without any regulation.”55
The construction of the mausoleum and the House of Government was a good beginning, but it was the Palace of Soviets—the site of national congresses and mass processions, the official stage for the House’s residents, and the ultimate public building of all time—th
at was going to provide the center around which the new world would be built. On February 6, 1931, while still working on the House of Government, Boris Iofan submitted a proposal and a timetable for the design competition; in spring 1931, a preliminary competition was held (Iofan was both a contestant and the chief architect within the Construction Administration); and on July 13, 1931, the presidium of the Central Executive Committee issued a decree “on the construction of the Palace of Soviets on the square of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the demolition of the latter.” The palace was to contain a main auditorium for 15,000 people, a second auditorium for 5,900 people, two additional halls for 200 people each, and an administrative area. By the December 1 deadline, 272 projects, including 160 professional designs, had been submitted to the Construction Council chaired by Molotov. On December 5, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was dynamited. On February 28, 1932, the commission announced that the three first prizes would be awarded to Ivan Zholtovsky, Boris Iofan, and an American, Hector Hamilton. Zholtovsky’s design included a tower that resembled a Kremlin tower and an auditorium that resembled the Colosseum in Rome. Iofan’s design was similar to Zholtovsky’s except that the tower and the colosseum were stripped of overt classical references. Hamilton’s massive rectangular fortress resembled Iofan’s House of Government (which was to serve as its shadow on the other side of the river).56
The House of Government Page 49
