Zholtovsky’s 1931 design for the Palace of Soviets
Iofan’s 1931 design
Hamilton’s 1931 design
None of the three winning designs was perfect, however (Iofan’s was considered “not organic enough”). According to the Construction Council, “the monumentality, simplicity, integrity, and grace of the architectural interpretation of the Palace of Soviets associated with the greatness of our socialist construction have not received their full expression in any of the submitted projects.” The announcement for a new, closed contest called for one monumental building of “a boldly tall composition” devoid of “temple motifs” and located on a large square not delimited “by colonnades or other structures that might interfere with the impression of openness.”57
By the spring of 1933, two closed competitions (for twenty invited participants and then, separately, for five finalists) resulted in a victory for Iofan, whose design represented a massive rectangular platform, with an elaborate facade resembling the Great Altar at Pergamon, supporting a three-tiered cylindrical tower and an eighteen-meter statue placed off-center above the portico. “This bold, firm, articulated ascent,” wrote Lunacharsky, “is not an imploring gaze toward heaven, but, rather, a storming of the heights from below.” On May 10, 1933, the Construction Council adopted Iofan’s design as the project’s “baseline,” but mandated that the building “culminate in a massive statue of Lenin 50 to 75 meters high, so that the entire Palace of Soviets would serve as a pedestal for the figure of Lenin.” On June 4, 1933, the Council appointed V. A. Shchuko and V. G. Gelfreikh, who had recently won the Lenin Library competition and whose own Palace of Soviets submission was a variation on the theme of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, as Iofan’s “coauthors.” The compromise version, with the Lenin statue centered at the top and the upper cylinder elongated in order to accommodate its size, was officially accepted in 1934. Iofan was appointed chief architect.58
According to a book about the final version of the design, the Palace of Soviets was to be 416 meters (1,365 feet) high. “It will be the highest structure on earth: higher than the Egyptian pyramids, higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the American skyscrapers.” It would also be the biggest: “In order to equal the internal space of the future Palace in Moscow, one would have to add up the volumes of the six largest American skyscrapers.” The statue of Lenin would weigh six thousand tons and reach a height of one hundred meters. “It will be three times as high and two-and-a-half times as heavy as the famous Statue of Liberty.” It would soar above the clouds, and, on clear days, be visible seventy kilometers from Moscow. “At night, the brightly lit-up shape of the statue of Ilich would be seen … even farther away: a majestic lighthouse marking the spot of the socialist capital of the world.”59
The building was to house the world’s first genuine parliament—the Supreme Soviet, its presidium, and its administrative apparatus—as well as the central state archive and countless museums, winter gardens, cafeterias, and reception halls.60
Iofan’s 1933 design
Gelfreikh and Shchuko’s 1933 design
Iofan, Gelfreikh, and Shchuko’s 1933 design
Palace of Soviets
The six columns of the Main Entrance to the Palace of Soviets will bear the engravings of the six commandments from the oath that Comrade Stalin took after Lenin’s death. These commandments will also be represented in sculptures.
Beyond the colonnade and loggias will be the Hall of the Stalin Constitution, which will seat 1,500 people, and, finally, the Great Hall. Figures are powerless in this case, so perhaps a comparison will help: the space of the Great Hall will be almost twice as great as the entire space of the House of Government, complete with all its residential buildings and theaters.61
The Palace of Soviets was going to be the ultimate wonder of the world: a tower that reached unto heaven not out of pride, but in triumph; a tower that gathered the scattered languages of the earth and made them one; Jacob’s ladder in stone and concrete:
There was once the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which stood at the mouth of the Nile and helped ships find their way into that trading port of the ancient world.
There were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. There were the great works of religious art: the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus and Phidias’s gold and ivory statue of Zeus at Olympia.
In later years, mankind created even more grandiose structures: the Panama and Suez canals connected oceans; the St. Gotthard and Simplon tunnels cut through the rock of the Alps; the Eiffel Tower rose over Paris.62
All of these structures were great masterpieces, but they were built by slaves in the service of false gods. In the Soviet Union, people would be free to build an indestructible monument to their own future:
State borders will vanish from the map of the world. The earth’s very landscape will change. Communist settlements, completely different from the old cities, will rise up. Man will defeat space. Electricity will plow the fields of Australia, China, and Africa. But the Palace of Soviets, crowned with the statue of Ilich, will still stand on the bank of the Moskva River. People—generation after generation—will be born, live happy lives, and gradually grow old, but the Palace of Soviets, familiar to them from their favorite children’s books, will remain the same as we will see it in a few years. Centuries will leave no traces on it, for we will build it in such a way that it will stand for eternity. It is a monument to Lenin!63
The new center of Moscow was to be formed by three linked squares. The mausoleum containing Lenin’s body and the Palace of Soviets supporting the Lenin statue would be connected to a third rectangular square named after Lenin’s patronymic (Ilich, or the son of Elijah). Radiating out from them would be straight, broad avenues, including “the ceremonial thoroughfare of Greater Moscow, Lenin Avenue.” The House of Government was the first in a series of new buildings meant to frame the city’s core. None of them, however, was to look like the House of Government. As Kaganovich said in September 1934, some buildings “overwhelm the individual with their stone blocks, their heavy mass…. The House of Government, designed by Iofan, is not a success in this regard because its top is heavier than its bottom. We are proud of this house as the biggest, most important, and most cultured house we have built, but its composition is a bit too heavy and cannot serve as a model for future construction.”64
■ ■ ■
The literature of the epoch of great construction sites was mostly about great construction sites. To take the best known, Yuri Olesha’s Envy (1927, a part of the movement’s advance detachment) is about the building of a giant public kitchen; Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Golden Calf (1931) is, in part, about the building of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway; Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932) is about the building of the Magnitogorsk Steel Mill; Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Second Day (1933) is about the building of the Kuznetsk Steel Mill; Boris Pilniak’s The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (1930), Marietta Shaginian’s Hydrocentral (1931), Bruno Jasienski’s Man Changes His Skin (1932), and Fedor Gladkov’s Energy (1933) are about the building of river dams; Leonid Leonov’s The Sot’ (1929) is about the building of a paper mill (on the River Sot’); the multiauthored The White Sea–Baltic Canal (1934) is about the building of the White Sea–Baltic Canal; and Andrei Platonov’s “Doubting Makar” (1929) and The Foundation Pit (1930) are each about the building of an eternal house.65
Palace of Soviets and the new Moscow
Most of them would later be classified as “production novels,” but none of them truly is one, because no actual production—of steel, paper, electricity, or sausages—ever takes place. They are, rather, construction stories—or, since human souls are also under construction—construction-cum-conversion stories. What matters is the act of building—a new world, a new Jerusalem, a new tower that will reach the heavens. “You’ve got a proper Socialist International here,” says a visiting foreign correspondent in Jasienski’s Man Changes His Skin. “Yes, we’ve got a real Tower of
Babel” responds the head of construction, and he begins to count:
Hold on, let me see: the Tajiks, make one, the Uzbeks, two, the Kazakhs, three, the Kyrgyz, four, the Russians, five, the Ukrainians, six, the Lezgians, seven, the Ossetians, eight, the Persians, nine, the Indians, ten—that’s right, we’ve got Indians, too, émigrés. The Afghans make eleven: there are several Afghan crews, right here and in Sector Three. Twenty percent of the drivers are Tatars—that’s twelve. In the repair shop, there are some Germans and Poles—that’s fourteen. Among the engineers there are Georgians, Armenians, and Jews—that’s already seventeen. There are also two American engineers, one of whom is the head of this sector—that’s eighteen. Did I forget anybody?
“There are some Turks, too, Comrade Commander.”
“That’s right: there are some Turks, and also some Turkmen.”66
In Kataev’s Magnitogorsk, there are “the men of Kostroma with their finely distended nostrils, Kazan Tatars, Caucasians (Georgians and Chechens), Bashkirs, Germans, Muscovites, Leningraders in coats and Tolstoy shirts, Ukrainians, Jews, and Belorussians.” In Ehrenburg’s Kuznetsk, there are “Ukrainians and Tatars, Buriats, Cheremis, Kalmyks, peasants from Perm and Kaluga, coal miners from Yuzovka, turners from Kolomna, bearded road pavers from Riazan, Komsomols, exiled kulaks, unemployed miners from Westphalia and Silesia, street traders from the Sukharevka flea market, embezzlers sentenced to forced labor, enthusiasts, swindlers, and even sectarian preachers.” And in Leonov’s The Sot’, there are sawyers and glaziers from Ryazan, stonemasons and stove fitters from Vyatka and Tver, plasterers from Vologda, painters from Kostroma, diggers from Smolensk, and carpenters from Vladimir. “From Perm they came, and from Vyatka, and from all the provinces where the old peasant ways passed down from their forefathers were no longer possible, but new ones had not yet arrived.” One of the carpenters offers to send for the young women, too, but the head of construction shakes his head: “We’re building a paper mill—not Babylon!”67
It is Babylon, of course (as the head of construction realizes toward the end of the novel)—only in reverse: from dispersion to unity. As Platonov’s Chiklin puts it, “Heard of Mount Ararat, have you? Well, if I heaped all the earth I have dug into a single heap, that’s how high it would reach.” And as Platonov’s engineer Prushevsky thinks to himself, “It was he who had thought up a single all-proletarian home in place of the old town where to this day people lived by fencing themselves off into households; in a year’s time the entire local class of the proletariat would leave the petty-proprietorial town and take possession for life of this monumental new home. And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity.”68
All construction stories are stories of creation; the epigraph to Ehrenburg’s The Second Day is an epigraph to them all: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And it was so. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” The most common cosmogonic myths are creation ex nihilo and creation from chaos. Platonov’s “all-proletarian house” is to be built on a “vacant lot” (pustyr’, from pustoi, “empty”); Jasienski’s dam and Ilf and Petrov’s railroad are to be built in the desert (pustynia, from pustoi, “empty”); and Kataev’s Magnitogorsk is in the middle of nowhere. “There was no way of telling what it was—neither steppe nor city.” In Gladkov’s Energy, “the gray-brown clay hills, the granite boulders wrested from the earth, and the river squeezed between its high rocky banks slept sadly and soundly.” Only at night, with the coming of searchlights, did “the chaos of rocks, cliffs, quarries, and concrete structures come alive in bright contrasts of light and shadow, like a moonscape.”69
Another word for “chaos” is “wilderness,” and another word for “wilderness” is “Asia.” In the creation tales of Kataev, Jasienski, Ehrenburg, and Ilf and Petrov, the departure from Europe is marked as a prologue to genesis. In Man Changes His Skin, the traveling American engineer, James Clark, notices that “the endless plain, which began long before Orenburg, was becoming more and more yellow and monotonous.” At the gate of Asia, he breaks his journey in Chelkar, the place of Tania Miagkova’s exile. She had probably left by then, having reconciled with her husband, mother, and the Party line.70
But by far the most popular form of chaos is the swamp: partly because it is a familiar interpretation of the biblical “waters,” but mostly because all Soviet creation novels come out of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (“from the darkness of the forests and the quagmires of the swamps”). Gladkov’s “precipice” smells of “swampy rot”; Ehrenburg’s builders work, “sinking into the yellow mud”; Leonov’s mill drowns in a boggy forest “choked with old-growth timber”; and the White Sea–Baltic Canal makes its way, just barely, through the “strips of mud” left behind by the glaciers. When one of Leonov’s young engineers says that Peter the Great “drained the vast Russian marsh in almost identical style,” the head of construction responds that he had done so without the benefit of a “Marxist approach.”71
True to both Testaments—the Christian and the Pushkinian—most Soviet creation tales include a flood that wipes out the wicked along with the innocent: “the man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air.” The few construction sites that are not on the water have to make do with fires and storms. Kataev’s Magnitogorsk has both. The storm destroys the old circus, which stands for Babylon.
The circus posts come loose, topple and sprawl on the ground. The parrots scream as they are crushed by the falling timbers.
The canvas roof swells and flies off, only to get caught up in the wires.
Feathers of every hue—red, yellow, blue—fill the air.
The elephant stands with his massive forehead against the storm. He spreads his fan-shaped ears and raises his trunk.
His ears inflate like sails in the wind.
The elephant fights off the dust with his trunk. His eyes look crazed, diabolical.
The wind compels him to retreat. He backs away. He is completely enveloped in the black whirlwind of dust. His body steams. He wants to escape, but the chain holds him fast. He lets out a dreadful, spine-chilling elemental scream.
It is the trumpet call of the Last Judgment.72
The world of silt, mud, rot, and dust contains countless things that need to be swept away, from Platonov’s “petty and unfortunate scraps of nature” to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Every construction project of the era of the First Five-Year Plan is a future Palace of Soviets. When the Magnitogorsk engineer Margulies calls his sister in Moscow, she supplies the script in the form of local news:
And the dome of Christ the Savior … Can you hear me? I was just saying that the dome of Christ the Savior … half of it has been dismantled. I never realized it was so huge …
“Good,” Margulies muttered.
“Every section of the cupola was over two meters wide. And, from a distance, it looked just like an empty melon rind…. Are you listening?
“Goo-ood!,” Margulies roared. “Go on, go on!”73
The most rotten scraps of the old world come from bourgeois apartments. The villainous Bezdetov (Childless) brothers from Pilniak’s The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea make their living buying up antique furniture. The pregnant proletarian girl from Time, Forward! looks out her train window and sees “an old kitchen table, a disassembled wooden bed with head and footboards tied back to back, a chair, and a badly scorched stool.” “They’re bringing their bedbugs with them!” says the conductor.74
At the center of the old home stands Odysseus’s bed—the “terrifying bed” from Olesha’s Envy, “made of precious wood covered with dark cherry varnish with scrolled mirrors on the inside of the head and footboards.” It belongs to a false Penelope by the name of Anechka Prokopovich. “She was sleeping with her mouth open, gurgling, the way old women do when they sleep. The rustling of the bedbugs sound
ed as if someone were tearing at the wallpaper. Their hiding places, unknown to daylight, were revealing themselves. The bed-tree grew and swelled. The window-sill turned pink. Gloom gathered around the bed. The night’s secrets were creeping out of corners and down the walls, washing over the sleeping pair, and crawling under the bed.” One of the bed’s main accessories is a blanket (“I boiled under it and squirmed, jiggling in the warmth like a plate of aspic.”). Another one—more compact both as object and metaphor—is a pillow. The Soviet creation novel’s most eloquent defender of everything resembling jelly is Ivan Babichev, a “modest Soviet magician” and the crafty serpent who guides the questing hero into Anechka’s Eden. Ivan is a short, “tubby” man who goes around “dangling a large pillow in a yellowed pillow case behind his back. It keeps bumping against the back of his knee, making a hollow appear and disappear.”75
Dismantling of the dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior
Ivan Babichev looks like a pillow. Shaginian’s “Philistines” look like beasts of Babylon: “I saw something that looked like a stairway from the Apocalypse, a stairway overflowing with rams and goats in tailcoats. The men and women were making bleating noises, and the women had sprouted fat sheep’s tails. They wagged their tails and diamond earrings, their round eyes bulging obscenely.”76
But most swamp creatures look like swamp creatures. In Leonov’s The Sot’, a young Soviet woman is walking through the woods and comes upon a cave filled with monstrous monks. Deep inside, ringed by “gaping nostrils,” “dangling earlobes,” and “huge, scurvy-stricken mouths torn by silent screams,” is a pit containing “the monastery’s treasure,” the hermit Eusebius. “It took her a moment to get used to the putrescent warmth emanating from the hole and swirling the flame before she could look in. There, in a nest of filthy rags, rolled a small human face overgrown with fur that looked like moss to her. The earth itself seemed to be shining through the translucent skin of the forehead. The lower lip was stuck out fretfully, but the eyes were closed. The holy man was blinded by the light, and his wild, bushy eyebrows trembled with tension.”77
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