The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The most efficient method, in his opinion [wrote Tania to her mother], would be to draw up a familywide socialist contract, which would list all the responsibilities of the children (cleaning their room, setting and clearing the table, helping with the dishes, doing homework, calisthenics, etc.) alongside all the duties of the grown-ups, including nondomestic ones. This would show how much more extensive the adult duties were and introduce elements of equality. Such institutionalization of the “family code” would allow the kids to regard it as a part of a larger system. We could also consider incorporating certain incentives (including those of a nonmaterial nature). The very act of drawing up such a contract would be of great pedagogical significance.59

  Tania voted for introducing the system gradually, so as not to overwhelm the children with detail and her mother with extra work, but, on the whole, she approved of the initiative. A few days later, she read a newspaper article titled “Our Children,” about a school in Moscow that had adopted a “student daily schedule” (“for the whole day, not just the school day”). “In that school,” she wrote to her mother, “every student used the model template to work out an individualized schedule adapted to the family’s schedule. Our kids need to do that, too (in the form of a socialist contract as suggested by Mikhas), so that they can become, through the pioneer organization, the initiators of this campaign in their own classes (at first only for the pioneers).”60

  The task was for the children to become responsible members of the family, and for the family to become a functioning part of the state. The family was to become a formalized institution bound by contractual obligations; the state was to become a family in which all children (and factories) were “our children.” Neither transformation was to be complete, however: no one envisioned an imminent dissolution of kinship ties and no one imagined the state as a patriarchal institution unmediated by legal codes enforced by strangers. The governing assumption—and the necessary condition for the victory of socialism—was the inherent compatibility and mutual attraction between the two.

  But what if the state spurned some members of a particular family? Could Rada’s happy childhood and her parents’ possible apostasy be reconciled? “It is with tremendous sadness,” wrote Mikhail to Tania, “that I think of how Rada will find out about my current reality. I would like for it to happen after your release, so that you can explain to her about your past and my present. That would make it easier for her to absorb. The main thing I am asking for is that the children have the same understanding about you and me and that Rada still love me.”61

  Could Rada still love her parents if the state was right to distrust them? Could Tania and Mikhail still love each other if one of them was irredeemably duplicitous? For as long as Tania’s answer was “no,” her love of the high-altitude balloon had to be as great as her love for her mother, Rada, and Mikhail. “I knew that the crash of the Maksim Gorky airplane would be a huge shock to you,” she wrote to her mother on May 30, 1935. “The common experience of joy and grief in our USSR is extremely precious.”62

  18

  THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

  The USSR was structured as a series of concentric circles. Tania and Mikhail found themselves in the outer layers (rings of purgatory). The House of Government, from which they had been exiled, was connected to the sacred center by the Big Stone Bridge. The sacred center included the Kremlin, where Comrade Stalin worked, and the Lenin Mausoleum, where Lenin’s body lay in state. On Soviet holy days, the two came together (with Stalin standing directly above Lenin’s tomb). Both were part of an ensemble centered on the Palace of Soviets (with Lenin on top). The Palace of Soviets served as the axis mundi connecting heaven and earth. The first circle around the Palace was the city of Moscow.

  After the Congress of Victors and the first Writers’ Congress of 1934 had ushered in the last golden age, harkening back to previous golden ages, the idea of constructing a brand new city was abandoned in favor of reconstructing the old one. The General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow, adopted on July 10, 1935, proposed to “radically regularize the network of streets and squares” while preserving the traditional radial-concentric structure of old Moscow. The new “parks, wide avenues, fountains and statues, and, in the immediate vicinity of the Palace of Soviets, gigantic squares covered with colored asphalt,” were to be built along the lines of the city’s “rings.”1

  Perfect human communities tend to be represented as either pastoral or urban. Pastorals are poorly disciplined; ideal cities are symmetrical and rigidly centralized. The Heavenly Jerusalem “had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb…. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide.” The capital of Thomas More’s Utopia was also in the form of a square. It was divided into four parts, with a marketplace in the middle. All the streets were of the same width, all the buildings were “so uniform that a whole side of a street looks like one house,” every house had two doors, and all doors had two leaves. All the other cities were identical to the capital, so that “he that knows one of their towns knows them all.” Albrecht Dürer’s ideal city, Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis, and Robert Owen’s harmonious settlement all had the same square or rectangular shape.2

  Thomas More’s Amaurot

  The other matrix of urban perfection is the circle. Plato’s Atlantis consisted of a hill surrounded by five concentric circles, “two of land and three of water”; Vitruvius’s city was radial (for defense purposes, he claimed). The ideal cities of the Renaissance repeated the classical formula: Bartolommeo Delbene’s City of Truth was a cartwheel with five spokes representing roads of virtue emanating from the central tower and cutting through the swamps of vice; Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun was “built upon a high hill” and “divided into seven rings or huge circles named from the seven planets, and the way from one to the other of these is by four streets and through four gates, that look toward the four points of the compass.” The design of the City of the Sun was based on Copernicus’s diagram of the planets revolving around the sun (as well as on St. John’s Jerusalem); its shape resembled the pictorial allegories of Dante’s purgatory as a terraced mountain with seven concentric rings. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden City was a circle divided into six equal sectors.3

  Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun

  Sforzinda

  The circle could be squared in a variety of ways. Filarete’s ideal city of Sforzinda, designed for Francesco Sforza in 1464, derived from two superimposed squares, forming an eight-point star inscribed into a circle; the center (a public square or, in the original design, a tower) was connected to the points of the star by canals and to the inner angles, by roads. Iofan’s Palace of Soviets was a stepped cone resembling Augustine’s earthly city or Dante’s Purgatorio placed centrally on top of a square.4

  Ideal cities are not simply spatial representations of the cosmic order: they are more or less elaborate diagrams of traditional human habitations—which tend to be spatial representations of the cosmic order. Most traditional dwellings are organized around two axes intersecting at the center to form a cross. Whether the points of the cross are connected by straight lines or a circle is secondary: the round Mongol yurt and the Russian peasant hut with its “corners” are both divided into four quarters with different practical and symbolic functions. The center is the vertical axis mundi that connects this world to its higher and lower counterparts.5

  Some new settlements follow the same pattern: at the moment of founding, the creation of the world is reenacted; the cosmic waters are divided; the axes of the settlement aligned with those of the universe (one following the sun, the other forming the axis around which the world turns); and the center marked with a stone, tr
ee, temple, fountain, forum, or tomb of the hero-founder. Not all cities are elaborations of traditional settlements or deliberate new creations, and not all those that are preserve their original diagrams, but no city is entirely divorced from the cosmic order, and some make the point of making the connection explicit. Prominent among the latter are holy cities (which often double as administrative centers) and administrative centers (which attempt to project holiness), including Roma quadrata (“Square Rome”) and its countless clones, the squares and rectangles of Chinese imperial centers, and the perfect circles of Median, Parthian, and Sassanian capitals (and their Muslim successor, Baghdad).6

  Roma quadrata

  Forbidden City in Beijing

  Cities impose order on the world. As time goes on, swamp waters seep through, migrants and money-lenders pour in, sheds and shortcuts proliferate, circles abandon their regularity, and right angles lose their sharpness. The original vision can be restored symbolically, through ritual, or physically, by means of demolition and new construction. In post-Reformation Europe, Rome set the standard for cutting through urban flesh; and Versailles, for starting anew. Both, along with Versailles’s monumental successor, St. Petersburg, were organized around a trivium, or three streets radiating from a common center (and suggesting—at least in diagram form—the rays of the sun). All embodied the restored symmetry of heavenly and earthly power; all spawned multiple progeny (including the tridental replicas of Russia’s imperial capital in Tver and Kostroma).7

  The next Age of Empire began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Emperor Napoleon III replaced old Paris with a network of avenues, boulevards, and star-shaped squares centered on the cross formed by the Rue Rivoli and Boulevard Sebastopol/St. Michel (but leaving the Swamp—Le Marais—intact in the northeastern quarter). Emperor Franz Josef I ordered the replacement of Vienna’s city walls with the world’s most spectacular boulevard. The British Empire did in New Delhi what it could not do in London: build a Rome “one size larger than life.” As one reporter wrote approvingly at the time, “Not a hint of utilitarianism interpolates upon the monumental affirmation of temporal power.”8

  Other colonial capitals within the empire strove for the same combination of symmetry and legibility. The two towers, two wings, and the connecting semicircular colonnade of Pretoria’s Union Buildings symbolized the unbreakable alliance of the two South African races (Briton and Boer). Canberra was designed as a “Parliamentary Triangle” superimposed on a cross formed by the “Land Axis” and “Water Axis.” The Secretary for Home Affairs who approved of the site claimed to have felt like “Moses, thousands of years ago, as he gazed down on the promised land.” Ottawa, by way of exception, tended toward the Gothic and the picturesque, and never quite lived up to the 1897 vision of John Galbraith, who described “the city of Ottawa in 1999” as a collection of monumental buildings and “immense skeleton towers,” with “mottoes formed of electric lights stretched between them.”9

  Versailles

  St. Petersburg

  The capitals of the newly restored European empires were to be firmly neoclassical. According to Mussolini’s reconstruction plan, formally promulgated in 1931, “Rome must appear marvellous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.” The theater of Marcellus, the Capitoline Hill, and the Pantheon were to be surrounded by vast spaces and connected by straight avenues; “all that has grown around them in the centuries of decadence must disappear.” Hitler, himself a student of architecture, admired Paris and Vienna and was determined to transform Berlin from an “unregulated accumulation of buildings” into a proper capital aligned along two cosmic axes. The plan’s main feature was the north-south avenue two and a half times as long as the Champs Elysées, lined with government buildings as well as, according to Albert Speer, “a luxurious movie house, for premieres, another cinema for the masses accommodating two thousand persons, a new opera house, three theaters, a new concert hall, a building for congresses, the so-called House of the Nations, a hotel of twenty-nine stories, variety theaters, mass and luxury restaurants, and even an indoor swimming pool, built in Roman style and as large as the baths of Imperial Rome.” The House of the Nations was “a huge meeting hall, a domed structure into which St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome would have fitted several times over.” The inspiration, according to Speer, was provided by the large buildings of Greek antiquity in Sicily and Asia Minor. “Even in Periclean Athens,” he wrote, “the statue of Athena Parthenos by Phidias was forty feet high. Moreover, most of the Seven Wonders of the World won their repute by their excessive size: the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Olympian Zeus of Phidias.”10

  Other reborn national capitals had their own dreams of Augustan and Parisian grandeur (Athens and Helsinki, in particular, entertained comprehensive reconstruction plans on a monumental scale), but, when it came to both ambition and execution, none could compete with the United States. A preview of things to come had been provided by the magical “white city” of the Chicago World’s Fair, which rose out of a swamp in 1893 before being swallowed up again (only the Palace of Fine Arts survived—as the Museum of Science and Industry). Among its legacies were the song “America the Beautiful” and the City Beautiful urban renewal movement, which transplanted the beaux arts version of the baroque city to the United States. The movement’s accomplishments included the large domes, open vistas, civic centers, landscaped parks, axial avenues, and ceremonial malls of many American cities and universities, but it was Washington, DC—the original “Versailles on the Potomac”—that benefited the most. L’Enfant’s palatial plan of 1791 (“proportional to the greatness which … the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest”) was revived in 1902 and mostly implemented over the next three decades—in a way that combined symmetrical consistency with an openness to later additions along preexisting lines.11

  Central Washington was organized around the east-west axis of the National Mall and the north-south axis of the White House, with the axis mundi monument to the founder at the point of intersection. As National Geographic put it in 1915, “the Washington Monument seems to link heaven and earth in the darkness, to pierce the sky in the light, and to stand an immovable mountain peak as the mists of every storm go driving by.” The overall composition, according to one of the designers, was “a crusader’s shield, emblazoned with a cross.” The base of the cross was the Capitol, the two arms were the Jefferson Memorial and the White House, and the top was the Lincoln Memorial, beyond which, according to another member of the original team, lay “the low bridge spanning the Potomac (symbol of the Union of North and South as foretold by Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster) leading both to the heights of Arlington where Lincoln’s soldiers rest in eternal peace, and also to Mount Vernon, shrine of the American people. Washington the founder, Lincoln the saviour of the nation, standing on the same axis with the Capitol whence emanates the spirit of democracy.” The Capitol was directly connected to the White House by the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue, which formed the Federal Triangle and symbolized the signing of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. New ministries and sacred memorials were placed symmetrically along the main axes. No variety theaters, movie houses, restaurants, baths, or cafés were allowed to interfere with the solemn monumentality of the ensemble.12

  National Mall, Washington, DC

  The General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was not as ambitious, or as consistently implemented, as the plans for New Delhi or Washington. The Palace of Soviets, the city’s vertical axis, was modeled after American skyscrapers, which were themselves patterned on classical columns and tended to serve as either corporate temples (each one its own “empire state”) or state capitols (such as the ones built in Louisiana in 1929 and Nebraska in 1932). No Soviet public building came close to the scale and symbolic legibility of the Pentagon, built in 1941–43 next to the Arlington Cemetery, where
Lincoln’s soldiers rest in eternal peace.13

  Pentagon, Washington, DC

  There is no such thing as “totalitarian,” let alone “socialist-realist,” architecture—but there are degrees of “the monumental affirmation of temporal power” as a reflection of the cosmic plan. Stalin’s Moscow and Hitler’s Berlin resembled Paris and Washington in the way Paris and Washington resembled Rome and Versailles and in the way Jesus’s Heavenly Jerusalem resembled Babylon the Great: they served similar purposes and strove to supersede their corrupt predecessors by imitating their original designs. As the architect and city planner Arnold W. Brunner said in 1923 about the neoclassical “civic centers” at the heart of American cities, “the civic center is the most anti-Bolshevik manifestation possible, for here civic pride is born.” Within a decade, Bolshevik civic centers had become neoclassical, too—because neoclassicism was “essentially rational” and thus “correct irrespective of time periods.” In a 1936 article, Iofan praised the Lincoln Memorial (1922) and Folger Shakespeare Library (1932), but argued (anticipating Cold War criticism of his own work) that most other government buildings in Washington, DC, were absurdly oversized caricatures of their Greek and Roman models. As pompous as empire style buildings, but much less accomplished, “these soulless copies fail to evoke the solemnity and monumentality to which they aspire…. Overall, the architecture of US government buildings is a monumental decoration aimed at persuading the ordinary American of the permanence of the existing political order.”14