A close reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel produces more than an understanding of a structure or a literary method. Almost all the themes that go to make up the mysterious nature of the year 1937 can be found in the book: the utter confusion, the blurring of clear distinctions, the shockwaves created by the irruption of unknown, anonymous forces into the lives of ordinary people, the fear and the despair. Almost all the locations that form part of the drama of Moscow in 1937 are referred to: the glorious city and the awfulness of communal housing; the public places filled with hysterical choruses; the setting for the show trials; the place of execution; but also the retreats in which individuals could find happiness.
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Moscow as a Construction Site: Stalin’s General Plan in Action
No medium could match film in mimicking the unprecedented pace at which events unfolded. And nowhere did events move so rapidly as in Moscow. With the building plans of the First and Second Five-Year Plans, Moscow had been transformed into one great building site. This was an alluring challenge for the filmmakers, directors and cameramen who had been endeavouring to keep pace with events ever since the 1920s. Even before that, a series of famous directors – Il'ia Kopalin and Mikhail Kaufman, Viktor Kuleshov, Boris Barnet and Abram Room – had used Moscow as the setting for their films.1 Sergei Eisenstein planned a great Moscow film for the city’s 800th anniversary, with the title Moscow 800.2
However, Aleksandr Medvedkin’s New Moscow was the film which best exemplified the theme of the transformation of Moscow. No sooner was this film finished than it was withdrawn from circulation; it was allowed to reach a larger audience only after decades had passed.3 It was he who succeeded, thanks to an inspired idea, in capturing on screen the vertiginous and transformational aspect of the changes.
Aleksandr Medvedkin’s film New Moscow
In Medvedkin’s film we meet Alyosha, a young architect, travelling from the provinces to the capital by train. The carriage he is in is very lively. Outside, the vast countryside flies by; there are no back courtyards and non-places – everything has already been smartened up by the process of Soviet modernization. In his luggage Alyosha carries his blueprint for building the new Moscow. This is all interwoven with a love story: the young architect wants to return to the provinces to carry on with modernization there; his bride, who hails from the capital, follows him there. In so doing, she shows that she is no laggard in the struggle for socialism. Together with the love story, the bustle of the capital comes into view: taxis, cars, buses and the underground. Above all else, we see the New Moscow – on the one hand, the buildings, highways, squares and canals already completed; on the other, deceptively accurate models of buildings yet to be built. The spectator is led through a gigantic building site; he passes buildings still surrounded by scaffolding, crosses the new bridges, and traverses vistas and arterial highways. Aeroplanes circle round mock-ups of the Palace of the Soviets. In the film we hear a voiceover, informing us that
Fulfilling the Stalin Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow, the Moscow Bolsheviks have carried out a colossal task. Old houses have been demolished and the broad vistas of the future have been opened up. And Moscow is now just one vast building site. Look now, Comrades, and you will see what the Bolsheviks intend to do for Moscow tomorrow. The new thoroughfare leading to the Railway Station, the Academy of Sciences Avenue, Maiakovski Square. Moscow’s embankments will be the capital’s finest ornaments. Marvellous buildings will transform our Moscow into a city of extraordinary beauty. Lenin Avenue, the Palace of the Soviets – a symbol of the greatness and strength of our homeland.4
The city is not only full of movement; the city itself starts to mutate. In one episode the painter Fedia, standing on a balcony, tries to capture the Moscow that is disappearing in a picture. But the city vanishes more rapidly than he is able to draw. Confronted with the pace of change, Fedia capitulates. In another scene the place where he has arranged to meet his girlfriend disappears overnight. Houses fly past the windows of an apartment in which two Moscow ladies are taking tea; this was not simply the invention of a filmmaker. Thus,
during the rebuilding of Gorky Street, in accordance with the grand ambitions of the General Plan, more than fifty buildings were quite literally moved to facilitate the widening of the street and the creation of a unified façade. The publicity that these removals acquired was unprecedented, celebrating the power of Stalinist Russia to quite literally remake the world and create a new landscape.5
It is in vain that the ladies attempt to notify the police and the fire brigade. They are informed that physically moving houses is an ordinary, normal event nowadays. But Medvedkin knows how to give a further twist even to this process of rebuilding. At the end of the film, Alyosha and his fellow workers show an assembled audience of dignitaries a cinematic vision of their Moscow project.
A disaster occurs: the film is placed in the projector the wrong way, and instead of the glorious achievements of socialism rising from the ruins of old Moscow, the audience sees these great buildings collapsing and old Moscow returning … The audience is hysterical with laughter; Alyosha is frantic. Finally, however, the situation is saved and the film is put in correctly.6
We are finally shown the new city, partly realized, just as it had appeared in Stalin’s General Plan of 1935, and partly still at the drawing-board stage or as a vision of the future.
Medvedkin found a way of expressing an experience much commented upon by visitors to Moscow at the time, including foreign visitors. Newspapers reported daily on the publication of new building projects, groundbreaking ceremonies or the completion of building works. The projects concerned were described and discussed in detail in the relevant professional journals such as Moscow Construction or Arkhitektura SSSR [Architecture of the USSR]. Every week the popular technical magazine Around the World contained a new story about the rebuilding of Moscow. The radio provided progress reports on the efforts to turn Moscow into the pacemaker in a programme of reconstruction that would embrace the entire Union. The General Plan had a nationwide impact beyond Moscow as a town-planning school and as the conduit for a new urban iconography.7
The fact is, however, that far more was at stake than simply the physical reconstruction of a great city. Moscow was the focal point of all the problems arising from an over-hasty and violent industrialization process. Moscow as building site meant also social laboratory, melting pot, human centrifuge. This was the point at which the pressures exerted by an unprecedented historical process of urbanization intersected with highly diverse cultures, customs and images of mankind. The conflict was between Moscow as it actually emerged from the Revolution and the New Moscow to be found in the imaginations of the new rulers, fascinated as they were by the advanced metropolises of the world – London, Paris, New York and Berlin. This New Moscow had been codified in the General Plan of 1935. The conflict between demolition and new construction was not simply a matter of architecture and town planning: it was the drama of Soviet modernization itself. We shall understand nothing of the events of 1937 unless we can picture to ourselves what Mikhail Bulgakov in the arts section of The Golden Age called the ‘cauldron in which the new life was being prepared’.8
A new cityscape: Stalin’s General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow
In 1937 the General Plan approved by the Party and the state authorities in 1935 was running at full throttle, and it was already possible to discern the outlines of the initial projects. The expected completion date was 1945. Two documents tell us what the initiators of the plan had in mind. The first is the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow itself.9 And the second is a volume documenting and illustrating the implementation of the plan up to 1937. It is a large-format album with numerous illustrations, drawings, diagrams and statistics, which was sent to press on 17 November 1937 and which benefited from the contributions of the most distinguished book designers of the day: Viktor Shklovskii for the text, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova for the
diagrams and illustrations.10 The volume appeared in an edition of 5,500 copies, and its very form was designed to capture the element of reconstruction. The designers of the album worked systematically with contrasts between the old and the new Moscow, between shots of nature and of industrial landscapes, between images of capitalist and socialist cities. Contrasting and suggestive diagrams and statistics are very prominent. The face of the new Moscow was defined by model buildings which subsequently became the icons of Stalin’s Moscow. Rodchenko, Shklovskii and Stepanova succeeded in capturing in book form the same vertiginous moment of Moscow’s transformation that Medvedkin had defined visually in cinematic terms. This was not the first venture of this kind for Shklovskii and Rodchenko; both had been involved in the text and illustrations for the legendary if not notorious collective volume accompanying the building of the White Sea Canal.11 Admittedly, it is evident from the preface that the situation had already deteriorated: it includes mention of the ‘Trotskyite–Bukharinite hirelings of fascism who have wormed their way into a number of building organizations and the Mossoviet administration, delayed the building work and attempted to derail the implementation of the programme for the reconstruction of Moscow. The glorious Soviet intelligence system has unmasked the scandalous traitors and dealt them an annihilating blow.’12
Grandiose and far-reaching as the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was, it had not appeared out of thin air. On the contrary, it was the product of collective efforts over a number of years on the part of a large number of writers and committees. It was the result of much-needed, long-overdue measures to modernize the capital. Ever since the Revolution, apart from a number of model constructivist buildings and isolated initiatives to improve the fabric of the city, no really large-scale projects had been decided upon or undertaken. Instead, the city continued to live on its past achievements. In many places, the effects of the fighting in October 1917 could still be seen. Wooden buildings, in particular, had fallen into disrepair, had collapsed or had been torn down for firewood. The population of the city had been halved as a result of the turmoil of the Civil War.
But one decade after the Revolution, as early as 1926, the situation had dramatically improved thanks to an astonishingly rapid economic recovery following the introduction of the New Economic Policy and the start of a massive influx of immigrants from the countryside. The stream of immigrants in the wake of the forced collectivization and flight from the land, the huge shortage of labour to service the rapid industrialization which was driven on by coercive methods – all this had aggravated the situation to breaking point. Basic problems of supply had to be resolved. How was housing to be found to cope with the whirlwind growth in population? How could the supply of water and electricity be guaranteed or the public transport system expanded? The municipal government had been battling with these problems for years – basically, it was simply a matter of taking up the reins of the modernization projects left dangling since before the Revolution: moving traffic underground, extending the sewerage system to deal with the constant threat of rising water levels, widening and straightening the road network and, above all, creating a modern infrastructure with everything that implied: schools, hospitals, universities, libraries, warehouses and port facilities.
In the new situation these changes had become indispensable. But now they came ‘all at once’, in one great push, in the shape of a grandiose master plan decked out with utopian features, whereas what was needed was to enable the Soviet capital to function properly and thrive in the new age. What was qualitatively new, and indeed utopian, lay in the unified approach to all the city’s problems. It was like a Gesamtkunstwerk in which the authorities were equipped with full administrative and political powers and a decision-making and implementing system whose like was to be found nowhere else. Moscow measured itself against other big cities – London, New York, Paris or Berlin – but it began from a very different starting point. What it achieved in exemplary fashion was a process that would be emulated decades later by the cities of the Third World: a reorganization under the pressure of mass immigration and ‘hyperurbanization’ (Moshe Lewin).13 It is a mark of the gigantic scale of the project that it should have produced its own forms, its own aesthetics and its own language. After all, its aim was nothing less than the transformation of the world, the creation of a novel urban and human landscape in a single mould. The conceptual preparations, the cooperation between leading commissions for architecture, planning and finance, show that the resolution passed by the Council of the People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the Communist Party on 10 July 1935 was not simply the product of a voluntarist whim. The number of people and institutions involved, as well as the know-how invested in the Plan, was too great for that, and the vision, which had benefited from the contributions of the best minds – engineers, historians and architects – was too overwhelming. With the pressure of the shockwaves of collectivization behind it, and inspired by the vision of a dynamic, functioning metropolis, the General Plan combined all the great, indeed self-evident, motifs of the Moscow modernization project.14
The Plan begins by taking stock, and it infers from this the necessity of a thoroughgoing reconstruction:
Even in its best years the spontaneous growth of the city of Moscow over the centuries reflected the barbaric features of Russian capitalism. The narrow, crooked streets, the fragmentation of its districts by a plethora of streets and blind alleyways, the uneven development of the centre and the periphery, the overloading of the centre with warehouses and small businesses, the inadequate height and dilapidation of the housing stock combined with high occupational density, the absence of proper planning for industry, the railways and other spheres of economic and everyday life – all these factors inhibit normal life and above all the transport system, in a city developing at a frantic pace. All this makes a fundamental systematic reconstruction imperative.15
The Plan was developed in sharp contrast to the template of the capitalist city. At the same time, a general policy was promulgated for maintaining continuity with the existing historical city in order to end the prolonged, and often bitter, controversy between radical de-urbanizers and urbanizers, between those who pleaded for demolition and new build and another faction demanding that the city should be left untouched. The General Plan is a document proposing a middle way between conservation and further construction, a kind of ‘critical reconstruction’ on a vast scale.
The Central Committee and the Council of the People’s Commissars reject the designs for the preservation of the existing city as a museum of the past and the simultaneous creation of a new city outside the bounds of the city as it is at present. Both also reject, however, the proposals for the demolition of the city as it has developed historically and its replacement by a new one on the basis of an entirely new plan. They proceed from the premise that what matters in defining a plan for Moscow is to preserve the foundations of the city as it has developed historically, while at the same time restructuring it by means of a thoroughgoing reform of its streets and squares. The most important preconditions for this reform are the proper siting of residential areas, industry, the rail network and storage facilities, the water supply, the freeing up and reorganizing of residential quarters in an appropriate manner, together with the creation of normal, healthy living conditions for the population of the city.
At the same time,
The plan should pay heed to the coherent design of squares, thoroughfares, embankments and parks, as well as making use of the best examples of classical and modern architecture together with all the latest design and technical advances in the construction of residential and public buildings. Moscow’s hills, the Moscow and Iauza rivers, the wealth of parks throughout the city – the Lenin Hills, the Stalin Park, Sokolniki Park, Ostankino Park, the Pokrovskoie-Streshnevo Park with the Khimki reservoir – all of these make it possible to bring the multiplicity of different town districts together and create a true socialist city.16<
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This plan envisaged a city that should end up with a population not exceeding 5 million.17 It refers to a territory to be expanded by incorporating outlying villages. By agreement with the surrounding Moscow district authorities, extensive forested and park areas – on the Moscow River, in Kuntsevo and Tsaritsyno – were to be preserved for future generations. To solve the problems of the water supply, water was to be abstracted from the Volga and the dammed-up Moscow–Volga Canal. The Moscow River itself was to become the ‘arterial highway’ of the capital, with its banks shored up with granite and the construction of broad embankment roads and monuments. The radial structure of the centre going back over centuries was retained, but was now to be opened up for traffic by bisecting the radial spokes, expanding existing junctions, and laying out new boulevards. One principal axis was to lead from Dzerzhinsky Square via Manege Square to the Palace of the Soviets and beyond – through a tunnel through the Lenin Hills into the new residential area of Iugo-Zapadnaia. This involved demolition work in which entire districts were cleared to make room for prestigious government buildings. Red Square was to double in size, and Kitai-gorod to be flattened apart from a few public buildings. The hilly banks down to the river in Zariad'e were cleared of their older buildings in preparation for the monumental House of Industry. At the intersections of the radial spokes and ring roads, imposing new corner buildings were to be constructed; these would reconfigure the image of the city as a whole. In the course of the coming decade, three arterial highways were planned to pass through the entire city. The first was to run from Izmailovskii Park to the Lenin Hills, the second from the Leningrad Highway to the Stalin automobile plant, and the third from Ostankino Park in the north-east to the Serpukhov Highway in the south. Centrally placed new buildings reconfigured the older suburbs; disparate and isolated parts of the city were now joined up into a coherent, articulated cityscape.
Moscow, 1937 Page 7
