Ring roads were planned to go around the centre. Some of them were already in existence but were now to be widened and embellished – others were to be newly built. This can best be seen in the outermost ring, which links up parks in the style of American parkways. Moscow’s central role at the heart of the railway network was further expanded and restructured. Some stations, chiefly freight stations, were placed beyond the city limits. Others were connected to each other via tunnels beneath the city centre. This was the case with the Belorusskii and Kazanskii stations and likewise the Leningradskii and Kurskii stations. The key project for solving the traffic problem, however, was the building of the Metro, whose first line runs through the centre from one park to the next: from Sokolniki Park to Gorky Park. The second line, from Sokol and Dynamo to the Kurskii Station, was already under construction; and the third was planned for the route from the north-west of the city to the Stalin automobile plant in the south-east. At the same time, the tram network was expanded, while new modes of transport – trolley buses – were brought in to link the suburbs with the new factories that were built following the First and Second Five-Year Plans, and with the city centre.
The main thrust of housing policy, the most pressing problem of all, was to decongest the city centre and achieve a more even distribution of the population in general. In 1935 there were 1,000 inhabitants per hectare within the Garden Ring; the aim was to reduce this to 500. That was to be achieved by adding new buildings and by raising the number of storeys to seven, eleven and fourteen. The building of the Moscow–Volga Canal would not just eliminate the annual threat of floods but also greatly improve the water supply and transport logistics. According to the Plan, Moscow would become a leader not only in the amount of surface water per head of population (4,000 hectares per head as opposed to 239 hectares in Paris) but also in the water available for consumption. The building of the canal would turn Moscow into the ‘port of five seas’. Over the next ten years the whole of Moscow would be connected up to the water supply and the sewerage system; in the centre, thermal power stations would supply heat and electricity. A new infrastructure for social welfare, hospitals, nursery schools, schools, technical colleges and cinemas was to be created from scratch.
In a metropolis in which any private ownership that might stand in the way of planning has been abolished and in which the conservation of the ‘historical tradition’ receives only lip service, planning comes to resemble an experiment on a tabula rasa; it is like modelling with infinitely plastic material. An executive which had everything at its disposal – including the use of hundreds of thousands of forced labourers, as was the case with the construction of the Moscow–Volga Canal – which was assisted by a team of outstanding experts, and which was under enormous time pressure to deliver visible results as quickly as possible, was able to act like the creator of a Gesamtkunstwerk. The members of the Commission for the General Plan included not only Moscow’s leading political figures – Party leaders, such as Lazar' Kaganovich, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar' Kogan and N. Melbart – but also leading architects, such as Boris Iofan, Karo Alabyan and Viktor Vesnin, academicians, such as Ivan Zholtovskii and Aleksei Shchusev, and also important representatives of Moscow constructivism, such as Nikolai Ladovskii and the German architect Kurt Mayer.18
The Plan was comprehensive and set out to transform an entire city. When complete, a new cityscape would arise in which the course of rivers would be changed and a new water circulation system introduced. This would incorporate parks whose ultimate shape would emerge not in a few years, but only after generations. The Plan boldly envisaged a new skyline, and entire districts, streets and squares were redesigned or conceived anew. All of this was to be undertaken in a city that could look back on an 800year history and whose massive compactness resisted ad hoc interventions.
This new landscape is best viewed from the Lenin Hills or from the roof of the key building of the future, the Palace of the Soviets. Its imaginative sweep could easily make us forget that what was envisaged was the creation of a completely new urban infrastructure. What was planned was a new urban machine, furnished with everything that distinguishes an efficient modern metropolis. Moscow would be transformed overnight from the coronation seat of the rulers of the Russian Empire into a modern metropolis. Even if we discount the figures, diagrams and statistics as having been exaggerated for propaganda reasons, even on a less ambitious scale, the creation of the new infrastructure remains impressive. In ten years, 15 million square metres of residential accommodation, i.e. around 2,500 apartment blocks, were to be created. Within three years, six new large hotels with a total of 4,000 rooms were to be built. The sewerage network, which was 44.6 kilometres in length in 1913, was to be extended to around 800 kilometres by 1937. By that date almost all households within the Boulevard Ring were to be connected up to the main sewerage system. In 1913 the water supply pipes totalled 537.3 kilometres in length; by 1937 this had risen to 1,043.6 kilometres. The entire underground cabling and piping was to be replaced – for telephone, electricity, gas, water and sewage. Heating was to be changed from private hearths to power stations providing district heating. By 1938 Moscow was to have as much electricity at its disposal as the whole of Russia in 1913. In 1933 there were thirteen hospitals in Moscow; by 1936 these were to increase to 97. In 1930 there were 6,700 beds in crèches and paediatric clinics; by 1937 this number had more than doubled. In 1913 there were 107 nurseries in Moscow; in 1937 this had increased to 1,052. The numbers of comprehensive schools grew by leaps and bounds: in 1934 there were 388; by 1937 this had increased to 652. In 1929 there were 52 technical colleges with 7,500 students; by 1936 this had increased to 100 with over 350,000 students. The food supply to the population was improved by the introduction of nine state-run department stores and five cold stores with a capacity of 50,000 tonnes, underground warehouses, three grain silos, six bread factories and industrial bakers. Over the next ten years, 50 new cinemas were to be added to the existing 52. In addition, there were to be houses of culture, public libraries, stadia and swimming pools. Old Moscow businesses were to be modernized in the course of the two Five-Year Plans, but even more were to be built from scratch. These included factories such as the car plant, the ball-bearing factory, the clock and watch factories, Elektrozavod, the machine-tool makers Frezer and Kalibr, but also large light industry and food industry enterprises – meat processors, margarine works and sewing-machine factories. No district was without its new factory. Old factories were renamed and given a new lease of life. The Gushon factory became Hammer and Sickle; the Bromley Works became the Red Proletariat. Moscow, where 5,000 cattle were slaughtered daily, possessed the world’s second-largest cold storage depot after Chicago.19 Roughly 2.2 million Muscovites could be fed in the canteens every day.20
The new Moscow was inconceivable without new roads and means of transport. Moscow’s crooked alleyways and streets inside the Boulevard Ring were broken up à la Haussmann and opened up to traffic. The age of droshkies and sleighs, the sound of which had defined pre-revolutionary, pre-modern Moscow, was now succeeded by new means of transport and new traffic streams. In 1913 there were only 305.9 kilometres of tram tracks; by 1937 this had increased to 514 kilometres. In the old Moscow the trams had been concentrated in the centre; twenty years later they connected the centre with the suburbs. In 1913 the trams carried around 257.4 million passengers; by 1937 this had risen to 1,791 million. The expansion of the bus network was particularly rapid. In 1934, there were only 33 buses; by 1937 this had risen to 339.
The most important project for speeding up travel, however, was the Metro, which introduced to the capital a new mode of transport, a new tempo and a new aesthetic. It now became possible to travel from Sokolniki in the north-east of the city to Gorky Park in the south-west in sixteen minutes. The metro stations brought with them a new transport space and hence a new civic space.21 Above ground the motorcar was the new means of transport par excellence. ‘The automobile
has changed the face of Moscow’s streets and squares’, wrote Rodchenko in his album on the reconstruction of the city. The city now almost appeared to have been constructed with the car in mind and for the sake of the view from the car, which did not seem in the least to act as the rival of public transport. It is not surprising that it was the motorist and not the flâneur who came to personify the focal point of the new perception of the city. It was not just builders and car factories whose existence was premised on that of the car. The town planners too had to take the building of garages and crossing-free streets into account, as well as parkways, whose magic came into being only with the arrival of motorists – as had been the case with droshkies and sleigh-drivers in times past.
Moscow as a construction site: between demolition and new construction
Iurii Pimenov’s painting The New Moscow (1937) shows a woman driving in an open-top car down the widened highway from Dzerzhinsky Square, between the recently completed Gosplan Building and Hotel Moskva, where building was still in progress. The painting captures a reality and at the same time anticipates what will become a universal fact in the years to come: a new city. Everywhere the new buildings displayed the new dimensions and proportions. Gorky Street had been widened from between 18 and 20 metres to 60 metres; for Novoslobodskaia Street a widening from 40 to 60 metres was envisaged, and for Kuznetskii Most from 17 to 35 metres. The new gable height was defined by exemplary new buildings such as the residential complex of Government House, with its twelve floors. New reference points for the cityscape came into being – a new skyline, for example, on the Rostovskaia and Smolenskaia embankments. Bridges ceased to be mere river crossings; they now became buildings that invested the city’s principal highway – the Moscow River – with beauty and elegance. The new façades and the number of floors created ‘urban canyons’. High-rise buildings gradually eroded the dominance of church spires and bell towers. A new generation of buildings followed on from the building complexes erected in the spirit of constructivism, such as the Izvestiia offices on Strastnaia Square, the Pravda Building by Il'ia Golosov or the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture on the Garden Ring – all products of the early thirties. These newer buildings included Hotel Moskva on Manege Square (architect Aleksei Shchusev), the Lenin Library (Vladimir Shchuko), the monumental Frunze Military Academy in Bol'shaia Pirogovskaia Street (Lev Rudniov) and the Theatre of the Red Army (Karo Alabyan). Even more impressive are major buildings which had previously existed only on the drawing board: the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry on the long façade of the Kremlin (to replace GUM), the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Municipal Services, the Palace of Culture, Radio House, the House of the Gramophone Record, the House of the Book and, as the centrepiece of the new, skywards-shooting silhouette of Moscow, the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow’s new centre, a synthesis of skyscraper and sculpture sited to the west of the Kremlin. These distinctive show buildings, taken together with the new design of functional public buildings – the entrance halls and foyers of the metro stations, bridge approaches, pumping stations, power plants and transformer stations – created a new cityscape superimposed on the old Moscow or brutally foisted onto it.
Figure 2.1 Iurii Pimenov, The New Moscow (1937)
‘Everywhere the new buildings displayed the new dimensions and proportions.’
Figure 2.2 Caricature by the Kukryniksy Group (P. N. Krylov) in the volume The Old Moscow
‘The grandiose building programme was preceded by an orgy of destruction and demolition.’
Figure 2.3 A scene from Aleksandr Medvedkin’s film The New Moscow, with the Palace of the Soviets in the background
‘These distinctive show buildings, taken together with the new design of functional public buildings, created a new cityscape superimposed on the old Moscow or brutally foisted onto it.’
Whatever the planners had in mind by way of reconstruction – i.e. whatever they had formulated in the General Plan as a general guideline that would preserve some kind of continuity with the historic city – such ideas could not be implemented without doing violence to the traditional fabric, without carving out new corridors, tearing buildings down and carrying out demolition on a gigantic scale. Furthermore, the rulers were concerned with a new codification of the urban texture, with the sovietization of the Russian capital – Stalinization might be the more appropriate term. They wanted to obliterate the symbolism of places that had particular cultural or political meanings or invest them with new ones. This was to be achieved either by renaming streets and squares or by demolishing buildings representative of the old regime and replacing them with buildings with new meanings.
In a city that had considered itself to be the ‘Third Rome’, a city with ‘forty times forty’ churches, this policy inevitably affected ecclesiastical buildings, churches, bell towers, cemeteries and monasteries. At the same time, Moscow was also the city of aristocratic palaces and banks and villas belonging to businessmen and entrepreneurs.22
Even if the decade after 1917 scarcely brought any larger new buildings to completion, ‘socialist reconstruction’, the process of industrialization during the First Five-Year Plan, did produce a ruthless attack on the ancient symbols of power. An entire stratum of the old Moscow was destroyed in the wave of demolitions from 1928 to 1932. Hundreds of churches were closed and destroyed, starting with the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had previously dominated the view of the city. The cathedral was blown up in December 1931 with 7 tonnes of ammonal and 1,500 detonators.23
Almost all the squares and sites chosen for prominent new buildings had previously been occupied – for how could it be otherwise? – by churches and bell towers. To put it even more bluntly: the grandiose building programme was preceded by an orgy of destruction and demolition. Dozens of monasteries were transformed into apartments, dosshouses, orphanages and prisons. Churches served as warehouses and workshops. Refectories were turned into workshops; many a monastic dormitory was used to house workers, as was the case with the Andronikov Monastery, whose bell tower was demolished so that its precious bricks could be reused elsewhere.24 But in addition entire streets, indeed entire districts, were demolished, as was the case with the one between St Basil’s Cathedral and Moskvoretskii Bridge, in order to improve access to Red Square, or the blowing up of the Resurrection Gate, so as to enable demonstrations to reach Red Square. Symbols of the ancien régime to be destroyed included the Triumphal Arch that had been erected 1827–34 to commemorate the victory over Napoleon (architect Joseph Bové – it was later rebuilt on Kutuzovskii prospekt) and the Red Gates.25 In 1934 the city wall surrounding Kitai-gorod, dating back to the sixteenth century, was pulled down. The same fate befell the densely built-up area around Okhotnyi Riad – the ‘belly of Moscow’ – in order to make room for the Gosplan Building and Hotel Moskva. The Strastnoi Convent was torn down so as to widen Gorky Street and create a new square (Pushkin Square). One of the most memorable buildings of old Moscow to be torn down was the Sukharev Tower, with its once legendary bazaar and black market, allegedly because it hindered the flow of traffic. Also demolished was the Simonov Monastery so as to make way for the Palace of Culture of the Stalin automobile plant. The number of buildings protected by the state rapidly diminished; the number of ‘working’ churches was reduced from 224 in 1930, to 40 in 1937, and to 16 in 1938; 11 of the city’s 25 monasteries were torn down in 1937.26
All of this was done in a very short time and in a systematic way. However, it was not just precious individual buildings that disappeared but also significant landmarks, as well as a sense of scale and, finally, an entire horizon. Not only belfries disappeared, but also the sound of bells, without which old Moscow could not be imagined. And conversely, whereas before the city had scarcely any lighting at night, it now started to be lit up by the glare of electric lanterns. Almost 39,170 street lamps and spotlights now bathed the town in light – in 1913 it had been no more than 20,842. Parks were illuminated; the Parachute Tower i
n Gorky Park and Hotel Moskva were lit up; neon signs illuminated entrances to cafés and cinemas – the signatures of the modern city. Carriages and trams disappeared with the old Moscow; they were replaced by buses and trolley buses – even if they were unable to have much impact on the chaotic throngs of people in the capital.
There was no lack of resistance to the demise of the old Moscow. Historians and campaigners for the defence of historical monuments made a determined stand; letters of protest were sent to newspaper editors.27 Petr Baranovskii, Moscow’s chief conservationist, protested against the planned demolition of St Basil’s Cathedral, which was under discussion in October 1931. In October 1933 he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in a plot to assassinate Stalin, after which he was condemned and banished to Siberia. Another conservationist, Vladimir Nevskii, who had made futile efforts to protect the Kremlin monasteries from destruction, was arrested in 1935 and shot in 1937.28
We will obtain an adequate picture of the reconstruction of Moscow only if we think of the building site as demolition and new build in one, if we imagine the waste lands alongside the scaffolding, the demolition squads alongside the bricklaying gangs. The furious pace of change that Aleksandr Medvedkin attempted to capture in his film must have been the common experience of all visitors to Moscow at that time. They all report seeing façades surrounded by scaffolding, the huge excavations, the building workers’ shacks, the teams of workers toiling away day and night in the glare of the floodlights, the building in water, in the earth and high up in the air. One such visitor was Ruth von Mayenburg, who lived in the Hotel Lux in Gorky Street, a street which contained not only the first model apartment houses designed by Arkadii Mordvinov but also numerous other houses that had been squeezed in there.
Moscow, 1937 Page 8
