Moscow, 1937
Page 31
Such a concentrated illustration of the Soviet self-image might also have been seen in a number of exhibition spaces in Moscow. But by bringing a number of projects together in a single site in the pavilion – in its Great Hall – a concentration scarcely conceivable elsewhere was achieved. The works of art on display in the Great Hall were all produced expressly for the exhibition – as was the group of statues by Vera Mukhina. All the potent myths of the age have been gathered together here: the role of science and technology is joined to the idea of the plan that would tackle anarchy and chaos head-on; the conquest of the skies, the polar regions and the far north, not yet opened up and inimical to man; the rational transformation of nature by modern infrastructure, by the construction of canals and transport links; the rebuilding of towns in accordance with the principles of reason; the self-improvement of man – his body and his mind; the uniting of artistic processes with everyday labour. The Soviet Union’s view of itself was effectively defined at the International Exhibition in Paris in a space of around 1,500 square metres.
The theme park of twentieth-century civilization
Many visitors sensed that the Soviet Pavilion was something out of the ordinary and tended to refer to it in the same breath as the German and Italian pavilions.16 The importance of the element of monumentality in distinguishing the Soviet, Italian and German pavilions from others becomes evident as soon as one takes a look at José Luis Sert’s and Luis Lacasa’s Spanish Pavilion or Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion as examples of civic buildings on a human scale. Setting to one side all the ideological differences between the three states, the monumentalism was perceived as an ‘image des civilisations totalitaires’ (J. Rimaud). But other buildings too were monumental, especially those of the host nation. We need think here only of the reconstruction of the Palais de Chaillot and the Museum of Modern Art.17
But, by the same token, the difference between the Soviet and German pavilions was also clearly noted:
The antithetical relationship between the Soviet and German pavilions expressed, provisionally for the last time, the battle dominating the architecture of classical modernity between the belief in progress and reaction, between socialist and restorationist ideologies. The overall shape of the USSR Pavilion was dedicated to the dynamism of modernity. The weighty cubes of windowless, squared-off compartments (that are astonishly similar to Speer’s) are offset by staggered wedge-shaped sections; this meant that the cubes resembled discs that really did appear to be storming forwards. A style whose symbolic forward thrust was excoriated in the Germany of the twenties as the expression of a modern nomadic outlook, intellectualistic and unstable in nature. A style, too, that was diametrically opposed to the blood-and-soil ideology of German fascism, with its idealization of (architectural) stolidity. In the ‘Third Reich’, and now in Paris as well, National Socialist architecture responded to such challenges with monuments of immobility, obssessed with notions of eternity.18
Albert Speer, who by chance had seen the design for the Soviet Pavilion while it was still under wraps, was said to have been so impressed by the two figures striding boldly forward that he introduced changes into his plan for the German Pavilion. ‘I therefore designed a cubic mass also elevated on stout pillars, which seemed to be checking this onslaught, while from the cornice of my tower an eagle with the swastika in its claws looked down on the Russian sculpture. I received a gold medal for the building; so did my Soviet colleague.’19
The themes presented in the Soviet Pavilion – and the same may be said of the presentation itself – were completely in accord with the age and differed from the mainstream, if at all, only by their radicality. The International Exhibition was international in the sense that it dramatized the central themes of the age on a site of 103 hectares in roughly 300 pavilions. If you went down from the hill of Chaillot to the Seine, you entered a theme park of the twentieth century.
At the foot of the Eiffel Tower were situated the pavilions of the Press and Cinema, and the pavilions of Electricity and Light were to be found behind the Champ de Mars. Between the Seine and the Avenue de Suffren lay the Centre Régional, while France was represented by its Overseas Department on the Île des Cygnes. On the Seine, further upriver, lay the pavilions of Hygiene, Sailing, the Museum of Modern Art, the Grand Palais and the Palais de la Découverte. On the Left Bank, you passed in order the Centre des Métiers, lying somewhat further back the Pavillion Thermal, those of Tourism and the U.A.M. (Union des Artistes Modernes). On the esplanade of the Invalides could be found the pavilions for Aviation and Railway, followed by a park with various sights. As an extension of the exhibition, Le Corbusier built the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux.20
The very title ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne’ adumbrated the principal ideas. The most important artists took on such themes as ‘transport of forces’ (Fernand Léger) and ‘free electricity’ (Raoul Dufy). Robert Delaunay had painted a fresco, Air, Iron and Water, at the entrance to the Railway Pavilion. Motifs in further Delaunay paintings included railway symphony, speed, security, precision, suppleness, propeller and rhythm,21 and an Aviation Pavilion as a streamlined building. Almost all the themes of the Soviet Pavilion can be found in the thematic exhibitions too, as well as in the other national pavilions: science, planning, health, the organization of labour, sport, tourism, town planning, hygiene, transport and mass festivities. Almost all the media that are so prominent in the Soviet Pavilion were also exploited by others: posters, photographic documents, statistics and diagrams, floodlights and large-scale illuminations. There was scarcely a nation that failed to combine its progress with a hymn to aviation; scarcely an event that failed to make extensive use of lights and floodlights.
Marginal encounters
Like every major event, the International Exhibition set hundreds of thousands of people, millions even, in motion. An exact count yielded 31,040,955 visitors.22 The International Exhibition became a magnet for tourists from all over the world. People travelled to Paris in order to visit it. They chose a route that went via Paris or moved a conference to the capital that had initially been arranged for Biarritz. The circus element, the sensational, the spectacular, without which no show can succeed, had its effect. Thus in 1937 the paths of millions crossed in Paris, and the normal metabolism of the political and cultural capital rubbed up against the accelerated metabolism of a mega-event. After all, had it not said as much in the exhibition catalogue:
Its task is to be a messenger of harmony and peace by striving to increase not only economic exchange between people, but also the exchange of ideas and friendship … The International Exhibition of 1937 aims to present a synthesis of all the progress achieved by our generation. It intends therefore to draw up a balance sheet of our civilization. This balance sheet will inform every nation and show it the areas to which it must direct its efforts in order to maintain its ranking or achieve a loftier one.23Paris was the European capital of exile, and it was here that those who had been driven out of their native land had the opportunity of observing the way those countries portrayed themselves, of hearing talks, readings and performances in their mother tongue or of seeing films. Paris had been the capital of Russian exiles for the past two hundred years, with tens of thousands of émigrés who had their own newspapers, cafés, political parties, schools and publishing houses.24 Somewhat later, and in a rather different situation, the Germans who had been expelled or exiled from Germany after 1933 arrived. Paris was also the oasis for those who were in transit to or from Spain.
In this way Russian Paris encountered the Soviet Union in the city and was able – frequently for the first time – to see the originals: films of the Five-Year Plan or classical performances by the Art Theatre. What they saw and heard was monstrous in their eyes. For the majority of those in exile, the Soviet Pavilion was a provocation, a falsification of history, a Potemkin-like performance, which they never wearied of unmasking in their newspapers and leaflets. Russian Paris w
alked round and round Merkurov’s statue of Stalin and gazed in wonder at Deineka’s and Samokhvalov’s frescoes. But the émigrés also numbered those who now began to feel pride in their home country, and who looked on incredulously as the world took in the record figures produced by the Five-Year Plans and the utterly incredible successes of the literacy campaign, while ignoring the other side of the coin. The show trials were still fresh in the memory of the public; the second trial had been held a mere three months previously. The International Exhibition had only just opened when incredible reports of a conspiracy in the military leadership came from Moscow and the execution of the conspirators was announced. In Paris there was an independent and well-informed press and a public capable of forming its own opinion, one that had recently read Gide’s Afterthoughts. In the city lived leading intellectuals among the exiled Russians who had contacts with ‘intellectual Paris’ (the title of a book by Gustav René Hocke that appeared in 1937). The diaspora of 1937 had been augmented by émigrés driven into exile – oppositionals forced out of the country, Trotskyists for the most part, with their own organizations and newspapers. Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son, had spent some time in Paris, where in 1938 he would be murdered by NKVD agents while in hospital. In Paris, visitors from Moscow might look up their acquantainces, albeit under certain specific conditions. This was the situation of the writers and poets who came to Paris in 1935 for the Congress in Defence of Culture. That, too, was the situation of Nikolai Bukharin, who could call unannounced on Boris Nikolaevskii, the Old Menshevik and archivist of the Russian exile, or on Fedor Dan in 1936. The old diaspora began to grow in the 1930s with the addition of individual members of Soviet oganizations and agencies who did not return to the Soviet Union because they feared for their lives – they became known as ‘non-returnees’. Spectacular cases in Paris early on included Grigorii Besedovskii, an employee of the Soviet Embassy, as well as Ignati Reiss and Walter Krivitskii, both members of the NKVD working abroad, who issued political statements and who were subsequently murdered by assassination units of the NKVD. Many of those suspected in cases of this kind left tracks leading back to Paris. As a European metropolis with its contacts, communities and networks, Paris was an ideal centre of operations for the infiltration and subversive activities of the Soviet services.25 An early instance of this had been the kidnapping in 1930 of Aleksandr Kutepov, the White Army general. Another example was a number of attacks on Boris Nikolaevskii in order to gain access to his archives. On 22 September 1937, General Evgenii Miller was kidnapped and taken on board a ship; he was executed in Moscow on 30 September.26 Those involved included well-known members of the Paris Russian community. One such was the popular singer Nadezhda Plevitskaia, who was subsequently put on trial and given a prison sentence; another was Nikolai Skoblin, a leading official of the White Russian movement.27 One person who had infiltrated the Paris Russian scene in the service of the NKVD was Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband, Sergei Efron.28 Miller’s abduction had not passed without causing a scandal in Paris: ‘Hirschfeld, the Soviet chargé d’affaires, was summoned to the French Foreign Office and told to inform Moscow that French public opinion had been so infuriated by the recent kidnapping of the tsarist General Miller that, in the event of a repetition of such an action or a murder on French soil, the French government would be compelled to break off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.’29 Barely six months after the abduction of General Miller, however, ensued the death of Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son and closest collaborator, following a successful operation in a Paris hospital. He had long since been the object of pursuit.30
In 1937 Paris lay at the crossroads of the pre-war and post-war periods. It was the meeting point of everyone who still believed in the re-creation of European civilization after the catastrophe of the First World War and in a modernity that offered solutions for overdue, indeed obsolete, problems. But here too could be found the first refugees from a counter-modernity of whose lethal resoluteness and rigour only few could have had any conception. Somehow or other, the calculations and expectations that might have led to a certain security and confidence no longer semed to add up. The opposing sides of yesterday did not really grasp the layout of the new battlefronts. The unease implicit in that awareness had also spread to a capital that was still living in an earlier century. Intellectual and artistic breakaway movements, such as the Surrealists, the Collège de Sociologie, new unambiguous ideologies – ‘civilisations totalitaires’ – were in the air.31 Paris was full of people who either now or just a little later would find themselves pursued – there were barely two years between the end of the International Exhibition on on 25 November 1937 and the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939. One of those to be hunted down was Walter Benjamin. He stayed in Paris from 28 July to 12 August so as to report on the Third Conference of the International Congress on the Unity of Science, which was held from 29 to 31 July at the Sorbonne. The major event near the Eiffel Tower and the symbolic confrontation between the two pavilions, those of Iofan and Speer, will not have escaped the attention of a man whose Arcades Project had placed such great emphasis on world exhibitions as a source for understanding the bourgeois world. One of the places he stayed – 3, rue Nicolo, Paris 16e, close to the Trocadéro metro – was only a stone’s throw from the exhibition site.32
13
Red Square: Parade Ground and Place of Execution
In Moscow in 1937 all roads led to Red Square. An exact geography of place and time would have to reconstruct the tangle, the cluster in which all journeys came together and separated again. The newspapers informed their readers of the dates of festivals and major events, which reached their apogee and conclusion in Red Square. They constituted the rhythm, the climaxes, the intervals between the phases of excitement and exhaustion. Whoever spent time in Moscow – whether as tourist or foreigner, member of a delegation or simply on business – spent time in Red Square. The Kremlin was the home of power; the Historical Museum mounted exhibitions – for the Pushkin anniversary, for example; the trading rows on the long side contained the State Department Store (GUM) and a variety of departments belonging to the People’s Commissariats.1
Here lives and gazes crossed paths. Red Square is not just a particular point within the topography of Moscow, but the intersection of gazes, a space in the minds of the nation. Whoever could analyse this concentrated space would possess a miniature history of Moscow in 1937.
The square seemed almost unchanged, but everywhere one could already see the new demarcations and outlines that were prefigured in the General Plan for Moscow. The square would be almost doubled in size, with a monumental, terraced skyscraper complex rising up opposite the Kremlin, along the long side where the GUM still stands. It was still the largest square in the capital, but it was already clear that in the foreseeable future it would be succeeded by the squares on which the Palace of the Soviets would arise, squares whose sole purpose would be to form the site for mass rallies. But matters had not yet progressed so far. In 1937 Red Square was still the square for rallies and festivities.
The 1937 issues of Pravda or Rabochaia Moskva reveal the choreography, the course of events planned for the central square of the capital. They are full of revolutionary jubilees and holidays, above all those of 1 May and 7 November, and this was particularly marked in the twentieth anniversary year of the October Revolution; but they also record the moment when the last vestiges of the old regime – the tsarist eagles on the Kremlin towers – were removed and replaced by the ruby-red Soviet stars. In addition to these climactic points in the Red calendar, there were major events – the sportsmen’s parade, the festivals of the railwaymen or the army of Red Workers and Peasants. But people’s real passions did not cleave mechanically to the ceremonies of the Red festival calendar. Instead they burst out in carefully staged ecstasies: the passing of the new ‘Stalinist Constitution’ in December 1936, the announcement of the verdicts in the great show trials, or the end of the elections to the Supreme Soviet in December
1937. There were triumphs to be celebrated, such as the return home of the pilots who had flown to North America via the North Pole or the miraculous rescue of Ivan Papanin’s team from the polar ice. But we should also include sadder events such as the memorial services for Gorky or Ordzhonikidze. On the most important holidays alone – 1 May and 7 November – upwards of 2 million people gathered in Red Square; on the days of the court judgements there were about 250,000. All of this was multiplied many times over in sounds and images transmitted across the nation and throughout the world.
The square, which seems so large and spacious, became the focal point, the eye of the needle and transformer of the energies of perspiring, wildly excited, anxious or tense human beings who were fully aware that they had the good fortune to have been chosen or nominated to take part in an extraordinary occasion. Such occasions would see 2 million people crossing the square within the space of a few hours, a square 1,000 metres long on one side and around 300 metres wide. The crowds would fill the square to bursting point, bodies pressed against bodies, shoulder to shoulder, a river of people who could manage to cross the square only by displaying the greatest possible discipline and resilience. The square was enlarged and cleared so as to facilitate such vast assemblies. On the north side, the Iberian Gates and the chapel, the Church of the Virgin of Kazan at the entrance to Nikolskaia Street, were torn down. On the south side, the entire block from St Basil’s Cathedral down to the Moscow River was demolished, so that the stream of visitors could pass freely onto the square from Gorky Street and Manege Square and could build up into a crowd, from where it could flow into the streets along the river banks or directly onto the monumentally renovated and widened bridge over the Moskva. Pathways led over the square, formed of tens and hundreds of thousands of people from all over the city: delegations from businesses, factories, institutes, from the army, young and old. Every department was identified and classified by banners, flags and streamers. Organized masses, the masses as ornament. Movement varied according to the occasion, forming one inspired mass of bodies: assertive youth, the armed forces and paramilitary forces looking military, a colourful ocean of children and young people with paper flowers and balloons. They were the atoms of a great totality, parts of an ensemble. There were the national delegations looking exotic, in glorious bursts of colour. There were entire armies of gymnasts, acrobats and athletes, marking out their geometric figures on the paving of the square. André Gide has given a description of a sports parade: