Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  But the Congress also heard voices that did not agree with Alabian and his supporters. Shchusev emphasized in his speech that Soviet architects could learn a lot from the advanced techniques of Western countries, especially the USA. Antiquity and classicism can teach us about realism, naturalness, humanity and harmony, but not about modern technology. Shchusev argued that,

  Because of the altered economic and technical conditions, the mechanical transfer of elements of classical architecture to the present can never produce satisfactory results. We must absolutely reject the route of restoration, the simplified exploitation of the classical. The architect must be not only a master of his craft, but also a philosopher at the forefront of his age.14

  Shchusev spoke out in favour of a new monumentalism that had been rendered possible only by the advent of socialism.

  Ginzburg spoke about the industrialization of housing construction and – in contrast to Alabian – praised advances in the West as exemplary. Here too the Soviet Union had much to learn from the United States; it should try out new materials and develop the efficient, transparent organizational methods current in the USA. In the USA new materials such as ceramics, asbestos and plywood had been introduced. Ginzburg pointed to the pace of construction in America and illustrated it with reference not only to such major projects as the Empire State Building and the Radio City Music Hall but also to ordinary family houses. He criticized the shock-troop methods of working, the waste of resources, the militarization of building methods and the subordination to incompetent political structures. Ginzburg’s audience responded with sustained applause when he stressed the need for architects to be independent, giving it as his view that only with Stalin’s assistance would Soviet architects be able to master these tasks.

  Viktor Vesnin’s speech was likewise received ‘with storms of applause’ when he proposed Stalin and others – Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin and even Comrade Yezhov – as honorary members of the presidium. A few days before the congress opened, Tukhachevskii and other leading figures in the Red Army had been accused, sentenced and shot. The prevailing hysterical mood infected the congress. Viktor Vesnin told a Red Army representative that the architects too would enlist in the Red Army ‘to a man’ so as to be able to fight the enemy. S. Z. Ginsburg detected among the architects countless ‘enemies of the people, diversionists, wreckers, agents of fascism, spies, murderers and blood-sucking gangs of Trotskyist and Bukharinist degenerates and traitors who are stretching out their filthy paws into architectural planning work’. He did not hesitate to name names and places.15 On the other hand, the congress interrupted its business to pay tribute to the world-record flight of Soviet pilots over the North Pole.

  However, controversy did not come to an end with the congress. In an open letter in Pravda on 30 August 1937, Leonid Savel'ev and Osval'd Stapran singled out Shchusev for criticism. They lambasted him for torpedoing socialist construction, for recommending foreign building methods and for his negative influence on the younger generation of architects. He was accused of running the state architecture bureau as if it were his own private fiefdom. Following Alabian’s speech on this subject, the section of the Party that met on 2 September 1937 called for Shchusev’s expulsion from the Architects’ Association. The indictment went even further. Shchusev was accused of telling anti-Soviet jokes; his studio had become a meeting place of descendants of the old ruling class, including a prince, seven aristocrats, two former priests, a merchant, three honorary citizens and some foreigners – he had been friendly with the traitor Tukhachevskii, and it was not true that he was the creator of Lenin’s Mausoleum. Shchusev, moreover, had an ‘anti-Soviet physiognomy’;16 he had been altogether too impressed by Italian architecture on his foreign travels, and he had made derogatory remarks about the Soviet treatment of historical monuments in Russia. In particular, he had described tearing down the Kitai-gorod monastery as an act of barbarism. A member of Shchusev’s practice had committed an act that even Shchusev thought contained ‘an element of wrecking’. Another colleague described Shchusev as ‘the head of a counter-revolutionary circle’ and extended his attack to the entire older generation of architects. ‘What right does a Tsarist academician have today under Soviet rule to call himself an academician and to throw dust into people’s eyes? But this is what our old ones are doing.’ Alabian himself was under pressure from informers and could not resist denouncing the ‘lack of vigilance’ in the Architects’ Association. ‘We should have recognized Shchusev’s hostile attitude earlier and the host of “little Shchusevs” must also be unmasked.’ ‘We must show no mercy in striking down all the architects who come to the defence of Shchusev.’17

  Shchusev was expelled from the Architects’ Association at the meeting of the presidium on 25 October 1937. Viktor Vesnin and Ginzburg were absent from the meeting – doubtless to avoid taking part in a kangaroo court. Alabyan was now the undisputed leader and sent commissioners to the capitals of the national republics to carry out purges. Shchusev did not acquiesce passively in his expulsion but attempted to resist, unlike Konstantin Mel'nikov, the grand old man. He turned to the Mossoviet and, since two of the men involved in his expulsion had themselves been unmasked as ‘enemies of the people’, was reinstated. He was able to complete his grand project – the Hotel Moskva – and then to be left in peace. Shchusev, the architect of Lenin’s Mausoleum, was saved from Alabian’s intrigues by the intervention of the Moscow Party leadership.

  Moscow as a building site

  In 1937 a ‘permanent building exhibition’ was opened in a special building complex on the Frunze Embankment. Countless foreign visitors to the capital sought it out.18 The fact was, however, that the entire city was an exhibition in itself. The participants of the first All-Union Congress of Architects convened on a vast building site. That had not been the intention; it had come to pass as a consequence of a string of postponements – the congress had initially been planned for 1934 and then for the spring of 193619 – and then because the anniversary of 1937 was an immovable deadline. The year was supposed to provide an overview of everything that had been achieved in the two decades following the Revolution. In a sense, the situation was unique. The congress was held close to the new buildings that were under discussion in its sessions. The illustrative material was available to all. However, Moscow in 1937 was not the best place for calm evaluation and reflection.

  Papers presented at the congress also reflected the main emphases of the feverish activity in the construction sector and the problems resulting from it. Reports in trade journals, such as Stroitel'stvo Moskvy, during 1937 provide a good overview of progress in construction and of the problems that were debated among architects at the time. The most important building projects are systematically presented and discussed. These include new hospitals and schools, club houses and cultural buildings, parks and infrastructure projects such as sewerage systems, a sewage treatment plant, housing projects, stadiums, hotels, and architecture for dachas and exhibition sites. There are discussions about project planning and management, new techniques for manufacturing concrete, developments in various trades – plasterers, electricians, furniture-making and craftwork, textiles, decorating, carpet manufacture, and the furnishing of public spaces (ornamental railings, lighting and park benches). Thus, the congress was held on a stage that had been erected in the middle of a forest of scaffolding, and scarcely a week passed without a new building being unveiled or else a significant new building being presented to the public gaze.20

  Of the buildings completed and opened to the public in 1937, the most outstanding were the reception hall at the entrance to the North River Terminal of the Moscow–Volga Canal and the entire system of locks and canal buildings. These included the metro stations on the second metro line, also constructed in 1937 – Smolenskaia to Kievskaia, from Manege to Kursk Station and from Sverdlov Square to Sokol. The same year also saw the production of plans for the initial phase of the construction of the third metro line: Krasnye Vo
rota – Kurskaia Station – Taganskaia – Paveletskaia Station. The Theatre of the Red Army was almost completed. The summer saw the opening of the most important of the culture palaces already built: that of the Stalin automobile plant. Furthermore, the Hotel Moskva, the prototype of the Soviet luxury hotel, was nearing completion. The position was similar with the Frunze Military Academy and an impressive number of apartment houses and residential complexes, intended principally for the families of People’s Commissars and members of professional associations and academies. These had been built at particular points marked on the General Plan, thus anticipating the coordinates of the Moscow of the future. The Palace of the Soviets, the most important project after the Metro and the canal, had just been started. By the summer of 1937 a giant crater had been excavated on the site where five years earlier the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had stood. For the architects, then, the outlines of the new architecture were becoming clear. Moscow in 1937 was the arena in which different, even incompatible styles were jostling for attention. One example was the Theatre of the Red Army, whose ground plan was designed to clash with any functional view of a theatre building. Based on the five points of the Soviet star, it gave priority to political symbolism, while, in contrast, the outward appearance and the inner structure of the culture palace of the Stalin automobile plant was the product of a mature constructivism.

  Chaos and stress

  Everything in 1937 was affected by the need to match the achievements and meet the deadlines imposed by the demands of the anniversary year. That can be seen in the official opening of buildings, in the completion of films and, above all, in the anniversary exhibitions. To postpone the publication of a book is one thing; any delay in opening an exhibition that has been long in the making is quite another. This can be seen from the exhibition ‘The Industry of Socialism’ that had been resolved upon in 1935 under Ordzhonikidze. Conceived as a celebration of the achievements of socialist industrialization and planned for autumn 1937, it failed to open on time, and after a number of postponements did not actually do so until March 1939 – to coincide with the Eighteenth Party Congress. Progress since 1917 was to be displayed in accordance with a thematic plan in twelve different sections, as seen through the eyes of artists who had visited major construction sites throughout the country since 1935 and who had produced works by way of illustration. The artists included notable painters such as Boris Ioganson, Pavel Kuznetsov and Il'ia Mashkov.21

  However, the debates on formalism wreaked havoc with all this planning to the point where, at the end of 1936, ten months before the intended opening, everything was in chaos. In June 1937 – that is to say, ten months before the planned opening – many artists, among them Dmitrii Moor and Il'ia Mashkov, had still not delivered their work. Some had taken on too much from elsewhere. Aleksandr Deineka was busy painting metro stations; others suffered from the shortage of materials – even the disappearance of canvas was ascribed to sabotage perpetrated by enemies of the people22 – yet others were subjected to criticism or even slander. Examples were Sergei Gerasimov and Aleksandr Deineka. The approval for the construction of the pavilion for the building exhibition that had been conceived by Aleksandr and Viktor Vesnin was withdrawn in June 1937. The exhibition was moved temporarily into the building of the permanent building exhibition on Frunze Embankment. Despite grotesque difficulties – there were problems with electricity in an exhibition devoted to the triumph of electrification – despite dismissals and other changes in the committees in charge, the exhibition finally opened in November 1937, only to be closed again to the public almost immediately, since it featured people and heroes who had gone through the purges and had been declared non-persons. Aleksandr Gerasimov’s group portrait of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry had to be taken down and repainted from scratch.23 A further eighteen months elapsed before the public was able to see the exhibition with its collection of around 2,000 works by 700 artists. The works exhibited then were by no means identical with those originally intended for the exhibition. ‘The works, commissioned in 1935 and completed mostly by 1937, could no longer meet current ideological or artistic priorities.’ The exhibition had somehow become irrelevant. Subsequently, individual works of art were distributed among provincial museums in places like Białystok and Lvov in the newly conquered territories.24

  The Soviet universe as exhibition

  The experimental, tentative qualities that still characterized Soviet architecture as late as 1937 were perhaps nowhere better displayed than in the All-Union Agriculture Exhibition. And nowhere was the aspiration of creating a novel synthetic style more in evidence than in that exhibition, which was designed to put on display the multiplicity of nations and their cultures.25 The exhibition had been decided on in February 1935 at the Second All-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers and was due to be opened in August 1937, but was postponed to August 1938 and then again to summer 1939. Even under the tsars there had been a rich tradition of all-Russian industrial, art and craft exhibitions, a tradition that the Soviets had continued with the All-Union Agriculture Exhibition as early as 1923. On that occasion, following the revival of economic activity by the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Soviet Union had made something of a splash with a new exhibition space and a novel form of exhibition architecture that in the event had caused a furore both at home and abroad. Especially noteworthy were buildings such as Konstantin Mel'nikov’s ‘Makhorka Pavilion’, which was to become an icon of modern architecture. An even stronger impression was made by the Soviet pavilions at the Paris Exhibition of 1925 (also by Mel'nikov) and at the Press Show in Cologne in 1928 (El Lissitzky). In 1937, however, it was the achievements of the new, collectivized agriculture that were to be put on display. The curating of the exhibition was in the hands of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. The theme of the exhibition underwent a number of phases. The plan initially was for a large complex with a monumental ‘House of Collective Farmers’ close to the Timiriazev Agricultural Academy, surrounded by an ensemble of smaller timber pavilions that would demonstrate the special nature of the Russian tradition of wooden construction and which could be dismantled after 100 days. But other sites were also considered – the Lenin Hills over the Moscow River, the square in front of Kiev Station or Luzhniki Fields.26 Later, Vera Mukhina’s sculpture from the Paris International Exhibition would be placed at the entrance to the site of the agricultural exhibition. The original conception, dating back to 1935, stipulated that the exhibition should have pavilions representing different branches of agriculture, but should also depict the achievements of individual republics and regions in order to display the reality of Soviet agriculture in a limited space: authentic farm buildings of the collective farms and state farms, agricultural machinery and tractor stations, experimental farms, workshops, laboratories, meteorological stations, greenhouses, experimental fields, cinemas and much more besides.27 In the five years between the planning and the opening, around 2,500 architects, artists and sculptors were involved, including Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Fridland and Alpert. In that time the concept changed frequently; what was originally conceived as a temporary exhibition now turned into a permanent one.28 The general plan for the exhibition, the work of Viacheslav Oltarzhevskii, was finally approved on 21 April 1936. No less a figure than El Lissitzky had conceived the design. The aim was to demonstrate the revolution in agriculture, making use of all the elements of nature – water, earth, air and fire – right down to the development of script.29 It was to be concrete, vivid and free of propagandistic intentions, a display of living objects – grain, fruit, vegetables and livestock. Dioramas would provide a multimedia record of progress since 1917 – from Repin’s church processions to the kolkhoz theatre – making use of loudspeakers, films, diagrams, pictures, and a hall where objects from the Tretiakov Gallery would illustrate everyday life in the old Russia, in contrast to a further hall displaying everyday life in the new Russia. The pavilions of the national Soviet republics were
lined up on the Square of the Nations and the Avenue of the Nations. The products of the Soviet republics were put on display in the different pavilions: Central Asia and cotton, Ukraine and sugar beet production – together with typical products of popular art. Visitors were supposed to be confronted with ‘an entire river, a waterfall, a Niagara of foodstuffs’.30 The enormous time pressure led to the construction of highly imaginative pavilions, both technically and aesthetically. Examples were the timber construction of the dome and tower of the central pavilion of ‘Mechanization’ and the woodwork on the pavilion of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Republic.31 The aesthetic appearance of the individual pavilions and their interior design – still lifes with cucumbers, pumpkins, mushrooms and melons – were a constant preoccupation of the creative and political collectives charged with producing them, and even of the People’s Commissars.