Moscow, 1937
Page 76
Figure 37.1 Section of the map of Moscow published by the Reichsamt für Wehrgeographie in 1942 ‘for official use only’: the legend contains around 1,000 references.
‘The draftsmen of the military map were interested in the relevant military infrastructure.’
However, for the production of a map of Moscow there was no need to invent spies or divulge cartographic information. At a time when Stalin was carrying out a bloodbath among the military leadership, and thousands of officers were confessing imaginary relations with German fascism under torture, cartographers in Berlin were already working on maps to be used in a future war. It is evident that this map was produced by genuine specialists conversant with the Moscow scene. Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, a geopolitics expert, a friend of Karl Haushofer and a professor of military geography at Berlin University, had spent ten years on the spot and had worked on a confidential mission in Moscow, acting as an intermediary between the Reichswehr and the Red Army. He had a thorough knowledge of the city. His ‘Institute for General Defence Theory’, financed jointly by the army and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, had been housed since 1935 at 40–42 Georgen Street, where in August 1936 it occupied thirty-two rooms, later increased to over forty. Together with experts and assistants who had produced studies of ‘The motorization potential of the Soviet Union’ in 1937, he had done the preparatory work for the army which led to the production of a three-volume cartographic work – the first volume on France, the second on the British Empire and the third on the Soviet Union. This was the Military Atlas of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, and it appeared in the red binding of the official Reich printers.
With this third atlas Niedermayer and his colleagues produced the best mapping of the Soviet Union to have appeared up to then outside the USSR itself. With the aid of 233 maps – in comparison, the first volume, on France, operated with only 60 maps – Niedermayer aimed to achieve a visual representation of the ‘Euro-Asiatic transitional region with its continental emphasis and its political organization’. This included the Soviet Union’s cold stores as well as its weapons factories and national minorities.5
Niedermayer was able to make use of the maps that were available in the USSR, but above all he relied on his own knowledge and his collection and evaluation of an infinite number of rich sources – newspapers, statistics, and refugees and returnees from the Soviet Union. It is certain that he was able to base his findings on information from staff at the embassy in Moscow, in particular that of General Ernst Koestring, the military attaché. Both Niedermayer and General Koestring were professionals with long experience as observers and analysts, and it is not really possible to doubt the quality of the extraordinary achievements of their intelligence work – in other words, their spying activities.6 However, it was Koestring of all people who sat among the observers at the second Moscow show trial, whose accused were known to him personally. And it was no doubt Koestring who was referred to in the third show trial when mention was made of the ‘representative of a foreign power’. And it was also Koestring to whom Stalin apologized in person for the fact that his name had been mentioned in the course of the trial!7 In January 1941, six months before the German attack on the Soviet Union, Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer was able to look around one more time when he stopped off in Moscow on his way to Japan. ‘Modern highways and ring roads, frequently with unattractive large new buildings, semi-skyscrapers that are completely pointless in a country in which land is so cheap, and, between them, wretched districts, criss-crossed by filthy lanes, the splendid metro underground and the often quite mean world above ground.’8
This work of collating and assimilating material in Berlin was not confined to objects within the precincts of the city of Moscow, but extended also to people. Moscow was scrutinized as the centre of Bolshevism and world Jewry, as the headquarters of the International, and as the focal point of German anti-fascists and political émigrés. As early as 1933 the Gestapo made a start on constructing a central index of émigrés, drawing on information obtained from the Foreign Office, the army, the German Labour Front, the security service, the SA, and foreign associations of the NSDAP. Researchers trawled through the exile press, consular reports and statements made by returnees from Russia – by 1939 as many as 12,000 people had returned from Russia. Other sources of information evidently included the files and dossiers of the NKVD and various People’s Commissariats that had been discovered after the outbreak of war in 1939 in towns temporarily occupied by Soviet forces – Lwów and Białystok, for example. What they were looking for was traitors, as well as members of the Soviet leadership, the Party, the economy, the military, the police apparatus, and representatives of culture and the press. They were particularly eager to identify officials and agents belonging to the Soviet intelligence services with whose assistance they hoped to track down the network of Soviet agents in Germany. The ‘Special Wanted List: USSR’ contains 5,256 entries, among them 500 leading Soviet officials.9 The entire professional and organizational spectrum of the exile community comes into view, the entire network of organizations. But the lists also include artists, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Il'ia Ehrenburg, Emil Gilels, Erwin Piscator and Heinrich Vogeler, Comintern officials, such as Dimitrov, Klement Gottwald, Palmiro Togliatti and Mikhail Moskvin, and German communists, such as Hermann Remmele, Heinz Neumann, Leo Flieg and Herbert Wehner. But even the People’s Commissars Nikolai Yezhov and Viacheslav Molotov are duly listed, as well as Stalin-Dzhughashvili himself. Some names even have an exact address attached – Friedrich Wolf: Nizhnii Kislovskii pereulok 8 – and in many cases a hall of residence is listed, though for the majority there is merely an institution. Many names on the list were no longer at liberty or even alive: among them were the former head of the Red Army Air Forces, Iakov Alksnis, Rosa Luxemburg’s comrade-in-arms Hugo Eberlein, the Hungarian communist Béla Kun, the chairman of the Moscow NKVD Stanislav Redens, and many others. While Stalin had innocent people slaughtered in the wake of fantastic accusations that they were ‘spies’ and ‘traitors’, Hitler’s agents were working meticulously on the map for the invasion. Many of those whose names stood on the wanted lists of the SS were also to be found on the lists of the NKVD – people such as the five members of the German family by the name of Feyerherd, who figured there as nos. 55 to 59.10 Stalin’s lust for annihilation had been anticipated by Hitler’s campaign of annihilation.
38
The Foundation Pit
‘Everyone knows the landscape that presented itself to anyone approaching Moscow twenty years ago’, wrote a G. Grigoryev in May 1937 in the illustrated magazine Ogonek:
Everywhere you looked, church domes rose up above low-rise, gloomy buildings. Somewhere in the centre of this ensemble, you could see the golden dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour gleaming brightly in the sun.
In recent years the architectural landscape of the capital has undergone a radical change. Many of the wretched hovels and warehouses have vanished. Multi-storey apartment houses have sprung up on the streets of Moscow. On the site of the former, now demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour – on what is now the construction site of the Palace of the Soviets – lorries travel back and forth and diggers grind away, excavating the sand from the foundation pit. Here, the tallest building is being built – at over 400 metres high, taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The mighty building of the Palace of the Soviets with its squares, surrounded by large, modern public buildings, will become the central ensemble of the new, socialist Moscow. It will be the greatest memorial to the heroic age of Stalin!1
The imaginary centre: a support for the empire
In the virtual stroll around Moscow to which the author has invited the reader, he speaks of the Palace of the Soviets as if it had already been built, as if it were a fixed element of the Moscow skyline; visually this impression was created by means of photomontages. He was not the only one to do so. By the start of construction in May 1937 at the latest, the Palace of th
e Soviets, which up until then had existed only as a project and in architects’ designs, had become omnipresent. It could be seen in newspapers, in magazines, as a vignette or as a striking outline drawing. A model of the palace stood in the centre of the Soviet Pavilion at the International Exhibitions in Paris and New York. For domestic and foreign tourists visiting Moscow, a visit to inspect the model in the All-Union Architecture Exhibition was obligatory. The ‘tallest building of the age’ existed not just as a mirage, but as a definite reality. As a project, it stimulated or dominated the imagination of contemporaries. For Muscovites unable to reconcile themselves to the huge plot of waste land in the centre of their city, it became a kind of substitute for the building that had been blown up in December 1931 and lost to Moscow for ever. And for all new Muscovites and for Soviet citizens outside Moscow, the building was to be a symbol of solidarity; it stood for the centre, for greatness and technical progress. It was a gesture of unbounded power, but perhaps also a landmark, a reference point the nation could rely on in an ‘age of confusion’. The Palace of the Soviets was never built; but the reasons for that failure are as illuminating as the origins of the entire project.
The visitor to Moscow could gauge the dimensions of the planned building for himself on the spot. Initially, the plot of land in the centre of the city was merely cleared, a giant empty space, but by the end of the year the diggers had excavated to a depth of 20 metres in order to prepare the ground for the construction of the foundations. These would lie directly on the banks of the Moscow River, where they would be subject to the pressure of the water table, and, given the problematic nature of the geology of the area, this was a challenging enterprise. The newspapers reported each sign of progress. They reported on the demolition of the cathedral and the removal of its foundations; they noted the use of the latest American technology provided by the Armstrong Company. Then there were the novel methods used to seal the terrain with a massive coating of bitumen so as to prevent the groundwater from seeping through. Next came the driving of the steel piles on which the bearing columns were to be erected that would support the weight of the steel frame of the palace.2 The thirty-two bearing columns were arranged in two concentric circles and were designed to support the weight of half a million tonnes. All the photographs of the pre-war period feature the giant crater situated between the western wall of the Kremlin with the Borovitskii Tower and the beginning of Kropotinskaia Street, which led into the finest and most elegant district of Old Moscow, with its palaces and villas.3 The palace was to be situated on a prominent street with buildings representing the Old and the New Moscow: the temple-like museum for the plastic arts that was renamed ‘Pushkin Museum’ in 1937; Pashkov House, an elegant neoclassical building situated on a hill, home to a library; and opposite, over the Moscow River, Government House, which had just been completed. A number of new buildings in the vicinity, including the Palace of the Soviets, convey an idea of the scale of the development. There was the new Lenin Library and Government House on the other side of the river. Then there were the buildings with a frontage onto a planned embankment: the Gosplan Building, the Hotel Moskva and, above all, however, the United States Embassy on Mokhovaia Street, Ivan Zholtovskii’s showpiece building in neo-Renaissance style. The businesses associated with the construction site encroached onto the surrounding locality. They had their own infrastructure, complete with sawmills, transport fleets, workshops, concrete factories and supply systems. The project maintained its own distributors throughout the USSR: steelworks supplied a newly developed stainless steel known as ‘DS’; research institutes experimented with acoustics and the manufacture of fast lifts. Throughout the country geologists and petrographers were on the lookout for the marble best suited to the project – it had to be especially durable and, indeed, like the buildings of antiquity, it was to be immune to decay for thousands of years.4 Together with the building of the Metro and the Moscow–Volga Canal, this was the largest construction project of the Second Five-Year Plan. The insistence on the giant dimensions of the buildings, the visibility of the work being carried out by this mega-machinery, was constantly reinforced in newsreels and newspapers. This explains why it could not be doubted that the building would become a reality. It grew, day by day, visibly, at first in the depths of the building site, but it was not long before the first piles for the steel frame began to take shape.
The dome that disappeared: Russian Byzantium
In reality, the foundation pit was a crater which had swallowed up the largest cathedral of the Russian Empire. On 5 December 1931, demolition crews had left the massive building in ruins. To blow it up, several attempts were needed. Following the decision to demolish the building, it had been plundered, dismantled and gutted. Museum and institute of art employees supervised the dismantling of frescoes, altarpieces, chandeliers and ornaments as best they could. The great marble reliefs on the walls, masterpieces of Russian sculpture, were sawn into pieces and preserved as fragments. The valuable marble was saved for subsequent use – in building the Metro, for example. Long before, the huge bells had been taken out and melted down. The labour of gutting the cathedral has been described in the memoirs of Old Muscovites.5
This act of destruction in 1931 spelled the end of a monument on which many generations had worked for nearly a century and which had rightly been regarded as a unique Gesamtkunstwerk and the product of a huge national effort. In 1812, when the last soldiers from Napoleon’s Grande Armée had left Russian soil, the idea had been conceived of building a new cathedral in gratitude and as a memorial. There was an international competition, which was won in 1817 by the design proposed by Aleksandr Vitberg. The building of what was in many respects a philosophically overloaded project began on the Sparrow Hills, but became so protracted for both structural and financial reasons that Alexander I’s successor, Tsar Nicholas I, abandoned Vitberg’s project in 1827 and decided to erect the building in the city centre, to the west of the Kremlin on the site of the Alekseev Monastery. ‘The new site had been cleverly chosen both architecturally and symbolically: whereas the Kremlin already had St Basil’s Cathedral on its eastern side, also commemorating a national victory, the new cathedral acted as its counterpoint, re-establishing an optical balance on the western side, further away than St Basil’s but correspondingly higher.’6
Figure 38.1 The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, already largely stripped of its ornaments and reduced to a skeleton, shortly before its demolition on 5 December 1931
‘Blowing up this cathedral was more than an intervention in the Moscow cityscape. The demolition of the Cathedral of the Saviour can be understood as the destruction of the most striking symbol of the late Russian tsarist Empire, as the elimination of its dominant feature, representing Russian Orthodoxy’s claims to spiritual hegemony over the empire and the city.’
In 1831 the architect Konstantin Thon produced a design ‘in the Russian-Byzantine style’, and the foundation-stone laying ceremony took place on 10 September 1839. Protracted though the preparations had been, financing and deciding on the pictures and the artistic ornamentation proved to be even lengthier. Not until 26 May 1883 was the cathedral dedicated, and until its demolition it remained, at a height of 102 metres, its four corner towers each with its bells and the gilded dome, the largest church in Moscow and one that defined the silhouette of the city. The most famous painters of the day had been engaged to paint the icons and frescoes – they included Vasilii Vereshchagin and Vasilii Surikov. The best iron foundries had taken over the task of casting the cathedral’s fourteen bells. The bronze and marble reliefs commemorating decisive battles such as Borodino and Leipzig became a kind of pantheon of the Russian victories over Napoleon. Holy Russia was fully represented, from Aleksandr Nevskii, via Sergius of Radonezh, down to the miracle-working icons of the Mother of God. Leading sculptors, among them Peter Clodt von Jürgensburg, spent almost two decades working on the ornamentation of the cathedral. Linked to the cathedral was a memorial and a museum ded
icated to men fallen in the Patriotic War, whose names were inscribed there.7
Blowing up this cathedral was more than an intervention in the Moscow cityscape. The demolition of the Cathedral of the Saviour can be understood as the destruction of the most striking symbol of the late Russian tsarist Empire, as the elimination of its dominant feature, representing Russian Orthodoxy’s claims to spiritual hegemony over the empire and the city. The complex history of the building crystallized Russia’s search for a way out of existing conditions on the eve of great upheavals – the emancipation of the serfs and the process of industrialization had begun; the non-Russian peoples and nations were starting to go their own way. The cathedral had remained open after the Revolution and still had a loyal congregation, despite persecution. Blowing it up was part of the general onslaught on the Old Russia in the name of collectivization. The detonation on 5 December 1931 was the sound of the war raging throughout the country, at the heart of the capital. It was literally the struggle for hegemony in the Moscow skies. At stake was the spirit of the city and the empire.
Labouring away at a vacuum: fantasies of the building of the century
In this struggle for architectural domination, it was almost inevitable that the twists and turns of the construction process of the cathedral should continue. This lay in the logic of the site. A gigantic vacuum at the heart of the city had to be filled. The fact was that this vacuum could be eliminated only by means of a building that put everything else in the shade and obliterated all memories, not just by its sheer size, volume and height, but by virtue of the spirit of the new building that would come to replace the old one that had been blown up. Strange as it may sound, the builders were prisoners of the site, and much that happened after 1931, both on the site and around it, bore the marks of trying too hard, of indulging in triumphalist gestures. The gigantomania that came to prevail in the course of the various competitions exhibited all the signs of escapism, of the need to escape from the shadow of its now demolished predecessor.