Moscow Monumental

Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital

Katherine Zubovich

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691205298
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper In the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old metropolis was reinvented to embody the greatness of Stalinist society. Moscow Monumental explores how the quintessential architectural works of the late Stalin era fundamentally reshaped daily life in the Soviet capital.Drawing on a wealth of original archival research, Katherine Zubovich examines the decisions and actions of Soviet elites—from top leaders to master architects—and describes the experiences of ordinary Muscovites who found their lives uprooted by the ambitious skyscraper project. She shows how the Stalin-era quest for monumentalism was rooted in the Soviet Union's engagement with Western trends in architecture and planning, and how the skyscrapers required the creation of a vast and complex infrastructure. As laborers flooded into the city, authorities evicted and rehoused tens of thousands of city residents living on the plots selected for development. When completed in the mid-1950s, these seven ornate neoclassical buildings served as elite apartment complexes, luxury hotels, and ministry and university headquarters. Moscow Monumental tells a story that is both local and broadly transnational, taking readers from the streets of interwar Moscow and New York to the marble-clad halls of the bombastic postwar structures that continue to define the Russian capital today.

1

RED MOSCOW

In 1928, the Moscow-based art historian Aleksei A. Sidorov published an album in Berlin of photographs recently taken in New Economic Policy (NEP)-era Moscow (figs 1.1–1.5). In arranging these photographs of the Soviet capital for a German audience, Sidorov drew the reader’s attention to the contrasts and “contradictory feelings” that Moscow—the centuries-old “heart of Russia”—elicited in the viewer.¹ Moscow was founded in the twelfth century, and it stood as the center of Russian Tsardom until Peter the Great moved the Russian capital north to St. Petersburg in 1712. When Moscow became a capital city again in 1918, it was of the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the RSFSR), and then of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR) as a whole when the federation was created in 1922. Moscow was an important battleground in the struggles of 1917 and in subsequent years the city served as a stage for the Bolsheviks’ new revolutionary politics. Still, a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution many observers and visitors still saw evidence of a former provincialism in Moscow’s urban terrain. In 1928, when Sidorov published the 200 photographs that made up his Moscow album, the “socialist reconstruction” of the Soviet capital had scarcely begun.

In the late 1920s, more than mere traces of pre-revolutionary life remained on the cityscape of the Soviet capital. The very structure of the city itself, with its medieval fortress, circular plan, winding lanes, and old stone walls, served as a constant reminder of Moscow’s pre-modern, and pre-Petrine, origins. The Kremlin’s tall cathedrals still marked the city as sacred ground. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovite rulers replaced the wooden buildings of the Kremlin with these ornate and durable stone structures, marking Moscow as the symbolic center of their domain. Russia’s early rulers communicated their right to rule in monumental cathedrals that drew on varied stylistic influences, from the Italian Renaissance to the architecture of nearby regions newly brought into the realm, like Novgorod and Pskov.² Moscow also retained elements in the 1920s of its more recent Imperial-era development. Starting in the 1770s, Catherine II sought to transform Moscow into a modern European city, recasting it in light of her newly enlightened politics. She oversaw infrastructure reforms that brought Moscow up to broader European standards, but the city was largely neglected by her successors.³

In the decades prior to 1917, Moscow was shaken by rapid and chaotic urban growth. Like other Russian cities of the late-Imperial period, Moscow suffered under the strains of industrialization, a process that began timidly in Russia in the 1860s, only to take off in the last decade of the nineteenth century before ebbing and flowing in the years of war and revolt that preceded 1917. As a result, Moscow gained a large population of transient, casually employed, and poorly housed industrial workers who maintained close ties to the countryside. Late-imperial Moscow was a merchant city and, as such, its pre-revolutionary urban growth was mainly the product of private economic investment rather than state-led or publicly funded development. The city’s social services and public transportation networks were inadequate. Its municipal leaders, beholden to Petersburg, lacked both funding and legitimacy. And at the turn of the twentieth century, Moscow had the distinction of being the unhealthiest large city in all of Europe.⁴

The first decade of Soviet rule saw little improvement. The population of Moscow in 1928 was only slightly higher, at just over 2 million, than it was in early 1917. During the harsh years of the Civil War, the city’s population had dipped to just over 1 million. But little by little Moscow grew again, as the Bolshevik approach to governance began to shift in 1921 from the punishing edicts of War Communism to the brief reprieve of NEP. By 1939, when Moscow’s “socialist reconstruction” was well underway, the city would boast a population of over 4 million.⁵ Rapid and continuous population growth would become a persistent problem in Red Moscow, ensuring that the city’s new leaders faced many of the same challenges as their pre-revolutionary counterparts. The Bolsheviks swiftly abolished private property, but this did not solve the problems caused by uncoordinated construction and the rapid influx of new residents from the countryside.⁶ Moscow’s city planners soon found that whatever advantage they gained in state control of land and buildings they lost in the chaos of daily urban life. In its early decades, Red Moscow was a challenging city to plan and to govern.

PORTRAIT OF A CITY

As the art historian Aleksei Sidorov saw it in the late 1920s, Moscow was “dirty and provincial.”⁷ In his photo album published in Berlin in 1928, Sidorov worked to make the city legible to foreign eyes. He showed Moscow as a city in the making caught between two worlds, one old and the other new. As Sidorov wrote in the introduction to his album, Moscow was “the liveliest spot in a wide, awakening Russia.”⁸ “Located at the border between Europe and Asia is Moscow,” Sidorov explained,

Once the City of the Tsars, the heiress of Byzantium, the winner of the fantastic idea of the “Third Rome.” Under the emperors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was a beautiful provincial town—baroque, lost in thought, and a little lazy. Before the revolution, it was the city of big industrialists, a liberal center of the intelligentsia, of the merchant opposition, and of art collections in which Picasso and Matisse mingled with Russian icons. Then, revolutionary Moscow in the first terrible years of upheaval was starved and neglected, nearing death. And today, Red Moscow, the Soviet capital … Of all the cities in the world Moscow may trigger the most contradictory feelings.⁹

In Sidorov’s album, Moscow is pictured as a city just beginning to show signs of its vanguard position in world history. New buildings and monuments had begun to appear in the capital and as early as 1918 the new architectural studio established at the Moscow City Council (Mossovet) began work on a general plan that drew on elements of British garden-city design.¹⁰ Ivan V. Zholtovskii and Aleksei V. Shchusev, both former members of the Imperial Academy of Arts, headed this studio.¹¹ Zholtovskii and Shchusev would maintain powerful positions in the Moscow architectural establishment well into the late 1940s, but their initial plan for the new Soviet capital was never implemented; in fact, the city did not adopt the first General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow until 1935. In Sidorov’s album, the small handful of buildings heralding the emergence of Red Moscow include a mixture of modernist and classicist structures from the experimental 1920s. The new Lenin Institute, boxy and modernist, was one such building.¹² It stood opposite the new Obelisk to the Constitution on Soviet (formerly Tverskaia) Square. The Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, designed by Shchusev and captured by Sidorov in multiple shots (one of which was reprinted in a 1929 issue of the New York Times), was still in its wooden incarnation (fig. 1.1).¹³ This temporary structure would soon be replaced by a final version made of granite and marble.

Figure 1.1: Lenin Mausoleum. Alexys A. Sidorow, Moskau, Berlin: Albertus-Verlag, 1928.

Sidorov also included in his album shots of Moscow’s new constructivist architecture, including the tall headquarters of Mossel’prom, the Soviet retail trust that was at the forefront of constructivist-inspired developments in advertising (fig. 1.2). Mossel’prom’s portable street kiosks tempted passersby with the slogan “Nowhere else but Mossel’prom” (“Nigde krome kak v mossel’prome”)—nowhere else could Muscovites find macaroni, sausage, and Red Star caramels with agitational wrappers designed by the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.¹⁴ Avant-garde buildings, billboards, and kiosks like these made good foils when photographed alongside an older Moscow. A billboard for Avtopromtorg, the Soviet state’s new transportation company, is framed in Sidorov’s album in juxtaposition to the cobblestone street below, where horse-drawn cart remained the more common form of transportation (fig. 1.3). As Walter Benjamin observed in 1926, having been in the Soviet capital for about a month, “Moscow is the most silent of great cities, and doubly so when there is snow. The principal instrument in the orchestra of the streets, the automobile horn, is rarely played here; there are few cars.”¹⁵

Figure 1.2: Mossel’prom Building. Alexys A. Sidorow, Moskau, Berlin: Albertus-Verlag, 1928.

Other photographs in Sidorov’s Moscow album drew on the conventions of documentary urban photography of the kind established by American social reformer Jacob Riis in the late nineteenth century. Washerwomen are shown cleaning linens in the Moscow River (fig. 1.4) and workmen are seen mending the riverbank by the Kremlin after a still-routine bout of flooding in the city center. In Moscow’s bustling open-air marketplace at the foot of the seventeenth-century Sukharevskii tower, where countryside and city collided among the rows of stalls, Sidorov found a by-gone era in the economic concessions and partial capitalism of NEP (fig. 1.5).¹⁶ Yet Sidorov did not publish his Moscow album merely to document contradictions and depravations. As a sympathetic observer of the revolution, he narrated the city through images that showed the beginnings of revolutionary progress. In part, this narrative was achieved through “before and after” comparisons. A photograph of homeless children from 1920–21, carefully titled to indicate the earlier period, is placed in the album adjacent to an image of a meeting of bright-eyed Young Pioneers. Red Moscow, as seen in images of the city’s new buildings and new people, was gradually coming into view.

Figure 1.3: Tverskaia-Iamskaia Street. Alexys A. Sidorow, Moskau, Berlin: Albertus-Verlag, 1928.

Figure 1.4: Washerwomen along the Moscow River. Alexys A. Sidorow, Moskau, Berlin: Albertus-Verlag, 1928.

Figure 1.5: Market at the foot of Sukharevskii tower. Alexys A. Sidorow, Moskau, Berlin: Albertus-Verlag, 1928.

Few in Red Moscow appreciated the power of images more than Aleksei Sidorov. Born in 1891 in the Ukrainian region of the Russian empire, Sidorov enrolled in 1909 as a student in the Historical-Philological Faculty at Moscow University, where he would specialize in art history and archaeology. Like so many young Russian scholars of the period before the First World War, Sidorov studied abroad, making his way westward in 1913 to Italy, Austria, and Germany—places to which he would return as a representative of the Soviet state after the revolution. Sidorov hailed the arrival of the Bolsheviks in 1917.¹⁷ As Russia moved that year from one revolution to the next, he was busily preparing his first art historical work: an article on Albrecht Dürer’s sixteenth-century painting of the four apostles. Sidorov used the German master’s monumental Reformation-era diptych to argue that images must be interpreted in relation to the ideas and creative practices that informed their production. Art, in other words, is the product of its unique historical moment.¹⁸

As the Bolsheviks established power in his city, Sidorov railed against the apolitical “formalism” of his mentors and peers. Realism was his preferred artistic style, but Sidorov found common ground with many modernists of the period in his determination to uncover the vital link between art and politics. Just as Dürer, in Sidorov’s reading...