Economic Science Fictions

by Davies, William;

  Buildings themselves were taken from standard catalogues, mere ‘ready-made objects distributed in space’.5 These districts were already being criticised within a few years, and there is much implicit criticism in a similar volume to Life in the Twenty-First Century, the collaborative The Ideal Communist City, put together at Moscow State University at the end of the 1950s and published a few years later.

  Whereas the prefabrication programme can be seen as a sort of ultimate Fordist city, with mass production brought out of the car factories and into the planning of the city itself, the authors of The Ideal Communist City were trying to work out what to do next. Partly, the problem is aesthetics. ‘Functionalism never defined the role of single buildings in total urban space. This space, rolling over many miles, loses all traditional points of reference and cannot be perceived as a whole, appearing rather as an unending and accidental continuity of spatial events, incoherent and lacking expressive significance.’6 This matters, because ‘the development of an urban environment made up of standardised residential units is of paramount importance for the building programme of Communism’. These must be planned in a way that makes them adaptable and more like ‘a living organism’.7 An illustration closely resembling the design of Novye Cheryomuskhi is captioned: ‘[A]‌ great number of standard forms are incorporated in contemporary building, but the spatial solutions arrived at differ very little. The result is a depressing uniformity.’8

  The problem with this is that the new society being created by Soviet socialism and the ‘scientific-technical revolution’ was going to be complex and differentiated, and defined not by the repetition and industrial labour of the car factory; that problem would be increasingly solved by automation, given that, under communism, ‘man’s role…is to program and control the labour of machines in a fully automated system of production’.9 This is becoming a reality, something shown in the production process of the micro-districts themselves; one illustration in the book shows gantry cranes on rails constructing almost an entire suburb without visible human input. Other works from the same time posed similar questions: Aleksandr Merkulov’s Automation Serves Man argues that workers will merely ‘tune’ their production lines for a couple of hours and then, in the words of the planner Stanislav Strumilin, ‘engage in their leisure time in technical inventions or swell the ranks of public figures, scientists and writers, inspired musicians and painters…and all these huge replenishments from among the workers will take the place of the one-sided workmen of the old system of labour division and make up the new society which we will call communism’.10

  For the authors of The Ideal Communist City, this poses questions for the design of the new districts themselves:

  [I]‌n the coming years, with the reduction of the work day to five or six hours and the parallel reduction of other chores, leisure time will consist of about six to seven hours per day. If we further decrease the work day to a period of not less than four hours and assume a minimum system of daily services, leisure in the next decade may increase to an average of eight to nine hours a day, not counting holiday or the extended annual vacation. The increase in leisure time in coming years will present a social problem of extraordinary significance: how to make use of this free time in a manner consistent with the communist ideal, that is, how to use it in the interests of each and all.11

  The micro-district in this context is inadequate, because too simple, straightforward and standardised; instead, the authors advocate what they call the ‘New Unit of Settlement’, a sort of changeable, mutable version of the garden city, with pedestrian priority: ‘Pedestrian walks are cut under the buildings, and in the shadow of the bearing walls along the walks there are bodies of water. The whole includes stairs, ramps, porticoes, show windows, cafes, and open-air amphitheatres. All this produces a lively sequence of architectural and spatial impressions, a rich variety of colours, forms and light. The individual regains the pedestrian street with its human scale, something that has been missing since the middle ages.’12

  It is on these more ambitious measures that the programme can be considered a failure. The nuclear family, the eight-hour working day, the repetitive production line – none of them was eliminated. In fact, as Lynne Attwood finds in her analysis of gender relations in Soviet housing, the new developments often replicated them. While ‘one third of the population were re-housed in the course of six years, between 1957 and 1963’,13 ‘Soviet planners had a distinct tendency to standardise, and the general perception was that two or three different apartment designs would accommodate all types of family’ – that is, ‘the average family’, which ‘apparently consisted of a married couple with two dependent children’.14 This became ‘the main focus of the housing programme’, for much of its duration. ‘If apartment design was over-standardised, there was little standardisation in distribution.’15 Some municipal allocation took place, but mostly the new housing was distributed via workplaces, on the basis of work, length of time in job, and need. This meant that often flats were in the name of male workers, making divorce difficult and obtaining housing hard for single women and single mothers. Nonetheless, industrialised housing made up 75 per cent of all stock by 1991, and was kept at minimal rents – between 3 and 5 per cent of a resident’s total income16 – so that, by Perestroika, ‘market socialist’ economists were worried that ‘people had come to expect to have their accommodation provided by the state virtually free of charge’,17 something that stood in the way of their attempt to introduce the concept of prices reflecting value into the system. Rather than an experiment, this became normality; the equivalent of a mock-Tudor semi or a Victorian terrace is a flat in a four- to ten-storey block. This is where the overwhelming majority of Muscovites live, not in the Tsarist-Stalinist palaces within the inner city, nor the hipster enclaves of Chistye Prudy or Gorky Park.

  The programme was necessitated by the housing catastrophe that the Soviet Union faced by the 1950s. The Russian Empire was 80 per cent rural in 1917, but under Stalin the fastest and probably the most brutal industrial revolution in history was forced through between 1929 and 1940. Moscow filled with rural migrants fleeing a famine-ridden countryside to work in the new factories. Many lived in subdivided pre-revolutionary apartments (‘kommunalki’), and many in barracks, basements, tents, even trenches. This housing crisis was barely under control when the war compounded the problem, with the Third Reich’s war of extermination against the USSR making millions homeless. The attempts to redress this under Stalin were almost whimsical, however: grandiose, richly decorated apartment blocks were built, lining wide, Haussmannesque boulevards; enormous resources were diverted into skyscraping luxury hotels, or grace and favour flats for artists and bureaucrats. The first independent act of Nikita Khrushchev after becoming General Secretary on Stalin’s death was to force through the aforementioned decree ‘On Architectural Excess’, demanding industrialised construction rather than bespoke masterpieces as a means of solving the crisis. It’s difficult to exaggerate just how huge a social advance this was for Muscovites, not only in the sense of amenities, but also in that a private life was now possible, after three decades when the majority had lived in cramped communal flats, one family to a room or worse.

  Out of Monumentality, Standardisation: Cheryomushki

  But, first, the half-constructed grand boulevards had to be completed. Vast neoclassical apartment blocks line the main roads into Novye Cheryomushki. Here the money ran out, however, for the more flamboyant features: the decorative pilasters stop halfway up, or are outlined in brick; the grand archways lead to scuzzy courtyards. As soon as these were inhabitable, grandiose pride and formal order would be replaced with utility. The contrast between the Stalinist boulevards and the first parts of the new Cheryomushki is striking. Around Akademicheskaya Metro Station, the blocks are lower and simpler, and the in-between spaces are full of fountains and benches rather than afterthoughts behind the grand facades. Novye Cheryomushki also featured an abundance of public space
and public buildings: health centres, crèches, schools, cinemas, libraries, theatres, clubs (see Figures 10.3–10.6). Initially, each mikrorayon was planned with all of this included, all to equally standard designs. Little on this scale had been attempted anywhere, and visitors flocked to see it. Dmitri Shostakovich composed an operetta titled after the district, satirising Muscovites’ desperate desire to move there; it was adapted into a colour film in 1963. Built in the year of Sputnik, it seemed to suggest the Soviet way of doing things – an egalitarian, centrally planned, mass production economy – was getting results. A certain nostalgia for these days pervades it; the photographs here are from a visit on May Day, when residents were enjoying the day off and the public billboards were stuffed with Soviet-nostalgic paraphernalia or posters for the upcoming Victory Day. That sort of bombast was incongruous with the easy, sociable space.

  Each mikrorayon was meant to have a factory, an institute or both, in order to be self-contained to some degree; the risk that they would become dormitory suburbs was realised early on, and here, at least, it was partially prevented. Around the Novye Cheryomushki Metro station are several research institutes, moved or founded here in the 1960s. Cheryomushki was not just a ‘sleeping district’ but a hub of the USSR’s scientific-military-industrial complex. The centrepiece was the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences Library, the Soviet equivalent of the Library of Congress, reached from the street by a concrete bridge over a (long-since drained) lake. Adjacent is the tower of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute, one of the drivers of the Soviet central planning system, a glass grid by architect Leonid Pavlov with a colourful Möbius strip sculpture set into the middle floors. This building is itself a useful index of the failure of the attempt to realise a fully automated, computerised communism in the 1960s. Intended largely as a computer centre, its bespoke, luxurious, non-standardised design was so complicated for the Soviet building industry to produce that the building was effectively obsolete when it was finished in 1978 (12 years after construction had begun) given the rapid shrinking of the size of computers.18 It became an image (and a rather impressive one) of computerised socialism rather than an actuality.

  In recent years, however, the shift in the urban economy from production to speculation has invaded this carefully arranged space and smashed up its order, with a dozen or so 30-storey towers with pitched roofs crashing into the open space around, creating a looming, claustrophobic feel; the sense that planning has been abandoned here and it’s everyone for him- or herself. Moscow’s suburbs have faced extreme levels of ‘infill’ development, with immense towers shoved into the parks and gardens of the mikrorayons, throwing flats into darkness and obliterating the communal amenities. One tower is even crammed into the small square between the tower and the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences Library, blocking out its light. The latter suffered a catastrophic fire in January 2015, described by the head of the Academy of Sciences as the academic equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster; over a million priceless volumes were damaged. The fire was ascribed to an electrical fault, but, given the intensity of development around it, it wouldn’t take a conspiracy theorist to suspect foul play. You could easily imagine the original attempts at making this something more than a suburb being erased in a decade or two, as it is turned into a commuter district like any other.

  Figure 10.3 A stripped Stalinist block, Cheryomushki

  Figure 10.4 Public space in Cheryomushki

  Figure 10.5 Central Economic Mathematical Institute

  Figure 10.6 Infill in Cheryomushki

  Standardising Nonconformity: Belyayevo

  Novye Cheryomushki’s pioneering status makes it a little different from the Soviet norm. That begins a couple of stops south on the Metro, at the mikrorayon of Belyayevo, developed from the 1960s onwards. This really is a quintessential ‘sleeping district’. From here on in, the original notion of self-contained districts with their own identity was watered down as a numbers game took over. The ‘winning’ square panel at Cheryomushki is extended into long slabs, tall towers and squat maisonettes, unrelieved by any variation or individuality whatsoever, without an obvious centre, and with relatively sparse social facilities compared with its predecessor (see Figures 10.7 & 10.8). The recent infill is depressing: malls, and more speculative behemoths crammed into the open space. In fairness, some improvements to the poor construction have been made: styrofoam and a layer of render to insulate the panels, which are rickety in their unrenovated form, with mortar leaking from the crudely connected joints.

  Off the main road, where they survive, the green spaces are Belyayevo’s saving grace, enclosing schools, ponds and park benches. Belyayevo has become a minor cause célèbre after the Moscow-based Polish architect Kuba Snopek submitted it to UNESCO as a potential entry on the World Heritage list, partlybecause of the design of the communal spaces – one of the few places where architects could actually do anything much with the standard volumes they were expected to use in housing.

  Although designing houses was taken away from (architects), they were still able to design great spaces between buildings, urban planning solutions, comfortable streets and paths… [D]‌esigners were also able to create interesting urban situations with surprising composition, rhythm and urban openings. Although this aesthetic was of a totally different nature to an archetypal city, using grand objects and vast patches of green, blue and white instead of a streets, squares and perimeter blocks, it definitely had its own value.19

  So, in the case of Belyayevo, the preserved orchard and the lakes and the layouts of the buildings are intended to offset the unnerving effects of mass production. Belyayevo is, accordingly, a place where it would be great to be six – loads of free open space and playgrounds to play in – and very probably a boring place to be 16, like most suburbs. It is the green spaces that made the area desirable once, and they are most at risk from development.

  Either way, Belyayevo implies a city that is homogeneous, based on the nuclear family, with a small series of housing types designed to provide for a population with – so the planners assumed – statistically predictable needs. Today this has been thrown into chaos by the decline of the built fabric and the new instability of the population, as flats are rented, sold and subdivided. The other reason for Snopek’s attempt to get Belyayevo on the World Heritage list, however, was an appeal to the fact that most of the ‘Moscow Conceptualists’, artists and thinkers such as Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov and Ilya Kabakov, lived and worked here in the 1970s. The Conceptualists’ famous 1974 ‘Bulldozer Exhibition’, broken up by police, took place in one of Belyayevo’s empty green spaces. Snopek argues this subversive activity was implicit in the area’s ‘uncontrolled common space, ready to become exhibition space or whatever else’. The mundanity of the area ‘conceals complicated and nuanced stories’. This is an important point; the lives being lived in such a district can be as multivalent as the architecture is one-dimensional, and, in that sense, the hope of the authors of The Ideal Communist City that leisure time could thrive in new standardised housing was fulfilled, albeit in a more critical way than they would have expected.

  The idea of listing the district, though, is akin to one of the Conceptualists’ knowing jokes – to argue that the true ‘hipster’ district of Moscow, the real ‘arts incubator’, was a mundane concrete suburb. This is still part of the capital, with all its draws, its centre reachable easily from the Metro. Much of what made it such a hothouse for art and experimentation was its connection to the scientific, technical and ideological institutions nearby, from the institutes in Novye Cheryomushki to various art schools and the Patrice Lumumba University, which trained cadres in the newly decolonised countries – something that made the Moscow south-west unusually multicultural. In that sense, the area is interesting precisely because much about it was not at all standard.

  Figure 10.7 Belyayevo doorways

  Figure 10.8 A pond in Belyayevo

  Standa
rdising Individuality: Chertanovo

  There are certain aspects to Soviet practice that always invited the monolithic aspects of the mikrorayon, particularly the limits of the command economy. On the one hand, there was opposition to the very idea of individual districts, as represented by the ‘quarter’. Writing approvingly as early as 1932 about Soviet utopian planning, Berthold Lubetkin wrote that ‘urban quarters are simply the obsolete survivals of capitalistic principles of planning. They represent class and caste prejudices (ghettoes, international concessions, west and east ends, brothel districts) or the now superannuated ideas of strategic defence, etc.’20 Because of this, the only aspect of a given area that could influence any individuality in its architecture or layout was the demands of the site. When this hostility was combined with the results of command economics, the results were drastic. ‘It would be to the greatest advantage of a centrally directed system of production,’ wrote Vaclav Havel in the 1980s, ‘if only one type of prefabricated panel were constructed, from which one type of apartment building would be constructed; these buildings in turn would be fitted with a single kind of door, door handle, window, toilet, washbasin and so on, and together this would create a single type of housing development constructed according to one standardised urban development plan, with minor adjustments for landscape, given the regrettable irregularity of the earth’s surface.’21 He was talking about something quite specific: housing estates that he knew well.