Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  The transformation of the Old Russian metropolis of world revolution into a modern world city of socialism was in full swing and was making astounding progress. Every newcomer could see the iron will that stood behind what was already the Second Five-Year Plan, that had launched the building of the Metro, erected the magnificent new buildings and ensured that the population was better fed and clothed: the will of Stalin. His picture looked down from the cranes and scaffoldings, from the hoardings surrounding the construction sites, in the windows of the new shops, over the entrance to the zoo. His picture on the front of the trolley buses accompanied passengers across the wide boulevards, adorned the delicatessen display in the ‘Yeliseev’, as Muscovites still call the giant food emporium a block away from the Lux, even though nowadays, enlarged and modernized, it has been given the socialist name Gastronom No.1. And his picture could be seen in the windows of bookshops amid the books and magazines which their author had now made compulsory reading. Wherever one’s gaze fell, one saw Stalin, the genius who was building socialism, the great leader of the Soviet nation.29

  Of course, what we do not see in the majority of reports by foreigners are the sites of the invisible Moscow.

  Moscow beyond the ring roads

  The Moscow of the General Plan is not the whole picture, but merely the first phase of the transformation. On closer inspection, it resembles a desperate attempt to resist the elemental force of spontaneous growth and stem the tide of a movement that no one can control by calling on all the resources available to a master plan devised by unlimited power: state finances, a compact organization, the know-how of planners, engineers and architects, and a grand design. However much residential space was created during the First and Second Five-Year Plans, it was all immediately filled up by the influx of settlers arriving in the city during those years. Despite all the new construction projects, the amount of housing per capita fell by half – to 4.2 square metres.30 However great the extension of the infrastructure, it could barely keep pace with the pressure created by a population that doubled in a decade. The city’s growth outpaced even the vision embodied in the General Plan, bold as it was. The idea that population density could be reduced in the heart of the city turned out to be an illusion. The transformation of the old blocks of rented flats into communal apartments – a development regarded in the Civil War and the twenties as a provisional solution – shaped the living space and became the focal point of existence for entire generations over the coming decades. An apartment originally intended for one family would be occupied by several families, with each family occupying one room and sharing the toilet, bathroom, kitchen and hallway. Such a space was occupied by human beings thrown together by chance, and it became the centre of their lifeworld for an entire epoch. And anyone who lived in such an apartment could count himself fortunate, since he would have heating, gas, electricity and running water and still be close to the centre.31

  The mass of city-dwellers, above all the migrants pouring in from the countryside, settled in outlying districts close to the factories or else in suburbs such as Kolomenskoe, Nagatino and Novinki, or in towns beyond the city limits such as Perovo, Liublino and Liubertsy.32 A new type of settlement came into being, a workers’ estate, half town, half village. If the peasant immigrants were in luck they would find themselves in huts put up in short order by the factory which employed them. In general, the large enterprises, factories and combines were the most important builders in the city. They were the clients who arranged for the building of workers’ barracks and hostels owned by the factory, either one storey or two storeys high, with rooms leading off from the hallway, furnished with bunk beds and lockers for people to keep their possessions in and a bedspread to separate them off and create a little bit of privacy. But even to have landed here meant you had escaped the worst. What the mass of new arrivals wanted above all was to find somewhere to stay – anywhere where there was a half-way dry refuge: basement rooms, do-it-yourself extensions, cells in former monasteries or former church rooms adapted for the purpose. More than a few bedded down in the factories themselves, literally under the workbench at which they stood during the day. Others found shelter in the metro tunnels and shafts or in dugouts.

  That is the other side of the Soviet metropolis. The overwhelming majority of Moscow’s inhabitants did not live in the stone-built Moscow of the General Plan, but in wooden houses, huts and basement apartments, erected mainly without permission. Far more people lived in the fast-growing suburbs than in the city centre. It took years before the tram lines to take them to and from the factories were built. Walking for hours to one’s place of work, travelling anything between 40 to 60 kilometres, was far from unusual. In this way, a city outside the city of the General Plan came into being. Furthermore, it was a city on the outskirts of the city, one which consisted entirely of immigrants from the countryside. Frequently, if space permitted, they brought rabbits, a pig, a cow or chickens for their own consumption or to take to market, something that was not permitted but was indispensable for satisfying the daily needs of the population.

  This village in the city was no novelty for Moscow. Moscow had long since been a peasant city – ever since the peak period of industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the peasants were drawn in, at first seasonally and then permanently. But the extent of the industrialization of the early thirties and the shock it produced put all earlier developments in the shade. Within a decade 2 million people had migrated to the city, all of them from the countryside. For the ‘native’ inhabitants of Moscow and for visitors, the ruralization of Moscow, the undermining of urban Moscow by the invasion of the peasantry, was an everyday experience. The large construction sites of the capital were places where the immigrants from the countryside and from the whole of the Soviet Union converged – tens of thousands on the building sites of Metrostroi, the Stalin automobile plant or the Palace of the Soviets. The railway stations through which people passed into the city played a crucial role in Moscow as a ‘peasant metropolis’. But so too did the parks in which newcomers to the city came together, often joining up with people from their place of origin, their village or region for singing, dancing or collective boxing matches – a piece of the old hometown in the new one. They tended to stick together. In the new migrant quarters people lived in accordance with their own routines; order was maintained more by self-organized gangs than by the militia, whose presence, if there was one, was often thin on the ground.33 But Moscow itself provided much by way of compensation. Ivan Gomozenkov, who had arrived in the city in 1937, remembered his excitement on discovering that ‘electric lights shone in every building along the street. I had never seen such electric lights before – I liked them so much! … I liked Moscow so much that I would have sold my soul to stay in Moscow!’34

  In the light of this influx, the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow appears not so much as the grand vision of an omnipotent state but almost as an emergency measure, as an absolute determination to assert itself in a country in which everything was changing. The Moscow built of stone contrasts with the Moscow of wooden buildings, the centre with the suburbs; the fixing of particular points of reference contrasts with a flux that calls everything into question. Thus the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was an act of self-assertion on the part of the urban power as against the elemental force of what Moshe Lewin has aptly referred to as a ‘quicksand society’. Thus the true meaning of the General Plan reveals itself only when we decode it as a human landscape.

  Human landscape, struggle for survival

  With its Passport Law of 27 November 1932, the government had attempted to clamp down on spontaneous migration and increase its control of movement throughout the country and especially to the major cities.35 Between 1926 and 1939 at least 23 million Soviet peasants migrated from the countryside to the towns – a migration from countryside to town that was unprecedented in world history. Peasant migration took place with suc
h rapidity that, by the end of the 1930s, 40 per cent of the Soviet urban population had arrived in the towns within that decade.36 The new Passport Law, together with the expulsion of ‘antisocial individuals’, or ‘former people’, produced only a brief breathing space but did not succeed in altering the overall trend. There was no overall impact on the extreme development towards hyperurbanization. Like other large cities, Moscow became the setting for a new social formation. During the First Five-Year Plan the population of Moscow had grown from 2.2 to 3.7 million; within the space of only two years, 1930 to 1932, the number of residents had increased by almost a million. The growth rate slackened slightly in the Second and Third Five-Year Plans, but, even so, by 1939 the city had around 4.1 million inhabitants. It we take the growth of the suburbs into account, the population grew by 3.2 million, to around 4.5 million.37

  Between 1929 and 1939 Moscow became the final destination for around 2 million people. They had set out because they hoped for a better life, but even more because they saw no other possibility of survival. Moscow, then, was a place where one might hope to survive! Hundreds of thousands of people, younger people and women above all, migrated to the city because, with its schools, jobs and cinemas, that’s where the future lay. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to Moscow, driven by the terrors of forced collectivization and the famine that followed it, to which millions had fallen victim. Hundreds of thousands of people had escaped to the city because only there could they elude the persecution and deportation that threatened them. It is difficult to determine where the wish to migrate ends and the wish to escape begins. For thousands of people the city was the only place to avoid persecution, to go underground and to acquire a new identity. Among the migrants were people who had seen terrible things and experienced them themselves, their heads filled with images of dying and killing, people who were traumatized or savagely resolved to put everything out of their minds and to venture on a radical new beginning. A migration of the tormented, the desperate, of those filled with hate and perhaps of those bent on vengeance – at any rate, not migrants in the normal sense of the word, but expellees and refugees sui generis.

  The large towns’ appetite for workers was insatiable; factories conjured up out of thin air hired workers without asking awkward questions about where they had come from or why. Some of the migrants came from the area around Moscow – like everywhere else, the Moscow region had been collectivized at the double – others from further afield. The building sites were a favoured location for recruits from every corner of the Soviet Union – Tajiks, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians and Bashkirs. Career-conscious young people joined the wave of immigrants, eager to improve their situation and willing to make sacrifices, especially Jews from the former Pale of Settlement.38 This brought about a major change in the ethnic, religious and demographic composition of the city in the two decades following the Revolution, particularly during the Five-Year Plans. Even though Moscow was overwhelmingly a Russian city, it was also a mixed city ethnically, religiously and culturally. At 87.4 per cent, the proportion of Russians had fallen; the Jews, with 6.6 per cent, were among the relatively large groups, as were Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Belorussians and, increasingly, Ukrainians.39 This was an arena where, if one wished, it was easy to unleash expressions of hatred and xenophobia. Moscow now contained an extraordinarily heterogeneous, déraciné population in constant flux, anything but unified by a common culture, language or religion – a population that had emerged from the revolutions and upheavals of the world war and Civil War and had experienced almost all the terrors to which a single generation could be subject.40

  This peasant immigration encountered a city and a population whose urban core had been decimated and weakened by violence, flight, emigration and expropriation. The structures and routines in which the 2 million-strong populace had organized its life up to 1914–17 had more or less collapsed or had been destroyed. By 1920 Moscow had lost around 40 per cent of its inhabitants of 1917; its population had been reduced by a million, the number of workers had been halved. The old city still existed – what are two decades, 1917 to 1937, in the life of a city! – but it had been fragmented, atomized and paralysed as a society of ‘former people’, of the dispossessed, and as a corpus of memories, a collective experience, an ensemble of social practices, and an actually existing identity that could not be extinguished from one day to the next. The debate on the nature of this historic city left its mark on the implementation of the General Plan; its bitterness was not unconnected with the presence of this collective memory, which could not simply be ignored by the new rulers. The old society still survived – with its professions, its taste, its connections among Muscovites, but also with people now abroad and its relations to the representatives of the new powers that be, whose origins were often to be found in secessionist and dissident elements of the old property-owning and educated elites. The old society continued to exist in the new one just as the old city still survived in the purlieus of the New Moscow. It had lost its structures, salons and associations, as well as its leaders and spokesmen, its organs and newspapers. But it had not vanished without trace. Its strength and vitality could be seen from the swift recovery of urban life in the years of the New Economic Policy.

  This set the scene for the clash of the old, paralysed and fragmented Moscow society with the new one, which was fed month in, month out, by hundreds of thousands of newcomers on the one hand and by the reorganization of society on the other. This clash was the true adventure of Moscow in the period between the wars and the true background for the drama that was preparing itself. It took place at every level, in every molecule of society: in the communal apartments, where the intimidated members of the previous society lived cheek by jowl with the social climbers from the factories; in the Metro, where the immigrants were acquiring the cultural techniques of big-city transport; in the factories, where the discipline of the machinery sent the novices from the countryside into a panic and stretched them to the limits of their abilities. With eyes wide and mouths agape, the young lads from the country looked at the motor cars on the streets, the advertisements in neon lights at night and the planes flying through the sky.41 In the factories a new generation began to appear, and a new class of engineers and technicians who had nothing in common with the old Russian working class that had been exposed to the storms of revolution and had in effect been dissolved by them.

  There was a stark contrast between the silhouettes of the onion domes of the churches and the skyscrapers whose scaffolding had just been removed. Young people’s thirst for knowledge seemed boundless and unquenchable, their vigour and energy inexhaustible. Their hatred seemed no less boundless and implacable. It expressed itself in choruses that erupted in the major city squares. A society that had lost its grip, its structure, its cohesion, or had not yet found it, a city that was composed of millions of people whose lives had been disrupted and who had nowhere where they could feel at home, such a society was fragile in the extreme; it seemed close to collapse, but was also in dire need of a sense of belonging. Everything seemed ripe for a civil war, a struggle of all against all; behind almost every individual stood the pressure of an existential struggle for survival, and the city was weighed down by the pressure of a thousand atmospheres – the pressure that arises when streams of people in flight all congregate at the same point. The knowledge they had acquired in their struggle for survival had entered the big city with them, magnified a million times over. Once there, that knowledge remained latent initially. But what would happen when all these people collided with one another or indeed were let loose on one another?

  Nothing held this amorphous ‘maximum city’ together so strongly as a great vision and the fear of mortal dangers. Nothing gave it more stability in a crisis than the determination to forge ahead regardless and give its enemies short shrift. Nothing sustained it more than the image of a common enemy. Its stability was to be found in permanent mobilization. Hun
dreds of thousands stood ready, eager to step into the void into which hundreds of thousands would disappear in 1937. And nothing illustrated the emptiness of that void better than the crater previously filled by the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, that symbol of the Third Rome, now demolished and awaiting the construction of the Palace of the Soviets, the mid-point of the New World.

  3

  A Topography of the Disappeared: The Moscow Directory of 1936

  The introduction to the 1936 edition of the Directory for All Moscow contains the usual preamble: information about what had changed since the previous edition, the addition of new topics and changes in presentation. It invites its users to suggest improvements and to send these in to the editors at Moskovskii rabochii, Moskva 9, ulitsa Gor'kogo 15. But the editors, who are listed in small print – A. Morin, G. Vaintsvaig, Ia. Dneprovskii, A. Lilye, G. Voronezhskii, D. Karpov and Ia. Tsvankin – could not have known that this edition would be the last.1 It included the names of people who a year later had been arrested or shot. People who had been prominent had now become unpersons. The directory had now turned into an epitaph, a catalogue of the dead.