Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  What the Devil, is it not crystal clear that the nation has made an unprecedented, historical leap forward and that it is now in the process of recovering its equilibrium? This is the most hazardous moment of all! This forward leap has caught the entire world off its guard so that now we shall either succeed in introducing a new equilibrium into the world, or else – but we should not waste words on any possible alternatives.

  Alea iacta est. There is no longer any choice. Today, patriotism is indissolubly bound up with Bolshevik internationalism. Life at home is inseparable from its situation in the world. That is the reason why it may be necessary to lay down one’s life for Spain on the Spanish front or for Soviet China, etc., since it has become clear that, in so doing, one is dying for one’s own country, for its historical destiny, for its future, for its creative logos. To die – together with the Masais – beneath the banner of the great Stalin!22

  Thus, as he listens to the news, Ustrialov conducts a dialogue with himself in an attempt to achieve clarity and persuade himself of the validity of his convictions. Listening becomes a kind of auto-suggestion; he, the former émigré who belongs to no party and who keeps his distance from every party, works himself up to an identification with ‘the great Stalin’. The radio becomes a kind of interlocutor, a partner in the process of self-clarification and integration in the nation as a whole.

  Wreckers at work in the ether

  The tasks facing radio were also discussed during a session of the plenum of the Central Committee – at the meeting of 26 February 1937. V. S. Bogushevskii, editor-in-chief of Za sotsialisticheskuiu industrializatsiiu, enumerated the weak points of radio, highlighting the failings of the programme entitled ‘Latest News’. He noted the inadequate qualifications of the editors and their dependency on receiving the mainstream news from TASS, the reporters’ inability to bring out the inner weakness of fascism, resulting in a tendency to convey a positive image of conditions in Germany and Italy, the prevalence of ‘idle chatter’ instead of ‘agitation by means of facts’, and their extravagant praise for local bigwigs, outright incompetence and naïvety – these and similar criticisms shed light on the chaotic conditions that must have obtained in Soviet radio at a time when it was still being built up. As the chief speaker on the subject of radio, Bogushevskii did not confine himself to weaknesses and errors. He also detected the activities of wreckers – on 22 January, for example, the day of mourning commemorating Lenin’s death, or 23 January, the day when the judgement on the Trotskyite centre was handed down. On 22 January, the day of mourning, the radio stations had broadcast dance music, gypsy music, foxtrots, and so forth, albeit as a ‘technical experiment’. On 23 January, following the announcement of the sentencing of the accused and the report of their executions, the radio had played Chopin’s B minor sonata, with the Marche funèbre. That could not have been coincidence. The announcer said nothing about a funeral march; he had simply announced the Sonata in B flat minor. Otherwise, the intention of expressing sadness about the sentencing would have been too blatant. ‘The explanation must be that a contamination by Trotskyite elements and other repulsive people was at work here.’23 A ‘loathsome rabble’ had wormed its way into the offices of the radio station.

  This somewhat clumsy unmasking of sabotage in the radio shows that the political leadership was very well aware that one of radio’s key roles was the creation of the great Soviet community of feeling.

  15

  Soviet Art Deco: Time Preserved in Stone

  Building has a time of its own. It is as inert, as ponderous as the material used in building and as slow as the building process. Erecting a building calls for planning and preparation. And once the building is finished, it stands there, a monument to itself and its age. This is why a building that incorporates the style of its epoch extends into a new age that is unable to make sense of it. Buildings move towards completion even though the age that resolved on their construction has passed away. Now they just stand there in all their solidity; they are quite unlike an assertion or an argument that can be swept from the table in the course of a debate. Time works with an inertia of its own. This applies even to a historical moment like that of 1937–8. The long, slow pace of time characteristic of buildings manifested itself in the midst of a vertiginous rush of events – congresses, plenums, records, executions. 1937 saw the completion of spectacular buildings that had been designed or resolved on in competitions in 1930 or 1932. Because they had been conceived at an earlier time, the buildings completed in 1937 do not really ‘work’ any more. The inspiration of the Sturm und Drang phase of the end of the 1920s and early 1930s lives on in 1937 and even beyond. Has there ever been a stranger situation? While the banishing of ‘formalism’ from architecture was wreaking havoc in it, late masterpieces of constructivism were coming into being. One such was the Likhachev Works Palace of Culture, by Aleksandr Vesnin, which was opened in the summer of 1937. Buildings were completed combining the ‘dictatorship of the right angle’ with a new monumentalism – Lev Rudnev’s Frunze Military Academy – and in which a new monumental, decorative style was proclaimed, as can be seen in the apartment houses in Gorky Street designed by Arkadii Mordvinov.1 The lengthy time frames characteristic of architecture and construction appear resistant to the short-winded time frame of political rhetoric and the programmatic declarations of ‘socialist realism’. And yet, for the world of construction, the year 1937 represented an exceptional situation.

  On 30 August 1937 Pravda published an open letter attacking Aleksei Shchusev, the architect of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, as a saboteur of socialist construction. That was the signal for a general witch hunt intended to bring about the downfall of one of the leading Soviet architects as ‘head of a counter-revolutionary circle’. Shchusev had also been responsible for the design of Narkomzem, the constructivist building of the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, and the Hotel Moskva, which was still under construction. On 25 October 1937, Shchusev was expelled from the Association of Soviet Architects, although he was soon readmitted at the bidding of the Moscow Party leadership. He died a natural death in 1949 at the age of seventy-six, having played a leading role in the rebuilding of Soviet cities that had been destroyed in the war.2

  Shchusev’s fate was shared by many who had physically survived the year 1937, the majority of whom lived to reach what was for Soviet conditions something akin to a biblical age. This holds good in the first instance for architects who had received their training before 1917, and who had succeeded in the Soviet period notwithstanding the fact that they were former members of the tsarist Academy of Arts. Ivan Zholtovskii, for example, had been born in 1867 and had created a notable example of neoclassicism with a ‘neo-Palladian’ building in Mokhovaia Street, which had marked something of a turning point. He died in 1959. Ivan Fomin, who had been born in 1872, was a prominent architect in St Petersburg. With his ‘Doric buildings’, he too had notable successes in the neoclassical style in the early 1930s. Inspired by the new vistas opened up by the Soviet government, he died a natural death in 1936. Aleksei Shchusev (born in 1873), to whom we have already referred, had likewise completed some of his notable buildings before 1917 – the Art Nouveau church commemorating the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig and the new Kazan Railway Station building in Moscow. However, the creative centre of his life coincided with Soviet power. Vladimir Semenov, born in 1874, a graduate of the Academy of Arts, was a leading town planner after 1917 and played a decisive role in the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow. He died in 1960. Another leading architect, Vladimir Shchuko, who was born in 1878, had already made a name for himself before 1917 and was one of the prominent architects to have worked on the project for the Palace of the Soviets; he died of natural causes in 1939. Some of the architects associated with the avant garde survived, but fell into oblivion in the mid-1930s: Grigorii Barkhin (1880–1969), Nikolai Ladovskii (1881–1941), Il'ia Golosov (1883–1945), Aleksandr Nikolskii (1884–1953), Aleksandr Vesnin
(1883–1959), Viktor Vesnin (1882–1950), Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), Nikolai Miliutin (1889–1942), Vladimir Krinskii (1890–1971), Lazar' Lisitskii (1890–1941), Moisei Ginzburg (1892–1946), Ivan Leonidov (1902–1959).3 Konstantin Mel'nikov (born 1890) lived in utter seclusion. The star of the ‘Makhorka’ Pavilion of 1923, the architect of some of the most exciting club buildings and what was probably the best-known and most isolated private house in the Soviet capital, died in 1974.4 Boris Iofan, born in 1891, the architect of the Government House, of the Soviet Pavilion in Paris and the Palace of the Soviets, died in 1976 in his apartment in the Government House in which so many members of the government had lived and had been arrested. After his design for the military academy, Lev Rudnev (born 1885) had designed a further key building of the late Stalin era: the Lomonosov State University of Moscow in the Lenin Hills. He died in 1956. Nikolai Kolli (born in 1894) had designed the Tsentrosoiuz Building, together with Le Corbusier, as well as a number of metro stations. He died in 1966. They all seem to have been survived by Karo Alabian, who was born in 1897. Known as ‘Stalin’s architectural Caliban’, the architect of the Theatre of the Red Army and director of the first All-Union Congress of Architects in 1937, he died in 1995, having almost reached his centenary.5

  These facts express a living continuity that is by no means a given in the history of elites in twentieth-century Russia. But it is at the same time evidence of a discontinuity, a rupture, a disappearance at the pinnacle of artistic achievement – admittedly one that does not coincide precisely with the year 1937.

  The First All-Union Congress of Architects, 16–26 June 1937

  The principal event determining the development of architecture in 1937 was the first All-Union Congress of Architects, which opened on 16 June in the Hall of Pillars of the House of the Unions and lasted until 26 June. Originally, it had been scheduled to start sooner, and preparations had been under way since 1932. As with the first All-Union Congress of Writers in 1934, at which the associations and organizations that had existed until then were succeeded by a unified All-Union organization and an aesthetic doctrine – the doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ – similar measures had been initiated in 1934 in architecture. It had been hoped that the Fifth Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) would be held in Moscow and would bring some glamour to the city with such visitors as Le Corbusier and Ernst May. Between 1934 and 1937, the communist wing inside the Architects’ Association had done everything in its power to gain control of the forthcoming congress. Architects had been among those branded as Trotskyists in the hysterical atmosphere whipped up following the murder of Kirov. One of the most prominent cases involved Mikhail Okhitovich, an architect associated with the left in the 1920s, who took a sceptical view of the suitability of modernism for Russian conditions and who had adopted ‘disurbanist’ views. He had been expelled from the Party and then readmitted, but after 1934 he again came under the scrutiny of informers. In the upshot he was denounced as a ‘Bukharinite’ and ‘right-wing deviationist’ – he had come out in favour of individual housing for farmers who had been organized in collective farms. Solomon Lisagor, another prominent architect close to the left, was attacked as a ‘Trotskyist’. Okhitovich was arrested during the purge of 1935 and died in 1937. A reconstruction of the debates suggests that, while the blow fell on Okhitovich and Lisagor, the true targets were the ‘grand old men’ – Moisei Ginzburg, Aleksei Shchusev, Ivan Zholtovskii and others. Much of this looks like a conflict between the young architects and the ‘Old Guard’, a struggle of cliques from the periphery and the provinces who had made their way in Moscow – above all, the ‘Caucasian mafia’ – who objected to the dominance of Jewish and Russian architects. The arguments used in these debates – Trotskyism, nationalism, even social fascism, insufficient vigilance – were arbitrary and interchange able. They testified above all to the ambitious drive and controlling instincts of a particular group that had originated in the Caucasus and had formed around Karo Alabian, a communist architect who had grown up in the revolutionary underground movement.6

  But whipping the architects into line turned out to be a highly complex enterprise. The leading and the most respected architects in the association – especially abroad – represented constructivist and functionalist trends as well as an academic, neoclassical tendency. It was the ‘Grand Old Men’ who were in demand as delegates and at international conferences, and not the social climbers or architects with Party membership. This situation made it difficult for the Party faction in the Architects’ Association to comply with Lazar' Kaganovich’s demand for architects to take up arms against philistinism, nihilism and ‘purism’ and to fight for a majestic and truthful architecture.7 In the professional debates on architectural issues that were still conducted in public, no one could be in any doubt about who was and who was not regarded as an authority. The architects attacked as ‘formalists’ and ‘non-national nihilists’ – Ginzburg,8 the Vesnin brothers9 and Shchusev – rejected the criticism of the Party group and declared they would not take part in the congress unless the tone of the debate were modified. This was at a time when the show trial against Piatakov had just ended and the Central Committee resolutions against wrecking activities and in favour of increased vigilance had appeared. However, at the decisive preparatory meeting of the Party group on 4 and 5 March 1937, it turned out that the Party could only undermine the leading position of the ‘formalists’ administratively and by resorting to repressive measures. Alabian spoke up about the struggle against ‘simplification’ in architecture; he approved of the appropriation of the cultural heritage and the study of national traditions. He detected ‘enemies of the people’ even in the field of architecture and called for a faster transition to industrial methods and the radical lowering of building costs. Alabian attacked Ginzburg, Golts and Burov as spokesmen of a ‘formalist’ tendency. Ginzburg, who was said to be unable to tolerate criticism ‘from below’, was evidently the spokesman of the formalist trend, the ‘Trotsky of architecture’. Mel'nikov, Ginzburg and the Vesnins were referred to by name as architects who were unwilling to ‘change their views’ (perestroitsia). A debate developed about the opposing aesthetic positions. Mordvinov praised the architecture of the Palace of the Soviets as the most important proof of the superiority of Soviet architecture.10

  The congress was attended by 418 delegates and seventeen official foreign guests. It was visited by representatives of factories, trade union committees and other professional associations, who presented the congress with their views and their proposals for improving Soviet architecture. Communists were over-represented. Whereas only 10 per cent of the members of the Architects’ Association were Party members, 104 communists were present at the congress, an obvious pointer to the uncertainty felt by Party members in their leadership of the Architects’ Association. Of the Party members, seventeen came from Armenia, eleven from Georgia, six from Azerbaijan, twenty-eight from Ukraine; seventy-one delegates were registered as Jews, and 95 per cent of the participants were men. The breakdown by age is also informative: The majority – 61 per cent – were between twenty-five and forty, while 18 per cent were fifty and over.11 Among the foreign guests were Simon Breines from the USA and Edvard Heiberg from Denmark. The most prominent guest was undoubtedly the ‘doyen of modern architecture’: Frank Lloyd Wright.12

  The opening address was delivered by Karo Alabian, who was also general secretary of the organizing committee. He reported on the progress of construction in Moscow, above all on the major projects – the Palace of the Soviets, the Moscow–Volga Canal and the Metro. He saw these projects as representing the essence of the Soviet era. Alabian launched into a major dissection of formalism and undertook a revaluation of Soviet architectural history. He attacked Mel'nikov, whom he presented as the clearest embodiment of formalism and the inability to break with the past. In addition, he criticized Ginzburg, Sabsovich and the Vesnins, accusing them all of succumbing to the myth that aesthetic form fl
ows automatically from technical construction. Such a utilitarian viewpoint constituted a vulgarization and led to the impoverishment of architectural form. Alabyan dismissed constructivism as ‘box architecture’, of which public housing was the most characteristic expression. Mel'nikov, Ginzburg and the Vesnins had failed to break free from their past. Alabian went so far as to equate the projects of such architects with wrecking activities and sabotage, which set out to damage the health and well-being of the working class. He called for a conscious and definitive break with formalism and a commitment to a form of architecture that complied with the guidelines of socialist realism: ‘mastery of the classical heritage as well as the best that has been achieved by contemporary architecture’.13 In his view, the Moscow Metro and the Palace of the Soviets were perfect examples of the successful combination of art suitable to the communist era and the people. They combined ‘ideological and emotional expressiveness’, and united the wealth of the artistic and technical possibilities contained in the classical architectural heritage with the architectural heritage of the people and the nation. The congress passed resolutions condemning wreckers, spies and enemies of the people, while for their part architects were to commit themselves even more strongly than hitherto to putting ‘concern for mankind’ (Stalin) at the centre of their endeavours.