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Soviet travel brochures from the 1930s

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In 1928, Stalin established a government-run foreign travel agency under the name Intourist (a contracted portmanteau of Иностранный [foreign] турист [tourist]). Though it had by that point already evacuated its international obligation to foment world revolution, Stalin’s regime was still looking to raise interest in the fledgling socialist state. All of the following brochures targeted potential tourists from the most advanced capitalist nations in the West — Germany, England, France, the US.

Stylistically, these pieces vary. Many are rather naïve, pastoral, even vaguely Orientalist, especially with respect to the more “exotic” Soviet Republics. Continue reading →

Stalinism and Bolshevism

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Leon Trotsky
Socialist Review
(August 1937)

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Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavorable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy “sectarian.” Actually it is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.

The reaction against Marxism and Bolshevism

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Great political defeats provoke a reconsideration of values, generally occurring in two directions. On the one hand the true vanguard, enriched by the experience of defeat, defends with tooth and nail the heritage of revolutionary thought and on this basis strives to educate new cadres for the mass struggle to come. On the other hand the routinists, centrists and dilettantes, frightened by defeat, do their best to destroy the authority of the revolutionary tradition and go backwards in their search for a “New World.”

One could indicate a great many examples of ideological reaction, most often taking the form of prostration. All the literature if the Second and Third Internationals, as well as of their satellites of the London Bureau, consists essentially of such examples. Not a suggestion of Marxist analysis. Not a single serious attempt to explain the causes of defeat, About the future, not one fresh word. Nothing but clichés, conformity, lies and above all solicitude for their own bureaucratic self-preservation. It is enough to smell 10 words from some Hilferding or Otto Bauer to know this rottenness. The theoreticians of the Comintern are not even worth mentioning. The famous Dimitrov is as ignorant and commonplace as a shopkeeper over a mug of beer. The minds of these people are too lazy to renounce Marxism: they prostitute it. But it is not they that interest us now. Let us turn to the “innovators.”

Vanishing commissars 1.

The former Austrian communist, Willi Schlamm, has devoted a small book to the Moscow trials, under the expressive title, The Dictatorship of the Lie. Schlamm is a gifted journalist, chiefly interested in current affairs. His criticism of the Moscow frame-up, and his exposure of the psychological mechanism of the “voluntary confessions,” are excellent. However, he does not confine himself to this: he wants to create a new theory of socialism that would insure us against defeats and frame-ups in the future. But since Schlamm is by no means a theoretician and is apparently not well acquainted with the history of the development of socialism, he returns entirely to pre-Marxist socialism, and notably to its German, that is to its most backward, sentimental and mawkish variety. Schlamm denounces dialectics and the class struggle, not to mention the dictatorship of the proletariat. The problem of transforming society is reduced for him to the realisation of certain “eternal” moral truths with which he would imbue mankind, even under capitalism. Willi Schlamm’s attempts to save socialism by the insertion of the moral gland is greeted with joy and pride in Kerensky’s review, Novaia Rossia (an old provincial Russian review now published in Paris); as the editors justifiably conclude, Schlamm has arrived at the principles of true Russian socialism, which a long time ago opposed the holy precepts of faith, hope and charity to the austerity and harshness of the class struggle. The “novel” doctrine of the Russian “Social Revolutionaries” represents, in its “theoretical” premises, only a return to the pre-March (1848!) Germany. However, it would be unfair to demand a more intimate knowledge of the history of ideas from Kerensky than from Schlamm. Far more important is the fact that Kerensky, who is in solidarity with Schlamm, was, while head of the government, the instigator of persecutions against the Bolsheviks as agents of the German general staff: organised, that is, the same frame-ups against which Schlamm now mobilises his moth-eaten metaphysical absolutes.

The psychological mechanism of the ideological reaction of Schlamm and his like, is not at all complicated. For a while these people took part in a political movement that swore by the class struggle and appeared, in word if not in thought, to dialectical materialism. In both Austria and Germany the affair ended in a catastrophe. Schlamm draws the wholesale conclusion: this is the result of dialectics and the class struggle! And since the choice of revelations is limited by historical experience and…by personal knowledge, our reformer in his search for the word falls on a bundle of old rags which he valiantly opposes not only to Bolshevism but to Marxism as well.

At first glance Schlamm’s brand of ideological reaction seems too primitive (from Marx…to Kerensky!) to pause over. But actually it is very instructive: precisely in its primitiveness it represents the common denominator of all other forms of reaction, particularly of those expressed by wholesale denunciation of Bolshevism.

“Back to Marxism”?

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Marxism found its highest historical expression in Bolshevism. Under the banner of Bolshevism the first victory of the proletariat was achieved and the first workers’ state established. No force can now erase these facts from history. But since the October Revolution has led to the present stage of the triumph of the bureaucracy, with its system of repression, plunder and falsification — the “dictatorship of the lie,” to use Schlamm’s happy expression — many formalistic and superficial minds jump to a summary conclusion: one cannot struggle against Stalinism without renouncing Bolshevism. Schlamm, as we already know, goes further: Bolshevism, which degenerated into Stalinism, itself grew out of Marxism; consequently one cannot fight Stalinism while remaining on the foundation of Marxism. There are others, less consistent but more numerous, who say on the contrary: “We must return Bolshevism to Marxism.” How? To what Marxism? Before Marxism became “bankrupt” in the form of Bolshevism it has already broken down in the form of social democracy, Does the slogan “Back to Marxism” then mean a leap over the periods of the Second and Third Internationals…to the First International? But it too broke down in its time. Thus in the last analysis it is a question of returning to the collected works of Marx and Engels. One can accomplish this historic leap without leaving one’s study and even without taking off one’s slippers. But how are we going to go from our classics (Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895) to the tasks of a new epoch, omitting several decades of theoretical and political struggles, among them Bolshevism and the October revolution? None of those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt tendency has indicated any other course. So the question is reduced to the simple advice to study Capital. We can hardly object. But the Bolsheviks, too, studied Capital, and not badly either. This did not however prevent the degeneration of the Soviet state and the staging of the Moscow trials. So what is to be done? Continue reading →

Building in empty spaces (1959)

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New houses and real clarity
Ernst Bloch, translated by
Frank Mecklenburg
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Obstetric forceps have to be smooth, a pair of sugar-tongs not at all.

— Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (1918)

Today, in many places, houses look as if they were ready to travel. Although they are unadorned, or precisely because of that, they express their farewell. Their interior is bright and sterile like hospital rooms, the exterior looks like boxes on top of mobile poles, but also like ships. They have flat decks, portholes, gangways, railings; they shine white and to the south, and as ships they like to disappear. Western architecture is so sensitive that for quite some time it has indirectly sensed the war that is the embodiment of Hitler, and it gets ready for that war. Thus even the form of a ship, which is purely decorative, does not seem real enough for the motif of escape that most people in the capitalist world of war have. For some time now there have been projects in this world to build houses without windows, houses that are artificially illuminated and air-conditioned, that are completely made of steel; the whole thing is like an armored house. Although during its creation, modern architecture was basically oriented toward the outside, toward the sun and the public sphere, there is now a general increasing desire for an enclosed security of life, at least in the private sphere.

The initial principle of the new architecture was openness: it broke the dark cave. It opened vistas through light glass walls, but this will for balance with the outside world came doubtlessly too early. The de-internalization (Entinnerlichung) turned into shallowness; the southern delight for the world outside, while looking at the capitalist external world today, did not turn into happiness. For there is nothing good that happens on the streets, under the sun. The open door, the wide open window is threatening during the era of Fascisization (Faschisierung). The house might again become a fortress if not the catacombs. The wide window filled with a noisy outside world needs an outside full of attractive strangers, not full of Nazis; the glass door down to the floor really presupposes sunshine that looks in and comes in, not the Gestapo. And certainly not with a connection to the trenches of World War I, but definitely with the Maginot Line of World War II, even though it was futile, the plan of a subterranean city developed — as a city of safeguard. Instead of skyscrapers, the projects of “earth-scrapers” invite, the shining holes of groundhogs, the rescuing city that consists of basements. Above, in the daylight, on the other hand, the less real but decorative escape plan of a flying city occurred, utopia-ized in Stuttgart and also in Paris: the houses rise as bullet-like forms on top of a pole, or as veritable balloons they are suspended from wire ropes. In the latter case, the suspended buildings seem particularly isolated and ready for departure. But also these playful forms only demonstrate that houses have to be dreamed of, here as caves, there on top of poles.

But what if under such conditions a jump toward brightness is to be demonstrated? That has indeed been tried in architecture, but with the affirmedly uncomfortable desire for many windows and equally sterile plain houses and instruments. Certainly, those things presented themselves as the cleansing from the junk of the last century and its terrible decorations. But the longer that lasted, the more it became clear that the mere elimination was all that remained — within the limits of late bourgeois emptiness — it had to be that way. The longer that lasted, the clearer the inscription above the Bauhaus and the slogan connected to it emerged: Hurray, we have no ideas left. When a lifestyle is as decadent as the late bourgeois one, then mere architectural reform can no longer be shrouded but must be without soul. That is the result when between plush and tubular steel chairs, between post offices in Renaissance style and egg boxes there is no third thing that grips the imagination. The effect is the more chilling as there is no longer any hiding place but only illuminated kitsch, even if, which is indisputable, the beginning had been ever so clean, that is to say, vacuum clean. Continue reading →

Narkomzem [Наркомзем] in Moscow, by Aleksei Shchusev (built 1928-1933)

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Aleksei Shchusev.

Soviet architect Aleksei Shchusev

Plans & sketches.

Continue reading →

Repetition repetition repetition

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Repetition takes place in time and space. But the same may be said of everything aesthetic,[1] architectural or otherwise. Which of these has priority, then? Time or space? Empirically, the recognition of repeated instances is almost always a temporal affair. They take a little while to figure out, in other words. Some disagreement remains as to whether this procedure is more a function of memory or perception, however. In studies of repetition blindness, for example, it is unclear if the failure to recognize recurring items in a sequence owes primarily to one’s inability to notice similarities the second time something appears. Conflicting evidence indicates it could just as easily involve an inability to remember the qualities it displayed the first time around. Psychologists are still split over this question.[2]

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Repetition has been acknowledged as an important aspect of architecture and design for several centuries now, although it was seldom theorized until recently. Despite architecture’s usual preoccupation with problems of space, most repeating patterns or spatial arrangements require time to grasp. That is, unless they’re intuited all at once, in a single glance. One must first be allowed to perambulate the structure, eyes gliding along its surface. Continue reading →

Bauhaus chess

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R. Réti vs. S. Tartakower
Vienna tournament (1910)
Caro-Kann defense: 1-0

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1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 dxe4 4. Nxe4 Nf6 5. Qd3 e5 6. dxe5Qa5
7. Bd2 Qxe5 8. O-O-O Nxe4 9. Qd8 Kxd8 10. Bg5 Kc7 11. Bd8.

(Click through the pictures in the gallery below to view an enlarged version of the game’s sequence played on Josef Hartwig’s 1922 Bauhaus chess set).

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Made with help from:

Schachfiguren_1_01

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The hypermodern style

Richard Réti
Modern Ideas
in Chess (1923)

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The hypermodern style: Thus did [Savielly] Tartakower, the prominent chess master and writer on the game, describe the style of the youngest masters — Alekhin, Bogoljubow, and Breyer. That designation is not to be deemed unlimited praise; but still less censure. For Tartakower himself in later years has approached that style.

As we younger masters learned Capablanca’s method of play, by which each move is to be regarded as an element of a scheme, that no move is to be made for itself alone (contrary sometimes to [Paul] Morphy’s principle that every move should have its concomitant development), we began to see that moves formerly considered self-understood and made, as it were, automatically by every good player, had to be discarded. Continue reading →

Narkomfin — A web documentary by Luciano Spinelli and Natalia Melikova

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Natalia Melikova, the mastermind behind The Constructivist Project, is collaborating with Luciano Spinelli and others from Ogino Knauss on a new web documentary about Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow. This comes not too long after Isabella Willinger’s excellent documentary Away from All Suns, released late last year.

Their description of the project is reproduced below. For further information on Dom Narkomfin, consider the following:

Moisei Ginzburg’s & Ignatii Milinis’ Narkomfin Workers’ Collective for the People’s Commissariat of Finance (1928-1931)
Narkomfin upon opening (1930)
Narkomfin in the construction stage, with Moisei Ginzburg supervising (1929)
Nikolai Miliutin, author of Sotsgorod and editor of Sovetskaia arkhitektura, inside his penthouse suite atop Ginzburg & Milinis’ Dom Narkomfin (1932)

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NARKOMFIN — A web documentary

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Project in progress — expected completion spring 2014.

Authors: Luciano Spinelli and Natalia Melikova, with Inna Erosh and Stepa Dobrov.

Summary: NARKOMFIN is a web documentary project that captures the atmosphere of current life in 2013 in this historic constructivist building located in Moscow, Russia. The virtual platform of the project invites the viewer to explore the hallways, knock on doors, and get to know some of the inhabitants. A variety of possibilities for interaction with the space and people of Narkomfin allows for a subjective experience for each visitor. By entering some of the apartments, one will have a chance to listen to the residents tell about who they are, what kind of work they do, how the communal architecture influences their everyday life and why they live in this particular building.

Why: The architectural significance and the various circumstances surrounding the fate of the building are widely discussed. However, few can freely visit Narkomfin because of its limited access, therefore little is known about what it is actually like to live there. After having the opportunity to live there for a couple weeks, we wanted to know more about how people appropriated and interpreted their space inside this famous building. This project takes a closer look at the homes and people hidden behind the ribbon windows.

How: In our project, we applied a photo-ethnographic approach of the space, perceiving the long corridors through the viewfinder and meeting new people with our cameras in hand. Progressing from casual conversations, we then asked each of the participants identical questions. In this way, we were able to acquire general information as well as giving the residents an opportunity to share their opinions. More than just a subject in front of our lens, their participation influenced the development of the project. Those that did not want to partake, did not. Those that did, they opened up their worlds to us, shared their homes, their stories, and their talents.

When: 2013 (majority of material capture in May 2013, additional capture summer 2013).

Content: images, video, stop motion, audio, text.

Languages: English / Russian

Special thanks to the people that opened up their doors to our project and shared with us their stories! Continue reading →

Moisei Ginzburg, competition entry for the Palace of the Soviets (1931)

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In previous posts, I’ve tried to give some sense of the magnitude of the international competition for the Palace of the Soviets project in Moscow. So far I’ve dealt with some of the entries by German architects such as Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Erich Mendelsohn, and Hans Poelzig, as well as the Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s famous entry. This would turn out to be one of the last major Soviet competitions in which modernist proposals featured prominently. (Another competition, for the Commissariat of Heavy Industry [Наркомтяжпром], took place in Moscow around 1933-1934, but only submissions from Soviet architects were considered).

Moisei Ginzburg was the chief theoretician and, besides the Vesnin brothers, probably the most accomplished practitioner of architectural constructivism in the Soviet Union. His project for the Palace of the Soviets, jointly carried out with A. Gassenpfliug and S. Lisagor under the supervision of A.F. Loleita, a specialist in matters of construction, and S.Ia. Lifshits, an acoustic technician. It was without a doubt one of his most futuristic proposals to date, almost resembling a landed spaceship faced toward the Kremlin.

One might perhaps compare it with his earlier submission to the 1922-1923 Palace of Labor competition, in terms of its scale and purpose, as the architectural historian Selim Khan-Magomedov has done. But formally, Ginzburg’s vision for the Palace of the Soviets was much more advanced. The multi-tiered central building was designed with stepped storeys parabolically curved upward toward a skylight crowning the dome. His scheme for its main thoroughfares and points of access would have accommodated huge crowds of visitors and personnel, with a series of platforms, ramps, and stairs expediting circulation into and out of the Palace.

Courtyards and terraces were to surround the different structures in the ensemble, with covered walkways connecting them to one another. Not only with respect to its internal composition was the Palace of the Soviets meant to be broadly accessible, either, as the building was easily open to approach from without. The variety of volumes included in Ginzburg’s plan may have clashed stylistically with the preexisting urban fabric of Moscow, but it would have been spatially integrated rather elegantly.

A few paragraphs pertaining to Ginzburg’s Palace of the Soviets appear below in the original Russian, extracted  from Khan-Magomedov’s book on Moisei Ginzburg. See also his excellent Narkomfin building.

Поиски новых типов общественных зданий в первом периоде творчества Гинзбурга завершаются конкурсным проектом Дворца Советов (1932 г.), который выполнялся им совместно с А. Гассенпфлюгом и С. Лисагором при консультации А.Ф. Лолейта (конструкция) и С.Я. Лифшица (акустика). По масштабу и роли в ансамбле центра Москвы Дворец Советов сравним с Дворцом труда (конкурс 1922-1923 гг.). Близка даже в какой-то мере и программа этих зданий (большой и малый залы и Ñ‚. д.). Сравнивая выполненные Гинзбургом проекты Дворца труда и Дворца Советов, разделенные всего девятью годами видно, какой большой и сложный творческий путь прошел их автор. Объемно-пространственная композиция Дворца Советов необычна по трактовке для предыдущего творчества Гинзбурга. Как правило, в более ранних проектах он использовал два композиционных приема: членение здания на отдельные корпуса, соединенные крытыми переходами (павильонный тип), или создание сложной композиции из соединенных между собой различных по форме и величине объемов. Continue reading →

On “conference communism”

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Some thoughts in closing

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Fol­low­ing the ap­pear­ance of my be­lated re­port on “con­fer­ence com­mun­ism” a couple days ago, I re­ceived a num­ber of ap­pre­ci­at­ive com­ments, e-mails, and replies. It would seem I wasn’t alone in my rather low opin­ion of these con­fer­ences. A few of the people who sent me notes to this ef­fect caught me genu­inely off guard; it al­ways feels vin­dic­at­ing to know that oth­ers agree with you.

Pre­dict­ably, however, the re­sponses that came in from the speak­ers who ac­tu­ally par­ti­cip­ated in the event, es­pe­cially those who had been singled out for cri­ti­cism, were less than ap­pre­ci­at­ive. Some seemed to take it all quite per­son­ally — and one of them, George Cic­car­i­ello-Ma­h­er, went so far as to de­friend me on Face­book. Was a bit sur­prised by it, to be hon­est; I’d al­ways thought he had pretty thick skin, oth­er­wise. For the most part, I think, I’d re­frained from the ad hom­inem at­tacks and man­aged to keep my re­marks strictly ad rem. Maybe he felt that by at­tack­ing his cre­den­tials to speak on a giv­en sub­ject, I was thereby in­dir­ectly at­tack­ing his char­ac­ter. This was not my in­ten­tion.

Congress of Soviet deputies, 1918

Either way, it’s not like it mat­ters. I’d an­ti­cip­ated it any­way. Just goes to show you can’t please every­one. Continue reading →

Stalinist kitsch

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The title of this entry deserves some explanation. “Stalinist kitsch,” one might object, is a bit superfluous. Or redundant, rather. Everything is announced by simply saying “Stalinist,” after all. Doesn’t matter if it’s politics, aesthetics, whatever. It’s already assumed that it’s kitsch.

All the same, there’s plenty about Stalinism that deserves to be taken seriously. Not because it’s “right” about history or society or economics; no, nothing like that. Rather, it’s because whether we admit it or not, Stalin did seem to represent one solution (or at least stopgap) to the problem of mass society. Perhaps not a likable answer to the issues posed by modernity, but a likely one. This is something that Boris Groys, among others, has pointed out.

Moreover, though Stalin might have been more than a little lackluster as a theoretician — the primitiveness and crudity of his imagination was legendary — it’s not like he was completely ignorant. Least of all about Bolshevism and its various controversies over the years. He’d been in the party since 1903, so he was hardly a novice. And to be honest, many historians politically aligned with Stalinism wrote very rigorous, detailed accounts of their various objects of study. Though they may be a little vulgar and undertheorized at times, they’re preferable to a lot of the crap that’s published.

What’s even scarier is that those few explicitly Stalinist parties that still exist often have better politics than their soi-disant “Trotskyist” counterparts, who now operate more or less according to the logic of Stalinoid popfrontism, but without even the vague self-consciousness that Stalinists possessed. Sad times indeed.

Below are a bunch of the kitschier photos, posters, and artworks from the Stalin era. Click on any of the images to enlarge them. Furthermore, to compensate for this bit of lighthearted parody, I’m including Evtushenko’s somber 1961 poem, published in Pravda, on the “heirs of Stalin.”

Vladimirskii’s “Roses for Stalin” (1934)

The heirs of Stalin

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Mute was the marble. Mutely glimmered the glass.
Mute stood the sentries, bronzed by the breeze.
Thin wisps of smoke curled over the coffin.
And breath seeped through the chinks
as they bore him out the mausoleum doors.
Slowly the coffin floated, grazing the fixed bayonets.
He also was mute — his embalmed fists,
just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside.
He wished to fix each pallbearer in his memory:
young recruits from Ryazan and Kursk,
so that later he might collect enough strength for a sortie,
rise from the grave, and reach these unreflecting youths.
He was scheming. Had merely dozed off.
And I, appealing to our government, petition them
to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab,
and stop Stalin from ever rising again
and, with Stalin, the past. Continue reading →