Plan for "New Moscow" (April 1929)
Here’s another batch of early Soviet avant-garde architectural journals, from between 1929-1930. The 1929 one is the one I most recently worked on; the others were converted into PDFs back before I had perfected the method of separating out the text from the rest of the page. As a result, these are all in grayscale, though they remain very readable. The image quality is a little lower than on my more recent uploads. But here they are, so enjoy!
A Young Nadezhda Krupskaia
The problem of the “socialist city” introduced by Sabsovich was not exclusively pondered over by architects and urban planners. Indeed, quite a number of prominent Soviet officials weighed in on the matter, from the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, to the renowned Bolshevik and member of the Politburo Grigorii Zinoviev, all the way to Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia.
Krupskaia, who will be the subject of the present post and whose writings will be included along with it, had largely been relegated to the sidelines of Soviet politics by 1929-1930. The Stalinist bloc had by then established itself on fairly firm footing in the political sphere, but knew that Krupskaia was too symbolically important to the Revolution to silence altogether. So Krupskaia was still able to publish some political articles here and there, and became a popular pedagogical and matriarchal figure for the young Soviet regime for her writings on education and children.
In 1929, when the economist Sabsovich published his seminal article on the Socialist city, Krupskaia became intrigued by the prospect of a new mode of social and municipal reorganization. Early on, she sided with Sabsovich’s proposal to overcome the antithesis of town and country with a more uniform system of settlement. She thus wrote her article, “Cities of the Future,” which can be found on pages 161-165 of the volume uploaded below, in which she announced her support for Sabsovich’s Urbanist plan. As a correlative of that plan, in which Sabsovich had proposed that children have their own “little cities” (детьÑкие городки), Krupskaia responded by writing an article posing the question, “Where will Children Live in the Socialist City?” This can be found between pages 206-209.
Also, as the competition for the “Green City” of Moscow heated up, Krupskaia offered her input, as she (amongst other Soviet intellectuals) tried to conceptualize a city for workers’ rest and leisure.
The articles:
Sabsovich’s “The USSR in (literally ‘after’) 15 Yearsâ€
In July 1929, the economist Leonid Sabsovich sparked a debate regarding the future of Soviet urbanism with an article he wrote for Плановое ХозÑйÑтво (Planned Economy), entitled «Проблема города» (“The Problem of the City”). Sabsovich was convinced that the major urban centers of the USSR were overcrowded and overpopulated; they needed to be reduced to a more manageable size, while preserving the industrial base they provided. At the same time, he considered the countryside to be far too provincial and culturally isolated to remain in the state it was in at that point. So Sabsovich proposed instead a uniform distribution of the population at regular intervals, of interconnected “socialist cities” — both industrial cities and “agro-cities.” These would be evenly populated, with between thirty and fifty thousand inhabitants each.
Sabsovich’s position came to be called the “urbanist” vision of Soviet municipal reformation. The widely-respected group of modernist architects — the brothers Leonid, Aleksandr, and Viktor Vesnin — endorsed his proposal. They all saw Sabsovich’s proposal as a way to overcome what Marx, Engels, and Lenin had termed “the antithesis between town and country.” Reduce the size of the filthy, noisy, and overcrowded mega-cities, Sabsovich argued, and disperse the population into new municipal units that could still maintain their industrial productivity. Conversely, these measures would reorganize the largely peasant population of the various Soviet Republics and grant them access to the culture, education, and opportunity that larger towns would make available. Quite ambitiously, Sabsovich thought that the entire population of the USSR could be redistributed accordingly within a period of ten years — or two five-year plans. He thus wrote a wildly utopian book under the title of СССРчерез 10 лет (The USSR in 10 Years), elaborating his vision and stressing the practical feasibility of the plan. Later, he would revise this figure to a more modest (but still outlandish) fifteen years, and stressed the central importance of this goal to the greater project of social transformation under communism.
Against Sabsovich’s notion of the middle-path between town and country, the sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich and the renowned Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg would oppose their idea of “disurbanism,” abandoning the notion of centralized resettlement altogether, advancing instead their notion of a “linear city.” This would lead to the first major split in the editorship of the journal Ð¡Ð¾Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼ÐµÐ½Ð½Ð°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° (Modern Architecture), as Ginzburg and the Vesnins for the first time found themselves at odds with one another. Luckily, by then, the position of main editor of the magazine had passed on to Roman Khiger, so the one side did not totally drown out the other. Khiger clearly sided with Ginzburg and Okhitovich, however, and so Sabsovich was forced to promote his viewpoint from the pages of Плановое ХозÑйÑтво and the various books he managed to publish through Генплан (Genplan, the central planning agency of the Soviet Union at the time). The Urbanist-Disurbanist dispute would continue through until 1931, when both sides were reigned in for utopian speculation. At that point, a number of foreign architects — Le Corbusier and André Lurçat from France, and Bruno Taut, Hannes Meyer, and Ernst May from Germany — were called in to assist in the process of planning Soviet urbanism. Their presence would in turn become unwelcome by 1937, at the height of the Stalinist terror, when the state would hand down the order that all foreign experts exit the country, under suspicion of “sabotaging” Soviet progress.
The following is the original journal article that sparked the whole controversy, reproduced in its entirety:
Nikolai Ladovskii's Rationalist Metro Station in Moscow (1931)
Not all of the early Soviet architectural avant-garde was “Constructivist,†strictly speaking. Though this was the title often generically ascribed to all modernist architecture coming out of Russia, only those pieces produced by the architectural group OSA can be considered constructivist. OSA’s self-proclaimed position was that of constructivism, which was founded on the principle of the “functional method†of design, as Ginzburg and the Vesnin brothers described it.
An earlier avant-garde group, ASNOVA, had been founded in 1923 by Nikolai Ladovskii, Nikolai Dokuchaev, Vladimir Krinskii, and El Lissitzky (though Lissitzky spent most of his time abroad). This school of architectural thought was deeply informed by the principles of abstract Suprematism in painting, the style invented by Kazimir Malevich some years before. In fact, Lissitzky’s PROUN series led directly into his architectural phase of production.
As opposed to the Constructivists in OSA, which was founded two years later (in 1925), the premise of architectural Rationalism, as it came to be called, was formalistic, rather than functional. The members of ASNOVA appealed to evidence gleaned from the study of psychotechnics, a science imported from Germany and America, to claim that certain formal shapes and patterns of design had a direct effect on the psychology of those who viewed the structure of a building. Once these formal principles could be discerned, they could be used to produce an ideological effect, lifting viewers out of their state of false consciousness and inspiring their participation in the construction of the new society.
Nikolai Dokuchaev was, next to Ladovskii, the main theoretical exponent of Rationalism in architecture. With Lissitzky in Germany, working on periodicals like G, ABC, and Merz, and the majority of Krinskii’s time devoted to teaching and designing new projects, it fell to Dokuchaev and Ladovskii to explicate ASNOVA’s programmatic stance. In the following series of articles, taken from the early Soviet periodical СоветÑкое иÑкуÑÑтво (Soviet Art), Dokuchaev compares the Soviet Constructivist architecture of the OSA group with architectural parallels he sees in the capitalist West. He criticized the Constructivists’ “functional method,†equating it with the spare style of Functionalism that was prominent in Germany at the time. Then, in a later article, published in the journal СтроительÑтво МоÑквы (Building Moscow) [the issue is reproduced in full], Dokuchaev lays out his proposal for the Socialist city of Magnitogorsk, one of the first of many experimental cities that were planned to be built.
These articles and the one complete issue can be downloaded below:
Mel’nikov’s Proposal for the Laboratory of Sleep (1930)
Included in this post is the original issue of Building Moscow (СтроительÑтво МоÑквы), in which the general planning schemes for the proposed “Green City†of Moscow were submitted. Contributors to this competition included some of the premier architects and city-planners of the day: Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch of OSA, Nikolai Ladovskii of ARU (a splinter group of ASNOVA), and Konstantin Mel’nikov, who was more of an independent (his membership in the different avant-garde architectural societies of the day varied over time).
The plans were wildly ambitious, and, unfortunately, none of them were realized. Nevertheless, the ambition and utopianism of their proposals remain as fascinating and haunting today as ever. Haunting, because these plans were so crudely shoved aside by Kaganovich and the Stalinist bureaucracy — because the ideas survived as artifacts long after their potential for realization had passed, because their fantasy has since outlived history and continues to linger over it, like a ghost. Thus, the fact that these science fictions were discarded, placed on the Hegelian “slaughterbench of history,†did not mean that they altogether vanished without a trace. They survive, spectrally, as testaments to a society that could have been.
The extraordinary ambitions of the Soviet planners were declared unrealistic and impracticable. And indeed, given the Soviets’ technological and material limitations at that time, they may well have been impossible. But such a verdict has often been passed on past visions of the future, and utopian speculation in general. Yet the modernists who took part in this competition felt that such utopianism was not only warranted, but required by a revolutionary society like the Soviet Union. Under capitalism, they argued, utopianism was a waste of time and impossible to realize. Now that the October Revolution had overturned these social relations, however, utopia was at last realizable, and so fantastic visions of the future were at last justified.
In any case, this issue contains Ginzburg and Barshch’s reproduction of their famous Disurbanist scheme for the Green city, which they had first unveiled in an issue of Modern Architecture (Ð¡Ð¾Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼ÐµÐ½Ð½Ð°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð°) a month before. It also includes Mel’nikov’s mysterious and intriguing proposals for a “Laboratory of Sleep,†an “Institution for the Transformation of the Perspective of Man,†and a “Sonata of Sleep.†Ladovskii’s project for “the rationalization of rest and socialist living†saw him experimenting with his notion of a parabolic city within the municipal limits of Moscow. The rationalization of rest and sleep were indeed very important when it came to the Green City; Le Corbusier mentioned over and over his delight at the Soviets’ abolition of the seven-day week, replaced now by a five-day cycle of working for four days and resting on the fifth.
Below is the original issue, digitized and restored to the best of my ability from the microfiche copy:
Public-House for 100 People (1930)
According to legend, the Soviet sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich wandered into the VKhUTEIN (ВХУТЕИÐ) studios one day in the summer of 1929. He left after a short while, having only been noticed by a few students and instructors. Okhitovich returned the next morning, this time storming directly into the office of the esteemed Constructivist architect and theorist, Moisei Ginzburg. Okhitovich then promptly locked the door, sequestering the surprised Ginzburg and himself inside the office. Ginzburg, whose work had hitherto mainly been focused on the problem of the collective dwelling and its place in the modern city, was known to have been an enthusiastic supporter of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme. In fact, he had personally translated extracts from Corbusier’s book on city-planning for the inaugural issue of Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Ð¡Ð¾Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼ÐµÐ½Ð½Ð°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð°) in 1925. After an hour and-a-half of heated discussion, however, Ginzburg emerged from his office with Okhitovich a convinced Disurbanist. The suddenness of his conversion was stunning. He would later suffer a great deal of criticism for his perceived fickleness in this matter. But Ginzburg would remain committed to the Disurbanist vision despite pressure from his friends and colleagues (Sabsovich and the Vesnin brothers) to revert to his earlier position. Ginzburg only relinquished his allegiance to this philosophy of decentralization after Stalin’s government stepped in and put a stop to all this “utopian” speculation, as they called it.
Here are a few more issues of СтроительÑтво МоÑквы:
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1929) – â„– 5
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1929) – â„– 6
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1930) – â„– 6
Diagram for the Proposed Reconstruction of Moscow
 СтроительÑтво МоÑквы, pronounced “Stroitel’stvo Moskvy,” was a Soviet journal published from 1924-1941. In the first couple years of its existence, its focus was primarily on the construction industry and its activities in Moscow, talking about city renovation following the end of the devastating Civil War. Its articles during this period were of a mostly journalistic nature, reporting recent developments and discussing new building proposals. One section toward the end was usually reserved for a “Chronicle of Foreign Technology,” in which new technological achievements in the West were detailed.
Around 1927, however, the focus of the journal shifted to more theoretical matters, absorbing some of the avant-garde influences of magazines like SA, which was reflected by some of the more programmatic articles it featured. The nature of modern architecture was discussed, in a way that was slightly more inclusive than the strictly Constructivist SA, under the editorship of Ginzburg and the Vesnins (and later Khiger). Nikolai Ladovskii published several articles in Building Moscow, as well as his protégés Krutikov and Krasil’nikov. Some of the more traditional, academic architects were also able to publish during this period.
Between 1929 and 1931, the subject of greater city planning was introduced to the journal, with a great deal of attention devoted to the plans to reconstruct Moscow, overseen by Stalin’s henchman Kaganovich. The competition for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, planned for construction right outside the Kremlin, was also a major subject dealt with by Building Moscow. After 1932 or so, with the results of the competition in, the journal slowly began to drift into a neoclassicist direction, where it would remain until it ceased publication in the leadup to war with Germany in 1941.
Anyway, here are another few issues of the journal, of a more avant-garde and theoretical flavor, talking about urbanism and design:
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 5
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 6
Aleksandr Sil'chenkov's Proposal for the "House of Industry" Project, 1929
Another long overdue update. My two-month absence can be explained by a series of personal matters to which I’ve had to attend, as well as by an exceedingly laborious part of my research in which I’ve been involved. This post will share some of the fruits of that labor, however, providing a sneak-peak into some of the subjects I’ve been working on. I flatter myself to think that I am also hereby contributing to the further democratization of knowledge, freeing long-forgotten documents from their obscurity in old libraries and distant archives. But the truth is that I have been the beneficiary of so much of the work undertaken by people with similar motives, scanning valuable documents and thereby disseminating their information, that I feel this is the least I could do.
Cutting to the matter at hand, the files attached to this post are just some of the old avant-garde journals which I’ve been carefully converting to a readable PDF format, in full-text versions that include illustrations as well as raw text. The difference between these files and the ones I digitized from Ð¡Ð¾Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼ÐµÐ½Ð½Ð°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° late last year is that I actually never encountered the physical documents that I was working with. These rare documents were only accessible to me in microfiche and microfilm format, preserved as part of Columbia University’s and the New York Public Library’s effort to catalogue early Soviet periodicals. Some of these microform documents were in good condition, with minimal dust and other imperfections. Others, unfortunately, were not.
To briefly describe the process by which I digitized these journals (for those who might be interested or are perhaps considering similar work), I shall here sketch out the major steps it involved. First, I had to create a makeshift light-table separate from the actual microform scanners at the library, which tend to produce extremely shoddy and unreadable facsimiles. I then proceeded to photograph each individual frame of microfilm or microfiche with a digital camera. I personally do not own a camera with a very high-resolution optical lens (this requires something like a 40-100x zoom), so I instead removed one of the detachable high-zoom lenses from one of the scanners and then shot my own pictures at my camera’s maximum zoom through this second lens. Anyone who has better equipment than I did can easily bypass this step.
It took a while to get used to taking good shots of each individual frame, but once I had gathered all of them I loaded them onto my computer and began running them through image-processing software. The number of programs I ended up using, which probably could be simplified by anyone who knows how to work with images better than I, included Aperture, Photoshop, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). If anyone is interested in the actual adjustments I made to each file to render them more readable, they can inquire in the comments section. I shall spare my readers these boring details. Anyway, clarifying the text portions of these journals I found often distorted the images that appeared alongside them, and so I decided to process each page with images twice, once for the images and once for the text. I then mapped on some cleaned-up versions of the pictures onto the cleaned-up texts and ran the resulting images through the ABBYY FineReader text-recognition program.
The final product of this whole confounded process can be found below. Enjoy! More will be coming soon. I’ve catalogued the entire run of СтроительÑтво МоÑквы from 1926-1932, СоветÑÐºÐ°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° from 1931-1934, and a number of assorted articles relating to architecture from the journals СоветÑкое иÑкуÑÑтво, Плановое хозÑйÑтво, and Ð ÐµÐ²Ð¾Ð»ÑŽÑ†Ð¸Ñ Ð¸ культура. They shall be forthcoming. Here are some of the ones I’ve finished so far:
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 9
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1931) – â„– 8
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1930) – â„– 1
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1929) – â„– 1
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 4
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 2
Barsch and Ginzburg, Proposal for the Green City (1930)
From Le Corbusier’s Precisions on the Present
State of Architecture and City Planning (1930)
*****
I am not trying to learn Russian, that would be a wager. But I hear people saying krasni and krassivo. I question. Krasni means red, krassivo means beautiful. Before [the Revolution], they say, the terms meant the same: red and beautiful. Red was beautiful.
If I base myself on my own perceptions, I affirm: red is what is a living being, life, intensity, activeness; there is no doubt.
So naturally I feel I have the right to admit that life is beautiful, or that the beautiful is life.
That little linguistic mathematics is not so ridiculous when one is preoccupied with architecture and planning.
*****
The USSR has decided to carry on a general program of equipment for the country: the five-year plan. It is being carried out. It was even decided to concentrate the greater part of the product of present work on carrying out this program: that is why there is no longer any butter on the spinach here,nor any more caviar in Moscow; the savings are used to make foreign exchange.