The House of Government

9

THE ETERNAL HOUSE

In September 1929, the “proletarian” literary journal October published Andrei Platonov’s story “Doubting Makar.” Makar is a peasant who, like all peasants, “does not know how to think because he has an empty head over clever hands.” Makar’s village chairman, Comrade Lev Chumovoi, on the other hand, does a lot of thinking because he has “a clever head, but empty hands.” One day Makar makes iron ore out of mud, but soon forgets how he did it. Comrade Chumovoi punishes him with a large fine, and Makar sets off for Moscow “to earn himself a living under the golden heads of all the temples and leaders”:

“Just where exactly is the center around here?” Makar asked the militiaman.

The militiaman pointed downhill and informed him:

“Next to the Bolshoi Theater, in that gully down there.”

Makar descended the hill and found himself between two flower beds. On one side of the square was a wall, on the other, a building with pillars. These pillars were holding up four harnessed iron horses, but they could have been a lot thinner since the horses were not very heavy.

Makar looked around the square searching for some kind of pole with a red flag, which would indicate the middle of the central city and the center of the entire state, but instead of a pole there was a stone with an inscription on it. Makar propped himself against the stone in order to stand at the very center and experience a feeling of respect for himself and his state. Makar sighed happily and began to feel hungry. He walked down to the river where he saw an amazing apartment building being built.

“What are they building here?” he asked a passerby.

“An eternal house of iron, concrete, steel, and clear glass!” responded the passerby.

Makar decided to drop by in order to do a bit of work and get something to eat.

There was a guard at the door. The guard asked:

“What do you want, blockhead?”

“I’m a bit on the hollow side, so I’d like to do a little work,” declared Makar.

“How can you work here when you don’t have a single permit?” said the guard sadly.

At this point a bricklayer came up and started listening eagerly to Makar.

“Come to the communal pot in our barracks—the boys there will feed you,” said the bricklayer to Makar helpfully. “But you can’t sign up with us right away because you live on your own, which means you’re a nobody. You’ve got to join the workers’ union first, and then undergo class surveillance.

And so Makar went to the barracks to eat from the common pot in order to nurture himself for the sake of a better future fate.¹

The eternal house they were building was officially called the House of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars, commonly known as the House of Government. It was designated for leaders with golden heads and designed by a man named Boris Iofan.

For most of the 1920s, top-ranking Soviet officials had been camping out in hotels and palaces converted into dormitories (Houses of Soviets). Everyone knew that the arrangement was temporary: the Left expected the imminent death of all domesticity; the Right looked forward to turning the Houses of Soviets into proper homes; and the growing contingent of foreign visitors required “large, well-appointed hotels with large comfortable suites of two to three rooms, with a bath, etc.” (The most desirable were the First and Second Houses of Soviets, formerly the National and the Metropol Hotels.)²

In January 1927, when the Right was still on the rise, Rykov, in his capacity as head of government, formed a Commission for the Construction of the House of the Central Executive Comittee and Council of People’s Commissars and appointed Boris Iofan head architect. Iofan was born in an Odessa Jewish family in 1891, received an Odessa Art School diploma in 1911, worked as an assistant architect in St. Petersburg, and, in 1914, emigrated to Italy, where he graduated from the Higher Institute of the Fine Arts in Rome and started practicing as an architect. In 1921 he joined the Italian Communist Party and, in 1924, acted as cicerone to the visiting Rykov family. Later that year, he had accepted Rykov’s invitation to return to Russia. His first two projects were a garden city for the workers at the Shterovskaia Hydroelectric Dam in Ukraine (1924) and a communal workers’ settlement on Rusakov Street in Moscow (1925). No other architect was considered for the House of Government commission.³

At its first meeting on January 20, 1927, the commission, chaired by Central Committee Secretary Avel Enukidze, decided to build the House of Government between the Nikitskie Gates and Kudrinskaia Square. It was to be seven stories: the ground floor was to be occupied by shops, the rest to be divided into two wings: one with three-room apartments, the other, with five-room apartments (two hundred apartments in all). The House was to be “open from all four sides” and to possess “high-quality” facilities, including central heating, parquet floors, hot water, and gas stoves. It was to be built of reinforced concrete, with brick walls and a metal roof; the construction was to be completed by the fall of 1928; the total cost was to be three million rubles.⁴

A month later, the commission decided to double the overall number of apartments, add some four-room apartments, supply the five-room apartments with special rooms for servants, double the total cost, and move the location to Starovagankovsky Alley, next to the Central Archive (the site of the future Lenin Library). Three weeks later, the commission decided to tear down the Central Archive. Two and a half months later, on June 24, 1927, it made “the final decision” to build the House of Government in the Swamp.⁵

Boris Iofan

The new location had some serious disadvantages. Building a large structure in the Swamp meant that the ground level had be raised (by at least half a meter above the level of the 1908 flood, or about 10.57 meters overall), the embankment reinforced, and the building itself supported (by about three thousand reinforced concrete piles, sunk into the bedrock five to fifteen meters below). The extra cost and effort were deemed justifiable, however, because of the site’s proximity to government offices and its relatively low density of development. The clearing of the area involved the closure of the Wine and Salt Yard, the relocation of the Regional Courthouse (the former Assembly of the Justices of the Peace), the tearing down of three residential buildings and more than twenty warehouses, the eviction of approximately one hundred permanent residents, and the transfer of the lumber yard belonging to the Electric Tram Power Station to the territory of the former Smirnov Vodka Factory.

A few months later, the Construction Commission also decided to straighten All Saints Street and demolish the Swamp Market (beginning with the stone and metal warehouses and the public toilet). At the same time, Iofan asked Enukidze’s permission to tear down the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker in order to build a detached kindergarten and day-care center. The State Historical Preservation Workshop, which was housed inside St. Nicholas, put up a strong resistance, claiming that the church was a part of the seventeenth-century Averky Kirillov Residence, and thus a much needed reminder of “the mutually advantageous proximity of religion and the ruling class” under the old regime. More to the point, they argued that the territory of the church was not large enough for a proper House of Government children’s facility complete with sunlit gardens and playgrounds. The Central Executive Committee ordered the Historical Preservation Workshop to vacate the premises, but then concurred with the size argument and decided to incorporate the children’s facility into the House of Government No. 2, to be built on the site of the former Swamp Market. The church was spared (and the second House of Government was never built).⁶

On April 29, 1928, the Moscow Regional Engineering Bureau issued a permit authorizing construction. The building was to be made of reinforced concrete with outer walls of brick. The bureau “considered it possible to allow, by way of exception, the construction of residential buildings ten stories high, instead of six, as prescribed by a binding regulation of the presidium of the Moscow City Soviet, with each stairway serving twenty apartments, instead of twelve, as prescribed by the same regulation.” The proposed complex consisted of seven attached residential buildings varying in height from eight to eleven stories, a movie theater for 1,500 people, a grocery store, and a club for 1,000 people, containing a theater, cafeteria, and various sports facilities. It stretched the length of All Saints Street from the Drainage Canal to the Bersenev Embankment, and was centered on three landscaped courtyards connected by tall archways.⁷

The residential wings were to include 440 three-, four-, and five-room apartments, not counting the special rooms set aside for the janitors and guards. Each apartment was to have a kitchen with gas stove and icebox, a toilet, a bathroom with hot water and shower, a ventilation system, a garbage chute, hot water radiators in special niches under the windows, and a large entrance hall that could be partitioned into two separate spaces, one of which “could serve as a place where servants could rest.” All garbage was to be burned in basement incinerators, “liquids and feces” evacuated into the municipal sewage system, and snow melted in special concrete pits and drained into the river. The laundry was to be located in a separate building.⁸

Bersenev Embankment. The building on the right is being torn down in preparation for the construction work.

House of Government construction site (facing the Kremlin)

The sinking of the piles began on March 24, 1928. The piles (3,520 altogether) were delivered to the site by three traveling cranes and lifted onto eight pile-driving rigs by electric winches; the same winches were used for hoisting the steam pile hammers, which ranged from two thousand to twelve thousand kilograms in weight. Cement mixers were placed in special carts and transported as needed. Sand and gravel were sorted and washed on the other side of the Ditch and delivered to the site by means of an aerial tramway. Much of the equipment had been transferred to the Swamp from the newly completed Volkhov Hydroelectric Dam. The workers came from the Moscow Employment Office or just wandered in.⁹

Makar settled into the life of the building of the house the passerby had called eternal. First he ate his fill of nutritious, black kasha in the workers’ barracks, and then went to look at the construction work. All around, the earth was scarred with pits, people were scurrying about, and machines of unknown name were driving piles into the soil. Cement gruel was pouring from spouts, and other productive events were also taking place before one’s eyes. It was obvious that a house was being built, but not clear for whom. But Makar was not interested in who was going to get what: he was interested in technology as a future boon for all the people. Makar’s commander from his native village, Comrade Lev Chumovoi, would, on the contrary, have become interested in the distribution of apartments in the future house, and not in the steam pile hammers, but only Makar’s hands were literate, and not his head; therefore, all he could think about was what he could make.¹⁰

Most workers were like Makar: seasonal laborers who came to Moscow to get away from Comrade Lev Chumovoi and to “nurture themselves for the sake of a better future fate.” This called for special vigilance: the bricklayer who tells Makar that he will have to join the workers’ union first, and then undergo class surveillance knows what he is talking about. The Construction Workers’ Union warned repeatedly that “the presence, among the unemployed, of a significant number of people who are alien to the Soviet order, do not truly need work, have a permanent income from temporary jobs including petty trade and artisanship, retain close links to the peasant way of life, and possess skills that have not yet been classified, … presents the Moscow Employment Office with the task of carefully checking all the unemployed.” Sixty percent of all union members were seasonal laborers who had to be “watched more closely at the time of hiring and then again in their day-to-day work.” In March 1928, when work on the House of Government was just getting under way, the Trans-Moskva District Party Committee declared that “the most common diseases” among the district’s workers were “(a) vulgar egalitarianism with regard to the city and the countryside, different kinds of workers, workers and specialists, etc.; (b) peasant attitudes (in particular, in connection with grain requisitioning); (c) trade loyalties; (d) mistrust regarding the rationality or feasibility of various campaigns (e.g., the rationalization of work, seven-hour workday, etc.); (e) anti-Semitism; (f) religious beliefs, etc.”¹¹

House of Government construction site (facing the power station)

One way to change the workers’ consciousness was to change their “social being”: the construction commission kept asking for mittens, jackets, pants, guards’ uniforms, “permits for goods in particularly high demand,” and, most urgently, living space. (As of late 1927, “the actual average living space of 5.57 square meters per person” in the Trans-Moskva district “continued to decline owing to the growth of the population and the deterioration of the existing living space.”) More important was the direct work on consciousness in the form of rallies, lectures, question-and-answer sessions, “construction workers’ congresses,” “production conferences,” literacy campaigns, newspaper subscriptions, the establishment of Lenin shrines (“little red corners” in workers’ barracks, analogous to the “red,” or icon corners in Orthodox Christian dwellings), and, in particular, repeated acts of public denunciation and confession known as “criticism and self-criticism” (“a powerful tool aimed at mobilizing the masses for the implementation of Party decisions”). Workers were to become “activists,” and activists were to expose evil by exposing its human agents. As one member of the Construction Workers’ Union said at a meeting of the Commission for Assistance to Worker-Peasant Inspection: “All the activists, as soon as they notice a parasite, must report to the commission right away. Only in this way will we be able to fulfill Lenin’s commandments.” Platonov’s Makar is determined to fulfill Lenin’s commandments. When the parasites with clever heads and empty hands ignore his invention of a special hose for pumping cement, he takes his case to the Worker-Peasant Inspection (“they like complainers and all kinds of aggrieved people over there”). His main sources of inspiration are Lenin’s deathbed articles, faithfully paraphrased for him by his friend Petr. “‘Our institutions are shit,’ read Petr from Lenin, while Makar listened, marveling at the precision of Lenin’s mind. ‘Our laws are shit. We know how to prescribe, but not how to execute. Our institutions are full of people who are hostile to us, and some of our comrades have become pompous bureaucrats and work like fools.’”¹²

House of Government construction site (facing the river)

In November 1927, as the site for the new House of Government was being cleared, the head of the Moscow Trade Union Council, Vasily Mikhailov, told the Trans-Moskva Party conference that improving the quality of the workers’ cafeterias was one of the Moscow Party Committee’s highest priorities—“because the workers have been telling us that there are one or two flies floating in every bowl, probably to enhance the flavor.” Three years later, the bureau of the Trans-Moskva Party Committee found that the quality of the cafeteria food at the district’s construction sites had not improved. “In some cases, the poor quality of the food exceeds all limits: in Cafeteria No. 43, seasonal workers were served spoiled food with maggots in it.” In September 1932, the House of Government construction site was housing six hundred people in six barracks with leaky roofs. According to the district’s control commission, “the barracks are in an unsanitary condition. There is not enough light. There are 8–10 workers for every 6–7 meters of space. There is no fuel for the winter. Party, state, and union officials never come to the dorm; cultural work is organized poorly.” According to the Moscow branch of the Construction Workers’ Union, this was true throughout the city. “Not all construction sites have boxes for complaints; articles from various newspapers are not being clipped and sorted; elements engaged in bureaucratic perversions of the class line in practical work are not being unmasked.”¹³

House of Government construction site (facing the Cathedral of Christ the Savior)

One of the most obvious consequences of poor supervision was drunkenness and other forms of “degeneration.” As one activist and foreman-in-training by the name of Oleander told the Extraordinary Congress of Construction Workers in February 1929, “the workers at my construction site tell me: Comrade Oleander, how can you lead if your own Communists spend our last kopeks carousing with young ladies?” Makar, too, notices that among the clever people with empty hands are “a great variety of women dressed in tight clothing indicating that they wish to be naked,” and that the parasite in charge of the trade union office “had read Makar’s note through the mediation of his assistant—a rather good-looking and progressive girl with a thick braid.” But the real danger, pointed out by Lenin in his testament, was that the people in charge of the union parasites were themselves parasites. The 1929 Extraordinary Congress of the Construction Workers’ Union was extraordinary because “the degeneration within the top tier of the provincial hierarchy had led to the dismissal of the whole governing board.” When Makar and Petr finally make it to the Worker-Peasant Inspection, they find two rooms. “Having opened the first door in the upstairs corridor, they saw an absence of people. Over the second door hung the terse slogan ‘Who, whom?’ and Petr and Makar went in. There was no one in the room except for Comrade Lev Chumovoi, who was busy presiding over something, having left his village at the mercy of the landless peasants.”¹⁴

Workers at the construction site

In June 1929, the Trans-Moskva Party Committee and Control Commission conducted an investigation into the construction of the House of Government and found “a series of outrages” involving “gross mismanagement” and violations of labor discipline. “Workers loitered around the construction site, and the situation with technical personnel was so terrible that the house seemed left to its own devices.” Boris Iofan was reprimanded for going abroad “at the height of the construction work” and leaving the project in the care of his non-Party brother, as well as for failing to adequately explain to the workers the policy (endorsed by the Construction Workers’ Union) of requiring two hours of overtime each day. The site supervisor and his deputy were fired for incompetence; the deputy head of construction, for “not promptly informing the District Party Committee of the problems on the site”; and the secretary of the Party cell, for “a lack of proper firmness” and “elements of infighting and degeneration.” The governing board of the Construction Workers’ Union had, of course, already been dismissed for degeneration; the head of the Moscow Trade Union Council, Vasily Mikhailov, had been fired for “vacillations” and “conciliatory tendencies” and transferred to the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam, as deputy head of construction. The new Party cell was told to “exercise great caution in hiring new workers” and to “conduct systematic purges of construction workers in order to eliminate self-serving and hostile elements who cause degeneration among the workers.” The new secretary of the Party cell, Mikhail Tuchin, was a thirty-three-year-old Red Cavalry veteran who had studied construction in a technical school and served as a member of the Party Committee in Tarusa; his non-Party wife, whom he had met in his native village in the Smolensk Province, had graduated from library school (and, according to their daughter, used to make delicious kulich and paskha for Easter). The new site supervisor, Comrade Nikitina, was fired when it was discovered that her father had been a priest in the Tambov Province. On February 8, 1930, the heated enclosure of Building No. 1 (closest to the bridge) caught fire. Parts of the brick wall were seriously damaged; a new investigation was launched; and new outrages were uncovered.¹⁵

Workers at the construction site

For Makar, the quixotic journey from one outrage to another ends according to Lenin’s State and Revolution:

Makar was not frightened by Chumovoi and said to Petr:

“Since it says, ‘Who, whom?’, then let’s get him?”

“No,” countered the more experienced Petr, “We’re dealing with a state here, not a bunch of noodles. We should go higher.”

They were received higher up where there was a great longing for real people and authentic rank-and-file intelligence.

“We are class struggle members,” said Petr to the highest official. “We have accumulated intelligence. Give us power over the oppressive scribbling scum….”

“Take it, it’s yours,” said the highest one, and handed over the power to them.

After that, Makar and Petr sat down at some desks in front of Lev Chumovoi and began to talk with the visiting poor people, deciding everything in their heads on the basis of their compassion for the have-nots. But soon the people stopped coming to that department because Makar and Petr thought so simply that the poor were able to think and make decisions in the same way, and so the toilers began to think for themselves inside their own apartments.

Lev Chumovoi was left all alone in the office because he was never recalled from there in writing. And he remained there until the state liquidation commission was formed. Comrade Chumovoi worked in that commission for forty-four years and died in the midst of oblivion and the files which contained his institutional state intelligence.¹⁶

Back in the Swamp, the eternal house was still being built. The initial reaction of the Trans-Moskva District Party Committee was to welcome the construction of the House as “the first step in the creation of an important cultural center in the area,” but the scale of the project and the uncertainty of its form and function provoked some puzzlement. The newspaper Construction wondered if the House was being built without any plan at all, while the journal Building of Moscow complained that, contrary to Soviet legislation, the plan was being kept secret. “The design was produced without an open competition, in a nontransparent, unacceptable way. Was the completed design discussed by the wider public? Unfortunately, it was not. Was the design published anywhere? No, it was not. The editors tried to obtain a copy for publication, but their efforts proved unsuccessful. Someone, somewhere, somehow, produced and approved a 14-million-ruble project that the Soviet public knows nothing about.”

Iofan responded by saying that the design had been considered by fourteen professional experts, approved by a special government commission, and discussed by the Moscow Regional Engineering Bureau, with the participation of “all departments concerned.” He ignored the question about the required open competition and public oversight, but agreed to publish a detailed description of the project. Doubts regarding the wisdom of building an eternal house in the middle of the Swamp persisted for a while before dissipating in the face of the inevitable. When one of the delegates to the Trans-Moskva District Party Conference of January 1929 said that the project could easily “wait another five years, thus saving tens of millions of rubles that could be used for, say, steel production,” the committee secretary responded: “What can we do? Building on the house has begun; the foundation has been laid; and construction is going forward. In the future, we should probably learn from this experience and make sure that there are no more big, showy projects like this one.” In September 1929, in the wake of the discovery of the “outrages,” the head of the district Control Commission restated the obvious: “We cannot interfere, because the government has made its decision, and the higher authorities have given their approval. In other words, where to build and how to build—these things do not depend on us.”¹⁷

Iofan (third from the left) at the construction site

In November 1928, the State Office for Financial Control wrote to Rykov that, since the decision to build the House in an “unfit” location could “no longer be reversed,” some parts of the project would have to be scaled down in order to keep down the costs. Rykov disagreed and in his capacity as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars forced the People’s Commissariat of Finance and the State Bank to make up the difference. The government, he made clear to all departments concerned, could build its own house by lending itself money as needed. The chairman of the State Bank, Georgy Piatakov, pointed out that “it is very awkward when the debtor, namely the Council of People’s Commissars …, issues a decree extending its own payment deadline,” but complied without further objection. Between February and November 1928, the estimated cost of construction rose from 6.5 to 18.5 million rubles. Within two years, it would reach 24 million. The final cost would exceed 30 million (ten times the original projection). A special review committee appointed by the Council of People’s Commissars in May 1931 concluded that, in the foreseeable future, the Soviet Union could not afford another residential building of comparable size and cost.¹⁸

The main reason for the high construction costs, according to Iofan, were the “heightened quality requirements” demanded by the government for a project of “government importance.” “When it comes to the use of materials, the construction of the House of Government cannot possibly be compared to ordinary wood-framed residential construction because of the presence, in this case, of public buildings with reinforced concrete frames (a movie theater, theater, club, grocery store, etc.), which make up about 50% of the cubic capacity of the residential wings, and the heightened requirements concerning the structure of the residential wings and living conditions within them (passenger and cargo elevators, garbage chutes, etc.).”¹⁹

The use of reinforced concrete frames throughout the complex, and not just in the public areas, was dictated by considerations of hygiene and fire safety. The extra high (3.4 meters) ceilings were a matter of residents’ convenience; terrazzo window panes and granite paneling were choices made for aesthetic reasons. Marble steps were preferred to concrete ones because of their durability; the same was true of ceramic, as opposed to cement, tiles in the kitchens and bathrooms. The more expensive flat roofs were used because of the “necessity” to have solariums. Extra floors were needed in order to accommodate more apartments (505, instead of the projected 440), which were needed in order to accommodate more residents and service personnel. Some other expenses not listed in the original plan included the building of a post office, bank, and shooting gallery; the laying of radio and telephone cables, including a direct line to the Kremlin; the furnishing of all the apartments (at a cost of about 1.5 million rubles); the use of “special military guards and special fire brigades”; and the fighting of the 1930 fire and several floods. The effort to complete the work by the thirteenth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1930 required paying more workers to do more work. In April 1930, the construction committee decided to switch to two and possibly three shifts and employ two hundred to three hundred additional plasterers. In September, the committee introduced a ten-hour work day and asked for new technical personnel, as well as five hundred more plasterers, three hundred carpenters, and fifty roofers. The House was still not finished by November 1930. The first residents began to move into the wings closest to the Ditch in the spring of 1931. The wings facing the river, including the theater, were not completed until the fall of 1932. The work in the courtyards and on the embankment continued into 1933.²⁰

View of Trans-Moskva from the cathedral. In the foreground is the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker. Behind it is the power station. The construction site is on the left.

Construction of the theater and club. In the background on the right is the Big Stone Bridge.

View of construction from the Kremlin

View of construction from the cathedral

Construction of the movie theater. A view from the Trans-Moskva side.

View of the nearly completed House of Government and movie theater from the Drainage Canal

Reconstruction of the Bersenev Embankment, with the Big Stone Bridge and Kremlin in the background and the theater facade on the right

House of Government construction nearly complete. Festive illumination marking the fourteenth anniversary of the Revolution in November 1931.

■ ■ ■

The fact that socialism was inevitable meant that it needed to be built. The USSR had no choice but to become “a gigantic construction site.” The new structure was eternal but mysterious. “It was obvious that a house was being built, but not clear for whom.” Or rather, it was obvious that the House would contain socialism, but not clear what it was going to look like. In the process of fulfilling the Five-Year Plan, the Bolsheviks, according to Krupskaia, “had run up against the challenge, unforeseen by many, of building a residential shell for the socialist society of the future.” Or, as one architect put it, “we are giving shape to a new everyday life, but where is this life? It does not exist. It has not yet been created. We know it must exist, we can say what it should look like, but it does not yet exist, nor does any assignment that would correspond to it.” The task was to “design for the future, even if such designs are not feasible or even appropriate at present.”²¹

“The task of the architect of the coming era,” wrote the Gosplan economist, M. Okhitovich, “is not to build a house, but to ‘build,’ or shape, social relations and productive functions in the form of buildings.” This meant that “the only architect prepared for the current conditions is Karl Marx, whose ‘client’ is the general interest and whose ‘employer’ is today’s proletariat and tomorrow’s classless society. Up until now it has been impossible to build without capital. From now on it will be impossible to build without Das Kapital.” The fact that Das Kapital offered little guidance on how to “shape social relations in the form of buildings” was not a serious challenge because Karl Marx’s representative in socialist society was Comrade Stalin, and Comrade Stalin was, by (Radek’s) definition, “the architect of socialist society.” The fact that Comrade Stalin offered little guidance on how to shape social relations in the form of buildings meant that ordinary Soviet architects would have to do it themselves.²²

The most popular plan envisioned “agro-industrial cities” encircling “production centers” and consisting of several “communal houses” or “residential combines” with twenty thousand to thirty thousand adult residents each. According to one much-discussed project, the “city of the near future” (five to fifteen years hence, according to different projections) would be covered by a large, green park crisscrossed by avenues lined with trees and bicycle paths and with a sidewalk along the perimeter.

Large residential buildings, their facades broken up by the wide, glass panels of windows and balconies, will be set off from the sidewalk by green lawns. The flat roofs of the buildings will be covered with terraces decorated with flowers and gazebos for shade. The buildings will be painted in light, joyous colors: white, pink, blue, and red—not in dull gray or black, but in harmonious, carefully chosen color schemes.

The first thing you will see when you enter a building is a large vestibule. To the left and right will be washrooms, shower rooms, and gymnasiums, in which residents, tired after a day’s work, can shower, change, and hang up their work clothes in special lockers if, for some reason, they were not able do so at their place of work or in the fields. Of course, each place of employment must guarantee total cleanliness.

Beyond the vestibule will be a reception area with an information desk, a kiosk for selling small items, a hair salon, and a room for shining shoes and washing and repairing clothes. Also here, tucked away in large alcoves, there will be comfortable furniture, to be used by residents for socializing or by the “welcoming committee” for receiving visitors from near and far. Farther along will be various rooms dedicated to cultural activities, including billiards, chess, photography, music, and many others, as well as larger rooms to be used for collective discussions and musical rehearsals and shops and labs for amateur radio technicians, electricians, and dressmakers to hone their skills while serving the needs of the residents.

An easy passage across a beautiful archway leading out to the park will bring you into a large American-style cafeteria. On the long counter, in pans and on electric burners, will be a great variety of dishes that can be served out in portions of different sizes. Visitors will be able to help themselves to any combination of dishes. Past the dining hall, or perhaps on the third floor, will be a large reading room with an adjoining rooftop veranda. The selection will not be large, but it will be possible to request any book from the central library by telephone. Next to the reading room will be small carrels for people who need to write reports for production meetings or speeches for rallies, or simply need a place to concentrate.

The upper part of the building will contain small rooms for each of the residents. In this compact, but comfortable space will be everything an individual needs: a bed or couch, a closet for clothes and other things, a convenient desk, a couple of comfortable chairs, some bookshelves, space for pictures and flowers, and, if possible, a door leading onto a balcony. The room should be around 7 to 9 square meters.²³

As Lunacharsky put it, communal houses must “express their inner essence clearly, albeit in a variety of ways, with individual dwellings grouped around a common core: cultural clubs and other public spaces.”²⁴

The idea was not novel. Most Russians, according to Krupskaia, were familiar with similar arrangements. “In conditions of exile and emigration, the need for cheaper and more rational meals led to the creation of consumers’ communes. Among workers, seasonal laborers often had communal eating arrangements, as did various rural work crews.” Those were not proper communes, however. “A dormitory becomes a commune only when the residents are united by a common idea, a common goal.” But this was not enough, either. “Monasteries used to be, in essence, communes,” but monks and nuns were united by the wrong idea and the wrong goal. Most important, their “religion-fueled intensity of effort” and “well thought-through organization of labor” were fueled by the practice of celibacy. The challenge was to create a true-believing, hardworking, coeducational monastery that permitted procreation and incorporated a day-care center. A common sectarian solution of having the leader monopolize or regulate access to all females was not acceptable. Fourier’s phalansteries were often cited as appropriate residential shells, but his ideas about matching residents by temperament were rejected as silly (individual psychology being, for orthodox Marxists, irrelevant to future harmony).²⁵

The answer was contained in The Communist Manifesto:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital….

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.²⁶

According to N. A. Miliutin’s widely read commentary on this passage, “it is difficult to imagine a better answer to all the crusaders against the new forms of everyday life and against the creation of the material preconditions for the destruction of the family. It is amazing that the bourgeois ideology is still so strong among some Party members that they keep inventing, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, new arguments for the preservation of the double bed as a permanent, obligatory fixture of a worker’s dwelling.” As The Communist Manifesto made clear, the abolition of private property would make permanent bonds based on mating and child rearing unnecessary. “By creating public cafeterias, nurseries, kindergartens, boarding schools, laundries, and sewing shops, we will achieve a genuine radical break with the existing property relations within the family, thus creating the economic preconditions for the abolition of the family as an economic institution.”²⁷

But was there anything else to the family? According to another communal house theorist, L. M. Sabsovich, “the question of a ‘natural,’ biological bond between parents and children, the question of ‘maternal affection,’ the possible loss of an incentive for women to have children, etc.—all these questions are usually raised not by workers or peasants, but by certain circles within our intelligentsia, strongly infected with petit bourgeois, intelligentsia prejudices. Exclusive love for one’s own children is, of course, based not so much on ‘natural,’ biological factors, as on socioeconomic ones.” Accordingly, “the principle of providing each worker with a separate room must be followed without deviation.” Any attempt to distinguish between single and married residents was “totally unjustified opportunism”:²⁸

It is obvious that in the socialist way of life each worker can be considered both “single” and “married” at the same time because any of today’s “single” people may become “married” tomorrow, and any of today’s couples may tomorrow become two single individuals, and because those elements of compulsion, most particularly the shortage of housing and common raising of children, that today often force men and women to continue their relationship and cohabitation even when the inner bond between them is broken and nothing else keeps them together, will become increasingly irrelevant with the provision of communal satisfaction of private needs and public education for children.²⁹

This did not mean that couples could not choose to live together for as long as mutual affection persisted:

All rooms in a residential combine should be connected with internal doors or movable partitions (which are much more expensive, but also much better). If a husband and wife wish to live together, they can receive two contiguous rooms connected by a door, i.e., something resembling a small apartment, or open the partition and transform the two rooms into one. But if one of the parties decides to have a separate room or end the relationship completely, the door or partition can be shut. If a worker’s family wishes to keep their children at first (although this is definitely irrational and can last for only a very short period of time), the children may be assigned to a third room, in which case the family will receive something like a three-room apartment.³⁰

The period of time would have to be very short. Today’s children were tomorrow’s “new men and women.” “Children who are now five or six will enter what we currently call ‘middle school’ (at the age of around twelve) under completely new conditions—conditions of a totally or almost totally fulfilled socialism.” Under these conditions, “children will no longer be ‘the property’ of their parents: they will be ‘the property’ of the state, which will take upon itself the solution of all problems involved in child rearing.” Not everyone accepted Sabsovich’s timetable or his idea of separate “children’s towns” (along the lines of young Boris’s dream in Libedinsky’s The Birth of a Hero), but every Bolshevik assumed that, in the “near future,” the state would take upon itself the solution of all problems involved in child rearing.³¹

Sabsovich’s main opponents were the “disurbanists,” who believed that communal houses were too similar to prerevolutionary workers’ barracks. According to the architect Aleksandr Pasternak (brother of Boris, friend of Zbarsky, and, thanks to the latter, one of the designers of the first Lenin Mausoleum and the Karpov Biochemistry Institute),

Will a large army of people accidentally assembled in one building become a true commune? And, even if they do, will it be able to live normally in a communal house, whose most characteristic features (we have now seen some graphic renditions of the theoretical concept) are extremely long corridors lined with tiny cells, long lines to the most basic facilities (sinks, toilets, coat racks), and equally long lines to the cafeteria, where people have to gulp down their meals with the speed of a visitor to a railway-station café who is late for his train (you can’t detain a comrade who is waiting for his plate, fork, and knife, can you?).³²

Sabsovich had compared capitalist urbanism to “life in stone cages.” Would not such “enormous, heavy, monumental, and permanent” communal houses produce more of the same? According to the main ideologue of disurbanism, Mikhail Okhitovich, all modern cities and their illegitimate “communal” offspring were Babylons and Carthages that “must be destroyed.” Under primitive communism, common labor had required common living. Modern communism was different. “Modern communism must unite, through a common production process, hundreds of millions of people, at the very least. If collective labor were always accompanied by collective living arrangements, it would mean building one house for several hundred million.” This would, of course, be absurd—as would the idea that “our whole planet should be equipped with one laundry and one cafeteria.”³³

Human beings, according to Okhitovich, had always lived where they worked. The nomads’ herds moved around, and so did the nomads. The peasants’ fields were stationary, and so were the peasants. Cities were an aberration, “the result of the separation of artisanship from agriculture, the separation of processing from extraction.” The task of socialism was to overcome the inequality and irrationality of urban life, which inevitably resulted from the inequality and irrationality of capitalism. In Pasternak’s formulation, “the fulfillment of the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin—the elimination of the gap between the city (excessive concentration) and the countryside (idiocy and isolation) and the creation, in their place, of new forms of settlement that would be the same for everybody (i.e., the socialist, uniform distribution of working populations)—is the unique historical role that has fallen to our country, our Union.”³⁴

The main hurdle, as usual, was the coresidential family. According to Okhitovich, the rural patriarchal dwelling housed four generations; the burgher’s dwelling, two generations; and the modern capitalist dwelling (a cottage or an apartment), one generation. Under socialism, all housing would be individual. Why does this not happen under capitalism?

Because husband and wife cannot end the division of labor between them, just as the capitalist is connected by the division of labor to his hired labor. Husband and wife are connected by common economic interests, common investments, and the inheritance of property. In the same way, the proletarian family is brought together by the common interest in reproducing its labor and by the hope that their children would support them in their old age.

Only socialism will allow society to confront the human producer directly, while allowing the human producer to confront social relations directly, without mediation.

For it will put an end to the division of labor between a man and a woman.³⁵

The fact that Communism stood for the abolition of the division of labor meant that it stood for the abolition of the family and, ultimately, for the freedom of the individual “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (as Marx had put it). Collectivism did not represent monotony or anonymity. “Celebrating the collective while ignoring the individual is like praising the Russian language while banning particular Russian words.” In fact, wrote Okhitovich, “the stronger the collective bonds, the stronger the individuals composing that collective.” Private property would be gone,

but human beings will continue to be born separately, not collectively. They will always eat, drink, and sleep—i.e., consume—separately…. The disappearance of private property will be followed by the disappearance of the bourgeois, capitalist property and the bourgeois, capitalist individual, but personal property, personal consumption, personal initiative, personal level of development, personal hands, personal legs, personal heads, and personal brains will not only not disappear, but will, for the first time, become accessible to everyone, and not only to the privileged few, as was the case before socialism.³⁶

Sabsovich was right that workers were entitled to their own separate rooms, argued the disurbanists, but surely there was no need to confine those rooms to awkward, inflexible, immovable buildings. The only dwelling fit for Communism was the kind that “could be improved, like clothing, by augmenting width and height, increasing size of windows, etc. But is this thinkable with the old technology? No, only prefabricated houses, easy to assemble, dismantle, and enlarge, will be able to meet the needs of each developing individual.” Such houses would be light, mobile, and connected to the world by radio, telephone, and constantly improving means of transportation, terrestrial or otherwise. And they would certainly fit the social needs of developing individuals much better than Sabsovich’s doors and partitions. As Pasternak explained, “No one will object if husband and wife, or two close buddies, or even several good friends place their houses next to each other and link them up; each unit will remain autonomous, with its own separate entrance and access to the garden. But if the couple separates, or friends have an argument, or one of them gets married, there will be no complications with ‘living space,’ since the units can, at any moment, be decoupled, enlarged, or reduced, or even dismantled entirely and moved to a different location.”³⁷

Both the urbanists and disurbanists were disurbanists. The main point of contention was whether modern cities were to be broken up into economic and residential nodes consisting of a few communal houses surrounded by “green zones,” or “decentered” and “destationized” completely. No one wished to preserve city streets and blocks; the question was whether the individual “cells” were to be attached to long corridors in multistory communal houses or to endless roads traversing the newly decentered landscape (or not attached to anything at all: Bukharin’s father-in-law, Yuri Larin, envisioned flying, floating, and rolling individual dwellings, with each human being behaving “like a snail carrying its own shell”).³⁸

Both the urbanists and disurbanists were collectivists. Most human activities, with the exception of urination, defecation, and procreation, were to be conducted in public. Sleep was a matter of debate. Konstantin Melnikov designed giant “sleep laboratories” with mechanically produced fresh scents and soothing sounds. N. Kuzmin proposed two classes of bedrooms: “group bedrooms” for six people and double bedrooms “for former ‘husbands’ and ‘wives.’” Most planners preferred individual cells. The main question was how many people to assign to each shower room, laundry, or cafeteria or where to position oneself between the two poles of countless mobile cafeterias, on the one hand, and a single planetwide “factory-kitchen, on the other.”³⁹

Both the urbanists and disurbanists were individualists. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,” proclaimed one of the most oft-quoted passages of the Communist Manifesto, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” “The stronger the individual,” wrote Okhitovich, perfectly uncontroversially, “the stronger the collective served by that individual.” Bourgeois individualism was a bad thing; the socialist individual was the measure of all things. In the absence of classes, any association of randomly assembled Soviet citizens could become a collective. Some Soviets were better prepared than others, but, except for the unmasked enemies who needed to be “reforged” before being reincorporated, all Soviets were ultimately interchangeable. A person was a member of a residential-building collective by virtue of residing in a building, a member of a kindergarten collective by virtue of being a kindergartner, and a member of an office collective by virtue of being an office clerk. Starting with the Stalin Revolution (the “great breakthrough”), most Soviets were assumed faithful until proven guilty. If a commune was a coresidential community of people “united by a common goal,” and if all Soviets, except for a handful of increasingly desperate enemies, were united by the common goal of building socialism, then the Soviet Union was one very large commune. Because there were no “antagonistic” differences within Soviet society, and no stronger commitments than the one to socialism, it did not matter which collective a particular Soviet belonged to. “Collectivism” stood for a direct connection between the individual and the state (Soviet universalism), or a willingness to see any group of Soviets as a community united by the common goal of building socialism.

“Bourgeois individualism” represented an attempt to surround the individual with an extra protective layer; a desire to belong to an untransparent community. Each Soviet belonged in his own cell, or shell. “This room,” wrote Lunacharsky, “is not only a place for sleeping…. Here begins the absolute right of the individual, which no one is allowed to violate.” Where the Soviet did not belong was in a “bourgeois-family” apartment, or “an autonomous, isolated unit that normally includes a separate entrance, one to three rooms, a kitchen, and other auxiliary spaces.” “It makes no difference,” wrote Kuzmin on behalf of all the architects of the future, “what the number or quality of such apartments is, or whether they are built as separate cottages or as units within multistory apartment buildings or so-called communal houses (called so in order to discredit a revolutionary idea), for what kind of ‘communal house’ is it, if it consists of apartments?”⁴⁰

Bourgeois individualism, in other words, was “family individualism.” Soviet collectivism consisted of individuals; bourgeois individualism resided in families. Emancipation—primarily of women, but also of children and eventually of all—meant freedom from the family. The “residential cells” of emancipated men, women, and children would be homes free of bourgeois domesticity (meshchanstvo). As one instruction manual put it, “dwellings in which people spend most of their lives from birth to death must be hygienic, i.e., spacious, light, warm, and dry. They must not contain stale air, dampness, or dirt.” They must, in other words, be free of the swamp and everything associated with it: greasy dishes, primus stoves, and dark corners on the one hand, and “muslin curtains, potted geraniums, and caged canaries,” on the other. The Revolution’s last and decisive battle was to be against “velvet-covered albums resting on small tables covered with lace doilies.” Softness threatened suffocation: nothing was more dangerous than the down pillow and double bed. Functional furniture was to be provided by the state (so as to liberate the workers from enslavement to things); as many pieces as possible—desks, beds, trays, stools, closets, bookshelves, and ironing boards—were to be folded away into special niches. Rooms were to resemble ships’ cabins or train compartments. Everyone quoted Le Corbusier to the effect that “whatever is not necessary must be discarded” (or, in Mayakovsky’s version, “rid your room of all useless stuff: it will get cleaner and be big enough”). As Kritsman wrote in The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution, “the motto of organic eras, ‘it exists, therefore it is needed,’ is replaced by a very different one: ‘If it is needed, it exists, if it is not needed, it will be destroyed.’” What Kritsman had in mind was “the destruction of fetishistic relations and the establishment of direct, open, and immediate connections among various parts of the Soviet economy.” What the architects of the future were attempting to accomplish was the establishment of direct, open, and immediate connections among Soviet individuals—connections undisturbed by “useless stuff” or durable affections.⁴¹

Most of the architects of the future were not architects. Those who were did not get a chance to build very much. The disurbanists, in particular, had to wait for the decentralization of production, “destationization” of the population, and the “electrification of the whole country.” M. Ya. Ginzburg and M. O. Barshch designed a “Green City” on stilts to be built outside of Moscow, and two large teams proposed long “ribbons” of stackable dwellings for Magnitogorsk, but none materialized since there was no infrastructure. Communal houses were easier to create—by converting existing dormitories or building one house at a time. One such structure in Moscow was Ivan Nikolaev’s communal house for students, built in 1929–30. It was based on five fundamental principles: “The expulsion of the primus stove is the first step. Domestic collectivization and the organization of the learning process is the second step. The third step is the hygienization and sanitation of everyday life. The fourth step is the transition to full self-service and the mechanization of the cleaning operations. The fifth step is the collectivization of the children’s sector.” The building consisted of two parallel units connected by a “sanitary block.” The three-story day-use section included a cafeteria, gym, health center, solarium, children’s sector, library with a large study area, and multiple rooms for club activities. Passing through the sanitary block at the end of the day, residents were required to take a shower and change into different clothes. The eight-story nighttime section contained one thousand six-by-six-meter “sleeping cubicles,” organized along narrow two-hundred–meter corridors. Each cubicle contained two bunks, two stools, and a concrete windowsill that served as a desk. In the mornings, students would exercise on the balconies of the sanitary block before proceeding to their study areas. During the day, the sleeping unit was closed to residents for ventilation and “sanitation” purposes.⁴²

Ivan Nikolaev’s communal house

What might work for university students did not—yet—work for workers’ families (“although this was definitely irrational and could last for only a very short period of time”). Most experimental housing built during the First Five-Year Plan was of the “transitional type,” in which residents were provided with collective services but allowed—for the time being—to live in family apartments. The most celebrated such building was M. Ya. Ginzburg’s and I. F. Milinis’s House of the Commissariat of Finance (Narkomfin) on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow (1928–30). According to a report on the project’s completion,

The huge building is 82 meters long; in place of a ground floor are columns—slim, graceful columns that carry the heavy weight of the gray stone. If not for these columns, which endow the building with a certain lightness, it might be taken for an ocean liner. The same flat roof, terrace-style balconies, radio masts, and continuous horizontal windows. The tall ventilation chimney enhances the resemblance….

The building is traversed by well-lighted corridors, from which small stairways lead up and down to the residential cells. Each apartment consists of a tall, double-lighted room for daytime activities and low sleeping lofts which are an integral part of the interior space.

The only “problem” with all the apartments in the new building is that they have no room for that broad, solid chest of drawers and absolutely no space for a primus stove.

Every apartment has clothes closets, a tiny anteroom for changing, and solid, sliding windows. The so-called “kitchen element” is in a separate corner. This “unhealthy element” consists of a small cabinet with an exhaust fan, several gas burners, a small refrigerator, a cabinet for dishes, and a sink.

For the sake of fairness, it must be noted that this bow in the direction of the old domestic arrangements is moderated by the fact that, if desired, the whole kitchen element may be tossed out in favor of public nutrition.

The communal “barge” is attached to the residential unit by a heated bridgeway. It has an engine room (kitchen) below, a cafeteria for two hundred people with windows on the opposite walls on the floor above, and a library, reading room, and pool hall on the third floor. Next to the cafeteria is a well-equipped gym and shower rooms….

“A good house,” says an elderly seasonal worker, while planing a board. “Except you can’t live in it just any old way….”

Indeed, one must know how to live in it. The trick is to be able to leave all kinds of domestic junk behind in the old house in order not to smuggle the spirit of the old stone boxes into the new apartment.⁴³

The Narkomfin house was routinely represented as a prototype for the mass-produced—and, with a few adjustments, communal—housing of the future. The “ocean liner” was a common metaphor combining the two main attributes of the age: mobility and monumentality. Another one was the airplane (a new interpretation of the cross), with long and narrow residential wings attached to oval or square service units by perpendicular bridges or walkways. Ginzburg’s design, and the constructivist aesthetic in general, combated the dampness and softness of domesticity with light, air, transparency, and the pure lines of elementary (“industrial”) geometric forms. Each significant social function was encased within its own, rigidly articulated, but not self-contained, “volume.” Life inside consisted of “processes” that involved synchronized movements of people analogous to Podvoisky’s mass games. The dominant indoor theme was the assembly line (Miliutin’s “functional-flow principle”): furniture served as equipment; human flows obeyed specific “schedules of motion”; and the entire “residential shell” was characterized by what one architect called “plastic Puritanism and austere nakedness.”⁴⁴

Narkomfin house

Human life began with work, could not be separated from work, and needed to be organized accordingly. Kerzhentsev’s “love of responsibility” was to be applied to the “process of everyday life” to produce Communism as “embodied harmony, where everything happens with accuracy, precision, and correctness.” Kerzhentsev’s “sense of time” was to be combined with the architect’s sense of space to produce harmonious men and women who love what they cannot escape. As Kuzmin put it, “There is no such thing as absolute rest. Human beings work all the time (even when they are asleep). Architecture influences human work with all of its material elements. The scientific organization of the material elements of architecture (light, color, form, ventilation, etc.), or rather, the scientific organization of work, is, at the same time, the organization of human emotions, which are a direct consequence of labor productivity.” The question was whether the workers could be trusted “not to smuggle into a new apartment the spirit of the old stone boxes.” Speaking on behalf of Ginzburg’s “transitional” approach, the head of the Art Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Alfred Kurella, argued that they could not. “If we build houses with only a communal kitchen, the worker is going to set up a primus stove in his room.” Citing the success of forced collectivization, Kuzmin argued that they could—and that Ginzburg’s not-quite communal “communal houses” were “an insult” to both Lenin’s ideas and the unfolding “socialist reconstruction.”⁴⁵

It soon turned out that the question was not whether they could be trusted, but whether they should. The answer, according to a preview of the official position, written by Koltsov, was that they should not. In a Pravda article published on May 1, 1930, two months after Stalin’s “Dizzy with Success,” he hinted that the primus stove might be redeemable, that leftism might, once again, be infantile, and that the end of the socialist offensive might be in sight. Soviet architects, he wrote, were suffering from “intoxicating dizziness.” The urbanists were preaching the creation of “enormous barracks, where the children are totally isolated from their parents, all aspects of a worker’s life are strictly regimented, everything is done on command, and where the greatest virtue is visibility and the greatest sin is solitude, even for the purpose of reflection and intellectual work.” The disurbanists, meanwhile, were proposing to settle the worker and his wife in two separate cabins on stilts, with an automobile underneath. “When the welder Kuzma wants to see his Praskovia, he must climb down his ladder, get into his automobile, and drive down a highway built especially for the purpose.” These absurd projects discredited socialist ideas, provoked the legitimate indignation of the workers, and amounted to wrecking. “No one has the right, whatever the justification, to fight against the basic needs of human nature, including the desire to spend some time by oneself or the desire to be close to one’s child.”⁴⁶

Within three weeks, Koltsov’s elaboration of the official position had been reformulated as the Central Committee decree “On Work toward Transforming Everyday Life”:

The Central Committee notes that, simultaneously with the growth of the movement for a socialist way of life, certain comrades (Sab-sovich, and to some degree, Yu. Larin and others) are engaging in totally unjustified, semifantastical, and therefore extremely harmful attempts to surmount “in one leap” those hurdles along the path toward a socialist transformation of everyday life that are rooted, on the one hand, in the country’s economic and cultural backwardness, and, on the other, in the need, at the present moment, to mobilize all available resources for the fastest possible industrialization of the country, which alone is capable of creating the true material conditions for the radical transformation of everyday life.⁴⁷

The argument was consistent with the spring 1930 respite from the “dizziness” of collectivization. The utopian schemes of certain comrades were harmful because they cost too much money, put the cart before the industrial base, advocated things for which the culturally backward population was not ready, contradicted natural human desires, and discredited the project of a genuine and radical transformation of those desires.

The House of Government was lucky. By May 1930, its shape and structure had long been determined, its budget exceeded, and its walls completed. It had often been accused of being elitist and wasteful. The architect A. L. Pasternak had written:

A large residential complex for the employees of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars is being built in Moscow right now. It has a club, theater, cafeteria, laundry, grocery store, day-care center, and even a walk-in clinic. Here, one would have thought, is a model for a new socialist dwelling. However, the residential sector of the complex consists exclusively of apartments made to accommodate the family economy and the individual servicing of family needs, i.e., circumscribed, autonomous family life (the apartments have their own kitchens, bathtubs, etc.).

Here we find two negative facts of our housing policy: on the one hand, the spread of individual apartments, which predetermine the nature of our dwellings and, consequently, our urban life for a long time to come (in the case of stone buildings, no less than 60 to 70 years); and, on the other hand, an incorrect interpretation of the idea of a communal house, which results in the postponement, and perhaps the discrediting, of the introduction of new social relations into the masses.⁴⁸

In May 1930, however, it turned out that it was Pasternak and his fellow utopians who were guilty of discrediting new social relations, and that the House of Government was a model building “of the transitional type.” Luck may not have been the only reason for Iofan’s vindication: some of the people involved in the writing of the decree were the House’s sponsors, and most were its future residents (including Koltsov, who had launched the attack). It is possible that they were not quite ready to part with their children or live in individual cells; it is certain that most of them, as good Marxists, believed that “industrialization alone was capable of creating the true material conditions for a radical transformation of everyday life.”⁴⁹

The House was, indeed, “transitional” in Ginzburg’s terms: the public sector was designed to cover a wide variety of needs, while the residential block allowed for a “circumscribed, autonomous family life.” The club (still referred to as the “Rykov Club” in 1930 but soon to be renamed after Kalinin) included a cafeteria capable of serving all House residents, a theater for 1,300 spectators, a library, several dozen rooms for various activities (from playing billiards to symphony orchestra rehearsals), and, above the theater, both tennis and basketball courts, two gyms, and several shower rooms. There was also a bank, laundry, telegraph, post office, day-care center, walk-in clinic, hairdresser’s salon, grocery store, department store, and movie theater for 1,500 spectators (the Shock Worker) with a café, reading room, and band stage. The residential part consisted of seven ten-to eleven-story units, with a total of twenty-four entryways (numbered, for unknown reasons, 1–10 and 12–25), two apartments per floor, 505 apartments altogether. Each apartment had three, four, or more furnished rooms with large windows; a kitchen with gas stove, garbage chute, exhaust fan, and fold-away bunk for the maid; a bathroom with bathtub and sink; a separate toilet, telephone, and both hot and cold running water. All apartments had cross ventilation and windows on both sides (including in the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet). Some apartments, particularly those facing the river (Entryways 1 and 12) were much larger than others. Some entryways had cargo, as well as passenger, elevators.

The “utopians” (both urbanists and disurbanists) seemed justified in arguing that the House of Government was functionally similar to bourgeois apartment buildings. As early as 1878, a New York court had formally distinguished between tenements, which housed several families living independently under one roof, and apartment buildings, which provided collective services to its residents. Most luxury apartment buildings in New York had public kitchens, restaurants, and laundries; some had play areas and dining rooms for children. The Dakota, on Central Park West between Seventy-Second and Seventy-Third Streets, had all those things plus croquet lawns and tennis courts. Expensive apartment-hotels were closer to communal houses in that they were designed for bachelors and did not have private kitchens.⁵⁰

The House of Government was transitional in another sense: stylistically, it was both constructivist and neoclassical. The whole complex was in the shape of a triangle, with the base (the club) facing the river, the truncated tip (the movie theater) abutting the Drainage Canal, and the store and laundry buildings centering the east and west sides, respectively. Plain, rectangular residential blocks of uneven height connected these public units, which served as the nodes of the composition and flaunted their functions in their design. The continuous horizontal windows above the club entrance mirrored the length of the gymnasium; the semicircular rear of the club repeated the shape of both the theater auditorium and dining room; the commercial unit (which included the two stores and hairdresser’s salon) stood out for its relatively small size and large windows; while the movie theater, with its huge semicone sitting atop a square base, resembled a giant flashlight pointing toward the island’s Arrowhead.

Three-room apartment floor plan

Four-room apartment floor plan

Interior view of one of the stairway entrances

Apartment door on one of the floors. On the left is the elevator door.

Cafeteria

Movie theater foyer

Movie theater stairway

Movie theater reading room

Club stairway

The constructivist elements did not add up to a constructivist whole, however. Because of the domination of massive, bottom-heavy rectangular blocks squeezed into a small area bounded by water, the overall impression was of immobile, fortresslike solidity. The three thousand piles connecting the building to the Swamp’s bedrock were hidden from view, and the newly raised and reinforced embankment was clothed in granite. The island location suggested a continued use of the ship metaphor, but it was not easy to imagine the House of Government staying afloat. Most dramatically, the side bordering the embankment was designed as a solemn, palatial facade. Flat, grand, and symmetrical, with its three colonnades flanked by the huge towers of Entryways 1 and 12, it looked out across the river toward the Museum of Fine Arts, whose Ionic portico it attempted, in rough outline, to reflect.⁵¹

As Lunacharsky wrote, against fashion, while the House of Government was still being built, classicism was not one architectural style among many—it was a universal “language of architecture that fit many different epochs. Just as some geometric forms—the square, the cube, the circle, and the sphere—represent something essentially rational, subject to modifications that render them vital and flexible but always remaining the eternal elements of our formal language, so most classical architectural forms are qualitatively different from all others because they are correct irrespective of time periods.”⁵²

The epoch of the First Five-Year Plan and great breakthrough, known to contemporaries as the “period of reconstruction” or the “period of transition,” was embodied in two iconic buildings completed at about the same time: the Lenin Mausoleum and the House of Government. One contained the leader-founder; the other his successors. One was a small structure designed to dominate a historic square; the other a huge fortress meant to fill a swamp. One represented the center of New Jerusalem; the other the first in a series of endlessly reproducible dwellings for its inhabitants. Both attempted to combine, and perhaps identify, the avant-garde’s search for the “eternal elements of our formal language” with the “classical architectural forms.” The mausoleum consisted of a massive cube supporting a stepped pyramid crowned with a portico. The House of Government resembled a Timurid mausoleum, with a tall, flat facade both shielding and advertising the tomb’s sacred contents.⁵³

The mausoleum was carefully inserted into the hallowed space of Red Square. The House of Government resembled an island within an island. The tall archways leading into the inner courtyards were blocked by heavy gates; the two embankments framing the building from the north and south were Siamese dead ends conjoined at the Arrowhead; the Big Stone Bridge would soon be elevated, turning All Saints Street into another dead end; and the western side, mostly invisible to pedestrians, overlooked the Einem (now Red October) Candy Factory, with St. Nicholas and a few other remnants of the Swamp cowering in perpetual shadow in between.

View from the bridge

View from the Kremlin

View from the cathedral

View from All Saints Street

View from the Drainage Canal (Ditch)

Relocation of the Big Stone Bridge (for the purpose of improving traffic access)

■ ■ ■

The House of Government was not going to remain an island for very long: a second House of Government was to be built on Bolotnaia (Swamp) Square, and a third one, across the river, in Zariadye (a crowded artisans’ quarter east of the Kremlin). But the task was not to fight the Swamp one building at a time: the task was to rebuild the capital along with the rest of the country. As Koltsov had written after the introduction of NEP in 1921, old Moscow, “bareheaded and unkempt,” had “crept out from under the rubble and poked her head up, grinning her old hag’s grin.” Malevolent and apparently immortal, she “looked the new world in the eye and bared her teeth, wishing to live on and to get fat again.”⁵⁴

It would take the great breakthrough to finish her off. In the words of a 1930 article, “The disorganized Moscow street has no face of its own, no perspective, no hint of any consistency of growth: from an eight-story ‘skyscraper,’ your eye slips down, with a sick feeling, into the gap of one-storyness; the street looks like a jaw with rotten, uneven, chipped teeth. Old Moscow—the way it is now—will inevitably, and very soon, become a serious brake on our advance. Socialism cannot be squeezed into an old, ill-fitting, worn-out shell.” Socialism required a new capital, and the new capital required a proper plan. “In this regard, we are lagging behind the capitals of bourgeois Europe. For several decades now, Paris has been built and rebuilt according to the so-called Haussmann plan. Australia has announced an international competition for the best design of its capital. But here, in the land of the plan, in the country that created the five-year plan, our capital, Moscow, continues to grow and develop spontaneously, according to the wishes of particular developers and without any regulation.”⁵⁵

The construction of the mausoleum and the House of Government was a good beginning, but it was the Palace of Soviets—the site of national congresses and mass processions, the official stage for the House’s residents, and the ultimate public building of all time—that was going to provide the center around which the new world would be built. On February 6, 1931, while still working on the House of Government, Boris Iofan submitted a proposal and a timetable for the design competition; in spring 1931, a preliminary competition was held (Iofan was both a contestant and the chief architect within the Construction Administration); and on July 13, 1931, the presidium of the Central Executive Committee issued a decree “on the construction of the Palace of Soviets on the square of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the demolition of the latter.” The palace was to contain a main auditorium for 15,000 people, a second auditorium for 5,900 people, two additional halls for 200 people each, and an administrative area. By the December 1 deadline, 272 projects, including 160 professional designs, had been submitted to the Construction Council chaired by Molotov. On December 5, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was dynamited. On February 28, 1932, the commission announced that the three first prizes would be awarded to Ivan Zholtovsky, Boris Iofan, and an American, Hector Hamilton. Zholtovsky’s design included a tower that resembled a Kremlin tower and an auditorium that resembled the Colosseum in Rome. Iofan’s design was similar to Zholtovsky’s except that the tower and the colosseum were stripped of overt classical references. Hamilton’s massive rectangular fortress resembled Iofan’s House of Government (which was to serve as its shadow on the other side of the river).⁵⁶

Zholtovsky’s 1931 design for the Palace of Soviets

Iofan’s 1931 design

Hamilton’s 1931 design

None of the three winning designs was perfect, however (Iofan’s was considered “not organic enough”). According to the Construction Council, “the monumentality, simplicity, integrity, and grace of the architectural interpretation of the Palace of Soviets associated with the greatness of our socialist construction have not received their full expression in any of the submitted projects.” The announcement for a new, closed contest called for one monumental building of “a boldly tall composition” devoid of “temple motifs” and located on a large square not delimited “by colonnades or other structures that might interfere with the impression of openness.”⁵⁷

By the spring of 1933, two closed competitions (for twenty invited participants and then, separately, for five finalists) resulted in a victory for Iofan, whose design represented a massive rectangular platform, with an elaborate facade resembling the Great Altar at Pergamon, supporting a three-tiered cylindrical tower and an eighteen-meter statue placed off-center above the portico. “This bold, firm, articulated ascent,” wrote Lunacharsky, “is not an imploring gaze toward heaven, but, rather, a storming of the heights from below.” On May 10, 1933, the Construction Council adopted Iofan’s design as the project’s “baseline,” but mandated that the building “culminate in a massive statue of Lenin 50 to 75 meters high, so that the entire Palace of Soviets would serve as a pedestal for the figure of Lenin.” On June 4, 1933, the Council appointed V. A. Shchuko and V. G. Gelfreikh, who had recently won the Lenin Library competition and whose own Palace of Soviets submission was a variation on the theme of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, as Iofan’s “coauthors.” The compromise version, with the Lenin statue centered at the top and the upper cylinder elongated in order to accommodate its size, was officially accepted in 1934. Iofan was appointed chief architect.⁵⁸

According to a book about the final version of the design, the Palace of Soviets was to be 416 meters (1,365 feet) high. “It will be the highest structure on earth: higher than the Egyptian pyramids, higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the American skyscrapers.” It would also be the biggest: “In order to equal the internal space of the future Palace in Moscow, one would have to add up the volumes of the six largest American skyscrapers.” The statue of Lenin would weigh six thousand tons and reach a height of one hundred meters. “It will be three times as high and two-and-a-half times as heavy as the famous Statue of Liberty.” It would soar above the clouds, and, on clear days, be visible seventy kilometers from Moscow. “At night, the brightly lit-up shape of the statue of Ilich would be seen … even farther away: a majestic lighthouse marking the spot of the socialist capital of the world.”⁵⁹

The building was to house the world’s first genuine parliament—the Supreme Soviet, its presidium, and its administrative apparatus—as well as the central state archive and countless museums, winter gardens, cafeterias, and reception halls.⁶⁰

Iofan’s 1933 design

Gelfreikh and Shchuko’s 1933 design

Iofan, Gelfreikh, and Shchuko’s 1933 design

Palace of Soviets

The six columns of the Main Entrance to the Palace of Soviets will bear the engravings of the six commandments from the oath that Comrade Stalin took after Lenin’s death. These commandments will also be represented in sculptures.

Beyond the colonnade and loggias will be the Hall of the Stalin Constitution, which will seat 1,500 people, and, finally, the Great Hall. Figures are powerless in this case, so perhaps a comparison will help: the space of the Great Hall will be almost twice as great as the entire space of the House of Government, complete with all its residential buildings and theaters.⁶¹

The Palace of Soviets was going to be the ultimate wonder of the world: a tower that reached unto heaven not out of pride, but in triumph; a tower that gathered the scattered languages of the earth and made them one; Jacob’s ladder in stone and concrete:

There was once the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which stood at the mouth of the Nile and helped ships find their way into that trading port of the ancient world.

There were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. There were the great works of religious art: the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus and Phidias’s gold and ivory statue of Zeus at Olympia.

In later years, mankind created even more grandiose structures: the Panama and Suez canals connected oceans; the St. Gotthard and Simplon tunnels cut through the rock of the Alps; the Eiffel Tower rose over Paris.⁶²

All of these structures were great masterpieces, but they were built by slaves in the service of false gods. In the Soviet Union, people would be free to build an indestructible monument to their own future:

State borders will vanish from the map of the world. The earth’s very landscape will change. Communist settlements, completely different from the old cities, will rise up. Man will defeat space. Electricity will plow the fields of Australia, China, and Africa. But the Palace of Soviets, crowned with the statue of Ilich, will still stand on the bank of the Moskva River. People—generation after generation—will be born, live happy lives, and gradually grow old, but the Palace of Soviets, familiar to them from their favorite children’s books, will remain the same as we will see it in a few years. Centuries will leave no traces on it, for we will build it in such a way that it will stand for eternity. It is a monument to Lenin!⁶³

The new center of Moscow was to be formed by three linked squares. The mausoleum containing Lenin’s body and the Palace of Soviets supporting the Lenin statue would be connected to a third rectangular square named after Lenin’s patronymic (Ilich, or the son of Elijah). Radiating out from them would be straight, broad avenues, including “the ceremonial thoroughfare of Greater Moscow, Lenin Avenue.” The House of Government was the first in a series of new buildings meant to frame the city’s core. None of them, however, was to look like the House of Government. As Kaganovich said in September 1934, some buildings “overwhelm the individual with their stone blocks, their heavy mass…. The House of Government, designed by Iofan, is not a success in this regard because its top is heavier than its bottom. We are proud of this house as the biggest, most important, and most cultured house we have built, but its composition is a bit too heavy and cannot serve as a model for future construction.”⁶⁴

■ ■ ■

The literature of the epoch of great construction sites was mostly about great construction sites. To take the best known, Yuri Olesha’s Envy (1927, a part of the movement’s advance detachment) is about the building of a giant public kitchen; Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Golden Calf (1931) is, in part, about the building of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway; Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932) is about the building of the Magnitogorsk Steel Mill; Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Second Day (1933) is about the building of the Kuznetsk Steel Mill; Boris Pilniak’s The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (1930), Marietta Shaginian’s Hydrocentral (1931), Bruno Jasienski’s Man Changes His Skin (1932), and Fedor Gladkov’s Energy (1933) are about the building of river dams; Leonid Leonov’s The Sot’ (1929) is about the building of a paper mill (on the River Sot’); the multiauthored The White Sea–Baltic Canal (1934) is about the building of the White Sea–Baltic Canal; and Andrei Platonov’s “Doubting Makar” (1929) and The Foundation Pit (1930) are each about the building of an eternal house.⁶⁵

Palace of Soviets and the new Moscow

Most of them would later be classified as “production novels,” but none of them truly is one, because no actual production—of steel, paper, electricity, or sausages—ever takes place. They are, rather, construction stories—or, since human souls are also under construction—construction-cum-conversion stories. What matters is the act of building—a new world, a new Jerusalem, a new tower that will reach the heavens. “You’ve got a proper Socialist International here,” says a visiting foreign correspondent in Jasienski’s Man Changes His Skin. “Yes, we’ve got a real Tower of Babel” responds the head of construction, and he begins to count:

Hold on, let me see: the Tajiks, make one, the Uzbeks, two, the Kazakhs, three, the Kyrgyz, four, the Russians, five, the Ukrainians, six, the Lezgians, seven, the Ossetians, eight, the Persians, nine, the Indians, ten—that’s right, we’ve got Indians, too, émigrés. The Afghans make eleven: there are several Afghan crews, right here and in Sector Three. Twenty percent of the drivers are Tatars—that’s twelve. In the repair shop, there are some Germans and Poles—that’s fourteen. Among the engineers there are Georgians, Armenians, and Jews—that’s already seventeen. There are also two American engineers, one of whom is the head of this sector—that’s eighteen. Did I forget anybody?

“There are some Turks, too, Comrade Commander.”

“That’s right: there are some Turks, and also some Turkmen.”⁶⁶

In Kataev’s Magnitogorsk, there are “the men of Kostroma with their finely distended nostrils, Kazan Tatars, Caucasians (Georgians and Chechens), Bashkirs, Germans, Muscovites, Leningraders in coats and Tolstoy shirts, Ukrainians, Jews, and Belorussians.” In Ehrenburg’s Kuznetsk, there are “Ukrainians and Tatars, Buriats, Cheremis, Kalmyks, peasants from Perm and Kaluga, coal miners from Yuzovka, turners from Kolomna, bearded road pavers from Riazan, Komsomols, exiled kulaks, unemployed miners from Westphalia and Silesia, street traders from the Sukharevka flea market, embezzlers sentenced to forced labor, enthusiasts, swindlers, and even sectarian preachers.” And in Leonov’s The Sot’, there are sawyers and glaziers from Ryazan, stonemasons and stove fitters from Vyatka and Tver, plasterers from Vologda, painters from Kostroma, diggers from Smolensk, and carpenters from Vladimir. “From Perm they came, and from Vyatka, and from all the provinces where the old peasant ways passed down from their forefathers were no longer possible, but new ones had not yet arrived.” One of the carpenters offers to send for the young women, too, but the head of construction shakes his head: “We’re building a paper mill—not Babylon!”⁶⁷

It is Babylon, of course (as the head of construction realizes toward the end of the novel)—only in reverse: from dispersion to unity. As Platonov’s Chiklin puts it, “Heard of Mount Ararat, have you? Well, if I heaped all the earth I have dug into a single heap, that’s how high it would reach.” And as Platonov’s engineer Prushevsky thinks to himself, “It was he who had thought up a single all-proletarian home in place of the old town where to this day people lived by fencing themselves off into households; in a year’s time the entire local class of the proletariat would leave the petty-proprietorial town and take possession for life of this monumental new home. And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity.”⁶⁸

All construction stories are stories of creation; the epigraph to Ehrenburg’s The Second Day is an epigraph to them all: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And it was so. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” The most common cosmogonic myths are creation ex nihilo and creation from chaos. Platonov’s “all-proletarian house” is to be built on a “vacant lot” (pustyr’, from pustoi, “empty”); Jasienski’s dam and Ilf and Petrov’s railroad are to be built in the desert (pustynia, from pustoi, “empty”); and Kataev’s Magnitogorsk is in the middle of nowhere. “There was no way of telling what it was—neither steppe nor city.” In Gladkov’s Energy, “the gray-brown clay hills, the granite boulders wrested from the earth, and the river squeezed between its high rocky banks slept sadly and soundly.” Only at night, with the coming of searchlights, did “the chaos of rocks, cliffs, quarries, and concrete structures come alive in bright contrasts of light and shadow, like a moonscape.”⁶⁹

Another word for “chaos” is “wilderness,” and another word for “wilderness” is “Asia.” In the creation tales of Kataev, Jasienski, Ehrenburg, and Ilf and Petrov, the departure from Europe is marked as a prologue to genesis. In Man Changes His Skin, the traveling American engineer, James Clark, notices that “the endless plain, which began long before Orenburg, was becoming more and more yellow and monotonous.” At the gate of Asia, he breaks his journey in Chelkar, the place of Tania Miagkova’s exile. She had probably left by then, having reconciled with her husband, mother, and the Party line.⁷⁰

But by far the most popular form of chaos is the swamp: partly because it is a familiar interpretation of the biblical “waters,” but mostly because all Soviet creation novels come out of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (“from the darkness of the forests and the quagmires of the swamps”). Gladkov’s “precipice” smells of “swampy rot”; Ehrenburg’s builders work, “sinking into the yellow mud”; Leonov’s mill drowns in a boggy forest “choked with old-growth timber”; and the White Sea–Baltic Canal makes its way, just barely, through the “strips of mud” left behind by the glaciers. When one of Leonov’s young engineers says that Peter the Great “drained the vast Russian marsh in almost identical style,” the head of construction responds that he had done so without the benefit of a “Marxist approach.”⁷¹

True to both Testaments—the Christian and the Pushkinian—most Soviet creation tales include a flood that wipes out the wicked along with the innocent: “the man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air.” The few construction sites that are not on the water have to make do with fires and storms. Kataev’s Magnitogorsk has both. The storm destroys the old circus, which stands for Babylon.

The circus posts come loose, topple and sprawl on the ground. The parrots scream as they are crushed by the falling timbers.

The canvas roof swells and flies off, only to get caught up in the wires.

Feathers of every hue—red, yellow, blue—fill the air.

The elephant stands with his massive forehead against the storm. He spreads his fan-shaped ears and raises his trunk.

His ears inflate like sails in the wind.

The elephant fights off the dust with his trunk. His eyes look crazed, diabolical.

The wind compels him to retreat. He backs away. He is completely enveloped in the black whirlwind of dust. His body steams. He wants to escape, but the chain holds him fast. He lets out a dreadful, spine-chilling elemental scream.

It is the trumpet call of the Last Judgment.⁷²

The world of silt, mud, rot, and dust contains countless things that need to be swept away, from Platonov’s “petty and unfortunate scraps of nature” to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Every construction project of the era of the First Five-Year Plan is a future Palace of Soviets. When the Magnitogorsk engineer Margulies calls his sister in Moscow, she supplies the script in the form of local news:

And the dome of Christ the Savior … Can you hear me? I was just saying that the dome of Christ the Savior … half of it has been dismantled. I never realized it was so huge …

“Good,” Margulies muttered.

“Every section of the cupola was over two meters wide. And, from a distance, it looked just like an empty melon rind…. Are you listening?

“Goo-ood!,” Margulies roared. “Go on, go on!”⁷³

The most rotten scraps of the old world come from bourgeois apartments. The villainous Bezdetov (Childless) brothers from Pilniak’s The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea make their living buying up antique furniture. The pregnant proletarian girl from Time, Forward! looks out her train window and sees “an old kitchen table, a disassembled wooden bed with head and footboards tied back to back, a chair, and a badly scorched stool.” “They’re bringing their bedbugs with them!” says the conductor.⁷⁴

At the center of the old home stands Odysseus’s bed—the “terrifying bed” from Olesha’s Envy, “made of precious wood covered with dark cherry varnish with scrolled mirrors on the inside of the head and footboards.” It belongs to a false Penelope by the name of Anechka Prokopovich. “She was sleeping with her mouth open, gurgling, the way old women do when they sleep. The rustling of the bedbugs sounded as if someone were tearing at the wallpaper. Their hiding places, unknown to daylight, were revealing themselves. The bed-tree grew and swelled. The window-sill turned pink. Gloom gathered around the bed. The night’s secrets were creeping out of corners and down the walls, washing over the sleeping pair, and crawling under the bed.” One of the bed’s main accessories is a blanket (“I boiled under it and squirmed, jiggling in the warmth like a plate of aspic.”). Another one—more compact both as object and metaphor—is a pillow. The Soviet creation novel’s most eloquent defender of everything resembling jelly is Ivan Babichev, a “modest Soviet magician” and the crafty serpent who guides the questing hero into Anechka’s Eden. Ivan is a short, “tubby” man who goes around “dangling a large pillow in a yellowed pillow case behind his back. It keeps bumping against the back of his knee, making a hollow appear and disappear.”⁷⁵

Dismantling of the dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior

Ivan Babichev looks like a pillow. Shaginian’s “Philistines” look like beasts of Babylon: “I saw something that looked like a stairway from the Apocalypse, a stairway overflowing with rams and goats in tailcoats. The men and women were making bleating noises, and the women had sprouted fat sheep’s tails. They wagged their tails and diamond earrings, their round eyes bulging obscenely.”⁷⁶

But most swamp creatures look like swamp creatures. In Leonov’s The Sot’, a young Soviet woman is walking through the woods and comes upon a cave filled with monstrous monks. Deep inside, ringed by “gaping nostrils,” “dangling earlobes,” and “huge, scurvy-stricken mouths torn by silent screams,” is a pit containing “the monastery’s treasure,” the hermit Eusebius. “It took her a moment to get used to the putrescent warmth emanating from the hole and swirling the flame before she could look in. There, in a nest of filthy rags, rolled a small human face overgrown with fur that looked like moss to her. The earth itself seemed to be shining through the translucent skin of the forehead. The lower lip was stuck out fretfully, but the eyes were closed. The holy man was blinded by the light, and his wild, bushy eyebrows trembled with tension.”⁷⁷

Pilniak’s patriarch, Yakov Karpovich Skudrin, drips slime on the living room floor and cradles his hernia through a slit in his pants. “His eyes watering with his eighty-five years, the old man swelled up, putrid and happy, like a boil full of pus.” He is an aged, but defiant Smerdiakov offering his services to a despondent Ivan Karamazov (the engineer Poltorak). “There’s always some deadwood in the swamp: the mud sucks it in; the leeches cling to it; the crawfish grab onto it; the minnows swarm round it; and the cows piss in the midst of all this filth and stench—while I live on, playing the fool, fouling the earth, seeing and understanding everything. We don’t mind killing. Just give me a name.”⁷⁸

True “wreckers” are selflessly and uncompromisingly devoted to the devil. “I can do anything,” says Skudrin, “but I wish only evil, and only evil makes me happy.” Their purpose is to sabotage the work of creation. They may take on various disguises, but their true nature is duly noted by the narrator and discovered—eventually, if not always simultaneously—by the reader and the secret police investigator. Skudrin has to cradle his hernia; Poltorak’s teeth are “disfigured by gold”; Gladkov’s Khablo has “blind eyes” and a “hideously scarred arm”; and of the three main villains in Man Changes His Skin, one is left-handed, one has a misshapen finger, and the third is missing an eye. All of them plan to unleash a flood. During the era of construction, a flood is the devil’s work. The devil’s work is, ultimately, God’s will. Skudrin is part of “that power which would the evil ever do, and ever does the good.”⁷⁹

Leading the charge against the swamp and treading the winepress of the fury of historical necessity are the Bolshevik commanders of the army of builders. Some construction heads, chief engineers, and Party secretaries are young enough, or timeless enough, to serve as the Adams of the new world. Kataev’s David Margulies, Jasienski’s Ivan Morozov, and Shaginian’s Arno Arevyan find young socialist brides and give every indication of being fruitful and multiplying. Others cannot “jump out of time” (as Kataev puts it). In Gladkov’s Energy, the head of the site’s Party organization, the Old Bolshevik and Civil War hero Miron Vatagin, goes for a swim, gets caught up in a whirlpool, and is pulled ashore by a young girl named Fenia. Both are naked. “‘Why is he being so shy?’ thought Fenia in amazement. She thought it was funny—funny and pleasant. Up until then, it would never have occurred to her that Miron could possibly be shy in her presence—timid and confused because of such a trifle, just because he was naked in front of her. After all, she was also naked—and did not feel any shame at all.” Miron, it turns out, has seen too much good and evil to be admitted into paradise. He comes to terms with his mortality, adopts a paternal role, and watches Fenia fall in love with someone her own age.⁸⁰

In The Sot’, the head of the project, Uvadyev, and his chief engineer, Burago, are both in love with their protégée, Suzanna. She chooses a younger man, and they console themselves by listening to “The March of the Trolls” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. “In my view,” says Burago, who stands for intelligentsia self-reflectivity next to Uvadyev’s Bolshevik action, “a new Adam will come and name all the creatures that predated him. And he will rejoice.” Suzanna will inherit the earth because she is as innocent as a child. “But I am an old man. I still remember the French Revolution, the Tower of Babel, Icarus’s unfortunate escapade, and the vertebra of a Neanderthal in some French museum.”⁸¹

What is their role in the creation myth, then? Pilniak’s engineer Laszlo, who knows he is not God, goes back to what all “fathers” keep going back to: the exodus. “Turn your attention to Comrade Moses who led the Jews out of Egypt. He was no fool. He journeyed across the bottom of the sea, made heavenly manna out of nothing, lost his way in the desert, and organized meetings on Mount Sinai. For forty years he searched and fought for a decent living space. But he never reached the Promised Land, leaving it to Joshua the son of Nun to cause the sun to stand still. His children reached it in his stead. People who have known Sodom cannot enter Canaan—they are not fit for the Promised Land.”⁸²

The Old Bolshevik in The Sot’ is dying from leukemia; the Old Bolshevik in The Second Day is dying from heart disease; and the Old Bolshevik in Energy is dying from tuberculosis. In Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, all the builders of the eternal house are their own grave diggers. Only Kozlov “still believed in the life to come after the construction of the big buildings,” but Kozlov masturbates under his blanket, has a weak chest, and is eventually killed by the kulaks. The others know that the big houses are for “tomorrow’s people,” take in a little orphan girl, and observe “the sleep of this small being who one day would have dominion over their graves and live on a pacified earth packed with their bones.” Those who did not die in the normal course of events would have to be killed. The war invalid Zhachev, who represents unquenchable proletarian wrath, “had made up his mind that, once this little girl and other children like her had matured a bit, he would put an end to all the big shots of his district. He alone knew that the USSR was inhabited by all-out enemies of socialism, egotists, and the blood-suckers of the bright future world, and he secretly consoled himself with the thought that sometime soon he would kill the entire mass of them, leaving alive only proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood.”⁸³

Ehrenburg’s Old Bolshevik, Grigory Markovich Shor, is forty-eight years old, but his young disciple, Kolka, calls him an old man. Shor’s life resembles “a completed questionnaire from the Party archive.” The son of a shopkeeper, Shor joins the Party while it still feels “like a tiny reading circle.” He spends time in prisons, exile, and Paris. After the revolution he makes speeches “in circus tents, in barracks, on trucks, and on the steps of Imperial monuments.” During collectivization he is beaten by the kulaks. In Kuznetsk, he studies bricks and concrete the way he used to study political economy, agriculture, and the “prison ABCs.” “But behind that harsh, rigid life was a stooped man, short-sighted and genial, with a poorly-knotted tie, who could rapturously smell a flower in a railway station garden and then ask a little girl, ‘What kind of flower is this, or rather, what is its name?’” Shor lives next to the blast furnace. Once he hears a fire alarm and races over, but the alarm proves false. He feels unwell, returns home, and dies in the arms of young Kolka.⁸⁴

In Pilniak’s The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea, the Old Bolsheviks live right next to the furnace, but they belong to the swamp as much as they do to the fire. They are spent men “for whom time stopped at the end of War Communism,” and their leader is Ivan Ozhogov (“Burnt”), first head of the local executive committee, brother of the slime-dripping wrecker, Yakov Skudrin, and descendant of Leonov’s underground monks. “Ivan Ozhogov plunged into the depths near the factory furnace, into the dark, stifling heat, and crawled toward the mouth…. The heavy air smelled of smoke, tar, stale humanity, and fish—like the crew’s quarters on a ship. Ragged men with long, matted hair and beards lay in the dark on the clay floor around the mouth of the furnace.” They are Left Deviationists—the fire-and-brimstone radical Puritans of the Bolshevik Revolution who have spent the years of the great disappointment weeping next to the mouth of the furnace. They know that the coming flood will be the second act of creation. “The year 1919 is coming back!” says Ozhogov. Or, as the Bolshevik Sadykov responds to the tale of Moses’s demise just short of the promised land: “It is true that he never got there, but he did write the Commandments.”⁸⁵

Gladkov’s Old Bolshevik, Baikalov, is an orthodox Party official whose life is the proletarian version of Shor’s “student” (Jewish) biography, but he, too, is “burning with an inner fire.” He, too, was present at the Battle of Dair, “when there was nothing in the dark of night but a hurricane of flames, as if the whole world were exploding amidst the rumble, fire, and smoke of an earthquake.” He, too, realizes that the coming flood is the beginning of eternity. “It is true that soon he will be no more and that the world will disappear for him. And yet, he is immortal.” As he tells another Bolshevik Moses, “I declare with the greatest conviction, that death, in its old, obsolete sense, cannot exist for us.”⁸⁶

When the flood finally comes, Ivan Ozhogov’s cave fills “with green, slow-moving swamp water.” Ivan—“a splendid man from the splendid era of 1917–21”—dies next to his furnace. A little boy named Mishka is watching the flood. “The creation of the new river signaled Mishka’s genesis, just as the factory whistle had for Ozhogov and Sadykov.” Peopling the newly cleansed earth will be today’s children: Petka, Kolka, Mishka, and the two Fenias, among others. Some of them have reached the age of fruitfulness (every construction story contains at least one pregnant woman, and Olesha’s Valia and Volodia plan to get married on the day construction is completed), but most are innocent representatives of proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood. Platonov’s diggers keep digging for the sake of a little girl named Nastia, who will have dominion over their graves and live on a pacified earth packed with their bones. Leonov’s Uvadyev imagines a little girl “somewhere over there on the radiant border, beneath the rainbows of a vanquished future.” “Her name was Katya, and she was no more than ten years old. It was for her and her happiness that he fought and suffered and imposed suffering on all around him. She had not yet been born, but she could not fail to appear, since untold sacrifices had already been made on her behalf.” And in Shaginian’s Hydrocentral, the artist Arshak is thundering against rams and goats in tailcoats when he suddenly has an epiphany. “It came from a pair of eyes, the dark brown and wide open eyes of an eight-year-old girl, the house’s Cinderella. With her chin resting on the edge of the table and her little head tilted back, she listened to him with her mouth open, with all the seriousness of her mysterious child’s being.”⁸⁷

Standing between the dying Bolsheviks and pure orphanhood are thousands of builders being tested by the act of building. Some are doomed from the start by illegitimate birth and branded with the seal of the beast; others, the intelligenty, spawn spiritual sickness and plebeian wreckers with their delirious speech. Ehrenburg’s Volodia Safonov cannot stop reading Dostoevsky. “Feeling guilty but unable to help himself,” he keeps plunging “into the thicket of absurd scenes, hysterical crying fits, and hot, clammy pain.” One day, he meets the embodiment of his faithlessness (a boy named Tolia), talks to him of freedom, and forces him to repeat a version of Smerdiakov’s refrain (“It’s always interesting to talk to an intelligent person”). The following morning Tolia wrecks an important piece of equipment.⁸⁸

But most builders pass the test: reforge themselves, achieve full conversion, submit to baptism (often in a river), and join the Bolsheviks in building the eternal house. In one of the central scenes in the quasi-documentary history of the White Sea–Baltic Canal, “a Ford comes roaring” into a labor camp.

The car made a sharp turn. Dust flew from under the braking wheels. A shaggy head popped out of the window and looked around.

On the opposite bank was a human anthill. The foundation pit reached to the horizon. Dusty wheelbarrows could be seen surging toward the crest. On the right stood the scaffolding of an unfinished structure. That was the lock.

A foreman ran up to the car and saluted. The shaggy-headed one put out his hand: “I’m Solts.”

He walks through the crowd “as if he were in Moscow in his own apartment.” He knows they have been reborn and baptizes them with the word “comrades.” They respond by shedding their “socially unhealthy” pasts and promise to work harder. “That same day they christened themselves the Five-Year Plan Crew and dug up eight hundred cubic meters of soil instead of the usual two hundred.”⁸⁹

The new world is born in a labor camp. Or did it give birth to a labor camp? Few Five-Year Plan creation stories are free of irony. All come out of The Bronze Horseman, and all belong to the continuum between a paean to the New City and a lament to its victim, who perishes in the flood.

There were young Communists working at the construction site. They knew what they were doing—they were building Leviathan. Working alongside them were some expropriated kulaks. They had been brought here from far away: peasants from Riazan and Tula. They had been brought here together with their families, but they did not know why. They had traveled for ten days. Then the train stopped. There was a hill above a river. They were told that they would live there. The babies cried, and the women gave them their shrunken, bluish breasts to suckle.

They looked like survivors after a fire. They were called “special settlers.” They began to dig in the earth—to build earthen barracks. The barracks were crowded and dark. In the morning the people went to work. In the evening they returned. The children cried, and the exhausted women muttered, “Hush!”

There were prisoners working at the Osinov mines, digging coal. Ore and coal together produced iron. Among the prisoners was Nikolai Izvekov [“from time immemorial”], the priest who administered the last sacrament to Kolka Rzhanov’s mother. After Izvekov was purged from the Sanitation Trust, he began to preach “the Last Days.” He copied the epistles of St. Paul and sold the copies for five rubles each. He also performed secret requiem services for the deceased Tsar. He was sentenced to three years in a concentration camp. Now he loaded coal in a pit. By his side worked Shurka-the-Turk. Shurka used to sell cocaine. Izvekov would say to Shurka: “The impious will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.”⁹⁰

Socialist construction sites were also labor camps, and possibly gateways to hell. On the Dnieper, “workers with shovels and crowbars, singly and in groups, swarmed among the rocks, next to the cables, trolleys, and iron boxes.” On the Sot’, “the number of diggers kept shrinking, and the last thirty had only seven square feet or so to maneuver in.” And on the Mizinka, “the scoop bucket rose, the gravel poured drily into the open mouth of the cement mixer, and from above, at automatic intervals, a thin stream of water squirted down on the gravel like a spray of saliva…. Rising again, the scoop bucket overturned the dripping mass into the concrete mixer, and the its jaws chewed on the gravel mixed with sand.”⁹¹

“This is like the creation of the world,” writes one of Ehrenburg’s Communist brides to the doubting Volodia Safonov. “Everything at once: heroism, greed, cruelty, generosity.” The creation of the world demands great sacrifice; great sacrifice involves great suffering, and great suffering produces doubt: the same doubt that Sverdlov and Voronsky struggled with in their own prerevolutionary catacombs. Volodia Safonov’s torment is not his alone: “At meetings everyone knows beforehand what each person will say. All you have to do is remember a few formulas and a few figures. But to speak like a real human being, that is, tripping up, stammering, and with passion, to speak about something personal—that they cannot do…. And yet they are the builders of a new life, the apostles called upon to make prophecies, the dialecticians incapable of error.” When the engineer Burago says that he cannot enter the new world because he remembers Icarus and the Tower of Babel, is he saying that he is too old or is he saying that the “new Adam” will have to learn about hubris?⁹²

Burago is an honest tower-builder, but even the dishonest and ill-intentioned ones manage to speak with considerable power and conviction. The oily American in Kataev’s Time Forward! surveys the Magnitogorsk panorama and then looks down at an old baste shoe lying in the grass before him:

“On the one hand, Babylon, and on the other, a baste shoe. That is a paradox.”

Nalbandov repeated stubbornly: “Here there will be a socialist city for a hundred and fifty thousand workers and service employees.”

“Yes, but will humanity be any happier because of that? And is this presumed happiness worthy of such effort?”

“He is right,” Nalbandov thought.

“You are wrong,” he said, looking coldly at the American. “You lack imagination. We shall conquer nature, and we shall give humanity back its lost paradise.”⁹³

The smooth German riding on the train in Ilf and Petrov’s The Golden Calf makes the same point by telling the story of a Communist Adam and Eve who go to Gorky Park, sit down under a tree, pluck off a small branch, and suddenly realize that they are made for each other. Three years later they already have two sons.

“So what’s the point?” asked Lavoisian.

“The point is,” answered Heinrich emphatically, “that one son was called Cain, the other Abel, and that in due course Cain would slay Abel, Abraham would beget Isaac, Isaac would beget Jacob, and the whole story would start anew, and neither Marxism nor anything else will ever be able to change that. Everything will repeat itself. There will be a flood, there will be Noah with his three sons, and Ham will insult Noah. There will be the Tower of Babel, gentlemen, which will never be completed. And on and on and on. There won’t be anything new in the world. So don’t get too excited about your new life…. Everything, everything will repeat itself! And the Wandering Jew will continue to wander the earth.”⁹⁴

The only person to respond with a story of his own is the “Great Operator” and one the most popular characters in Soviet literature, Ostap Bender. The Wandering Jew will never wander again, he says, because in 1919 he decided to leave Rio de Janeiro, where he had been strolling under the palm trees in his white pants, in order to see the Dnieper River. “He had seen them all: the Rhine, the Ganges, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Niger, the Volga, but not the Dnieper.” He crossed the Romanian border with some contraband, and was caught by Petliura’s men and sentenced to death. “‘But I am supposed to be eternal!’ cried the old man. He had yearned for death for two thousand years, but at that moment he desperately wanted to live. ‘Shut up, you dirty kike,’ yelled the forelocked commander cheerfully. ‘Finish him off, boys!’ And the eternal wanderer was no more.”⁹⁵

Ostap Bender wins the argument. The wandering Jew is supposed to stop wandering on the eve of the millennium; the millennium is scheduled to begin at the great construction site in the desert; and the train they are on is leaving the world of eternal return behind. Or is it? A short time later Ostap crosses the Romanian border with some contraband. His plan is to go to Rio de Janeiro and stroll under the palm trees in his white pants. The border guards catch him and beat him up, but they do not kill him. The Wandering Jew is on the loose again. “Hold the applause! As the Count of Monte Cristo, I am a failure. I’ll have to go into apartment management instead.”⁹⁶

Ostap may be difficult to destroy (he had been killed and resurrected before), but he is a homeless stranger in search of a mirage. Olesha’s Ivan Babichev, the god of the bed and brother of the chief tower-builder, Andrei Babichev, is much more dangerous because he sits at the very source of eternal return. “Keep your hands off our pillows!” he says to his brother on behalf of humanity. “Our fledgling heads, covered with soft reddish down, lay on these pillows; our kisses fell on them in a night of love, we died on them—and people we killed died on them, too. Don’t touch our pillows! Don’t call us! Don’t lure us, don’t tempt us! What can you offer in place of our ability to love, hate, hope, cry, regret and forgive?”⁹⁷

Ivan is “a magician,” however—and possibly a fraud. His own pillow is homeless, and the bed he ends up in is the bedbug-ridden realm of the snoring Anechka. But there is one test of the legitimacy of doubt that every Russian reader knows to be unimpeachable. What if the child who is to live in the New City and for whom “untold sacrifices” have been made dies before the work is done?

Platonov’s Nastia, “the fact of socialism,” catches a cold during the “ordeal of the kulaks,” dies, and is buried in the foundation pit of the eternal house. But The Foundation Pit—closest to The Bronze Horseman in its degree of ambivalence—was not published at the time. Much more striking is the death of the little girl in Leonov’s The Sot’, which was praised as a flawed but timely account of socialist construction at the Sixteenth Party Congress. “The engineers felt a strange, guilty sorrow because the corpse was that of a little girl, and, judging from her size, she could not have been more than eleven. Her bare knees were covered with mud. In its senselessness, the accident resembled murder.” Uvadyev, the chief of contruction, imagines that “he has recognized in the dead girl the one who had been so closely bound up with his own fate. Driven by a strange need, he asked her name and was told it was Polia.”⁹⁸

In the end, however, it always turns out that the sacrifice has not been in vain and that Dostoevsky’s absurd scenes and hysterical crying fits are but a passing sickness. Doubt is natural, and the suffering terrible, but the work of creation cannot be tainted by the loss of innocence. (Even in The Bronze Horseman, the death of Evgeny does not seem to doom “Peter’s creation.” And, of course, the most popular of all Soviet construction novels is Aleksei Tolstoy’s Peter I, which depicts the prologue to the First Five-Year Plan as a joyfully violent event.) In The Sot’, Uvadyev reaches a conclusion “that would not make sense to anyone else and was possible only on such a terrible night: she was the sister of the one for whom he had suffered and caused others to suffer so much.” In the novel’s final paragraph, he sits down on a bench above the river:

Having scraped off some of the icy crust, Uvadyev perched on the edge of the wooden plank and continued sitting there with his hands resting on his knees until the lights at the construction site began to glow. Half an hour later, the wet snow had partially covered the man sitting on the bench. His shoulders and knees were white; the snow on his hands was melting, but still he did not move, although it had already grown dark. Staring out into the March gloom with a barbed, dispassionate gaze, he could probably make out the cities that were to rise from those inconceivable expanses and feel the fragrant breeze that would blow through them and tousle the locks of a little girl whose face he knew so well.⁹⁹

Even in The Foundation Pit, the work goes on. Voshchev, victim of “a vain mind’s troubled longing” and the collector of “petty and unfortunate scraps of nature,” finds, thanks to Nastia, true knowledge, hope, and his place as the head of the purged peasants. And of course “Nastia” comes from “Anastasia,” which means “resurrection.” The engineer Prushevsky sees past his own approaching death, and perhaps that of Nastia, too. “Prushevsky looked quietly into all of nature’s misty old age and saw at its end some peaceful white buildings that shone with more light than there was in the air around them. Prushevsky did not know a name for this completed construction, nor did he know its purpose, although it was clear that these distant buildings had been arranged not only for use but also for joy. With the surprise of a man accustomed to sadness, Prushevsky observed the precise tenderness and the chilled, comprised strength of the remote monuments.”¹⁰⁰