Legacy 6- Soviet Architecture

Buildings for Revolutionary elites

Jan 26, '12 5:28 AM for everyone

I finally caught the Royal Academy’s exhibition on Modernist architecture in the Soviet Union just before it packed up.  Presumably Sir Joshua Reynolds will be getting sole rights to the courtyard back as the scale model of Tatlin’s famous Third International Tower (never built) is dismantled.   It was interesting to see this most notorious of early Soviet projects modelled in the open air (previous reconstructions, including one in the RA itself) have been indoors- and it merely confirmed my suspicion that it’s probably a good thing it was never built given the issues with Soviet construction standards.   I don’t for one moment believe that the rotating  layers within the structure would have worked reliably and they might well have cost many electricians and mechanics their lives, potentially shot as “saboteurs” and “wreckers” if the systems failed on a major Party occasion.   The maintenance would probably have been difficult in the extreme.  Admittedly one of the iconic images of the show was a radio tower in Moscow which was put up in 1922 and is still operational, but this wasn’t as high or anything like as structurally complex and people weren’t expected to work in offices within it.  In many ways the Shabolokova Tower (see above) is a more effective memorial to this period than Tatlin’s fantasy project would be.  It fits neatly with the technological fascination of the early Soviet regime (“Soviet power plus electrification”)- and the need to control society, in this case by dominating communications.

The show was formally divided into two parallel sections- though in practice it actually fell into three parts.   The first, and in some ways the least novel and interesting, was labelled “Artists”, covering the brief heyday of the Supremacist and Constructivist movements- the works of people like Malevich, Rodchenko and Popova.    It’s perhaps a little unfair to call this “uninteresting”- the art is worth seeing in its own right- but those particular artists have had quite a lot of exposure in London in the past decade or so (the older parts of this blog pick up some of this and, for instance, the  Rodchenko/ Popova  duo had a dedicated show at Tate Modern during my period of radio silence) so there isn’t much that’s really novel here.   There is also the awkward reality that, although Supremacist and Constructivist are keeps trying to jump into three dimensions even in strictly two dimensional media and although artists in these movements were great manifesto-issuers with aspirations to influence architectural practice (some more realistic than others) their direct long term impact on the actual built environment of the Soviet Union was minimal.   Partly this was a matter of timing; the heyday of the movements was the early 1920’s when the Soviet authorities had a civil war to win and other urgent tasks in entrenching their power.  There wasn’t much energy or many resources for construction projects.     In part also it was probably that their approach lent itself far better to genres like textile design (the Rodchenko/Popova show at the Tate presented some fabulous examples which I’m sure the more artistically inclined of my friends would love to try out in their wardrobes), theatrical sets, exhibition pavilions or the kind of ephemeral architecture associated with political rallies, Agitprop events and the like.  One of the less familiar names in this part of the show, the Latvian Gustav Klutsis (usually best known for his posters) , did an intriguing line on loudspeakers and other fittings for such events.   There is perhaps a certain grim irony in the knowledge that this artistic collaborator in the work of indoctrination was himself shot in 1938 during one of the purges of members on non-Soviet nationalities driven by the increasingly nationalist-inflected paranoia growing from “Socialism in One Country”.

The more purely architectural part of the show broke rather newer ground.   This in turn could be divided into two parts, one of which (perhaps not entirely intentionally) rather overshadowed the other.  The focus was on the construction of a number of major building projects in different cities and for different purposes (public buildings, major industrial sites, residential premises etc) .   This was illustrated by a certain amount of contemporary photography- obviously all in black and white, quite small formats and rarely inherently interesting.  Very few actually depicted the construction process, perhaps because the Soviet authorities were somewhat sensitive about the very primitive construction techniques on display.  For one thing, much of the building labour force in the 1920’s was still made up of seasonal migrants from remote villages to the cities (only with collectivisation and the mass expulsions from the countryside in the 1930’s did the majority work force become permanently urban in residence).  For another, desperate shortages of modern high tech materials meant that ultra-modernist buildings had wooden beams masquerading as metal or were insulated with chopped straw (given the poor quality of the material on offer, this may actually have been a good thing…).   In any event, these contemporary depictions were totally overshadowed by the large format colour photographs of the buildings as they stood in the 1990’s.  These were all taken by Richard Pare, a man with a fascination of the Soviet architecture of this era and an outstanding architectural photographer.   His photos are so compelling that they tend to focus the eye on the (generally) crumbling and derelict state of the buildings rather than their construction and heyday.

This is rather a pity (and I suspect Mr Pare would agree with that assessment).  It’s also a pity that the exhibition labelling and even the catalogue are very patchy in their coverage of what a Marxist would probably call “the material framework of production” which underlay the construction processes.   There is very little indeed on how architects and clients interacted in the quasi-pluralistic world of the New Economic Policy and how this may have changed as Stalin consolidated his hold on power.  How did the various Commissariats (in effect Government Ministries) choose architects for their major projects?  There appears to have been a competition process for many of the projects but it’s not clear how far a given Commissariat had its “pet” architects- there are hints that this may have been the case but they’re not followed through.    

What is clear is how relatively open to outsiders the Soviet scene was.  Big name Modernists were positively encouraged to design buildings there and several took up the challenge.  Le Corbusier (a man who appears to have had an uncomfortable fondness for authoritarian regimes with grand construction plans and who flirted with quasi-Fascist groups in France) came up with a design for the headquarters of the State Federation of Co-Operatives which was subsequently allocated to another ministry when co-operatives fell out of favour as a way of organising production.  He went to Moscow more than once to organise the site- and struggled with design changes to cope with the lack of air conditioning equipment and escalators.

  Erich Mendelsohn, best known in British parts as designer of the iconic Bexhill Pavilion (backdrop of endless period TV series), designed the Red Banner textile mill (see below). 

  Although more obviously in ideological sympathy with the regime than Le Corbusier he found this a bruising experience and eventually disowned the project, with comments on the shortcomings of Russian technical expertise which reek of a sense of German cultural superiority.   It’s an intriguing thought that, had Sant’Elia survived the First World War, he might well have picked up Soviet commissions- and the surprisingly warm relations between Mussolini’s Italy and the Soviet Union which prevailed until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War would have meant that there was little to stop him accepting them.   Lesser lights from abroad did well in the NEP Soviet scene too- though not represented in the show, several American practices did multiple projects there, usually associated with the projects constructed there by companies like Ford which all parties were ultimately only to keen to forget had ever existed.

As far the domestic Soviet profession is concerned, the exhibition catalogue argues that architecture was one of the last areas in the art world to be “Stalinised”; although squabbles between different groups associated with movements like Constructivism opened to door for the imposition of a single organisation for architects in 1932, the profession was not, it is suggested, fully brought to heel until the mid 1930’s.   Close examination of the biographies of the architects whose works are covered in the show also suggests that it was a good deal less dangerous to be an architect than a painter or a writer- while some clearly fell out of favour and one or two had brief spells in the Gulag there are very few with tell-tale death dates in the late 1930’s and none with the even more tell-tale question mark in place of a death date.  This needs to be qualified a little as (intriguingly) there are architects in the list about whom nothing seems to be know other than their names and the project they happen to be associated with so presumably these shadowy figures might have come to a painful end in the 1930’s but I think it’s overall a valid point.   It also looks as if the architectural profession was less disrupted than many by the drive for class-based affirmative action which saw most universities closed down in the 1930 and replaced by forcing houses dedicated to cramming people with the right class background through enough technical and scientific education to enable them to displace “bourgeois experts” with degrees which predated the Revolution or had been issued through traditional university structures in the 1920’s- at least men with “traditional” training seem to have been getting work well past the terminal date of the show in 1935.

In a way this may be surprising.  Major buildings take a long time to put up so you’d expect there to be ideological lags in implementation of state cultural policy (Le Corbusier’s project was still being completed in 1936, some time after the climate had changed).  Obviously architecture is an area where technical competence matters- class credentials aren’t much use if the buildings you design fall down or prove totally impractical.   On the other hand, a political culture obsessive about spies, saboteurs and wreckers lurking round every corner wasn’t necessarily an easy one for architects, who ran the risk of being held personally responsible if anything went wrong with their buildings.   There was the additional risk of being tainted by association if the person who had commissioned you was suddenly revealed as an enemy of the people.   It would have been really interesting to know more about how these issues played out in the bureaux and on the building site but this isn’t covered in either of the “shows within the show”.

One reason for late Stalinisation of architecture was perhaps that Stalin himself doesn’t seem to have been all that interested in the subject.   It’s no coincidence that Stalinisation of the arts started earliest in those areas where the Vozhd had a genuine interest (and indeed genuine personal talents)- literature and music.  “Socialist Realism” in the visual arts was essentially worked out by others on the basis of analogies with Stalin’s views on those arts.   It was probably less clear just what “Socialist Realism” in architecture ought to mean- and indeed the exhibition itself was a bit vague over just what came next and how it differed from the distinctly varied and eclectic approaches to Modernism on display.  The general impression is that it was displaced by a form of Neo-Classicism- a development curiously parallel to developments in Italy at about the same time.   Like Italy, though, I’m not sure what gets labelled “neo-classical” (interestingly used in a pejorative sense….) in Stalin’s Soviet Union would have passed much muster with Andrea Palladio, or even with the pseudo-Corinthian columns and overblown domes of Albert Speer’s plans for Imperial Berlin.  It may be horribly heavy and overblown but it’s also rather eclectic, with quite a bit of modernism still in the mix, along with odd echoes of Russian church architecture.  It’s designed to impress by sheer bulk- as Speer, and even more the ultimate architect of the dream/nightmare city of Germania, Adolf Hitler, would have appreciated.   It clearly has imperial overtones even in a workers’ and peasants’ state (and exported easily after 1945 to places like Prague and Budapest- or even Pyongyang).   I don’t however think it can be divorced as easily from what went before as the RA show rather liked to pretend.   “Corbusianism” was a Formalist heresy that would –be Soviet architects had to formally damn after the mid 1930’s if they wanted to keep a job but it still cast its shadow.

So what of the buildings actually covered in the exhibition?   Here the sheer artistic quality of Pare’s photos and the way they play into an aesthetic of dereliction perhaps sell some aspects of the buildings short.   It’s hard to blot out the visible signs of concrete cancer, damp and all the other ills that Modernist architecture is potentially heir to and reconstruct just how impressive these buildings would have been when built, especially to city dwellers many of whom were at most a generation away from the countryside.    They must have constituted a very effective way of underlining the novelty and strength of Soviet power- and that in the end may have been more important than the detailed analysis of their architectural influences, which probably mattered more to the architectural professionals in Europe or the USA looking at photos of them as new.   

They were also sites of massive privilege.  This is perhaps self-evident for government buildings and even factories and schools.  It’s not too difficult to see for the health centres and sanatoria for the Red Army officer corps or senior industry managers.    It’s equally true for the residential premises.  This is easy to comprehend for Konstantin Melnikov’s house (see below), which he was allowed to create for himself and his family as an exceptional concession because of his important role in presenting the Soviet Union in major exhibitions outside its borders and other conspicuous services to the state.

   It also applies to the flats as well It’s all too easy to forget that very few of the workers would actually have lived in the flats on display- they crammed into the existing built environment of cities like Moscow or Leningrad or into hastily constructed barracks associated with new industrial sites.   These flats were for the elite of the new state, for the key staff in its key ministries (one of the blocks shown was for Chekists, which must have been a strange place to live)  or, occasionally, for the workforce of particularly favoured factories.   Their internal designs hovered uneasily between two competing models of the socialist future; large communal kitchens and other domestic facilities for those among the inhabitants who were ready to abandon retrograde bourgeois notions of family privacy went alongside more conventional flats for those who weren’t ready to make that leap.    Corridors were wide to encourage interactions between residents; living spaces somewhat compressed.   Obviously this posed problems later when it became clear that there were relatively few takers for communal living.   It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that even those at the very top of the Soviet pile lived in this quasi-collective manner well into the 1930’s- Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s fascinating “Red Czar” biography of Stalin has a lengthy section on the remarkably intimate domestic relationships between the Poliburo members in this period, mostly living in one large and rather luxurious block of flats within the Kremlin complex.  Having servants helped with day to day existence, of course.  On the other hand, these blocks could also be seen as a way of keeping key staff under close supervision- and could become death traps during the Purges when the arrests started and everybody in the block would automatically become suspect.    I have a feeling that, if there are any ghosts in the former Soviet Union, the RA exhibition covered some of the most haunted places in that haunted terrain.