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Leningrad: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955–1991
A large-panel five-story building without an elevator and waste chute: this was already a khrushchevka[26] in its own right. So why didn’t this building go into production? Simply because it was too good. There was still room to economize. The main problem was the height of the ceilings, since it forced residents to climb not to the fifth floor, which was considered the maximum permissible without an elevator, but to the sixth. By cutting 50 centimeters off each floor, 2.5 meters could be saved in total, the height of that “extra” story. Given that Khrushchev was in the habit of measuring everything in relation to himself (“I’ve squeezed through, so others will squeeze through,” he once allegedly said when emerging from a narrow lavatory in a new building), and the general secretary was of modest height, it is clear that a three-meter-high ceiling seemed to him a pointless extravagance.
The layouts in this building also smacked of old-regime luxury: it is often described as “Stalinist” on notices announcing apartments for sale. They featured insulated rooms, separate bathrooms, and an enormous kitchen (10–14 square meters). There were cold stores (“Khrushchev fridges”) under the windows, closable shelving units and built-in cupboards on the walls, and space for strollers and bicycles in the basements. The floor was linoleum on plywood, and the bathrooms contained a water heater and chrome heated towel rails. There were some excesses in the decoration: the entrance doors were made of oak, for example. But the main-and openly provocative-decorative excess was found on the facades.
Photo: V. Turoverov, 1957
Plan of a residential section
The building was clad in multi-colored tiles. The first two floors were dark, and the white window frames stood out well against this background. The top two, on the contrary, were light, and the dark window frames were surrounded by a stylized casing made of brown ceramic chips. Finally, the windows of the third floor alternated with dark rectangular panels in light frames. The online publication The Village writes that “not long before construction Vasiliev and his wife traveled to Florence, and it was there that he admired the decoration of the Renaissance era, which he used in the design of the building.”[27] The Baptistery in Florence does in fact have similar panels, but there was no need to go so far. We see the same technique-stucco trim around the window apertures (and with the very same Baroque “ears”) – in Peter the Great’s Summer Palace in the Summer Garden. And Vasiliev’s third floor with its panels is an obvious paraphrasing of the band of bas-reliefs around the palace.
Of course, this decorative finishing (in the 1970s it began to crumble off, and in the 1990s the building was simply painted) looked a little forced. The architects were still not capable of imagining a residential building without some kind of decorative element. But the allusion is fitting, as both buildings ushered in new eras, in history and in architecture. The reference to the Summer Palace is also typically daring for Leningrad: in beginning a new era, a link was established not with 1917 but with the eighteenth century. But Peter’s Summer Palace was considered at the time to be “the first building based upon a standardized design principle.”[28] And it was no accident that it was placed on the cover of the magazine Construction and Architecture of Leningrad in March 1955, after Khrushchev’s first speech on the subject of “architectural excesses.”
Peter the Great’s Summer Palace, built by Domenico Trezzini (1711–1712)
The building is a proclamation of those same modernist values: simplicity, practicality, rationality. “Antioch Kantemir, a Russian diplomat in Paris, told the wife of the famous Montesquieu how surprised he was when, having arrived in Petersburg, he ‘saw a royal palace, resembling the modest house of some Dutch farmer.’”[29] The interior of the palace was equally modest, and given that it also served Peter as an office, the tsar’s private chambers were a pure trifle: a bedroom, a study, a dining room (plus a lavatory under the grand staircase). It was essentially a tryoshka, a three-room apartment, a good Soviet standard.
However, three-room apartments also varied. In Vasiliev’s building it was the high ceilings (3.1 meters, almost as high as the 3.3-meter ceilings in Peter’s palace), the proportions of the rooms (three-quarters of them were square), and the size of the windows that made it comfortable. In addition, the building was narrow and short (with just two residential sections), meaning two apartments on each floor received light from opposite sides, and two more had windows on various sides. The combination of apartments was also extremely unusual: five one-room apartments, 10 two-room apartments, five three-room apartments and 10 (!) four-room apartments. Their neat arrangement meant that only three pairs of plumbing risers were required. “In regular khrushchevkas the bathrooms, lavatories, and kitchens were all tiny,” says one of the building’s inhabitants. “And the walls are so thin. Here there are good thick walls, excellent soundproofing. I wouldn’t be caught dead moving to a khrushchevka.”[30]
But the outer walls, on the other hand, were thin. “The new occupants settled in, planted trees underneath their windows according to their taste-bird cherry, cherry, and maple-and pretended not to notice that not all was well in their new home. “‘Is it cold, Kolya?’ the chief engineer of the Glavleningradstroi association Alexander Alexandrovich Sizov asked at one meeting. […] ‘It’s liveable, Alexander Alexandrovich. After all, it’s the first building. So, we’ve covered up the cracks, bought stoves, we’re keeping ourselves warm.’ […] They both knew there was no cause to rejoice. The building was cold.”[31]
In the Summer Palace the walls were also thin, with single frames, but it was a summer residence and was occupied only from May to October. On Ulitsa Polyarnikov, slag concrete panels were used, a move that was unjustified mainly because of the substantial heat loss involved (in future this material would be replaced by expanded clay aggregate, foam concrete, and aerated concrete). Nonetheless, it was right here that the “panel per room” concept first resounded in all its simplicity: there were no additional details such as pilasters to conceal the joins between panels, and all the panels were identical in size. The water pipes were run into the panel between the bathrooms of adjacent apartments, and the gas pipes and heating were also installed in the walls, which was true know-how (though later, of course, when the time came to change them, they all had to be yanked out of the wall).
Discussing the building with its residents was made possible by the fact that the apartments were allocated to the people who built it (not to all of them, of course, but to the best, including the aforementioned Kolya, an assembler named Nikolai Zdobnov). In addition, one of the apartments in the building remained a testing ground: the residents were janitors, who were supposed to check the temperature and monitor the state of the building. The concern was understandable, as the building had been constructed very quickly, in 79 days (after the completion of groundworks), and another 23 days had gone on finishing work. It was assembled by a team including six fitters, one welder, and three concreters, and work was carried out in two shifts. The crane, admittedly, stood idle half of the time.
Two more of these buildings were constructed in the 122nd quarter, but afterward the experiment was considered too great a luxury. The layouts were recognized as a success, and it was these that grew into Series I-507, but without the high ceilings. The USSR took a different direction, and for a long time this building was referred to as a design failure. Though the shabbiness of its current appearance is due not only to the fact that its exterior decoration has fallen off (and the only balconies, on the third floor, now seem a strange whim and not part of a well-considered composition) but also to the fact that the building is closely surrounded by stately Stalinist buildings, like a sergeant standing between generals. Yet, had it ended up in the adjacent 124th quarter[4], surrounded by real khrushchevkas, it would have been the numerous inhabitants of the neighboring buildings who would have had cause for envy.
2. First Experimental Quarters of Large-Panel Construction 1956–1959
ARCHITECTS EVGENY LEVINSON, DAVID GOLDGOR, I. ALEXANDROVULITSA SEDOVA, 61–83
“There’s our hallway, and there’s our coatrack. Our room, Sasha! Our room, Masha! The whole apartment is ours, ours, the kitchen too is ours, ours!” The dream of the newlyweds from Dmitri Shostakovich’s operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki[32] was relevant for the inhabitants of all the cities of the USSR. No wonder that the film adaptation was called just Cheryomushki[33] and shot in Leningrad, prefiguring the collision of Eldar Ryazanov’s The Irony of Fate. Under closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that panel residential buildings in the two capitals differed noticeably from the very beginning.
Quarters 122 and 123 in Shchemilovka were built at the same time as the Ninth quarter in Novye Cheryomushki and were part of the same experiment, an investigation into the possibilities of building using large panels and small apartment layouts. But these experiments were carried out in different ways. In Moscow there was a sharp break with previous practice, but the Leningraders, despite the switch to a new method of construction, were able to maintain continuity.
View of the courtyard of the 122nd quarter, 1959
Firstly, the new quarters were designed by the same studio within Lenproekt, under the direction of Evgeny Levinson and Igor Fomin, which developed the Shchemilovka district from the mid-1930s. By the mid-1950s quarters whose design was united by a common architectural approach (that is, a practically standardized design) already stood on both sides of Ivanovskaya Ulitsa leading to Volodarsky Bridge and along the side of the future Ulitsa Sedova closest to the Neva. “The central part of the new quarters features a single significant complex, in which a large role is played by a school building with play areas. This placement brings the school closer to the quarter it services and makes it possible to approach the school without crossing main roads, and also creates conditions in which there is no street noise to disturb school activities.”[34] This was how Levinson and Fomin described their project in 1936, a quarter of a century before this became the most important principle of microdistrict layout.
The 122nd quarter essentially repeated the layout of its predecessors, with the buildings even curving slightly around the corners of the plot-this despite the fact that early panel housing construction went to great lengths to avoid corner sections, which complicated the assembly process. The 123rd quarter was practically linear, stretching out along Ulitsa Sedova, but only because on the opposite side it was bordered by a large lake. Even without building reforms, it is likely that buildings would have appeared here in more or less the same way. Stores were built into the lower floors of several buildings, unlike in the Ninth quarter of Novye Cheryomushki in Moscow where all the stores and cafés were set apart in separate “cubes,” and the buildings, for the builders’ convenience, were filled with identical apartments all the way from the first floor up.
For the inhabitants of the new buildings, Leningrad conservatism was more of an issue where the permissible minimum apartment size was concerned. There may well have been three-meter-high ceilings in the first Moscow khrushchevkas, but you won’t find a 10-meter-square kitchen in Cheryomushki, while in Shchemilovka they are the norm for two- and three-room apartments. Another substantial difference is the complete absence of communicating rooms. At a national level walk-through rooms were seen as fully acceptable for single-family apartments and even desirable, since they served as a certain guarantee against the transformation of the apartment into a kommunalka (communal apartment).[35] But in Leningrad they decided otherwise: they would isolate all the rooms, and the threat of them being turned into kommunalkas could be guarded against at the administrative level. They simply would not allocate more than one family to an apartment, and that was that.
The outdoor architecture, of course, had to be changed: the magnificent gigantic porticoes and columned loggias adorning the buildings on Ivanovskaya Ulitsa and the even-numbered side of Ulitsa Sedova unquestionably fall into the category of architectural excesses. The new buildings, now reduced from six stories to five in line with the new rules, were assembled from factory-made panels. Nonetheless, their walls are clearly articulated: there is both a plinth and an entablature; the stairwells are denoted on the facade by an almost uninterrupted glass panel, while the balconies are grouped in such a way as to create rhythm in a fairly monotonous building line. The architects were not prepared for the complete asceticism of walls made from identical panels and attempted to lend them a little decorativeness. The panels may have been manufactured at a factory, but at this early stage the method of production remained artisanal. The cladding of the exterior surfaces was applied by hand, with tiles of various sizes and two colors-cream and terracotta-available for use, and in some places terrazzo made from broken tiles.
Obliged to abandon one class of references (Ivanovskaya Ulitsa was inevitably recognized as another version of Ulitsa Zodchego Rossi, so sacred to Leningraders), architects found in the Petersburg tradition another that fitted the occasion. Can there be any better example of economical residential architecture than Peter the Great’s Summer Palace?
Recreation zone in a new residential district. Perspective
General plan of the 122nd and 123rd quarters
Model of the 122nd and 123rd quarters
The apartments were very well received. “Something new! That is the first thing one wants to say on encountering this new housing. The convenience and repeatability of the elements that this architecture uses shows how we can build in a new way, liberated from primitive manual labor, from all kinds of excesses and deceptions,” wrote one reviewer.[36] Softly reproaching the architects for not making use of the opportunities for the free arrangement of buildings, and pointing to a certain monotony arising from their uniform height, the author concludes: “Large-panel housing construction in Leningrad has successfully passed the first, experimental stage and is entering the second stage, mass construction.”[37] Lenproekt itself cheerfully reported in 1957 that as a result of the experiment with the 122nd and 123rd quarters, the institute had developed designs for standardized large-panel housing for mass construction in Leningrad.[38]
However, the landmark decree “On the Development of Residential Construction in the USSR,” published on July 31, 1957, was followed by new directives that reduced the utility area of apartments (i.e., all non-residential rooms) by at least half, lowered ceiling heights to 2.7 meters, limited the width of stairwells to 2.2 meters, reduced the weight of the outer panels, and introduced flat roofs.[39] The Lenproekt designers began grudgingly to rework their plans. Over the course of several years, until a new decree was issued on raising the quality of residential construction, apartments were built in Leningrad in the same way as in other cities in the USSR: with low ceilings, microscopic kitchens, and a combined bathroom and lavatory, which snarky Leningraders dubbed a “gavanna” (a compound of the words for “latrine” and “bath,” galyun and vanna). They also had to forget about individual designs for panels, which meant additional expenditure and labor.
Evgeny Levinson and David Goldgor took advantage of the remaining opportunities at their disposal, and in their very next project, the 124th quarter in Shchemilovka, they would combine buildings of various heights and place them more creatively around the plot. All the same they would have to use the “Lagutenko system” imposed from Moscow, which would later be criticized for the low quality of housing it produced. In an article on the prospects of industrial construction, Levinson and Goldgor made pointed reference to the American architectural theorist Lewis Mumford, who was well-respected in the USSR, repeating his dismissal of the machine method as ultimately destructive of creativity.[40]
3. Piskaryovskoe Cemetery 1945–1960
ARCHITECTS ALEXANDER VASILIEV, EVGENY LEVINSONSCULPTORS VERA ISAEVA, ROBERT TAURIT (SCULPTURE OF MOTHERLAND), MOISEI VAINMAN, BORIS KAPLYANSKY, ABRAM MALAKHIN, MARIA KHARLAMOVA (BAS-RELIEFS)PROSPEKT NEPOKORENNYKH, 72There is a scene in Viktor Sokolov’s 1967 film Day of Sun and Rain where two Leningrad youths discuss how one of their fathers does not wear his war medals. The modern-day Russian viewer may be surprised by this dialogue and the fact that there was no explanation for not wearing them. The scene meant to underline the fact that war is not only victory and great deeds but also tragedy and sorrow. In Leningrad, this feeling chimes like nowhere else, so medals are not worn here, and they cannot explain this, and the main site of remembrance is not some stirring monument but the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery.
This piece of land was designated as a cemetery back in 1939. At that point the central axis appeared, which provoked heated debates during the perestroika years. Were some of the graves destroyed when it was expanded to create a central avenue? Contemporaries testify indirectly to this. Analyzing the competition for memorial sites that was held by Lenproekt in 1945, Viktor Tvelkmeier writes: “One of the main difficulties which the architects of the mass graves faced was the presence of trenches, the location of which was not very favorable, which can be explained by the extremely difficult situation of the harsh siege winter of 1941/1942 that everyone remembers so well. The very location of the trenches and their relative position often excluded the possibility, without reburials, of a comprehensive spatial resolution for the whole composition.”[41] The attitude toward graves in the Soviet era was not especially Christian: entire cemeteries were destroyed in order to build housing and roads. And the Siege of Leningrad made even a slightly civilized attitude to the ritual of burial completely impossible: initially corpses were brought to the cemeteries-on sleds or simply dragged-but when even coffins became a luxury (they were used as firewood, as were crosses from the old cemeteries), bodies were just wrapped up somehow (they were described using the terrible word pelenashki, “nurslings”) and simply left in the street.[42]
General plan
At the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery the situation was as follows: “The cemetery and the approach to it were littered with frozen bodies covered in snow. No one had the strength to dig the deeply frozen earth. Anti-aircraft teams would blow up the ground and tip dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of corpses into the capacious graves.”[43] This is the only quote that official Soviet historiography allowed itself to cite (it belongs to Dmitry Pavlov, Minister of Trade of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [RSFSR], then in charge of supplying Leningrad with food). It refers to 1942, but when in 1945 the future designer of the memorial, Alexander Vasiliev, came here, the first thing “that struck him was the smell, the sweet stench of decay, hanging like a haze in the spring air.”[44]
Alexander Vasiliev, competition design, 1945
General view of the memorial, early 1970s
He was appointed project architect in 1945, after receiving first prize in the aforementioned Lenproekt competition. The final design, as Vasiliev’s son writes, “differed little from the competition version,”[45] but instead of the figure of Motherland there was an obelisk. In 1946, Evgeny Levinson became the coauthor of the project (the work was too important for it to be entrusted to a 33-year-old architect), and the master “considered it necessary to enhance the emotional character of the ensemble, replacing the somewhat dispassionate form of the obelisk with a more expressive sculpture.”[46] As it happens, female figures also appeared in other projects, so this correction can be seen as the fruit of the collective work of Leningrad architects.
By the statue of Motherland, 1960s
Tvelkmeier writes that there were no prototypes for the memorials for which the 1945 competition was held: “History knows no precedents analogous to the heroic defense of Leningrad, and therefore the architects do not have to look for any, even distant, analogies.”[47] But this is not quite true. The general structure (the eternal flame at the entrance, the descent to the graves, the wall with a statue that completes the composition) is very similar to the Brothers’ Cemetery in Riga, constructed in the 1920s–1930s. But the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery is of a truly different scale, and in this enormity architecture melts away, its forms so strict and sparing that one wants to call the complex a model of minimalism. At the very least, in comparison with the cemetery in Riga-intimate and human, full of details, traditional in its general spirit-this is a distinctly modernist gesture. And if we are to speak about the “inhumanity” of modernist architecture, then here like nowhere else it correlates to the inhumanity of the history which it marks.
The memorial during construction, 1960
Comparing these two cemeteries, the Petersburg art historian Ivan Sablin notes that if the Riga Motherland is made from stone (“as if petrified with grief”), then the Leningrad one is made from bronze; the former holds out a wreath to the dying sons at her feet, the latter simply advances toward us “and we do not fully understand what this gesture means.”[48] Nonetheless, among her Russian “sisters” the Motherland at the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery looks the most human, which is partly explained by the character of its designer, who Vasiliev’s son recalls “had a low voice, was not particularly careful about language, smoked Belomor incessantly, was clearly not a teetotaler, and wore a shirt and tie, trousers, and a beret. This was Vasya. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that Vasya was the brilliant female sculptor Vera Isaeva.”[49]
“The most powerful impression you got from looking around this place,” recalled the architects, “was its unusual breadth, its boundless space.”[50] They preserved these qualities, making them a powerful metaphor for the immensity of grief. A vast sky, and beneath it half a million Leningraders, who had become “just soil and grass.” All of the remaining elements were very small: the modest headstones, set into the kerbs, and the restrained pattern of the railings. The bronze vases were only installed in 1976 and they emphasized the austere design of the entrance propylaea. These pavilions were designed in a neoclassical spirit, which is logical, given when work on the memorial began, although they continue to grate with their astonishing similarity to the architecture of Speer and Piacentini. This similarity is “more of a paradox than a crime,” as Sablin puts it. He raises a different objection to the entrance group: “there is a lack of the detail that is so natural for the kingdom of the dead, such as gates that cleanly separate it from the world outside.”[51] This is a truly rare case, but there is an obvious metaphor: death has special rights in this city. Nothing that is “Petersburgian” can be understood outside mortality, writes the Petersburg philosopher Mikhail Uvarov. Here everything is concerned with the contraposition of life and death, although it is the image of death that most frequently dominates.[52] “The Savichevs have died. They’re all dead. Only Tanya is left.” A copy of the famous diary of Tanya Savicheva is kept in the museum in one of the entrance pavilions.
