Planning for Collective Living in the Early Soviet Union
Architecture As a Tool of Social Transformation
by Vladmir Zelinski [From Women and Revolution #11, Spring 1976]
Architecture As a Tool of Social Transformation
by Vladmir Zelinski [From Women and Revolution #11, Spring 1976]
"Despite all our emancipatory laws, woman remains now as before a domestic slave, since she is oppressed, suffocated, dulled, debased by the petty tasks of housework, which chain her to the kitchen and the nursery and cause her to dissipate her creative powers in downright barbarically unproductive, petty, unnerving, deadening, depressing labor. The true liberation of woman, true communism, will begin only where and when (under the leadership of the proletariat at the helm of the state) the mass struggle against these petty household tasks or, more correctly, their transformation en mass into large-scale socialist economy begins."
-Lenin, "The Great Initiative" (1919)
The Bolshevik program for the full emancipation of women through the replacement of the oppressive family structure by alternative institutions for the socialization of domestic labor implied a radically new set of architectural priorities and tasks requiring a re-thinking of the fundamental premises of social architecture.
In its announcement of a competition for the design of a communal dwelling in 1926 the Moscow City Soviet explained:
"It is the duty of technological innovation, the duty of the architect, to place new demands on housing and to design in so far as possible a house that will transform the so-called family hearth from a boring, confining cell that at present burdens down women in particular into a place of pleasant and carefree relaxation.
"A new life demands new forms.
"The worker does not desire his mother, wife or sisters to be a nursery maid, washerwoman or cook with unlimited hours; he does not desire children to rob him and particularly their mother of the possibility of employing their free time for social labor, mental and physical pleasures...."
The abolition of the private ownership of land, which had already been accomplished, pointed the way to a successful resolution of the problems posed for home design (as well as for city planning and the service sector) in carrying out the elimination of the household oppression of women.
Under capitalism, the city planner's life is one of continual frustration and he tries, in vain, to reconcile the conflicting interests of dozens or hundreds of private property holders and land speculators who then require further appeasement in the form of tax concessions, rent subsidies, zoning variances and the like to ensure the profitability of the shoddy housing that they may (or may not) erect. The growth of cities (and their collapse) is in principle uncontroled, and physical and aesthetic squalor the accepted norm.
One of the first acts of the new proletarian regime (14 December 1917) had been to forbid all speculation in land. In 1918 a series of laws expropriated without compensation the landed estates of the gentry as well as all city structures yeilding an income above that set by local authorities. Thus the Soviet city planner had (and in principle still has) to concern himself primarily with social values--the creation of a rationally organized, amenable urban environment on the basis of human needs.
But the country inherited by the new workers state was near total collapse. In World War I and the civil war that followed it, Russia had lost some 20 million people. The output of heavy industry was in 1920 only one seventh of what it had been in 1913; the transportation system was virtually non-functioning, while the social base with which to rebuild the country--a trained working class--had suffered extremely great losses in the civil war, since it was precisely the skilled workers who, as dedicated Bolsheviks, had volunteered for the Red Army eing constructed by Trotsky. From 1917 to 1920 almost no new construction could be undertaken; the best that could be done was to redistribute to the workers the luxury apartments of the bourgeoisie in the major cities. But construction materials were in such short supply that even the existing houses could not be maintained, and foreign visitors were horrified at the deterioration of the country's entire physical plant.
It was not until 1925 that the new workers state began, albeit only partially, to overcome the circumastances of its birth, so that the architecture of the '20's divides naturally into two parts: 1920-25, a period which saw the creation of some brilliant designs but in which next to nothing was actually built; and 1925-31, when the new architects were able to commence the reconstruction of the nation's physical plant. Even so, it is estimated that no more than 10-12 communal houses were built in the entire country before Stalin's rehabilitation of the nuclear family and "Soviet motherhood" put an end to this work.
In addition to material obstacles, these revolutionary architects, proponents of a functional modern architecture, had from 1928 onward to contend with increasingly turn-of-the-century eclectism promoted by the emerging bureaucracy and its sycophants in the realm of the arts. While striking modern architecture was still being erected as late as 1931-32, this was on the basis of contracts awarded years before. The final death knell of innovative Soviet architectural design was sounded in 1932 when the bureaucracy awarded one of the surviving hacks of the old regime first prize in a competition for the symbolic structure of the country, the Palace of the Soviets. Only the intervention of World War Two prevented Stalin's megalomania from being visited upon the people of Moscow.
