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RUSSIA: Walls in Jericho

2 minute read
TIME

Among the lesser ambitions of Communist Dictator Stalin was to possess the world’s largest building. Plans of a Palace of the Soviets, taller than New York’s Empire State building, went astray somewhere in World War II, but in the last five years of his life Stalin ordered eight skyscrapers built in Moscow. Rising 20 to 38 stories out of Moscow’s sprawling slums, and occupied exclusively by Communists and Communist undertakings, they stand today, huge omnipresent memorials to Communist contempt for the comfort and well-being of the common people.

Warned to make their designs “harmonize with the historically developed architecture of Moscow” and not to copy “the ugly system of capitalist building,” Stalin’s draftsmen spread their efforts over acres of ground, but in reaching for height, they were unable to avoid imitating at least one American skyscraper. The Moscow vysotnye zdania or “tall buildings,” bear a marked resemblance to New York’s 1913 Woolworth building, but to Woolworth Gothic the Soviet architects added adornments borrowed from classical sources, and some of their own devising. Thus all eight vysotnye carry tall spires mounting garlanded Red Stars and as many Doric and Romanesque pilasters, rococo arches, turrets, flying buttresses, rooftop pergolas, asparagus-shaped domes, gingerbread plaques and ferro-concrete statuary as the construction will stand. The skyscrapers got the lion’s share of Russia’s postwar building resources, but the Communists received poor value for their money. Plumbing failed, elevators stuck, doors and windows were full of cracks, balconies fell into the street. Less than two years after Stalin’s death, the drab walls of the jerry-built Jericho were crumbling to the inaudible trumpeting of Moscow’s overcrowded restless millions.

Communist Party Boss Nikita S. Khrushchev, whose monitory voice is heard more loudly these days, last week condemned the wasteful skyscrapers, some of which, he said, looked like churches. Said Khrushchev: “The architect needs a beautiful silhouette, but the people want apartments. Architects must learn to count money.” Khrushchev ordered Soviet architects, under pain of punishment, to launch a mass-construction housing program based on simple standardized designs. To speed up building, he detailed a shock brigade of 100,000 “volunteer” Communist youths to work in plants making prefab reinforced construction parts. “Everything that can be replaced by concrete,” ordered Khrushchev, “should be so replaced.”

After Stalin’s Woolworth Gothic comes the age of Khrushchev Concrete.

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