https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lz3rj1/why_did_the_ussr_build_such_grandiose_designs_and/gq09pvf/ Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts [ ] Log InSign Up User account menu 5.0k Why did the USSR build such grandiose designs and ornate decorations in the Moscow Metro stations as opposed to the usual bland brutalism of Soviet architecture? [renderTimi] Close 5.0k Posted by Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship 2 months ago Helpful2Silver3Hugz Why did the USSR build such grandiose designs and ornate decorations in the Moscow Metro stations as opposed to the usual bland brutalism of Soviet architecture? [renderTimi] 103 comments share save hide report Sort by best View all comments View discussions in 6 other communities [renderTimi] level 1 2 months ago * edited 2 months ago Platinum2GoldBravo!Helpful10& 21 More [1/3] This is exactly the kind of question I was hoping to answer! Thank you! First of all, I completely understand where the idea of "bland brutalism" comes from, as well as the idea that the Metro's beauty is entirely separate from that bland brutalism. However, that distinction is not exactly accurate. Stalin was not at all a fan of blandness or Brutalism -- his opposition to the former is a large part of the answer, so stay tuned, and he couldn't have been a fan of Brutalism because it didn't exist. But the Metro is not the only piece of architecture that rejects simplicity or blandness in Moscow from Stalin's lifetime. In fact, Stalin is most associated with "Stalinist Classicism", which is very ornate, so it wasn't just restricted to the Metro. Example: MGU, Moscow State University. Commonly cited as the pinnacle of the style, but built from 1949 to 1953, a little after the critical period I will discuss below. I did not study there myself, sadly. I still have a lot to learn about Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's visions for Moscow, for socialist architecture, and for the Metro, so I will focus on Stalin in this answer, but for now I will say this: Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev (or rather the Soviet state and culture during their tenures as First/General Secretary, because I'm a good post-post-revisionist) envisioned their construction of housing and of the Metro as part of the same ideological project to bring comfort and beauty into the lives of Soviet citizens. The difference is that Khrushchev and Brezhnev focused much more on the utilitarian side of that mission than Stalin. So their Metro station designs see a lot of simplification compared to Stalinist Metro stations just like their residential architecture sees compared to Stalinist residences. Nothing that any of those three built was ever supposed to be bland, or purely functional, though. So why did Stalin decide to build a "grandiose", "ornate" Metro system, as you describe it? There are a few reasons, some of which are emphasized and some of which get overlooked, and I am apparently making it my life's mission to bring those overlooked ones to attention. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Part 1: Competition With the West There are two reasons that everyone jumps to, and that has sort of stifled the public understanding of the Metro a little. The first reason that everyone jumps to is that Stalin and the Soviets wanted to show off to, and compete with, the West. This is an understandable conclusion to come to -- much of the propaganda surrounding the Metro is couched, subtly or not, in terms that compare it to the systems of London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Stalin and the party were indeed very intent on proving the triumphs of socialism, and the Metro was to be the greatest example of that. Especially during the construction of the first line from 1931 to 1935 and in the early days of operation in the '30s, Pravda and other press organs certainly crowed a lot about how the subway systems of those Western cities were darker, dirtier, uglier, more crowded, all in all just inferior, and how the Moscow Metro outshone (literally and figuratively) them all. This gets a much shorter explanation than the other factors later, not necessarily because it's less true, but because it's a little easier to wrap your head around, and I think most of us have an intuitive sense of it. And maybe it is a little less true as well. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Part 2: The Congestion Problem and Soviet Comfort But that's a little bit Euro-ego-centric. None of that is false, but it is far from the only reason Stalin and the party had in mind for building the Metro. Which brings us to the second commonly-trotted-out reason, which is that Stalin really did want to improve the lives of his people. This one is a little tricky. I won't go too far into the history of Metro planning in Moscow, but let's talk about congestion. The main means of public transport in Moscow in the late 19th and even into the 20th century was the horse-drawn tram car. Electrification of the tram network began in the late 1890s, and was completed by 1911, but even then, much of Moscow remained reliant on horse-carts. Although trams didn't produce manure, they caused terrible congestion in the center of Moscow too. Dietmar Neutatz, whose book Die Moskauer Metro is the gold standard on the history of traffic planning in Moscow until 1935, describes a tram network already "at the borders of the possible" in the 1910s, with the main streets completely "jammed with trolleys" [my translation]. (38) This is, in fact, what led to the first ideas for a light rail/rapid transit network in Moscow in 1902, but that never got off the ground. Congestion was improved, in a very darkly comic way, by the war. WW1 forced the tsarist regime to shelve plans for a subway due to budget concerns, but then the need for those plans was suddenly removed by the Civil War, which led to a massive depopulation of Moscow and a massive decrease in tram ridership (nearly half the 1915 population fled Moscow for the countryside by 1920). However, as soon as the Civil War ended, people began to trickle, and then flood, back to Moscow, especially because of the economic flexibility introduced with the NEP. In 1924, the Moscow City Council (Mossovet) came to the conclusion that, by 1928, the tram network would be entirely incapable of handling the required load. They began a new plan for a Metro, but for reasons I will talk about later, it was not implemented. By 1929, the tram network was operating at 150% capacity, sidewalks were impassable, streetcars were overflowing with people, and dozens of preventable injuries happened each week when people lost their hold or were pushed off overcrowded trams and fell behind them, or even worse, in front of them. This is all according to the other great work on the planning and construction of the first line, William Wolf's Russia's Revolutionary Underground. And this is all as industrialization and dekulakization are beginning to send an even further mass of people into Moscow. Between 1928 and 1933, thanks to those programs, the population of Moscow ballooned from 2.3 million to 3.6 million, and I'll say it again: that's 1.3 million more people in just five years. So something desperately did need to be done by 1931. But in order to answer the question of whether Stalin and his subordinates really were motivated by altruism, we have to ask, was a Metro really the best way to improve the lives of Moscow's people? I would say it wasn't the best way -- investment in new housing was even more desperately needed, and transport to outlying parts of the city would probably have helped more people, even if the problem was mainly in the center. Building a Metro certainly did improve many people's lives by giving them a shorter and easier commute. But that didn't really become accessible to many people until the later 1930s, or even after WW2 for some parts of the city. So the idea of the altruistic motive isn't wrong, but it's not the full picture either. So now let's get back to that question of beauty. The way that these two tropes above were employed, I argue, can tell us a lot about why beauty was so important. 1.9k Reply Share ReportSave level 2 2 months ago * edited 2 months ago Helpful2 [2/3] Part 3: Making the New Soviet Man Those tropes were employed with particular frequency by Lazar Kaganovich, often called Stalin's right-hand man, who was First Secretary of the Moscow Party Committee from 1930 to 1934, where he oversaw the most important phase of Metro construction, and for which service the Metro was named in his honor when it opened in 1935. Kaganovich loved to speak about how the Moscow Metro was going to make life easier and more comfortable for everyone who came into contact with it, and about how it was more beautiful than anything in the West, but limiting his rhetoric to those two practical points is a little bit reductivist. It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's take an example. Perhaps more than anything else, the Soviet leadership, and Kaganovich above all, loved to talk about "brightness". Brightness stood for both better living quality, joy, happiness and all that; and beauty, superiority to the ugly stations of the West. Andrew Jenks suggests that all of this essentially amounted to a number-measuring contest: "Moscow metro ceilings would ascend to 5.6 meters, compared to 2.7 meters in New York [...] Soviet lighting would outshine London's, 50 lux to 24 lux." But, taken out of context, those facts can be misleading. Soviet Metro stations needed to be brighter because -- this is the key -- brightness was intended to create an altered, transcendental space. It was intended to transport Muscovites, literally speaking, yes, but also figuratively, to another realm of existence. The beauty of the Moscow Metro is an attempt to give Soviet citizens a glimpse of the future of socialism -- not the present, the future. That is (part of) why Stalin and Kaganovich were willing to prioritize it over fixing the urgent housing problem. The lack of housing space arguably affected more people more deeply, with many old bourgeois apartments subdivided between several working families, and having to share a kitchen and toilet made life very unpleasant for Muscovites indeed. However, simply building more housing cheaply and quickly was not good enough for a mature, developed, sophisticated socialist society. If they were going to do it, they had to do it right, or else it wasn't worth doing. The Metro was a glimpse of what that perfect world would be, and it was accessible to everybody. (Note: they built a bunch of cheap, simple housing too, but they pretended they weren't doing so, and then moved people out of it as soon as they could. The barracks that were built to house new migrant laborers had often even worse conditions than communal apartments, with no room dividers or internal plumbing at all, and for hundreds of people. These barracks were built for all sorts of industrial laborers, but also laborers working on, ironically, the Moscow Metro.) Part of this mature socialist society that Stalin wanted to represent in the Metro is the perfection of man. My academic advisor might even say that that was the core of Stalinism: a belief in the perfectibility and moldability of man. (I'm probably misquoting him -- hi, Matvei Filippych!) Entering the Moscow Metro is supposed to be a transcendental experience in the way I discussed above, where you see the end-point of history manifested in the station architecture, but it's transcendental in another sense too. Even though the body physically descends, the spirit and the mind are raised up to the highest heights of achievement. That is another aspect of the concept of brightness here, a pun which works both in Russian and English: enlightenment. Metro stations were designed to enlighten the people passing through them. One architect put it this way: within the brief period a Metro rider spends in one station, "the architecture, emblems, and entire artistic image should actively act upon [affect, influence] him."^1 Beauty was put on display to educate the citizens in proper aesthetic taste, to uplift their spirit, to show them the heights they could achieve under Stalin's guidance. This is also reflected in the way the dangerous, difficult, and often badly-mismanaged construction of the first line was spun in propaganda. It was a grinding slog, sure, but the Metro builders had defeated the odds, defeated nature itself. "Technically," Sergei Kirov had said of some other construction project, "it may be impossible, but Bolshevik-ly, we'll do it anyways."^2 The point is, under socialism, anything could be done, in extremely short time frames, and done aesthetically pleasingly and well, to top it all off. (But the story of that mindset running into the realities of Metro construction is another question that I would love to answer some other time.) Man stood triumphant over all, and beauty showed the extent of his mastery. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ^1 Kolpinskiy, in Dni i gody metrostroya, edited by Reznichenko. Translated in Jenks, "Metro on the Mount." But I don't like his exact translation, so I modified it a little. ^2 Paraphrased in Wolf, Russia's Revolutionary Underground. The word I translate as "Bolshevik-ly", po-bolshevistski, could also mean "in a Bolshevik manner", referring to the construction methods. He translates it that second way, but I don't exactly like that. The point isn't the difference in construction methods, it's the difference in states of reality. 1.3k Reply Share ReportSave Continue this thread level 2 2 months ago Just want to chime in here that I expected "boring Soviet architecture" when I visited Moscow and what I actually saw looked like Paris. 71 Reply Share ReportSave Continue this thread level 2 2 months ago I just want to say that I read all the answers and followups and it's been awesome, thanks for taking the time and share great knowledge! Never had I felt the rush to see if there were free awards available to give it to the answers. It was great! Thank you again! 3 Reply Share ReportSave level 2 2 months ago So their Metro station designs see a lot of simplification compared to Stalinist Metro stations just like their residential architecture sees compared to Stalinist residences. Nothing that any of those three built was ever supposed to be bland, or purely functional, though. The caterpillar stations and other cookie-cutter designs ended up bland and purely functional, though. Take a look at the route of the Filyovskaya line beyond Kievskaya: * [Studencheskaya, 1958](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Studencheskaya_(Moscow_Metro_station)#/media/ File:Stud_01.jpg) * [Kutuzovskaya, 1958](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Kutuzovskaya#/media/File:Kutuzovskaya_ (%D0%9A%D1%83%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F) _(5035775374).jpg) * [Fili, 1959](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fili_ (Moscow_Metro)#/media/File:Fili-mm.jpg), all three share the same utilitarian design * [Bagratiobovskaya, 1961](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:%D0%9F%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B8_%D0%B2_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%83_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8_%22%D0%A4%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B8%22_ (%D1%81%D1%82.%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE %D0%91%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_,_2013).jpg? uselang=ru) * Filyovsky Park, 1961 * [Pionerskaya, 1961](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Pionerskaya_(Moscow_Metro)#/media/File:Pion_07.jpg), again, all three have the same design * Kuntsevskaya, 1965, almost the same design, again, very austere and functional * [Molodyozhnaya, 1965](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ %D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%91%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_ (%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE,_%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B0) #/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Molodezhnaya-mm.jpg), a typical "caterpillar" station If you sort the list of stations by the date of opening, you can see that the austere "caterpillar" design ends with Belyayevo, 1975, deep into Brezhnev rule, with the last decorated caterpillar being Lenino, 1990. 5 Reply Share ReportSave Continue this thread level 2 2 months ago Thank you! 2 Reply Share ReportSave View Entire Discussion (103 Comments) More posts from the AskHistorians community Continue browsing in r/AskHistorians Subreddit Icon r/AskHistorians The Portal for Public History. 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