Anna Bronovitskaya, Nikolay Malinin, Yuri Palmin
Leningrad: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955–1991

Authors

Anna Bronovitskaya

Nikolay Malinin

Photographer

Yuri Palmin

Consultant

Vadim Bass

Project Manager

Olga Dubitskaya

Translators

Tobin Auber

Alastair Gill

Editor

Ruth Addison

Proofreader

Alfred Salisbury

Design

ABCdesign

Design and layout

Dmitry Mordvintsev

Svetlana Danilyuk

Narine Faramazyan

Maps

Darya Goryacheva

Architectural Drafter

Elizaveta Mordvintseva

Prepress

Anastasia Ageeva

Tatyana Borisova

Svetlana Danilyuk

Darya Goryacheva

Ekaterina Pankratova

www.garagemca.org/en

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or otherwise transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

© Anna Bronovitskaya, Nikolay Malinin, texts, 2021

© Yuri Palmin, photographs, 2021

© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2025

© IRIS Foundation, 2025

© ABCdesign, layout, 2025

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

From the Authors

Every book in this series begins with apologies. This time, they are particularly apposite. After all, how can children of the south (and Muscovites at that) write a book about St. Petersburg?

There is competition between major cities in many countries (New York and Washington, D.C., Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Montreal and Toronto), but in Russia, the struggle (let’s face it, the enmity) between St. Petersburg and Moscow has long since become a cultural and political phenomenon.

And, of course, any Petersburger will tell you that Muscovites not only use the wrong words for curbstone and entrance but that they are, in general, ruder and more vulgar. In the “cultural capital,” every drunk knows that “the delicatessen on Rakova Street was built by an architect from Krakow,”[1] and every schoolchild can tell the difference between “empire style and baroque, like you could distinguish firs from pines at that age.”[2]

The jealousy and envy Petersburgers feel for Muscovites (because the capital moved and because “all the money’s in Moscow”) are not blunted by the fact that St. Petersburg was preserved thanks to Moscow. Not only in the 1930s, when Moscow was transformed into the “capital of communism,” but in the 1960s, when Moscow was straightened out and warped again on a wave of impulses generated by the “thaw.”

Accordingly, the choice of Leningrad as the subject of a book in this series is a little strange. Here Soviet modernist architecture is not so striking as in Moscow (or Alma-Ata,[3] the subject of the second book in the series). This architecture does not define the face of the city, and in the center of St. Petersburg there is very little of it. When it is there, the architecture is a distinct compromise.

A common characteristic of Soviet modernism is its constant circumspectness, its timidity and even fear, which distinguish it from international modernism. This is not difficult to explain when looking at the historical context. Despite having dumped Stalin, the country did not reject Lenin, and in the same way that its attempts at renovation were half-baked, so was its architecture. Sergei Dovlatov hit the nail on the head: “We ended up in a newly constructed district. Glass, concrete, identical buildings. I said to Naiman, ‘I’m sure Pushkin would not have agreed to live in this horrible place.’ Naiman answered, ‘I’m sure Pushkin would not have agreed to live in this year!’”[4]

But it would be St. Petersburg that would develop this theme on the ontological level, as a struggle not only between the thaw and Stalinism but also as a conflict of place and time, progress and culture, the old and the new, which define architecture everywhere and always. And if from the point of view of progress we see the insufficiency, timidity, and listlessness of Leningrad buildings of the 1960s–1980s, from the point of view of culture, memory, and tradition we have, conversely, the phenomenon of respectfulness, reserve, and nobility.

For example, the Yubileiny Palace of Sports[18][5] was the first building in the USSR with a cable-stayed roof. But this does not affect the external appearance of the building, which is reminiscent of a classicist rotunda, and the technology was only used (rather than the usual, tried and tested dome) to make the structure as low as possible, thus reducing the damage to the historical fabric.

This does not mean that St. Petersburg was not demolished. In this book there are two buildings constructed in place of freshly demolished churches. And as St. Petersburg literary historian Samuil Lurie wrote, “German bombs destroyed fewer architectural treasures than did the ordinary decrees of Leningrad City Council’s Executive Committee.”[6] But the real “catastrophe for the city was mass reconstruction,” noted historian of St. Petersburg Natalia Tsendrovskaya. “Almost none of the buildings that underwent reconstruction retained the decoration of their facades in its entirety. And as for the interiors…” However, here there were no catastrophes comparable to that of Arbat in Moscow, and “the only place in the city which was wiped from the face of the earth was the Gospitalnaya Sloboda district. They began with the Pirogov Museum in order to build the Leningrad Hotel[25] and then they demolished almost everything up to Sakharny Pereulok.”[7]

Typically, the hotel is not blamed for these losses and not even for the fact that it did not “fit in” to the location, but for its diffidence. Appearing at as important a point as the Stock Exchange, it did not offer any real competition. This is what dispirits city residents. Because bold gestures were a tradition in the city, starting with its foundation (which was in itself a modernist gesture). Looking at St. Petersburg through the prism of modernism, we were amazed at the radical nature of the Admiralty, the Alexandrinsky Theater, the Engineer’s Castle, and the Kunstkamera, and even Peter the Great’s cabin, which is a wooden building that has nothing in common with the Russian izba (log hut). We saw St. Petersburg as a city of permanent modernism, and even thought about including these buildings in the book as separate texts, but we decided this would make it too much like an ordinary guidebook. And we may even have been worried that the modernism of Rossi and Voronikhin would overshadow that of Zhuk and Speransky.

Leningrad turned out to be a poor springboard for the affirmation of Soviet architecture. Two centuries as the capital had provided the city with the highest quality of construction and carefully considered urban planning. Accordingly, despite its proclaimed status as “the cradle of the revolution,” Leningrad did not receive the necessary ideological appearance in terms of architecture and urban planning. No truly revolutionary design was constructed after 1917: no skyscrapers were built, the Novy Obvodny (“New Bypass”) Canal was not dug, the Central City Park was not laid out, the new center around Moskovsky Prospekt was never formed, and the main new building of the city (the House of Soviets) was never properly utilized. This sequence of non-achievements continued in the period from the 1960s through the 1980s: the Sea Facade did not appear, the “trident” thoroughfares were not extended, and not a single complete square was constructed. But to state that the modernist fuse fizzled out in the age of modernism would be incorrect.

“In the topography of Leningrad, there is a colossal difference between the center and the outskirts,” wrote Joseph Brodsky. “And I suddenly realized that the outskirts are the beginning of the world, not the end. They are the end of the familiar world, but the beginning of the unfamiliar world, which, of course, is much bigger; it’s huge, right? And the idea was as follows: in leaving for the outskirts, you separate yourself from everything on earth and enter the real world.”[8] In the same way, Leningrad architecture left for the outskirts in order to activate the genuine drivers of development. They were not so much in new forms (which in any case were still borrowed) as in new functions, structures, and materials.

Many new engineering techniques were employed in Leningrad for the first time: the first cable-stayed roof[18], the first arches made of reinforced cement[6], the first building made of plastic[RESIDENTIAL II], the first building to use lift slab construction[RESIDENTIAL II], the first 22-story apartment block made of monolithic reinforced concrete[31]. In Leningrad, the block-sectional method[RESIDENTIAL III] was developed and first used, and it was here that the idea for the great and terrible panel construction factory was born. The city was also the location for the first multilevel pedestrian space in the USSR[26], and the square by the Volodarsky Bridge[33] was the first experience of creating a grand ensemble from standard panels.

In this book there are not only individual buildings but also urban forms such as squares, highways, quarters, and embankments. In this respect, Leningrad was also at the forefront. An integrated approach was dreamed about across the entire Soviet Union, but in Leningrad it was already a tradition and was solicitously applied to the outskirts of the city. When we first made a list of buildings for potential inclusion in this book, we observed that it was dominated not by representational public buildings as in Moscow but by typologies: the kindergarten, the school, the vocational technical college, the dormitory, the institute, the registry office, the market, the automobile service station, the library, the service center, the shopping mall. Normal human life, which they romantically attempted to improve through architecture.

Yes, it did not work out everywhere, but they made a sincere effort. And this idealism, which is imprinted in the buildings, makes the architecture of the 1960s–1980s unique. The ideals of modesty, equality, and fraternity are particularly apparent in residential architecture. There was little of it in our previous books. It seemed to us that residential buildings did not have a strong link to a particular place and should be covered in a history of architecture, not a guide. But in Leningrad (where all residential buildings, even standard ones, were constructed using individual designs and formed the ensembles of the new squares and embankments) this was not the case. Otherwise, the city would be “the guide, the museum crowd, the bus, the hotel, a view of the Thermae, the Colosseum.”[9]

Of course, tourists don’t travel to St. Petersburg (or to Rome) to look at this architecture. And we acknowledged that we were slightly mad to include Avtovo, Kupchino, Grazhdansky Prospekt, and Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony on the map. But these mass residential districts are the best possible reflection of a surprising time that did not happen anywhere else (and probably will not now), with all of its contradictions. This architecture was not bad at all, it was simply poorly constructed and there was too much of it. For that reason, we compromised: there are separate texts about the most interesting residential buildings and the others are grouped into four thematic chapters (marked on the map with Roman numerals referring to the chapters).

Rome (meaning EUR, the new district begun under Mussolini and completed in the 1950s) will appear more than once on the pages of this book. It is one of the places where architects of the twentieth century attempted to define a local “code,” to build something new based not on the letter of the city but the spirit. Leningrad architects visited EUR, so this is not just an analogy. But that is the source of the unexpected touch of totalitarianism that can be found in buildings of the late 1950s, such as the Theater for Young Audiences[9] and the Telecenter[7]. Of course, it’s not quite right to assign them to modernism, but here it is often like that: “modernized classic” or “classicized modern.” The city appears to constantly even out time, not allowing a single trend to take off at full tilt. “This beast never rushes anywhere,” as Yuri Shevchuk sang.

In this book there are fewer references to Western examples than in previous guides, and this is not accidental. Leningrad depended much more on St. Petersburg than on Le Corbusier and Mies. And it is not just about concrete places with which the new “blends” or “does not blend” (a subject often discussed in Moscow), but about the city as a whole, its architectural traditions. In creating the Theater for Young Audiences, the architects were thinking not so much about Pionerskaya Ploshchad as about the Alexandrinsky Theater; when building the Finland Station[5], not about Lenin but the Admiralty; in constructing the Telecenter, not about Ulitsa Chapygina but about the German Embassy.

This constant, tense dialogue with tradition is the main peculiarity of Leningrad modernism, the fundamental reason for its originality and beauty. And it is the reason for its reservedness, which does not make the architecture any less interesting. On the contrary, accepting its weaknesses allows us to evaluate the true worth of its wisdom. This is probably a unique case in the history of Soviet architecture, when the ethical element prevails so clearly over the aesthetic.

To be honest, this approach is dangerous from the tactical point of view. A critical word from us is grist to the developers’ mill. In Leningrad, the Sports and Concert Complex, the River Station, and several cinemas and shopping malls have already been demolished, and the Leningradsky Palace of Youth[34] has been pulled down in 2024, after the Russian edition of this book saw the light. Not to mention the “reconstructions,” the saddest of which is the Moscow Hotel[36]. Nevertheless, we decided not to remove the Leningradsky Palace of Youth from the book: may the building haunt the dreams of the architects designing its replacement. Like the construction worker killed during the demolition of the Sports and Concert Complex.

When reading discussions of these demolitions on social media (in this book we finally admit that the internet is now a valid source), we see that they do not provoke a great deal of grief. But here it is not architecture that is to blame. “Today, we are learning to look at Leningrad buildings of the 1970s through the eyes of foreign tourists, with a certain admiration for the idealism of the architects, but from the safe distance that the current political course affords us.”[10] These words were written by Vladimir Frolov, curator of the exhibition Leningrad Modernism. A View from the 21st Century, in the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition took place in the St. Petersburg House of Architects in 2006.[11] Alas, the visual images (modernist buildings through the lens of contemporary photographic artists) were weaker than the texts. As well as Frolov, authors included the main specialists: Vladimir Lisovsky, Yuri Kurbatov, and Alexey Levchuk. But the exhibition was not successful in rediscovering modernism in the way that the World of Art group rediscovered classicism in the early twentieth century. It is important to note that this attempt took place against the background of the 15-year-old “political course.” Today Alexey Levchuk’s words from the same catalogue seem more appropriate, with their focus on the perception of Soviet architecture by its contemporaries: “The judgment of a person in a prison cell regarding the architectural merits of the prison is unlikely to be objective.”[12]

But 30 years later, many people are beginning to see the merits, albeit the architectural ones, of the Soviet “prison.” “Today, compared to the garishness and gigantism of new construction, a reality which once appeared gray and boring seems an oasis of humanity,” wrote Vladimir Frolov in the catalogue of another exhibition, Leningrad Modernism and Postmodernism. A View from the 21st Century (in which one of the authors of this book, Yuri Palmin, participated), that took place in 2020 at the SHKAF Library and Art Residency at 31 Ulitsa Marshala Tukhachevskogo. The building did not make it into the book, in the same way that, for various reasons, a number of other important buildings did not: the Russian National Library on Moskovsky Prospekt and the archive complex on Shpalernaya Ulitsa, the sports schools on Prospekt Koroleva and Maly Prospekt, the swimming pools on Sredny Prospekt and Konny Pereulok, Lenelektronmash on Grazhdansky Prospekt and the Forestry Scientific Research Institute on Institutsky Prospekt, the dormitories on Sadovaya Ulitsa and Ulitsa Rentgena, the former party school building on Ulitsa Fuchika, and the Shipbuilding Institute on Leninsky Prospekt.

Of course, Petersburgers will curse us for that, and for the book as a whole, but that was predictable and unavoidable no matter how hard we tried. Even so, we hope that reading this guide will be as interesting as wandering through the strangest and most beautiful city in the world.

Acknowledgments

We thank the architects, the heroes of our book, and their family members, who shared with us memories and valuable materials: Alexander Feshin, Ekaterina Golynkina, Evgeny Lobanov, Igor Noakh, Stanislav Savin, Sergei Shmakov, Varvara Speranskaya, Ludmila Travina and Vera Reikhet, Vladimir and Yasia Tserbuk, and Yuri Zemtsov.

We are very grateful to the people who work in the buildings of interest to us. They helped us to see them from the inside and located the documents we needed in their archives: Tatyana Kornevaya (School No. 345), Natalia Safonova and Zoya Stepanova (Museum of St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University), Natalya Subbotina (Karnaval Theater and Concert Complex), and Eleonora Tudoran (Central Scientific Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics).

We are happy to thank those Petersburgers who showed us the city in a way that we would not have been able to see it ourselves: Maxim Atayants, Maria Bernshtein, Alexander Florensky, Pavel Gerasimenko, Alla Knyazkina, Dmitry Kozlov, Steve Kuddins, Sergei Kuznetsov, Ludmila Likhacheva, Lev Lurie, Ksenia Malich, Anna Matveeva, Sergei Padalko, Sergei Tchoban, and Nikita Yavein.

Huge thanks to those who took on the task of reading individual texts (and finding in them individual, and sometimes huge, errors): Polina Barskova, Kira Dolinina, Vladimir Frolov, Dmitry Gusarov, Nastasya Ivanova, Mikhail Krainov, Irina Kurdina, Yan Levchenko, Alexey Levchuk, Sergei Mishin, Dmitry Pilikin, Olga Ryabukhina, Alexander Strugach, and Natalia Tsendrovskaya.

We thank our colleagues for their priceless prompts and advice: Sergei Ageev, Vasily Baburov, Alexander Borovsky, Boris Bocharnikov, Boris Chukhovich, Maria Fadeeva, Irina Finskaya, Efim Freidin, Anna Gnedovskaya, Dmitry Goncharuk, Elena Gonzalez, Evgenia Gubkina, Grigory Guryanov, Mark Hakobyan, Dmitry Khmelnitsky, Svetlana Lipgart, Elena Markus, Maxim Matyashov, Andrey Mushta, Nadia Nilina, Serguei Oushakine, Lev Rassadnikov, Grigory Rezvin, Denis Romodin, Lev Shevchenko, Natalia Solopova, Mikhail Tubli, Yulia Tulovskaya, Anna Vyazemtseva, Dmitry Zadorin, and also Lev Eidinov, who helped us with the illustrations.

The St. Petersburg architectural historian Vadim Bass made an invaluable contribution to the work on this book, selflessly taking on the role of research consultant. He became our guide to the archives of St. Petersburg, our advisor in the choice of buildings for the guide, and, at the final stage, a keen reader of our texts.

We are happy to have produced this book with the wonderful designers from ABCdesign, Dmitry Mordvintsev and Svetlana Danilyuk. And we thank the director of Garage, Anton Belov, for the fact that he supported our project, and of course Olga Dubitskaya, the editor of the original Russian edition of this book, for her angelic patience, which we tested mercilessly once again.

Historical Overview

The architectural development of Leningrad, the second city of the USSR in terms of size and importance, was inevitably subordinated to countrywide rules. The third major stage in the history of Soviet architecture began after the All-Union Conference of Builders in December 1954, at which First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Nikita Khrushchev blamed architects for wasting the people’s money on extravagant and unfunctional buildings, and the publication of the decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of November 4, 1955 entitled “On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction.” It ended with the collapse of the USSR. The main aim of the reforms of the mid-1950s was a rapid resolution to the housing crisis, but symbolically it was part of the strategy of de-Stalinization, a demonstration of a significant rupture from the previous epoch. As a result, Soviet architecture, which, during the first postwar decade, had provided a stylistic contrast between the socialist and capitalist camps, once again began to follow the course of global development. Formally the doctrine of socialist realism was not cancelled, but de facto the architecture of postwar modernism came to the USSR, as did postmodernism, with some delay compared to Western countries.

Andrei Ikonnikov and G. Keller, Design for a standard large-panel residential building. Part of the facade, 1956

Over a period of 35 years there was significant evolution, which largely followed global processes but also reacted to economic and political factors within the country. There were four main phases, which coincided approximately with individual decades.

In the transition period of 1955–1961, there was an intensive assimilation of international experience, accompanied by attempts to find a new style. In a situation where the party and the government had made it clear that they required cheaper, standardized, and industrialized construction but had only vague requirements in terms of aesthetics, an understandable confusion arose. The reforms of the thaw period took place using tried and tested command economy methods. Architecture was subordinated to construction and, as a result, became a technical discipline. Whereas the Stalin Prize, which was abolished in 1954, included the category “architecture,” the Lenin Prize, which was reestablished in 1956, was awarded to architects of buildings and structures for achievements in the field of technology. The decree of August 23, 1955 entitled “On Measures for the Further Industrialization, Improvement of Quality, and Lowering of Costs of Construction” and the establishment soon after of the professional holiday Builders’ Day raised the prestige of this profession, and the role of the architect began to be secondary. The liquidated Academy of Architecture was replaced by the newly created Academy of Construction and Architecture, of which construction engineer Nikolai Bekhtin (1896–1983) was appointed president.[13] By 1960 the journals Architecture and Construction of Moscow and Architecture and Construction of Leningrad had symbolically changed their titles to Construction and Architecture of Moscow and Construction and Architecture of Leningrad.

All of these regrettable factors led to discussions about the death of the architectural profession and, accordingly, to disdain for the construction of recent decades. But there were also positive consequences resulting from the linking of architecture to technical disciplines. The traditionally strong Soviet school of engineering produced specialists in developing innovative structures. In Leningrad this work was focused in the Sector of Spatial Construction of the Leningrad Academy of Construction and Architecture,[14] headed by leading engineer Aleksei Morozov, who was coauthor of many of the structures in this book.

In addition, having turned from art into a branch of technology, to a certain extent architecture slipped out from under ideological control. Whereas an artist who dared to go beyond the boundaries of socialist realism would lose the possibility to exhibit or publish their works, architects were directed to be contemporary. The doctrine of socialist realism in the field of architecture was reduced to the triad “veracity-historical concreteness-ideological aspiration,”[15] which could be interpreted very broadly. Unlike artists, who were not permitted to show interest in Western trends, architects were expected to adopt international experience. In the USSR employing the technical achievements of capitalist countries was not considered shameful.

Beginning in 1955, delegations of architects, construction engineers, planners, and landscaping specialists were sent abroad, including to capitalist countries, to study international experience. On their return they gave talks and published articles about their findings. Soviet architects also participated in major international events. Some of these took place in the USSR: in 1958 the International Forum of Student Architects gathered at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad. In Moscow in the same year the Fifth Congress of the International Union of Architects took place, and shortly afterward at the Leningrad section of the Union of Architects papers were read which described impressions of the congress. Professional libraries increased the number of subscriptions to international journals: 50 titles from capitalist countries and nine from socialist countries were acquired by the library of the Lenproekt Institute in 1960. However, few architects knew foreign languages sufficiently well to be able to read these journals. Foreign periodicals were processed by a group of translators at the institute and summaries of the most important articles were published in the Bulletin of Technical Information, which was launched in 1955 and distributed to designers across the USSR.[16] For a few years following the start of the reforms, the professional community was persuaded that the leadership of the country dictated only economic parameters, with concrete decisions left to the professionals. The tone was set by the First Secretary of the Central Committee, who could close a meeting about questions of urban planning with the words “My instructions are as follows: do everything sensibly. I haven’t given you any instructions. You are the engineers and architects, so don’t dump it on me.”[17] But it was changes in society itself that formed a key factor in the development of architecture in the second half of the 1950s. The denouncing of the cult of personality, the freeing and rehabilitation of large numbers of innocent prisoners, the weakening of censorship, the broadening of international ties, and technological achievements crowned by the launch of the first satellite and the flight of the first man in space created an atmosphere of optimism that was productive for architectural creativity.

Cover of the Bulletin of Technical Information published by Lenproekt Institute, 1959

The discussions that took place in the professional community were summarized by two lectures. Their authors attempted to link the new stage in Soviet architecture with the achievements of the 1920s, in this way supporting the self-awareness of Soviet architects, who found themselves in a situation of catching up on developments after two decades in which they were instilled with the idea that Soviet architecture was superior to its international equivalent in every way.

In 1959, Konstantin Ivanov (1906–1987), who was a student of the Leningrad constructivist Alexander Nikolsky and had been appointed director of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture in Moscow in 1955, gave a lecture about “trends in Soviet architecture today” to the architectural community of Moscow and Leningrad. He announced that one of the important tasks of the present moment was to have a correct understanding of constructivism. “People simply do not understand the nature of architecture when they say that constructivism is something ugly, that it does not aim for beauty. It does, but understands beauty in a completely different way.”[18] Underlining that the new discoveries of constructivism were discredited largely due to primitive construction technology, Ivanov suggested to his audience that the ideas of constructivism could prove fruitful at this new stage, when architects had access to better technology, even if it was adopted from abroad.

In 1960 Evgeny Levinson (1894–1968), a Leningrad architect of the older generation who had made a splash abroad in the 1920s and 1930s, gave a similar lecture about the development of contemporary international architecture to architects from Moscow and Leningrad. Levinson stressed that the masters of the modern movement, among whom he picked out Mies van der Rohe, were influenced by vanguard Russian artists, in particular El Lissitzky and Malevich.[19] These lectures helped the Russian avant-garde to become one of the sources of form-making in the new Soviet architecture long before its official rehabilitation.

In 1961 two events took place that defined the launch of a Soviet modernist architecture that would completely assimilate new constructions, materials, and forms: the first manned spaceflight, which stimulated a belief in the endless possibilities of technological progress, and the adoption of the third program of the CPSU, which promised complete social harmony in the near future. Their influence would not last to the end of the decade. The entry of Soviet troops into Prague in 1968 and the subsequent repressions in the USSR dispelled any illusions about the nature of the regime, and the American Moon landing of 1969, after which it was no longer possible to consider the conquest of space a purely Soviet achievement, forced an examination of the situation in other fields and an admission that the situation with technological progress was not unproblematic. But until that point the appearance of architectural structures translated a belief in a brighter future using the international language of modernism.

This recharging with international ideas took place through various channels. The most accessible was the printed word: in addition to the short notes in the Soviet architectural press and international journals, which most architects could not read as they did not know foreign languages, in 1961 a Russian version of the leading French journal L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui was launched. The lucky few who managed to go abroad on business would share their impressions with colleagues. Exhibitions from various countries held in major Soviet cities had a significant influence. The most important to take place in Leningrad were Architecture USA (1965) and Contemporary Architecture in the Federal Republic of Germany (1966). And finally, foreign stars began visiting with lecture tours. In 1962 Alvar Aalto gave lectures for Leningrad architects and in 1965, in connection with the American exhibition, there were visits by Louis Kahn and Vincent Scully.

At the end of the 1960s priorities changed, and laconicism in architecture began to be perceived as “naked functionalism.” In 1969 a decree was issued regarding quality improvements in residential and civil construction in which, in particular, it was stated: “When constructing cities and other population centers, to ensure the development and use of standard designs for buildings, which may differ in terms of architecture, number of stories, and extent, and to decorate facades with durable and attractive materials (facing bricks, decorative concrete, glass, and ceramic tiles, aluminum, colored glass, natural stone, colored cement, durable paints). When building and reconstructing cities, to ensure the creation of architectural ensembles of city centers includes complexes of public, administrative, cultural, and retail buildings, both standard types and economical individual designs (with the use of standard uniform structures) in order to give the city a suitable image and color in line with modern urban planning requirements.”[20]

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Architecture USA, 1965

The status of architecture and architects changed again. In 1970 the first architects were awarded the title People’s Architect of the USSR, which had been established in 1967, and the Union of Architects was awarded the Order of Lenin. The welcome from the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR to the Fifth Congress of Architects of the USSR, which took place in the same year, included the wish “to create works of architecture in which the great socialist transformations of our Motherland will be imprinted for centuries.”[21] Architecture was art once again, the architectural image “also an important part of the concept of Soviet culture, just like the artistic images of literature, music, painting, and other arts.”[22] In speeches at the Fifth Congress the theme of the architect’s individual signature was raised.

The expressiveness of engineering solutions took second place to the complex development of form and the plastic development of walls, which regained their palpable materiality-characteristics typical of brutalism. Signs of impending postmodernism also appeared in Soviet architecture of the 1970s: a contextual approach to design and employing the forms of architecture parlante and retrospective motifs.

The way in which foreign models were adapted changed. Earlier, books on contemporary Western architecture had been published rarely and architects got their inspiration mainly from photographs and from schematic designs published in the press, refiguring them based on their own requirements and Soviet construction practice. Now, architects had the opportunity to become acquainted more systematically with the ideas behind innovative forms. Stroyizdat produced a series of books on the contemporary architecture of France, Italy, the USA, Japan, and other countries. In 1972, the author of most of these books, the Moscow-based Leningrader Andrei Ikonnikov, published the important volume Masters of Architecture on Architecture, which included excerpts from texts by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, Kenzo Tange, Pier Luigi Nervi, Gio Ponti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Bruno Zevi, Minoru Yamasaki, Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Alison and Peter Smithson. Translated histories of modern architecture also appeared, including Sigfried’s Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture. This acquaintance with the ideas of their foreign contemporaries provoked fascinating theoretical discussions in our country. The publication in 1973 of a translation of British theorist Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism promoted the popularity of brutalism in the USSR.

Vladimir Shcherbin and Lidia Varshavskaya, New building of the Russian National Library, 1982–1988. Main facade

In the early 1980s construction slowed. Too much had been spent on preparations for the Olympics, and the economic and political crisis that would lead to perestroika and the eventual collapse of the system meant that new resources were unavailable. Intellectual activity, in contrast, became more animated. Postmodernism in the West and its relevance to local architecture was the subject of lively discussions in the professional press. In 1985, even those who only read in Russian could get to know the theory of this new trend from a primary source: a Russian translation of Charles Jencks’ The Language of Postmodern Architecture was published.

Projects completed in the 1980s were reworked to include more semantic richness, and among newly created designs there were examples of a European type of postmodernism that interpreted historical prototypes with great freedom but without the playfulness typical of the American postmodernists. The apogee of this trend was the new building for the Public Library in Leningrad (now the Russian National Library), which was approved in 1985.

Vladimir Shcherbin and Lidia Varshavskaya, New building of the Russian National Library, 1982–1988. Rear facade

At all of these stages, Leningrad architecture differed markedly from that of Moscow in terms of what might be called its timidity, in which a noble restraint can be observed. Until the early 1960s Leningraders had no desire to leave classical architecture behind, simply cleaning away “excesses” and combining it with contemporary constructions. Here there was not such a strong contrast with the previous stage, since the Stalinist architecture of the northern capital was largely a continuation of prerevolutionary neoclassicism and, in the same way, was oriented toward the architectural heritage of this great city. But when modernism had, it seemed, finally taken first place, a preference remained for calm, symmetrical compositions, and when architects decided to change them they took inspiration from the architecture of neighboring Finland or the heritage of Leningrad constructivism. At every opportunity Leningraders revived the image of the classical colonnade, whether in the proportions of the piers between deep-set windows or in the pylons supporting a high-tech ceiling. The preserved link to tradition also explains the fact that in Leningrad the practice of adding mosaics or murals to the architecture was not common, although it was here that there was an example proving that the contemporary modernist conditionality and flatness of monumental art could develop from a classical prototype: the sgraffito Friendship of Peoples on the wall of the Friendship Hotel on Ulitsa Chapygina used techniques from Greek vase painting (Boris Axelrod, 1960).

The lack of enthusiasm to have done with the past was not simply due to the power of the historical architecture, which inspired humility in its descendants, but to a particular relationship with the city as a result of the trauma of war. Leningrad suffered significantly more than Moscow, and the postwar decade was spent not on the construction of triumphant structures but on the healing of wounds. Although during repair and reconstruction many ordinary buildings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lost their decoration, they were considered valuable and consequently demolished much less often than in Moscow.

Large-scale demolition was also avoided because in the city on the Neva the authorities selected as their residence not the Winter Palace or the Peter and Paul Fortress but the building of the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens, where the headquarters of the Bolsheviks was located during the October Revolution of 1917. In the 1930s it was suggested that the center of government move to a new region in the south of the city, where in the prewar period the House of Soviets was built to a design by Noi Trotsky. The move did not take place, and in the 1970s an ensemble of party and government buildings grew up near the Smolny Institute, but even so, this was at the edge of the historical city, not in the center.

Boris Axelrod, Friendship of Peoples sgraffito, 1960

Map of “Conservation zones of architectural monuments,” 1971

Large modernist interventions in the center could not be avoided, but they were few and far between and the plan for a large-scale reconstruction of the territory between the Neva and the Obvodny Canal,[23] developed in the mid-1960s, was not approved. In 1969, several years earlier than in Moscow, amalgamated conservation zones were formed in the center of Leningrad and the territory of the historical center in between them became subject to building restrictions. For architects who wished to construct something noticeable within sight of celebrated architectural ensembles it was already extremely difficult to get approval for designs (for example, Sergei Speransky was forced to reduce the height of his planned 22-story Leningrad Hotel[25] almost by half), and after the introduction of the conservation zones architectural experiments were finally pushed to the outlying districts.

The General Plan for the development of Leningrad, which was devised from 1955 under Valentin Kamensky and Alexander Naumov and approved in 1966, envisaged the even growth of the territory in all directions. The doubling of the area of the city to 528 square kilometers forced the speeding up of the development of the metro, although its construction was considerably slower and more difficult than expected. In 1955, when the first part of the Leningrad metro was launched, it comprised one line and seven stations. In 1991 it consisted of four lines and 54 stations, including some with a very unusual design.

Проект генерального плана развития Ленинграда на 1960–1980-е годы. 1964

Design of the General Plan for the development of Leningrad from 1960 to the 1980s, 1964

The new residential areas, which were constructed on the microdistrict principle, with open planning and all of the infrastructure required for living, were conceived as a significantly more comfortable environment than the historical center, with its communal apartments and enclosed courtyards. However, the system of highways and squares followed the planning logic of historical St. Petersburg.

The main innovation of the General Plan of 1966 was the expansion toward the sea, of which, until the appearance of the technical possibility to reclaim land, architects could only dream. For decades the city’s Sea Facade was an important theme for experimental design, although in reality the reclaimed western end of Vasilyevsky Island and the neighboring islands remained only partly developed. Even when setting the task of creating a new silhouette for the city as seen from the gulf, Leningrad’s urban planners were careful that the new vertical dominants did not obstruct the historic ones but complemented them.

Another important urban planning task was the creation of new construction on the banks of the Neva in those places which had previously been occupied by factories and warehouses. And here the designers attempted to follow historical models, organizing squares with highrise accents set back from the river at defined intervals. However, their scale and methods of construction, which prevented the creation of a complex silhouette of individual buildings, forced the use of new techniques based on rhythmic alternation of volumes of various heights.

Architects felt most free at a safe distance from architectural treasures of previous centuries. Accordingly, several complexes of scientific research institutes with unusual and inventive designs appeared in the Grazhdanka district, and although Moskovsky Prospekt did not become the new administrative center, it was completed with the most ambitious of the ensembles that were constructed, Ploshchad Pobedy[31].

Igor Chaiko, Nikolai Baranov, and Felix Yakovlev, Sports and Concert Complex, 1965–1979, demolished in 2020

Near Moskovsky Prospekt, on the other side of Moskovsky Park Pobedy, the grandiose rotunda of the V.I. Lenin Sports and Concert Complex was erected between 1970 and 1979 and would become the main Leningrad venue for the 1980 Olympics. Covering a 160-meter diameter space with a steel membrane only six millimeters thick was the latest triumph of the Leningrad engineering school, and the catastrophe which killed a worker on January 31, 2020, during the demolition of the building, demonstrates the pitiful state of construction culture in our time. The outrage provoked by the hasty demolition of this unique building is evidence of the fact that Petersburgers have accepted late Soviet architecture as part of their cultural heritage. The aim of this book is to show the modernist heritage of Leningrad to those who have yet to notice it thanks to the blinding magnificence of imperial St. Petersburg.

Yuri Bilinsky and G. Shikhaleva, Laboratory block of the Forestry Scientific Research Institute, 1980

Guide

1. First Large-Panel Building 1955

ARCHITECT ALEXANDER VASILIEV

ENGINEER ZINOVY KAPLUNOV

ULITSA POLYARNIKOV, 10 LOMONOSOVSKAYA

The first fruits of the new architecture ultimately proved too good to go into production

The first Soviet panel house in Beryozovsky, 1946

This unassuming building in the middle of a quarter by Lomonosovskaya metro station is a no less fateful place than Senate Square or Palace Square. It is exactly the same kind of turning point, a place at which Russian history could have taken a different direction. And it would have been a direction inspired more by what the former square represents than the latter.[24] If this building had been taken as the model for Russian housing, rather than the five-story block designed by construction engineer Vitaly Lagutenko, generations of Soviet people would have grown up much kinder and happier. Because they believed that the conditions of existence determined consciousness, and high ceilings and large windows would have made life very good indeed. Though residents would have had to climb to a height of 15 meters without an elevator.

The Khrushchev decree “On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction” (November 4, 1955) is often described as a bolt from the blue, but preparations for the transition to prefabricated large-panel housing construction had been underway for the previous 10 years, and the building on Ulitsa Polyarnikov, completed in November 1955, is one confirmation of this. But the common claim that it “has heritage status as the first large-panel building in the USSR”[25] is erroneous. The first panel buildings-one-and two-story-houses-appeared as early as 1945–1947 in the Urals: in Beryozovsky, Severouralsk, and Yekaterinburg.

The first multi-story frame-panel building was built in 1947–1948 in Moscow on Sokolinaya Gora (four floors, a completely metal frame, with pilasters covering the joints between panels). Then, in 1948–1951, 15 more buildings of four to six stories were put up on Khoroshyovskoye Shosse (though by the second phase of the project the frame was already of reinforced concrete), and in 1951 a six-story brick-clad building was built in Kiev, with a first floor of monolithic reinforced concrete. Later, in 1951–1952, two frameless panel buildings were erected in Magnitogorsk. Admittedly, these were still very small: one had three stories, the other four. A higher building-with five- and seven-story wings-sprang up between 1953 and 1955 at Oktyabrskoye Polye in Moscow, with transverse load-bearing walls and elevators. The culmination of this architectural phase was this building in Leningrad: five-story, frameless, with longitudinal load-bearing walls.

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. ALEXANDROV

ULITSA SEDOVA, 61–83 LOMONOSOVSKAYA

Cheryomushki, Leningrad-style

“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 LEVINSON

SCULPTORS VERA ISAEVA, ROBERT TAURIT (SCULPTURE OF MOTHERLAND), MOISEI VAINMAN, BORIS KAPLYANSKY, ABRAM MALAKHIN, MARIA KHARLAMOVA (BAS-RELIEFS)

PROSPEKT NEPOKORENNYKH, 72 PLOSHCHAD MUZHESTVA

By delicately minimizing the range of pictorial elements, the designers of this memorial created a surprisingly modernist ensemble

There 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.

The flower pavilion at the entrance to the cemetery, 1973

But opposite them, on the other side of the highway-striking an unexpected contrast-an absolutely transparent flower pavilion stood in the 1960s. However, when designing the cemetery, and even the parkland around it, “the authors deliberately avoided including flowers in the plantings,” a reviewer commented on the second part of the project. “The landscape composition of the avenue should be distinguished by strict solemnity, a noble restraint of colors.”[53] Yet trees, carefully selected and neatly cropped, were an important part of the ensemble: “Four rowan trees in front of the propylaea, a linden grove at the entrance, a semicircle of birches encompassing the monument, silver spruces on small terraces on the back of the stele, two weeping elms standing apart on the upper level …”[54]

An equally important part of the whole was the music, Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony, which plays continuously over the cemetery. Soviet architecture had never seen such a powerful Gesamtkunstwerk. The architects, of course, drew an open parallel with Leningrad’s Field of Mars, and it is not only the sharp disparity between the scale of the space and its design that associate them but also the role of words. The lines by Olga Berggolts were written in accordance with specified dimensions, all the way down to the number of letters in a line! “No, I did not think that it should be my duty to give this wall a voice,” recalled Berggolts. “But somebody had to give it words and a voice. And it was such a miserable Leningrad fall, and it seemed to me that time had already run out.”[55]

Halted in 1949, on the back of the “Leningrad Affair,” work on the creation of the memorial recommenced only in 1955, and it was unveiled on May 9, 1960. To this day it remains the purest and most honest architectural statement about the siege, in spite of how much already “has been said about the paradoxical situation of the existence of two parallel histories of the siege-the official one, with the granite, gilding, and emptiness of monuments, and the personal, domestic one, with the silence of our relatives, with the impossibility of eating your fill, of throwing away bread, and at the same time with the impossibility, the enormous difficulty in finding the right words to say what this bread was.”[56]

4. 124th Quarter 1957–1960

ARCHITECTS EVGENY LEVINSON, DAVID GOLDGOR, ANATOLY SHPRITS, KONSTANTIN EMELYANOV

BETWEEN ULITSA SEDOVA, ULITSA BABUSHKINA, ULITSA SHELGUNOVA, AND BULVAR KRASNYKH ZOR PROLETARSKAYA

The most conceptual quarter of the Khrushchev era: here everything about the design was right, but all the same it was not a success

The hero of Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House “had not once left the old town in all his life” and “knew about the outer districts only through hearsay.”[57] When he got there, he was astounded. “There were no archways, just like there were no streets. Everything was one large courtyard, around which the wind tore, twisting into dry, evil tornadoes. There was lots of space for the wind here, nothing limited or directed it; in some sense there was nowhere for it to blow, and it blew everywhere.”[58] For city natives, resettlement to the new districts inflicted a powerful psychological blow, a trauma that today we would identify as a loss of identity. It was not only an estrangement from the places that had formed them but also a rupture with the urban tradition of life as determined by the streets, courtyards, and archways. Yet it was precisely these archways and well-yards-gray, dank, unhealthy-that the new districts had been designed to counterbalance. The architects genuinely counted on the poverty of the new housing being compensated for by the space around it-vast, meaningful, and landscaped. It provided air and light, and that meant health and freedom. “The outskirts are all the more to my liking because they give a feeling of spaciousness,” as Joseph Brodsky recalled his Leningrad youth. “And I suddenly realized that the outskirts are the beginning of the world, not the end. They are the end of the familiar world, but the beginning of the unfamiliar world, which, of course, is much bigger, it’s huge, right?”[59]

General view of the 124th quarter from Ulitsa Sedova

In fact, the process of replacing the courtyard with a quarter did not begin under Khrushchev, and not even in the 1920s. The first example of this new typology was Gavansky Gorodok, a quarter of small-scale apartments built in 1904–1906 by Nikolai Dmitriev. It consisted of three buildings for families and two for bachelors, with a store, nursery, canteen, library, classrooms, and an outpatient clinic on the ground floors. The novelty was both in the layout of the apartments (corridors were kept to a minimum, and the bachelors’ buildings featured communal kitchens) and of the quarter itself, where for the first time in the city they deviated from perimeter construction, supplementing it with elements of ribbon development. The exterior of the buildings is extremely charming: white bands of pilasters and moldings embroider the brick walls and carved brackets cling to the pediments. The same goes for the courtyards. For the very first time, “the contraposition between the grand street frontage and the inner area of the quarter had been removed.”[60]

Nikolai Dmitriev and Vasily Fedorov, Gavansky Gorodok, 1904–1906

Nonetheless, it was dark and cramped (land still cost money at the time), and the next step was taken only with the mass housing of the 1920s and 1930s, when “architects were able for the first time to move away from crowded capitalist housing in favor of separate, freestanding buildings on spacious, landscaped territory. Urban residential buildings became separate volumes, instead of façades in an even line of contiguous housing.”[61] But in the mid-1930s everything changed again. Perimeter housing came into vogue, corner buildings appeared, the inner space of quarters began to be divided into small courtyards, and kindergartens were situated on the first floors. As a result, although construction was of the same density, the “sanitary and hygienic quality deteriorated.”[62] Comparing constructivist and Stalinist quarters in 1959, Yuly Shass was still very cautious in expressing a preference for the former: “It is not difficult to see that the construction of the earlier quarters was often conducted at a higher level than what followed.”[63] He cites as the first (and at the time the only) praiseworthy contemporary example the 124th quarter in Shchemilovka, where “construction is no longer being carried out indifferently (along the perimeter), as it was in quarters 122 and 123[2], and is now taking into account the purpose of the adjacent streets, their orientation, and the nature of the building itself.”[64]

Nikita Khrushchev inspects the construction of new quarters in Shchemilovka, May 23, 1957

The 124th quarter in Shchemilovka. General plan

The layout of those first two quarters-the still solid houses of Series 506 – also remained very Stalinist, especially that of the 122nd quarter. It was closed in by perimeter housing (L-shaped buildings on the corners), strictly symmetrical, and decorated with fountains with sculptures. But on May 22, 1957, Khrushchev came to the city, and in a speech at an agricultural laborers’ meeting he promised to catch up with the United States. The next day he inspected the new quarters in Shchemilovka and realized that at this pace the USSR would only be able to catch its rival in meat and milk production and would never close the gap in terms of housing. In spring 1958, new rules and regulations on construction came into force. Built in accordance with them, the 124th quarter was the very cheapest housing: Series OD, the Leningrad version of the “Lagutenko” five-story residential buildings. It was this that compelled the quarter’s designers to seek new paths in order to compensate for the “brave new lifestyle” to which its inhabitants would have to become accustomed.

Maximum diversity became the chief guiding principle, and the first way of doing this was in the layout of the quarter, which the designers called “open-plan,” reasoning that it was neither perimetral nor ribbon development. In fact, it brought together all possible types: both perimetral and ribbon development and linear. At the same time, they are all fairly geometrical, but buildings from different series are grouped together, since they needed to be built using a rapid construction method. Nonetheless, the 124th quarter can be considered the birthplace of Soviet open-plan urban layout, which would take off explosively in the 1960s. Later, critics would also express disappointment in it, grieving “about classical traditions, about the fact that the ‘free’ arrangement of buildings results in disorder, ruins the composition, brings chaos to the intra-quarter spaces.”[65]

But this would be said 20 years later, amid the postmodernist return to the classics. At the time the 124th quarter was built, Stalinist pomposity had only just been cast aside, and the designers saw problems with an open-plan layout: they “cannot organically become part of the general landscape of the city. They effectively live their own life and practically turn into a system of through streets or dead-end inner streets.”[66] So the architects diligently linked the 124th quarter with the city, making each of its four sides absolutely different in accordance with the direction they faced. Ulitsa Sedova was to become the district’s main artery, while the parallel Ulitsa Babushkina opened onto Kurakina Dacha park and the river; Ulitsa Shelgunova had electric power lines running along it, and Bulvar Krasnykh Zor was slated to eventually become the Yuzhny Obvodny Canal. The buildings were therefore placed in a “П” shape along the canal/boulevard (four sideways-on and two front-facing, flanking them). Along the opposite street, with its power lines, they were set at an angle. Ulitsa Babushkina can be seen from the Neva, so here they built large volumes with seven stories (Series E-5-58, a more advanced version of Series 507), and the ribbon development of housing on Ulitsa Sedova with its Series OD five-story buildings was interposed by the “dots” of towers.

This was the first example of this simple approach (“dot-dash-dot”), which went on to be widely used in Leningrad. Novoizmailovsky Prospekt[14], Sverdlovskaya Embankment[26], Prospekt Geroev-all the city’s new main roads would be configured this way. But in each of these cases the role of the “dots” was played by highrise towers built to original designs. Here the role of the vertical is played by modest eight-story buildings from Series G. While they look wonderful in Natalya Zakharina’s sketches, in real life they are clearly rather low and are lost in the open space of the street. They are even outshone by their neighbors, five-story Series OD buildings that are “greater in volume with large window apertures.” So writes Alexander Vasiliev, citing as an example the housing on Krasnoputilovskaya Ulitsa, where all the buildings are of the same scale. There, the buildings are from Series G, but are six-story rather than eight-story, and the towers are not “running out” toward the street, like here. On the contrary, they are set back from the road. At the same time, the five-story buildings there are from the same Series G, while in the 124th quarter for the first time they tried to combine not only two types of building, but houses of different series – OD, G, and 507.

This was a second step toward diversity, but the architects also constructed the quarter from buildings of different heights. Here there are buildings of one, two, five, seven, and eight stories! It was after the completion of the 122nd and 123rd quarters that the disadvantages of building to a uniform height became obvious, although this had been clear earlier. In a city with a flat relief it is very important to create an attractive skyline. Over time it would become clear that differences of one or two stories were insufficient for this, and in any case the sprawling trees serve to level off any silhouette. Nonetheless, the architects were on the right path, as evidenced by their idea of adding a contrast in materials by inserting glass structures of stores into the gaps between the rows of buildings (in Zakharina’s sketch their facades are not only completely glazed but also tilted). Naturally, there were not just stores but also a kindergarten, a daycare center, a boiler house, a laundry, garages. Everything was built from the same panels, but most importantly, at the same time. Because it was this that would become a major problem in the future: the pace of infrastructure construction would lag catastrophically behind the pace of housing construction.

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Примечания

1

From the song “Russian Symphony” by Aquarium.

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2

From Alexander Kushner’s poem “As the Maple and the Rowan Grow on the Threshold” (1976).

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3

This series of books uses the Soviet names of cities, some of which have since changed.

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4

Sergei Dovlatov, Zapisnye knizhki. Solo na undervude. Solo na IBM (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2003), 19.

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5

Numbers in square brackets denote the chapter number of the building in this book.

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6

Samuil Lurie, Muraveinik. Fel’etony v prezhnem smysle slova (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal “Neva”, 2002), 11.

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7

From an interview with Natalia Tsendrovskaya by the authors of the book, September 12, 2021.

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8

Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim (Moscow: Eksmo, 2012), 13.

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9

From Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Piazza Mattei” (1981).

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10

Vladimir Frolov, “Klassika leningradskogo modernizma,” Leningradskii modernizm. Vzgliad iz XXI veka (St. Petersburg, Al’fa, 2006), 10.

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11

The buildings (and architects) of Leningrad modernism came to the attention of historians earlier, but they were presented in the broad historical context. (See the books Yuri Kurbatov (ed.), Arkhitektory ob arkhitektorakh. Leningrad – Peterburg. XX vek (St. Petersburg: Ivan Fedorov, 1999); V.G. Isachenko (ed.), Zodchie Sankt-Peterburga. XX vek (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2000); Alexey Levchuk, “Arkhitekturnaia istoriia Leningrada,” Project Russia, 26, 2003; L. Lavrov and L. Likhacheva, Sankt-Peterburg. Arkhitekturnyi putevidotel’. 1703–2003 (St. Petersburg: Eklektika, 2003.) This was the first project that looked exclusively at the epoch of Soviet modernism.

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12

Alexey Levchuk, “Musornoe prostranstvo sovetskoi arkhitektury,” Leningradskii modernizm. Vzgliad iz XXI veka, 10.

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13

See Konstantin Khrupin, “Reorganizatsiia arkhiteturno-stroitel’noi nauki: sozdanie nauchnogo tsentra pri Gosstroe SSSR. Akademiia stroitel’stva i arkhitektury SSSR” in Olga Kazakova (ed.), Estetika “ottepeli”. Novoe v arkhitekture, iskusstve, kul’ture (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013), 383–401.

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14

In 1963 this sector became part of the Leningrad Zonal Research Institute for Standard and Experimental Design of Residential and Public Buildings (LenZNIIEP).

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15

Stenographic record of the meeting of the Leningrad architectural community to discuss various trends in Soviet architecture today. Central State Archive of Literature and Arts of St. Petersburg, Ф. Р-341. Оп. 1–2. Д. 540.

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16

See E.I. Kargina, Tekhnicheskaia informatsiia i obmen opytom v proektnom institute (Leningrad: Leningradskii dom nauchno-tekhnicheskoi propagandy, 1960).

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17

Stenographic record of the discussion between Nikita Khrushchev and the leaders of the Moscow City Council regarding questions of urban planning. Central Archive of Social and Political History of Moscow, Ф. 4. Оп. 124. Д. 9.

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18

Central Archive of Literature and Arts of St. Petersburg, Ф. Р-341. Оп. 1–2. Д. 540.

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19

Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, Ф. 1. Оп. 3. Д. 480.

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20

Decree no. 392 of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR of May 26, 1969, “On measures to improve the quality of residential and civil construction.”

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21

V s”ezd arkhitekorov SSSR (Moscow: no publisher, 1970), 7.

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22

“Doklad pervogo sekretaria pravleniia SA SSSR G.M. Orlova na V s”ezde arkhitektorov,” V s”ezd arkhitekorov SSSR, 15.

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23

Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, Ф. Р36. Оп. 12. Д. 785.

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24

Senate Square was the location of the Decembrist Revolt (1825). Palace Square was the location of the Bloody Sunday massacre (1905) and the seizure of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution (1917).

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25

“Zhiloi dom na ul. Poliarnikov, 10,” www.citywalls.ru

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26

A khrushchevka is a panel apartment block constructed during the 1960s under Khrushchev.

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27

Elena Soroka, “Protokhrushchevka,” The Village, April 5, 2017.

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28

Y.V. Trubinov, “Pervye postroiki Peterburga. Issledovanie i restavratsiia,” SiAL, no. 9 (1973): 28.

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29

V.A. Korentsvit, Letny sad Petra Velikogo. Rasskaz o proshlom i nastoiashchem, chapter 1, part 1.

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30

Y. Galkina, “Ia zhivu v protokhrushchevke,” The Village, April 5, 2017.

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31

“Melodiia mikroraiona,” in Belye nochi (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1975), 84.

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32

Libretto by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky, 1958.

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33

Directed by Herbert Rappaport, Lenfilm, 1962.

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34

E.A. Levinson and I.I. Fomin, “Zhilye kvartaly na vnov’ osvaivaemykh terrritoriiakh Leningrada,” Arkhitektura Leningrada, no. 2 (1936): 26.

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35

See “Itogi Vsesoiuznogo konkursa na tipovie proekty zhilykh domov,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 7 (1956): 1–3.

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36

Y. Shass, “Kvartaly krupnopanel’nykh domov v Leningrade,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 1 (1958): 30.

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37

Ibid., 37.

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38

V.A. Bystrov, et al., “Proidennyi put’,” Lenproekt. Biulleten’ tekhnicheskoi informatsii, no. 3 (1957): 8.

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39

D.A. Chagin, “Zhilye doma v Leningrade s malometrazhnymi kvartirami dlia posmeinogo zaseleniia,” Lenproekt. Biulleten’ tekhnicheskoi informatsii, no. 3 (1957): 11–12.

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40

E.A. Levinson and D.S. Goldgor, “Palitra arkhitektora stanovitsia bogache,” AiSL, no. 3 (1959): 23.

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41

V.F. Tvelkmeier, “Synov svoikh Rodina ne zabudet, vragov ne prostit,” AiSL, June 1946, 17.

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42

See S. Yarov, Blokadnaia etika. Predstavlenie o morali v Leningrade v 1941–1942 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2021), 184–192.

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43

G.F. Petrov, Pamiatnik skorbi i slavy. Piskarёvskoe memorial’noe kladbishche (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986), 27.

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44

G.A. Vasiliev, “Aleksandr Vasil’ev,” in Arkhitektory ob arhkitektorakh. Leningrad – Peterburg. XX vek, ed. V.G. Isachenko (St. Petersburg: Ivan Fedorov, 1999), 400.

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45

Ibid., 402.

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46

G.A. Ol and E.E. Levinson, Evgenii Levinson (Leningrad: Stroyizdat, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1976), 76.

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47

Tvelkmeier, op. cit., 17.

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48

I.D. Sablin, “Pamiat’. Smert’. Arkhitektura,” www.art1.ru, October 16, 2013.

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49

Vasiliev, op. cit., 402.

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50

Petrov, op. cit., 30.

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51

Sablin, op. cit.

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52

See M.S. Uvarov, “Metafizika smerti v obrazakh Peterburga,” in Metafizika Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Eidos, 1993), 113–129.

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53

“Prospekt Nepokorennykh,” SiAL, no. 6 (1966).

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54

Petrov, op. cit., 47.

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55

Ibid., 38.

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56

P. Barskova, “Blokada – neotrefleksirovannaia gumanitarnaia katastrofa,” Colta, September 8, 2021.

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57

A. Bitov, Pushkinskii dom (Moscow: Vagrius, 2007), 58.

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58

A. Bitov, Pushkinskii dom (Moscow: Vagrius, 2007), 96.

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59

S. Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim (Moscow: Nezavisimaia Gazeta 1998), 28.

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60

B.M. Kirikov and M.S. Shtiglits, Arkhitektura leningradskogo avangarda. Putevoditel’ (St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2008), 34.

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61

A. Strugach, “Kommentarii arkhitektora,” The Village, May 16, 2016.

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62

Y.E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” AiSL, no. 4 (1959): 18.

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63

Y.E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” AiSL, no. 4 (1959): 18.

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64

Y.E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” AiSL, no. 4 (1959): 20.

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65

E.M. Poltoratsky, “I planirovka-tvorchestvo,” SiAL, no. 11 (1977): 5–6.

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66

E.A. Levinson and D.S. Goldgor, “Palitra arkhitektora stanovitsia bogache,” AiSL, no. 3 (1959): 23.

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