New Socialist Cities Foreign Architects in The USSR

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New socialist cities: foreign architects in the

USSR 1920–1940
a
Koos Bosma
a
Faculty of Arts, Research Institute for the Heritage and History of the
Cultural Landscape and Urban Environment (CLUE), De Boelelaan 1105,
Amsterdam NL 1081 HV, The Netherlands
Published online: 17 Sep 2013.
To cite this article: Koos Bosma (2014) New socialist cities: foreign architects in the USSR 1920–1940,
Planning Perspectives, 29:3, 301-328, DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2013.825994
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Planning Perspectives, 2014
Vol. 29, No. 3, 301 –328, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2013.825994
New socialist cities: foreign architects in the USSR 1920 –1940

Koos Bosma∗
Faculty of Arts, Research Institute for the Heritage and History of the Cultural Landscape and Urban
Environment (CLUE), De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam NL 1081 HV, The Netherlands
(Received 20 August 2012; final version received 15 June 2013)
The creation of a Communist society between 1917 and 1939 implied the concomitant
establishment of a non-capitalist economy and a non-bourgeois culture and lifestyle. In
terms of the rhetoric used at the time, the Communist utopia was based on confidence in
Downloaded by [Tufts University] at 06:25 19 November 2014
the beneficial impact of science, technology, planning and management. This necessarily
presupposed alternative (new) town planning concepts, a reformed building industry, a
new housing typology, and new management styles. Solutions for this mission were
expected to come from foreign (mostly German) engineers, architects, and town planners
who were invited to the USSR to realize the Communist utopia during the first Five-Year
Plan (1928– 1933).
Keywords: space; heritage; new towns; socialist city; city planning; building industry;
housing typology; architecture; Ernst May
A new civilization
The foundation of a Communist society in Russia in October 1917 must have been a fascinating
spectacle. One of the challenges of the new Communist regime was the question of whether
it could create an alternative, non-capitalist economy and a non-bourgeois culture. As Kotkin
puts it:
Bolshevism itself, including its evolution, must be seen not merely as a set of institutions, a group of
personalities, or an ideology but as a cluster of powerful symbols and attitudes, a language and new
forms of speech, new ways of behaving in public and private, even new styles of dress – in short,
as an ongoing experience through which it was possible to imagine and strive to bring about a new
civilization called socialism.1
A great many people in the West were fascinated by the art, literature, theatre, film, and Construc-
tivist architecture inspired by the October Revolution. In the 1920s and 1930s, about 100,000
foreigners visited the Soviet Union: professionals of all sorts: writers, scientists, artists and intel-
lectuals (some of them famous), mostly during the first Five-Year Plan. These visits were crucial
for Soviet-Western cultural and intellectual interactions.2 The height of Western admiration
coincided, it may be observed, with the most repressive phase of Soviet Communism.3
Some of these visitors were professionals – town planners, engineers and architects – who
were contracted to assist in fostering the country’s industrialization and in creating housing pro-
jects. Since 1990, when Kopp published the results of his study of the ambitions, commissions,
and careers of the Western architects who worked in the USSR, our perspective on their
∗
Email: je.bosma@let.vu.nl
# 2013 Taylor & Francis

302 K. Bosma
activities has changed. Research in Russian archives and elsewhere has helped establish a better
framework for understanding Western interventions.4 In this article, we take a closer look at the
importance of town planning, modern housing technology, and social engineering and planning
in Communist society.5 We do not adopt an avant-garde perspective or look at individual build-
ings as objects that somehow directly represent the proletariat, but focus instead on the structure
and concept of the socialist city. Our basic assumption is that the driving force behind all the
efforts to import Western expertise was the regime’s desire that the new towns provide an
alternative to the capitalist city. Many visiting architects thought that their universal solutions,
using standardization and the aesthetics of serial design, would be suitable for every part of the
modernizing world, especially the socialist states. A key question was whether the socialist city
could be created only by capitalist means. How would labour, the building industry, architec-
ture, and town planning be organized in this new civilization? Could the bourgeois family be
destroyed to make way for a collective and egalitarian socialist life? Answers to these questions
were needed in that period as they affected the programming, the design, and the represen-
tational character of all new buildings and cities.
The Communist era of 1920–1940 may be usefully divided in two periods: the experimental
period of 1920–1928, and the Stalinization period of 1928 –1933 (first Five-Year Plan), when
the enforced restructuring of mass society through industrialization and the cult of proletariani-
zation were dominant trends. For each period, we present one typical plan designed by a foreign
architect and evaluate the results of trying to realize it. The evaluation is based on new research
published in articles, books and dissertations (some of which partly use Soviet sources), as well
as on some of our own research.
The experimental era

During the first decade of the Communist era, experiments were made in almost every field in
order to find a suitable structure and expression for the new culture.6 The architectural exper-
iments may be termed ‘utopian’ inasmuch as architecture always refers to a better future,
although it does not itself claim to be the foundation of utopia. It reacts to and reflects
society as a whole. It needs a sociopolitical reform programme as its guide in order to be
capable – if materialized – of fulfilling a representative role. Communist utopia, it was
thought at the time, should take an affirmative stance toward the modern city and city life, con-
ceiving town and country as an urbanizing continuum – to be industrialized – and advocating
the abolition of the existing agrarian production cycle and way of life. During this first phase,
some model experiments (buildings, sites, and projects) were executed that were used to
impress foreign visitors: model prisons, children’s communes, schools, scientific research
centres, and hygienic institutions.7 These models – the very term implies that they were excep-
tions – were often the work of avant-garde architects and could be admired as such. To a certain
extent their proposals and designs were meant to assert and confirm the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat. An early experiment in this vein was the creation of the new town of Kemerovo.
Kemerovo: an early new town experiment

One of the primary goals of the Soviet regime was the exploitation of minerals in the Caucasus,
Siberia, the Ukraine and the Urals. Right from the start, it was clear that the country lacked the
Planning Perspectives 303
technical knowledge, tools and scientific management infrastructure for creating heavy industry.
Kemerovo (until 1931 called Ščeglovsk) was planned to be the capital city of the coal region of
Kuznyetski Bassin or Kuzbas (Siberia). The first coal mines of Kemerovo had been dug in 1870
with bare hands. Coal was transported via the River Tom (a tributary of the Ob) to Omsk. In
Tsarist times (1915), the first coke factory was built. A major event was the opening of the
Trans-Siberian Railway (1916), after which various primitive, small miners’ settlements
sprang up.
The idea of constructing a sort of company town on the river’s right bank (‘Autonomous
Industrial Colony Kuzbas’ [AICK]) originated with the American branch of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), or the Wobblies, as an enthusiastic reaction to Lenin’s Letter
to American Labourers (New York 1918). In this letter, Lenin stressed his interest in recruiting
the aid of the international proletariat for the first workers’ state. He was particularly eager to
launch the idea because of his admiration for the technical and scientific management of Amer-
ican industry, and he expressed the conviction that the American revolutionary workers would
play an extraordinary role in the industrialization of the USSR. A prominent IWW member,
Herbert Henry Calvert, promoted the idea of creating a model industry for foreign workers,
and he was brought in contact with the Dutch Communist Sebald Rutgers.8 This civil engineer,
who was acquainted with the IWW, became a key figure in the construction of the colony. In
October 1921, Lenin signed the agreement for the installation of the AICK.
Numerous Americans went to Kemerovo, including mining experts, nurses, machinists, car-
penters, electricians, accountants, and engineers. Between 1921 and 1925, the Kemerovo coal
mines were modernized, and a chemical factory, coke ovens, and some offices were built.
On account of difficulties with the Kremlin, the number of foreign workers was reduced.
They had to sign a declaration proving their awareness that they would suffer privations ‘in a
country that was quite backward and had suffered unprecedented destruction’. They also had
to agree to strive for ‘productivity of labor and discipline surpassing the standards of capitalism,
or else we will not be able to surpass or even to reach the level of capitalism’.9 In a new contract
with the leaders of the colony, the idea of an autonomous, huge industrial enterprise owned and
led by workers was rejected. From a historical point of view, this was a decisive moment,
because one of the basic ideas of socialism – the decentralization of power in favour of the
autonomous collectives of the egalitarian proletariat – was abandoned.
One remnant of autonomy remained: foreign workers and engineers supervised the army of
Russian workers in order to teach them modern technology. Despite all these troubles, Sebald
Rutgers and his team succeeded in completing a large coke and chemical factory and in reform-
ing mining according to American standards of efficiency. From October 1922 until January
1927, Kemerovo housed a community of 11,000 inhabitants, among whom were 700 foreigners
(representing more than twenty nationalities).
The Kuzbass colony underwent an expansive building programme.10 In 1925, Rutgers
invited the Dutch architect J.B. van Loghem (1881–1940; Figure 1)11 to come to Kemerovo.
The two men had studied together at the Technical University in Delft. Van Loghem was a
member of the Union of Revolutionary-Socialist Intellectuals and was acquainted with social
housing practice. In Kemerovo he supervised a building department of the autonomous indus-
trial colony, which counted 3 Dutch engineers and 15 Russian technicians between March/April
1926 and September 1927. Originally, Van Loghem was asked to make a plan for the urbaniz-
ation of the whole region around Kemerovo, about a thousand hectares on both sides of the Tom,
304 K. Bosma
Figure 1. Dutch architect J.B. Van Loghem (1881– 1940) (photographer unknown).
with the possibility of accommodating a population that might grow to 250,000. He was even
supposed to make a plan within a diameter of about 250 kilometres for centres with blast-fur-
naces, etc. (Gevresk, Leninsk, Prokopyevsk, and Ščeglovsk on the lower part of the Tom; the
latter existed already). No documentation about this regional plan has been found, and given
the fact that he had no experience whatsoever with spatial planning at this scale, it seems
improbable that Van Loghem ever delivered such a scheme. There is some evidence,
however, that he made a plan for Kemerovo itself, with traditional building blocks and a diag-
onal axis. He did not draw on a pre-established urban model, but adapted urban functions to the
natural landscape. The city was split up, or, to put it in a positive way, dominated by the Devil’s
Valley, where a cable-lift brought the coal across the Tom River to the chemical factory.
Van Loghem supervised the construction of about 1000 dwellings (of three different types),
and some collective facilities were realized, such as an electric power station, a fire station, a
community centre, shops, and a school with a concrete water tower and a bathhouse (with a con-
crete vault) (Figure 2). In fact it was a rather small company town designed in the manner of
modernist Western ‘white’ architecture, or at least it appeared so at first sight (Figure 3). The
houses and facilities were situated near the coal mines. Van Loghem used the tower of one
of the coal factories as a visual marker in the axis of the main road. Some individual houses
Figure 2. Reconstruction by Mrs Schoorl-Laub in 1965 of Van Loghem’s plan for Kemerovo, 1926 –
1927.
Notes: 1 – chemical factory, 2 – cable-lift, 3 – Devil’s Valley, 4 – school with water tower, 5 – coop-
erative building, 6 – coal mine, 7 – ferry-road, 8 – chain-ferry, 9 – old village, 10 – stadium. A –
housing type A, B – detached houses in the wood, C – housing type B.
Figure 3. Van Loghem, row housing in Kemerovo just after completion, 1926 – 1927 (kindly provided
by Dr Ivan Nevzgodin).
306 K. Bosma
were situated at the edge of the woods. The other houses were designed in a row and placed on a
grid (type a and b). The houses, however, could not possibly be built according to Western
methods; the material was not available and, regardless, would have been too expensive. Van
Loghem, therefore, used local timber-framing techniques that offered the advantage of enabling
one to continue to build in winter, which was impossible with bricklaying. Timber framing also
allowed standardization of elements, and thus the prefabrication of many houses did in the end
become a reality. The walls of the houses were plastered, which gave the impression that they
were monolithic concrete structures, but because of the timber framing the roofs had to be
pitched. The ‘normal’ dwelling, standardized by Van Loghem, was extremely small: only
about 3.6 square metres per person. One of the dilemmas he faced was the fact that the
Russian workers were farmers who took cattle with them and needed a vegetable garden as a
means to survive.
After two years, Van Loghem left, having been obliged to hand over the job to his Russian
colleagues. No more building activities were undertaken alongside the right bank of the Tom. In
1927, the city and its factories were brought under the complete control of the Kremlin. For this
reason most foreigners in Kemerovo left the country at that time.
What happened to the plans of Van Loghem, who ended his stay with the creation of wooden
houses – instead of avant-garde architecture – in Kemerovo, was a early warning of the hin-
drances encountered by the groups of German architects and engineers who came in large
numbers to Russia around 1930.
The second period: the Five-Year Plan (1928–1933)

Although the avant-garde had been active in the production of all sorts of model institutional
architecture, the crucial problem the Communist state had to face was the creation of an inde-
pendent economic structure in the shortest possible time. A centralized state was now in charge
of the industrialization processes, which were channelled into a new framework: a Five-Year
Plan. In the latter, the state opted for an accelerated industrialization and the collectivization
of agriculture.
In its efforts to overcome the old structures and create new socialist ones, the government
invited foreign experts, counting on them to help speed up the transition. The rhetoric used
to discuss the Communist utopia was rooted in a firm confidence in the beneficial impact of
science, technology, and planning. Such notions functioned well in the geopolitical context
of the Soviet Union, and were also well suited to describing the activities of managers, engin-
eers, architects, and urban planners (four professional groups which, given the nature of their
jobs, were obviously oriented toward future developments).
After the experimental era, the second decade of socialism was characterized by a radical
industrialization, a planned economy, Fordism (rationalization, standardization, and the assem-
bly line), and socialist competition – all crucial elements in furthering a policy of proletariani-
zation. During the first Five-Year Plan, it was necessary to do more than overcome the backward
Czarist economy and culture; the modernization campaign had to be seen as a great leap forward
that would surpass even capitalism.
Since the state could easily take the land it wanted, town planning was expected to be much
easier and quicker in the Soviet Union than in Western Europe. Under Stalin, socialism was
interpreted as a form of Party monopoly. This notion found expression in a radical expansion
of heavy industry and the collectivization of agriculture, in planning, and in scientific manage-
ment, which took the place of the market economy. The core of the Five-Year Plan was the cre-
ation of new factories for heavy industry combined with the founding of 200 industrial and 1000
agrarian cities. In many ways, they can be compared with nineteenth-century company towns.
American engineers and architects were contracted for the introduction of scientific management
in heavy industry.12 Foreign experts were also invited to organize the Sotsgorod, the socialist
new towns. To create them, the Communist Party needed feasible town plans, and since no tech-
nical or organizational know-how was available locally, it had to be imported. Numerous archi-
tects and engineers came from abroad.
The Soviet government signed a contract with Henry Ford and the Austin Company.13
American engineers even produced a design for a car manufacturing city of 150,000 inhabitants
inspired by Detroit (Avtostroj or Nižnij Novgorod; during 1932–1991 officially called Gorki),
with two axes that led to official Communist buildings.
The largest tractor factory in the world was built in Stalingrad. The architecture was designed
by the American architect Albert Kahn (1869–1942), whose star had risen through his work on
the advanced design of Henry Ford’s factories in Detroit, home of the legendary first assembly-
line production of motor cars. Under the supervision of Albert and his brother Moritz Kahn, who
had an office in Moscow (where more than 1500 Soviet engineers worked and gained experi-
ence), more than 500 specialized factories were built in the USSR between 1929 and 1932.
Working with prefabricated prototypes, standardized structures, his designs were extremely
rationalized.14 These efforts also were also instrumental in accelerating Stalin’s drive to collec-
tivize agriculture, a process that was going full speed in those years. The individual farmers had
to be removed from the land and taken to the factories. The new agricultural structure with col-
lective farms would be adorned with the tractor as the icon of Communism’s glorious progress.
A huge number of peasants were forced to leave their lands in order to find food and work else-
where, often in the production processes involved in creating buildings, factories and new
towns. Between 1926 and 1939, the number of people living in cities increased from 26.3 to
55.9 million.
The proletarianization cult

The Five-Year Plan campaign was accompanied by military rhetoric, and sometimes even
included organized violence. Seen in terms of geopolitics, industrialization, including the collat-
eral social engineering, can be interpreted as a form of inner colonization in the Caucasus, the
Urals, the Ukraine and Siberia. The new socialist man or woman would live in a new socialist
town that was the front of the battle against backward Czarist structures and extreme climatic
conditions: mountains, rivers, deserts, and steppes. In the USSR, the organization and use of
the labour force underwent a radical change. In white collar and planning circles, the watch-
words were scientific management, planning, measuring, counting and (the manipulation of)
statistics, while for workers shock work and socialist competition became the rule. In order to
heighten productivity and strive for records, the system of shock work was standardized: ‘. . .
the whole point was sheer energy and persistent hard work’.15 Lenin and Stalin thought they
could import capitalist production processes ‘without importing the sensory shock that afflicted
workers within it’.16 The basic idea behind the shock work was that ‘centuries of backwardness
were [to be] made up in a decade’.17 This notion served as an alibi to import capitalist measures
308 K. Bosma
and tools to heighten efficiency and productivity. These shock projects were accompanied by all
kinds of propaganda, and even well-known Russian fiction writers were ‘invited’ to be part of
the propaganda campaign. They were presented as a brigade of engineers of the soul. One of the
results of all this propaganda and socialist competition was an infectious cumulative radicalism:
the praise of their engineering achievements was so great that the call for ever-more ambitious
projects grew steadily louder. At the same time, it became increasingly difficult to disguise the
hellish execution of these projects and their painful collateral effects on the environment.
This overly demanding proletarianization, forcing the young adult shock troops to work
extra hard, exhausting and sacrificing their bodies and souls for an idea, cleared the way for
playing workers against each other. Those who were not fanatic could be branded as ‘class
enemies’, and Party stalwarts could be rewarded with medals for ‘Worker of the Month’, etc.
‘Shock work, combined with socialist competition, became a means of differentiating individ-
uals as well as a technique of political recruitment within the working class.’18 The cruelty of
shock work was presented in a poetic, dreamlike way and combined with scientific exactness.
Speed, standardization, and ‘technical spirit’ were necessary. ‘Catastrophes’ – destruction and
death – were inevitable. The power of ‘machinism’ would produce a new human sensorium of elec-
tric nerves, brain machines, and cinema eyes; and a global, mass body with collective movements,
collective feelings, collective goals.19
In fact, shock construction was superhuman and did not fit well with the idea of scientific man-
agement. The real reason for it was simply that the Soviet Union needed cheap labour in order to
prevent it from being completely dependent on investments, technology, and logistics from capi-
talist nations.
Scientific management and Fordism

Scientific management and Fordism were leading concepts during the first Five-Year Plan. This
had implications for town planning and housing. Among the issues being debated were the abol-
ishment of the city–country contrast, the theory of the socialist city, and the socialist way of life.
The prospects seemed ideal: a national land policy (no more private ownership), the Party as the
almighty patron of the whole building industry, a city image that would be dominated by the
architectural visualization of the one and only class, and the creation of the new socialist
human being – one with a collectivist identity resulting from a completely different kind of edu-
cation. The abolition of the contrast between town and countryside could be managed spatially
according to different concepts, still to be determined. In any case, the factories would be new
vital centres, and residential areas would be dominated by collective housing. Russian econom-
ists, planners, and architects had been quarrelling about the extent to which the cities should be
decentralized by leaving the old cities behind and distributing new production centres over the
country alongside the transport and energy networks. Linear cities, sometimes conceived as ana-
logous to the assembly line, were also under consideration, for example, in Nikolai Miljutin’s
concept for Stalingrad or Ivan Leonidov’s plan for Magnitogorsk.20 Did linear cities with scat-
tered cultural institutions along traffic arteries offer a solution? Or was reduction of cities to a
closed community of no more than 50,000 inhabitants connected to centres of heavy industry
(company towns) sufficient? In the event, a third way was chosen: housing and industrial
areas would be planned as ribbons parallel to the main traffic arteries.
Russian architects were discussing not only the decentralization of housing but also the
nature of the dwelling itself. Vehement debates took place about women in the labour
process, the destruction of the ‘bourgeois’ family, state education of children, and even the cre-
ation of separate cities for children and their schools. In short: the architects had to look for ade-
quate artistic concepts for a new way of housing and a new life style.
Western participation
Because Germany and the USSR fostered special relations during the Weimar Republic, it is not
surprising that a large number of German specialists worked in the Communist country.21 A
Soviet report of 1928 listed about 80,000 foreigners, of which 20,000–30,000 worked in indus-
try. About 10,000 of them were German: political expatriates, Communists, and shock workers,
but also well-paid bourgeois technical experts.22 The town planners, engineers, and architects
were high profile and privileged, and their participation brought prestige to the projects they
worked on: ‘Intense, even utopian, hopes were invested in their presence during the period of
the Five-Year Plan.’23 The most prominent group was the so-called May ‘brigade’, named
for the German architect and town planner Ernst May (1886–1970; Figure 4).24 Along with
May’s brigade, other German brigades were engaged in the planning of new towns. In some
cases they collaborated with May’s team. Another influential group, known as the Rotfront
Figure 4. German architect and planner Ernst May (1886 – 1970). Fragment of a collage presented to
May by his collaborators on the occasion of his 70th birthday, 1956 (collection Jo Sillich).
310 K. Bosma
(Red Front) brigade, was under the supervision of the former Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer
(1889–1954), who left for Moscow in 1930 with seven Bauhaus students.25
Of all these groups, the May brigade was undisputedly the most important, and May made
the most of his opportunity. The reasons why the Kremlin wanted May to solve the housing pro-
blems in the USSR have been summed up by Thomas Flierl. When the Russian delegation
visited the second CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) meeting in 1929
in Frankfurt, it was impressed by the social housing May’s group had built in that city, as
well as by the concept of minimal housing as it had been developed by Walter Gropius,
Hans Schmidt and May for the CIAM meeting. May accepted an invitation to make a lecture
trip to Moscow, Leningrad and Charkow, where he lectured about the ‘The New City’, ‘The
status of housing in Germany’, and ‘Rationalising of housing construction’.26 To quote Flierl:
His rational methods in the analysis and assessment of the building locations for all inhabitants;
the high value placed on communal facilities in the housing projects; and his experience in the
development of housing type projects for standardised and therefore industrialised housing
construction promised the solution to the housing problem – through the assembly line develop-
ment and for an assembly-line production of towns.27
Some points should be noted here already. May specialized in city expansions, not in new
towns, let alone in combining old town structures with new ones. He was not invited as an
avant-garde architect, but first and foremost as a manager and housing technician. For his com-
bination of efficiency and speed May was called the ‘planning athlete’. His task was to develop
generic solutions for housing problems and to introduce the most advanced capitalist thinking
and techniques concerning housing in a country with no infrastructure or building industry
such as existed in the capitalist countries. It is also worth remembering that in 1929, Frankfurt
stopped building May’s social housing, as it had become too expensive. When the housing
quality was diminished, it simply became very minimal and boring. How would the new social-
ist town first reach the level of capitalism and then surpass it? And if it could, what would be the
visual difference between the modern capitalist city and the socialist city?
The invasion
To help accelerate its industrialization drive, the Soviet Union imported a large number of archi-
tects from Western Europe, which was all the easier to do because unemployment had risen
quickly there since 1929. German architects were popular in the USSR. In the second half of
the 1920s, well-known German architects were invited to participate in competitions for ‘repre-
sentative’ socialist buildings. In the 1930s, the USSR still needed housing and industrial experts,
and in that decade between 800 and 1000 architects – half of them Germans – went there to help
construct the socialist society. One of the biggest and best-organized teams was a group that had
built several industrially produced social housing districts in Frankfurt that were seen as repre-
senting the avant-garde of Western social housing.28 In October 1930, the May brigade was
commissioned to conduct a survey to determine, within one year, the possibility of sheltering
700,000 people in prefabricated new towns that had to remain viable in the middle of
nowhere. In fact, this mission constituted a dramatic litmus test for the utility of exporting
Western Europe’s progressive social housing experiments.
The Cekom Bank in Moscow, which was responsible for the creation of new industrial
towns in the USSR, financed the big housing and new town projects of the Five-Year Plan.
By October 1930, May was already appointed manager of the bank’s planning office. In
March 1931, he became a board member of the Sojuzstandartžilstroj (a new organization for
industrialized housing in the USSR), which was supported by the Supreme Soviet Economic
Committee. In the fall of 1931, a separate organization called Standartgorproyekt was estab-
lished with the goal of building the maximum possible number of dwellings through the
mechanization and standardization of housing production. The May brigade switched its atten-
tion from social housing for an expanding Frankfurt to the creation of new socialist cities, and,
considering the powers he was given, it is no wonder that May called this commission ‘possibly
the greatest task an architect ever faced’.29 If we compare the position of the architect Albert
Speer under Hitler with Ernst May under Stalin, May was certainly much more powerful. On
the other hand, Speer also became a government minister, which May did not, and Speer
held his position longer than May, whose power lasted for too short a time to leave impressive
results behind.
Composition of the May brigade

The May brigade consisted of numerous collaborators, including radical leftist architects like the
Dutch, Mart Stam30 and the Swiss, Hans Schmidt,31 and it proved to be a highly competent town
planning collective. In the first stage, in September 1930, about 13 architects and technicians
(and their wives) received visas and travelled to Moscow – planners, specialists in various
domains (social housing, hospitals, schools, children’s facilities, traffic, and installation), as
well as garden architects, specialists, mockup builders, graphic artists and building inspectors.
Many more followed soon afterwards. In fact, May created an international planning collective
that worked like a machine, with standardized procedures and a division of labour, and it did so
at tremendous speed – a real bourgeois shock troop led by the ‘planning athlete’ Ernst May. His
machine was fuelled by the exhausting work of well-trained and experienced experts and col-
leagues who could work day and night in shift work on all spatial scales and who could cope
not only with the schematic, comprehensive planning of new towns, but also with the detailed
planning of various functions like traffic, housing, greenery, and building types. Yet May also
had to deal with the constraints imposed by the Communist regime. The Five-Year Plan created
all sorts of difficulties. Because investments and efforts were one-sidedly concentrated on the
development of heavy industry, housing was necessarily treated as a second-rate enterprise.
Often building materials could not be obtained, and the collaboration with Russian colleagues
did not go smoothly, since they had different ideas about housing.
The planning principles of the May brigade – zoning, egalitarian and collective living facili-
ties, prefabrication and serial production of building types – seemed the perfect solution for the
housing needs of Communist Russia.32 In fact, there was a clear parallel with the rapid creation
of industrial plants that Albert Kahn achieved through imitating the assembly line production of
the Ford factories. Avant-garde architects had repeatedly asserted that the modern way of build-
ing houses could best be realized by following the production methods of a Ford automobile, but
they did not really understand that a house is something completely different from a motor car,
and that a Fordist factory is completely different from a new town. In housing production, May
was obliged to deliver the speed, efficiency and cost control that Kahn had done in such an
312 K. Bosma
exemplary way in his field. May’s Fordist mentality was of great advantage to the Russians; for
them, it meant quite simply that he could get the job done.
The members of the May brigade came to Moscow with the idea that it was precisely their
specialization as architects which would be crucial. As an individual, May himself was apoliti-
cal, but he was obsessed with his professional concerns and convinced that he would be wel-
comed with open arms and would get all the support he wanted.33 His idealism made him
blind to the difficulties that awaited him.
Living in Moscow
The adventures of the May brigade in the Soviet Union in the period 1930–1934, and more
specifically, the life of the group in Moscow, can be sketched in some detail. A good starting
point is the photo collection and letters of Karl Eugen Lang (1906–1943) and his wife Magda-
lene Bercker-Lang (1906–1988).34 They married on 17 July 1931, just before starting their
sojourn in the USSR as members of the second group of architects who went to Moscow to
join the May brigade.35 To what extent it really was an adventure is illustrated in a letter
from Magdalena: ‘I have never studied communism until now. That is why I have now read
Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc.’36 She wrote letters from Moscow to her parents in Germany about
her experiences in the promised land (1931–1933), and with a Leica she and her husband
took photographs of the group’s members and visitors, their living and working conditions,
and their trips. Contracted by the Sojuzstandartžilstroj (the new organization for industrialized
housing in the USSR, also called the Trust) Karl Lang made perspectives, mockups and posters,
and was commissioned to design proletarian clubhouses, fire stations and, above all, hospitals
with Werner Hebebrand and Kurt Liebknecht (Novokuznetsk).37
At the time the Langs arrived in Moscow, about 48 German architects were employed in the
group and about three or four times as many Russian technicians. They elaborated their plans in
a shared office in a five-storey nineteenth-century building on the corner of the Mjasnitzkaja
(now Kirow Street). The design work of the Standardgorproyekt was concentrated here,38
and at times this building housed about 800 people engaged in planning activities.
‘Collectivity’ was the watchword of the day, and this meant the exclusion of private inter-
ests. During the train ride from Berlin to Moscow of the first group of the May brigade, Mart
Stam proposed that all future publications should be presented as a collective effort of the
office.39 The next question was how the group would manage to live together in a collective
manner. It is worth observing that the ‘bourgeois’ division of labour in the May brigade was
not modified to accord with socialist ideals. Its members preserved a classic marriage pattern,
with the males playing the more active role and taking the lead in the design work, and the
women in more of a caring and service role. In summer, most of the women went to live in
dachas outside Moscow to flee from the heat, the dust, and the terrible number of flies,
midges, and mosquitoes.40 Austrian architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky41 continued to specialize
in the domain of the home and the interior. (Her work was photographed by Magdalena and Karl
Lang.) Schütte-Lihotzky, who was famous for the compact and ergonomic adaptation of the
physical acts of housewives to the kitchen infrastructure in the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen,
worked, under enormous time pressure, on many commissions for schools and day nurseries
in new towns for which she completely standardized all the furniture. She had the children of
the members of the May brigade try out the prototypes of her designs (Figures 5 and 6).
After a short period of living in hotels, the brigade moved to an apartment with some com-
munal facilities (namely a kitchen). Two families, with or without children, always shared a
house. Next to the Lang family lived the married couple Schütte-Lihotzky, who shared their
rooms with Walther Schulz and his wife Martha, then with Fred Forbat42 and his wife and,
finally, with the Swiss family of Hans Schmidt. The Lang family shared its rooms with the
Schulzes when the Forbats left.43 People in the apartment came and went. For instance, we
read that ‘Adler and Feldmann returned from Tajikistan because they could not bear the
climate and the conditions there.’44 It is not only the letters of Mrs Lang that are preserved;
there also are four letters from Schulz. In the first (21 October 1930), he described life in
Moscow and Russia two weeks after the group’s arrival. As storage room was missing, the ele-
vator space (which never did get an elevator) was transformed for storage uses. There was a plan
to create a central dining hall for all the inhabitants in the cellar underneath the apartment.
Living in this apartment was a compromise, because the group visited and rejected several
communal houses that looked like a collection of hotel rooms (cells). Schulz was unsure whether
this housing type was simply meant to be cheap or whether the type might be part of a cultural
concept.45 In fact, Walter Schwagenscheidt designed a communal house for the May brigade in
1930. It looks very odd (Figure 7).46 It has a square, undivided basement with 9 double beds and
a single bed along the wall, facing the other 10 double beds. Along the third wall is a record
player and beds for nine children, and along the fourth wall, shelves with books and magazines,
four toilets and three bathtubs can be found. In the centre of the room is placed a long table for
Figure 5. Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, standardized furniture for children. Prototypes tried out in Moscow
1931 –1932 (photograph collection Lang family).
314 K. Bosma
Figure 6. Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, standardized furniture for children. Prototypes tried out in Moscow
1931 – 1932 (photograph collection Lang family).
communal meals and a small table for the children. Ernst May’s bed is extra large (a four-poster
bed with baldachin), as is his seat at the dining table in the centre of the room. Schwagenscheidt
drew a caricature of the authoritarian behaviour of Ernst May.
Buying food together, using a collective day nursery, perhaps doing the washing together
would be acceptable, but the collective kitchen was rejected. Also, the idea of a communal sleep-
ing area was rejected by the women as a horrible idea.47 A design by Werner Hebebrand for a
communal house with cells for each individual and without collective spaces was dismissed, as
well.
Many German children were born in the apartment, including, on 24 January 1933, Karl and
Magdalena’s daughter Renate.48 One month earlier Magdalena wrote to her parents: ‘Again
three families are leaving the country. And all of us have the feeling that we are not going to
stay here for as long as we thought at the beginning.’49 In March 1933, Magdalena and Karl
planned a trip to the Crimea, where Hebebrand and his wife were living with their two children.
It seemed to be an escape; as Karl wrote: ‘. . . because it is not a bad idea we don’t wait until the
end of our contract (and the contracts are, it is generally felt, not renewed) and already seize the
opportunity offered us’.50 In May, they left the Soviet Union on a boat with a lot of ‘disap-
pointed’ Germans and Americans, disillusioned Communists, returning home. Thanks to
Schulz, who worked on Hermann Goering’s private house, Carinhall,51 and to M.U.M.
Gewin, who had contacts in the Luftwaffe, Lang found jobs in airport construction. He first
became a glider pilot and, in 1939, an air scout. He crashed on 2 June 1943, near Charkow.
Figure 7. Walter Schwagenscheidt, drawing of an ideal communal house for the members of the May
brigade as published in 1956.
Commissions for the May brigade

In October 1930, May received a commission to prepare industrialized housing for about
700,000 people in regions with heavy industry. Between October 1930 and September 1931,
he was at the peak of his activities, supervising plans for about 20 new towns in the Kuzbas
Basin (Western Siberia), Kuznetsk Basin (Urals), Donets Basin (the Ukraine), Armenia and
Kazakhstan (Figure 8).
As in the Donets Basin, iron ore was found in the Urals, leading to the plan for the creation of
the new town of Magnitogorsk, which was to have facilities for a number of industries: mining,
energy, chemical, and metallurgical. And 2000 kilometres further into the Kuznetsk Basin, with its
316 K. Bosma
Figure 8. Locations of the projects the May brigade was involved in, 1930 – 1933 (collection Deutsches
Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt).
abundant coal, the new town Novokuznetsk was to be built. The minerals from these two basins
were to be combined and transported via railways. Starting in 1930, 20 freight trains daily trans-
ported West Siberian coal to the ore areas in the Urals over these 2300 kilometres of tracks.
About 15 architects’ teams collaborated on the planning for the construction of Magnito-
gorsk and Novokuznetsk. Working on site was an extraordinarily complex undertaking
because no maps were available. May and his collaborators, who visited these places in winter-
time, had to use sleds, wheel-barrows or, sometimes, automobiles. The plans for roads, pipes for
water disposal, and the location of the living quarters were elaborated on the spot. When May
and his colleagues returned to Moscow, they prepared more detailed plans. For example, Grete
Schütte-Lihotzky needed about 30 draughtsmen, skilled labourers, and translators for the design
of the children’s facilities. The need for her designs was so great that it could be satisfied only by
standardizing the production process. The drawings were sent quickly to all the new towns under
construction, but for the most part it is unknown if they were executed, altered or simply disap-
peared. This proves that there was a very large gap between design and execution, which was
increased by transportation problems, an enormous shortage of building materials, and a chronic
lack of technicians and craftsmen like bricklayers, carpenters, and tilers. It goes without saying
that great inaccuracies in the treatment of glass, steel, and concrete were common, which is one
of the reasons why, already in 1931, speedy and cheap systems of building wooden housing
were put back on the agenda. The modernist housing ‘symphony’ of glass, steel, and concrete
thus remained a goal for the future.
A letter to Stalin
This shift very probably caused May to write a letter (dated 7 September 1931) to none other
than Stalin himself, requesting a meeting in which he would explain how the comprehensive
urban planning of industry, traffic, housing districts, and green areas, based on scientific foun-
dations, was being blocked by the use of piecemeal plans for sectors and how this could be pre-
vented.52 Sending such a letter was an audacious act in the year when the brutal collectivization
of the rural areas – ordered by Stalin – moved into high gear and created a kind of inner colo-
nization (the installation of gulags, deportation of ethnic groups or kulaks and forced labour) and
a permanent housing and food shortage, culminating in the organized famine of 1932–1933,
which caused the death of millions of farm families.53 Was his letter a display of fighting
spirit, an overestimation of himself and his position, a bluff, or simply a sign of distress? In
any case, he never met Stalin,54 and his letter was filed away in the KGB archives. May’s pos-
ition slowly weakened. The Lang family witnessed the crisis in the May brigade. In January
1932, rumours were circulating that May would resign, because his Russian clients were not sat-
isfied with the execution of the housing programmes for which he was responsible. He would be
replaced, it was said, by Hannes Meyer. According to the gossip ‘he [May] did not do very much
for his employees, did not take truth too seriously and many have great personal difficulties with
him. In short: no one will mourn when he leaves.’55 In February 1932, it appeared that he had
been fired, but this punishment was reduced to the downgrading of his position.
May is staying for half his salary. In his position as chief engineer he was demoted several levels . . .
[nevertheless] it is a fact that he earns an enormous amount of money . . . The other ‘valuta-guys’
are very worried that their dollars will be taken away from them.56
The only position he still held was chief of the town planning department of Standartgorproyekt.
He knew at this point that his efforts had lost momentum.
When the May brigade first arrived in the Soviet Union, a decision had already been made in
favour of an egalitarian city concept with an austere formal repertory and a minimum of comfort.
By 1931, it turned out that the Soviet government was forced to stop all experiments with col-
lective housing. Planners and architects were ordered simply to build as cheaply as possible.
After Austin left Russia in 1931, the May brigade took over the planning of Avtostroj near
Moscow, the model industrial new town, designed by the engineers of Austin, but it was not able
to alter the overall plan. Avtostroj was presented as the first Soviet model city that was a success-
ful combination of Russian, American, and German town planning efforts, and it overshadowed
the reputation of the new town of Magnitogorsk.
In the summer of 1931, the May brigade ended its work on the Kuzbass towns of Leninsk
(45,000 inhabitants) and Tyrgan (today Prokopyevsk; 90,000 inhabitants). Their plans remained
on paper.57 In the widely read German professional journal Bauwelt, a sharp debate developed
about the loss of the momentum of the German efforts in Russia, starting with Wilhelm Stein,
318 K. Bosma
who reacted to a telegram from the ‘Red Front’ brigade led by Hannes Meyer.58 A few months
later, two other colleagues of Meyer at the Giprogor explained that socialism was not expressed
in communal living and socialist cities, but in planning founded on economic plans, an orien-
tation toward production, the end of class society, and the comprehensive organization of
material and cultural facilities.59 The situation grew worse when May brigade member
Walther Schulz, who had returned to Germany in 1932, gave an account of the fundamental pol-
itical, governmental, and educational issues in the Soviet Union. He wrote that it was very hard
to make plans for new towns since the central government had not yet decided about ‘bourgeois
instincts’ (living in a family, private vegetable gardens), the role of women in the labour process,
and the extent to which children should receive a state education. As long as no decision was
taken on these issues, it was impossible to develop appropriate lifestyle housing types and to
find norms for the distribution of green spaces and the amount of recreation area per inhabitant
of the new towns. He asserted that the idea of introducing housing standardization for the whole
of the Soviet Union was illusory, in part because the Russians felt no sympathy for the endless
repetition of abstract, unadorned row housing, which, in any case, was easily associated with
capitalist Mietskasernen. The introduction of radical new living conditions was impossible,
he claimed, without mental preparation on the part of the Russian people.60
Magnitogorsk
Magnitogorsk was the first new town the May brigade worked on after their arrival. This new
town was expected to be a Soviet showcase, but right from the start there were severe obstacles.
May could not start from scratch for several reasons. First, in December 1929, a competition for
the prestigious company town for 50,000 people was held and all the plans were put aside as too
utopian. Then, May and his shock troopers must have experienced quite a little shock them-
selves, seeing a lot of people living in extremely primitive circumstances, at least according
to Western norms: a city of mud huts, tents, and barracks. Furthermore, it was a real
company town, which meant enormous investments were made in the metallurgical complex,
but the company was also responsible for financing, from its profits, housing and public ame-
nities. Such a dependency was not likely to foster the development of rapid processes for
housing construction. In 1932, Magnitogorsk counted 250,000 inhabitants, among them
foreign political refugees, engineers, and foreign immigrants, mostly well-educated people
with socialist convictions. Additionally, there were a thousand Russian experts and Party
bosses and a number of convicts from gulag camps, as well as a number of ordinary criminals.
But the majority were kulaks who had been transported from other regions.61 How could a Sots-
gorod be created from this melting pot in the biggest shock construction site in the USSR?
Initially, Magnitogorsk was supposed to have a population of 120,000.62 Later on this
number was raised to 200,000 or even 300,000. This increase was probably caused by the
famine in the countryside and the deportation of kulaks to the Urals and Siberia.
The May brigade arrived expecting to fulfil the great expectations of Magnitogorsk to
become the showcase of the Soviet Union. The brigade was invited to make a master plan in
three weeks, but it had to compete with a Russian shock troop supervised by Sergej
E. Cernyšev, in conformity with the socialist competition practice of eliciting both plans and
counter plans. May’s entry was designed according to a more-or-less standardized grid
concept, and it featured the following elements (Figure 9):
Figure 9. May brigade, first master plan for Magnitogorsk, November 1930 (collections Schusev State
Museum of Architecture, Moscow, Russia; VII.578).
(1) implementation of a functionalist, egalitarian arrangement of dwellings in straight, par-

allel rows based on experience gained in Frankfurt;
(2) the production method was based on prefabrication according to fixed norms for the
dwelling elements and on a restricted number of housing types;
(3) the architects worked in a local area without a tradition and were recourse to the qualities
of classical town planning: hierarchy, centre and representation.
The grid plan was composed of Quartali, socio-spatial units for 8000–10,000 inhabitants with
collective facilities, enclosed by a green belt. These can be interpreted as a socialist version of
the neighbourhood unit, a concept that was published (and widely read) in one of the volumes
of the Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs (1929). The houses of three or four storeys
in the Quartali were East–West oriented. Each neighbourhood unit contained a number of basic
facilities: playground, nursery, clinic, school, dining room, sports area, and shops.
The struggle with the Russian competitors and institutions has been reconstructed by Bod-
enschatz and Post.63 The jury criticized basic elements of both plans and precisely identified
their weaknesses: no cost calculations; no visual concept of a socialist city that would differen-
tiate it from a capitalist city; central facilities located too close to the periphery; no differentiation
in the facades; too many independent Quartali; failure to take into account future demographic
320 K. Bosma
growth and transportation links and no relation of the plan to the existing terrain and to features
of the natural environment. The park for culture and recreation was situated along the lake
without taking the existing facilities into consideration.
Walther Schulz gave an ironic account of the competition entry:
We presented the latest Western wisdom: ribbon building! . . . . One row after another, up the moun-
tain, down the mountain, East-West, East-west [oriented building blocks; KB]. Persil remains
Persil! Presented punctually, after many nights of work, drawn very well and exhibited with the
latest techniques; and the reaction: This is extremely boring! Make room for variety, we want
Russian romanticism! Unanimous refusal.64
In fact, the debate about the planning of Magnitogorsk can be seen as a microcosm of the con-
flicts regarding socialist town planning and housing in general, of the loss of idealism, and of the
(re)turn toward economic realities. It is revealing that already in January 1931, the supervision of
the planning of Magnitogorsk was taken over by a Russian agency. May and the Cekombank
lost control. The struggle for the next few years was about the location of the new town:
should it be placed on the West or East bank of the lake?
In the end, May’s plan for Magnitogorsk (Figure 10) shrunk into the commission to design
only one Quartal, for 15,000–17,000 inhabitants (Figure 11). At first it was Stam who super-
vised the building activities. He had to reduce the plan to 10,000 inhabitants (Figure 12). After a
while, Stam could no longer bear the harsh local conditions and the building processes, and he
left disappointed. His Dutch colleague Johan Niegeman took over and left the USSR in 1937.65
Figure 10. May brigade, adapted master plan for Magnitogorsk, 1931 (collections Schusev State
Museum of Architecture, Moscow, Russia: VII.570).
Figure 11. May brigade, part of the neigbourhood realized in Magnitogorsk. Foreground left: the infant
school, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, around 1932 (collections Schusev State Museum of
Architecture, Moscow Russia; VII.27522).
In 1932, between 80,000 and 250,000 inhabitants of Magnitogorsk lived in barracks, huts, and
tents, while about 8000 people used the houses designed by the May brigade. In 1931, there was
a severe famine which must have cost many lives as the cemetery had to be expanded. How
many people died in the factory, or perished from famine or disease, is unknown. In November
1933, it was decided to locate the new city on the right bank of the lake. The May brigade was
finally pushed aside; it was allowed to finish the Quartal it had begun, but without public build-
ings. Meanwhile, a new plan for the right bank was drawn up by a Russian team from (ill. 11)
Leningrad, a plan that was embedded in a regional scheme.66 The Russian architects made a
kind of American City Beautiful plan with a grid, a waterfront, an axis, star-shaped squares,
and representative classicist Party buildings.67 Hierarchy and highlighting of the symbols of
the Communist Party were prominent aspects. But this plan also envisaged a sort of parallel uni-
verse. On the left bank of the lake a pattern of parallel row housing can be found that more or less
showed a curious class society. About 100,000 citizens lived in all kinds of temporary little
settlements, like a little gulag: an enclave for the elite, kulak villages, a little ‘Frankfurt’, with
other groups living in tents and mud huts without sewer and water systems, etc.
The houses were so overcrowded that the city management created a system of public baths,
public dining halls, nurseries and ‘comrade courts’ to settle disputes. A central decree dating
Figure 12. Russian design of the representative city Magnitorgorsk on the right bank, 1934, left first
variant, right second variant (Bodenschatz and Post (eds.), Städtebau im Schatten Stalins, 203).
322 K. Bosma
from 1935, combating hooligan-like behaviour, illustrates how crude the ‘comrades’ in Magni-
togorsk could be. It mentions:
the holding of regular drinking bouts in the apartments, accompanied by noise, fights, and abusive
language; the inflicting of beatings (especially of women and children), hurling insults, threatening
revenge by capitalizing on one’s work status or party position, perverse conduct, baiting of nation-
alities, defamation of character, other kinds of mischief (throwing out another person’s belonging
from the kitchen and other rooms used in common, spoiling food prepared by other tenants, dama-
ging other things and products, etc.).68
Magnitogorsk was not only a poor and criminal environment, but also a repressive habitat that
was haunted by informers of the local militia or Checka (predecessor of the KGB). It was the
monstrous prototype of the socialist new town.
Exit May
At the end of 1933, the Soviet chapter was finished for Ernst May. In 1934, he left for Africa
where he worked as a farmer and architect. Others stayed a while longer: Werner Hebebrand,
Hans Schmidt, Hans Leistikov, Wilhelm Schütte and Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. Most of them
wound up in trouble and were forced to leave the Soviet Union.69 Nonetheless, they left
traces of their activities scattered through the countryside of the USSR. In Magnitogorsk, Novo-
kuznetsk, and Birobidshan we can find (subsequently transformed) buildings for children
designed by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, schools by Wilhelm Schütte, and hospitals by Werner
Hebebrand.
In 1933, Stam, Schmidt, Hebebrand and Schütte-Lihotzky collaborated with the Meyer
brigade for the new Gorstroiproyekt (a trust for town planning projects). Between 1933 and
1935, Hans Schmidt made master plans for large industrial new towns like Nižnij Tagil,
Orsk, Stalinsk, and Kemerovo (Figure 13).70 Dutch architect Lotte Beese71 collaborated
briefly with Hannes Meyer, then with Mart Stam, on plans for Orsk and Balchaš. It is worth
remarking that Stam refused to design Balchaš in the hostile landscape of a salt steppe,
where the copper mines were located. He proposed, instead, that the miners should be
housed in Alma Ata and travel to work on a 200-kilometre railway.72 With Mart Stam,
Schmidt developed a master plan for Orsk, south of Magnitogorsk. Stam was only involved
in the initial phase, and then Niegeman and Püschel took over.73 In 1939, the city counted
66,000 inhabitants.
Dissemination
Most architects who left Russia between 1934 and 1937 had a whole list of reasons to legit-
imate their disappointments and departure. Family matters, low income, or the end of a con-
tract were sometimes the reason, but political reasons could lead to their departure, too.74
Working conditions were mentioned as well, meaning that architects could not bear the
mental and professional stress in tough local circumstances. Finally, there were political
and ideological reasons for leaving the USSR: the tendency toward traditionalism in Soviet
Party buildings (after 1933, the Russian press showed an exclusive interest in representative
classicist architecture) and the increasing Fascist propaganda against the Soviet state and
Figure 13. Hans Schmidt, Walter Schwagenscheidt et al., Master plan for Kemerovo, 1933 vv. (kindly
provided by Ernst-May-Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main).
324 K. Bosma
planned economy. A special category was constituted by the Jewish architects (like Adler,
Kaufmann, and May) who had to flee, for instance to Turkey or, like Philipp Tolziner,
became naturalized in Russia.
Returning German architects found a country that had developed a totally different orien-
tation and had experienced a totalitarian take-over. At the time, nobody could foresee the
dramatic events that would later occur, but the architects observed that commissions were
mainly given by right-wing individuals or Nazi sympathizers. They had to adapt or
choose a different profession. The international community of foreign architects who
worked in the USSR and had shared Communist experiences did meet again occasionally.
The diehards were in exile (Hannes Meyer, Mart Stam). After the Second World War,
some of the German architects were able to find jobs in the reconstruction of West
German cities (like Hebebrand, May and Schwagenscheidt), while others met again in the
DDR (Benny Heumann, Gerhard Kosel, Kurt Liebknecht, Hans Schmidt, Werner Schneidra-
tus, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky).
Heritage?
The initial plans of the May brigade for new towns were rather schematic and could be inter-
preted as a primitive ‘stamping’ of Quartali into the landscape. The planned cities had no
centres and no boulevards to stroll along. They functioned as a straitjacket for a people of
shock workers who were expected to be egalitarian in their attitudes and who had essentially
lost their own souls. In fact, it turned out that town planners in Western Europe had no clear
concept for the ideal structure of a modern city, or at least not for a socialist one. May and
his colleagues could only produce districts or neighbourhoods. They were convinced that, in
the long run, the Russians would appreciate serial aesthetics as a category of beauty. Moreover,
the adult trees and shrubbery would also eventually diminish the overall egalitarian impression
made by the housing projects. The May brigade could point to an impressive list of accomplish-
ments compiled in a short time, but it had been given a ‘mission impossible’. From the begin-
ning, its methods were subject to criticism. This was foreseen by Walther Schulz, who used a
striking metaphor in one of the letters he sent from Moscow:
Arriving in the present conditions is very complicated. We sit here in the room, and the windows are
frozen. If we want to look out then we have to blow a peep-hole in the ice. And when you stop
blowing, the hole freezes again. To what extent we will communicate with the Russians depends
on us; the Russians don’t strain themselves.75
He seemed to be saying that without empathy for the ‘Russian soul’, it would be useless to be
engaged in housing problems.
In the Soviet Union of this era, a technology-driven Communist utopia, put into practice by
politicians, planners, engineers and architects who were firm believers in the malleability of man
and society, was embedded in an institutional framework designed to achieve socialism by
employing a number of fictions that adorned the new society. The way in which this technologi-
cal utopia was intended to be built raises the fascinating question of the status of the relics of this
utopia, of its engineering accomplishments (both literal and social), the ruined investments, and,
more generally, all those frozen fictions. What should we do with them, and how should they be
remembered?
Notes on contributor
Koos Bosma is a researcher of twentieth-century architecture and city planning. He did extensive research
on the planning and design of the Dutch IJsselmeerpolders and the reconstruction of the Netherlands and
Europe after the Second World War. In 1993, his dissertation on regional planning in the Netherlands
1900 –1945 was published. Since that time, he has published on housing, city planning and infrastructural
planning, such as the Channel Tunnel, the High-Speed Trains programmes in Europe and the large Euro-
pean airfields, theory of architecture and urban history. More recently, he has started studying heritage
topics like the Atlantic Wall and Cold War relics.
Notes
1. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 14.
2. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 1.
3. As he used historical documents from Soviet institutions, David-Fox presents a far more convincing
explanation for this paradox than earlier influential authors like Caute, Fellow Travellers and Hollan-
der, Political Pilgrims.
4. Kopp, “Foreign Architects,” 176 – 214. Kopp analyses the role of two French architects in the USSR:
Le Corbusier and André Lurçat.
5. Early publications about parts of this topic: Cohen, de Michelis, and Tafuri, URSS 1917 –1978; Riet-
dorf, Neue Wohngebiete; Rosa, Socialismo.
6. Chan-Magomedov, Avantgarde.
7. David-Fox, see note 2 above, 107.
8. Trincher-Rutgers and Trincher, Rutgers.
10. Blinow and Filippow, “Die Rolle,” 261 – 75; Yurov, Kemerovo; and Nevzgodin, “Het Nieuwe.”
11. van Loghem, “Stedenbouw,” 74 – 6; van Loghem, “Wat gebeurt”, 57– 62; and Schoorl-Traub, Een
beetje vrijheid.
12. Bodenschatz and Post, Städtebau, 36 –43.
13. Austin, Building utopia.
14. Nelson, Industrial Architecture; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry; Bucci, Albert Kahn.
15. Simon et al., Moscow, 178.
16. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, 104.
17. Kotkin, see note 1 above, 69.
18. Ibid., 205.
19. Buck-Morss, see note 16 above, 107.
20. Miljutin, Sotsgorod.
21. Probably because Britain had no special cultural relations with the USSR and hardly any avant-garde
movement, almost no British experts went to work in the USSR. Gold, Experience of Modernism and
Ward, “Soviet Communism,” 499– 524.
23. Ibid.
24. Mohr and Müller, Funktionalität und Moderne; May, “Der Bau,” 117– 35; May, “Städtebau,” 63 –
72; Höpfner, Ernst May; Jaspert, Die Architektengruppe; and Bueckschmitt, Ernst May.
25. We will not discuss the important contribution of the Meyer-Brigade here.
26. Flierl, “Possibly,” 161. The same story is told by the eyewitness and colleague of May in Frankfurt
and in Moscow, Eugen Kaufmann (alias Eugene Kent). Memoirs of Eugene Kent c. 1978, 176 –9.
RIBA archives (KeE-1) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
27. Flierl, see note 26 above, 161 –2.
28. About the official inivitation of May, see Flierl, see note 26 above, 159– 60.
29. Flierl, see note 26 above, 159.
30. Möller, Mart Stam; Oorthuys, “Mart Stam”; Oorthuys, “Met Mart Stam,” 39 –43; Oorthuys, “Portrait
of an Architect,” 6– 15; Hils-Brockhoff and Möller, Mart Stam; and Rümmele, Mart Stam.
326 K. Bosma
31. Schmidt, “Die Sowjetunion,” 146; Schmidt, Beiträge; Suter, Hans Schmidt; Huber, Die Stadt; and
Möller and Lichtenstein, ABC.
33. von Herwarth, Zwischen, 69.
34. Private collection of Renate Prasse-Lang, Reichenbach, BRD.
35. Postcard Mrs Lang, July 17, 1931.
36. Letter Mrs Lang, September 15, 1931.
37. Letter Mrs Lang, July 21, 1931. About Hebebrand: Conrads and Kühn, Hommage.
38. Liebknecht, Mein bewegtes Leben, 48.
39. First letter Walther Schulz, October 21, 1930. Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), Frankfurt am Main.
40. Letter Mrs Lang, May 22, 1932. This is confirmed by E. Kaufmann (E. Kent), 200.
41. Schütte-Lihotzky, “Damals,” 8 –15, 11 – 14; Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen; Noever, Margarete
Schütte-Lihotzky; and Noever, Die Frankfurter Küche.
42. Werner, Fred Forbat and Forbat, Fred Forbat.
43. Letter Mrs Lang, October 24, 1931.
44. Letter Mrs Lang, July 15, 1932.

45. First letter Walther Schulz, October 21, 1930. DAM.
46. Baukunst und Werkform, 9 (1956).
47. First letter Walther Schulz, October 21, 1930. DAM.
48. Letter Mrs Lang, January 24, 1933.
49. Letter Mrs Lang, December 4, 1932.
50. Postcard Karl Lang, March 27, 1933.
51. Knopf and Martens, Görings Reich.
52. Letter of May to Stalin, September 7, 1931. This letter stems from a KGB-archive in Moscow, that
was kindly copied to me by historian Werner Müller.
53. Snyder, Bloodlands, Chap. 1.
55. Letter Mrs Lang, January 27, 1932.
56. Letter Mrs Lang, February 11, 1932.
57. Blinow and Filippow, see note 10 above, 271.
58. Stein, “Eine Drahtung,” 818.
59. Blumenfeld and Gerfánoff, “Ein neuer Brief,” 1058.
60. Schulz, “Planmässiger,” 633 –4; Reaction from Meyer, “Brief an die Bauwelt,” 764 –5; and Schulz,
“Wie arbeitet,” 66.
61. Kotkin, see note 1 above, 72 – 90.
62. Accounts of the horrible circumstances during the building of the factories and the town: Austin, see
note 13 above and Kotkin, see note 1 above.
63. Bodenschatz and Post, see note 12 above, 43– 63.
64. Third letter Schulz, December 26, 1930. DAM.
65. Wit, Johan Niegeman.
66. Bodenschatz and Post, see note 12 above, 193– 207.
67. Ciucci et al., The American City, 1 –142.
68. Kotkin, see note 1 above, 175.
69. Historian Werner Müller wrote to me that the KGB created files on them and sent me copies of files of
some architects who were shadowed. Hebebrand, for instance, was in prison on the accusation of spying.
70. He was assisted by the engineer Bartotschat and the German emigrant Gerhard Kosel. “Die Mitar-
beit,” in Exil in der UdSSR, 704.
71. Damen and Devolder, Lotte Stam-Beese.
72. “Die Mitarbeit,” in Exil in der UdSSR, 701.
73. “Die Mitarbeit,” in Exil in der UdSSR, 725– 35. The life and work of Niegeman in Magnitogorsk is
pictured in: Krone-Schmalz, Strasse der Wölfe.
74. Liebknecht, see note 38 above, 71.
75. Third letter Schulz, December 26, 1930. DAM.
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New socialist cities: foreign architects in the USSR 1920 –1940

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

The experimental era

Kemerovo: an early new town experiment

The second period: the Five-Year Plan (1928–1933)

The proletarianization cult

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(1) implementation of a functionalist, egalitarian arrangement of dwellings in straight, par-

tus, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky).

44. Letter Mrs Lang, July 15, 1932.

sowjetischen Avantgarde.” In Avantgarde II 1924 –1927. Sowjetische Architektur, edited by R.

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