Production Lines and Golden Domes. Foreign Eyes on a Closed City
Nizhny Novgorod is celebrating 800 years with run-of-the-mill ‘anniversary publication’
Owen Hatherley
In 2021, the city of Nizhny Novgorod is marking its 800th anniversary. As part of the anniversary celebrations, the Centre 800 organisation curating the city’s preparation for the anniversary events, in association with the TATLIN publishing house and supported by the government of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, has compiled a sizeable and opulently illustrated volume entitled ‘800 years of Nizhny Novgorod: Reassemblage. Stories of the City and its People’ (‘800 let Nizhnego Novgoroda: peresborka. Istorii goroda i ego lyudei’). Compiled and edited by Kirill Kobrin and Alexander Kuritsyn, the book is by no means a run-of-the-mill ‘anniversary publication’. The city itself, the past, present and future of its residents, its buildings and landscapes ‒ these are the protagonists of the book. It offers another perspective in the discourse about Nizhny Novgorod/Gorky/Nizhny Novgorod. The texts dedicated to the city are informed by the personal professional and creative experience of the authors ‒ writers, historians, art historians, philosophers, artists, philologists. Together, the separate articles form a cohesive three-dimensional image of Nizhny Novgorod, a city both so familiar and yet to be discovered. The following article is an abridged version of the essay by the British architecture critic Owen Hatherley included in Chapter Six of the book, ‘The Gorky City’.
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‘You have those illusions, Pussinka, though your esprit is not really léger as regards Russia… but you are wilfully romantic. I don’t know how you are going to reconcile the lot when you do get there. You must realize that what you choose to imagine, and what is, are far apart. You see yourself driving about the countryside in one of those old-fashioned back-to-back carriages – a dolgoushka – or dashing from one golden-domed city to another in Tchitchikov’s britchka, scarcely drawing rein, because you have an Imperial padoroshna – that’s an equally out-of-date laissez-passer for fresh relays of horses. Let me tell you, only something as remote as a padoroshna could transport you to the realms you imagine. Today’s visas – when you get them – will only show you today. And that won’t tally with your mind’s eye, Miss.’
Lesley Blanch, Journey into the Mind's Eye (1968)
Nizhny Novgorod is the last really big city going directly east from Moscow to the Urals; it is, on any of today's definitions of “Europe”, within the continent, though some earlier definitions that drew that shifting border along the Volga would have it just in Asia, with the city centre on a ridge at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka. Architecturally, its city centre is in an unadulterated Russian style. This is neither an enlightened, ruthlessly planned “window on the world” like St Petersburg, nor a megalopolitan multicultural city like Moscow; nor is it a nearly-complete Soviet foundation like contemporary Russia's third and fourth largest cities, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg. This is not only relatively central in Russia, it is central to a certain idea of Russia, and Russianness.
“Russia is not Europe” is a standard declaration of Central European liberals1, and for some travellers, that has been exactly the appeal of the country, and of a city like Nizhny Novgorod. In Journey Into The Mind's Eye (1968), Lesley Blanch's brilliant autobiographical tale of obsessive Russophilia, the English writer considers it – which she insists on still calling Nizhny Novgorod rather than its name at the time, Gorky – to be one of the most exotic of cities. The 'traveller' who seduces the teenage Blanch has her imagine it in her suburban London home, as part of a fantasy geography: ‘We are at the Fair at Nijni-Novgorod...we’re Jenghis Khan’s guests of honour at the Festival of the Banners...then we’re in Siberia… I know! We’re in a sleigh – we’re dashing through the forest pursued by wolves...'2 This, she tells us, was 'the landscape of my mind's eye – the landscape of my heart's desire'3, a world of multicoloured or golden domes, tented roofs, snow, sleighs, the Volga.
Photos: Dima Četyre, 2020
We can look at Nizhny Novgorod as a city which is caught between this exotic image and one which spent much of the 20th century reconstructing itself as one of the ultimate modernist cities, dedicated to mass production, avant-garde architecture and radical town planning. In many cases – surprisingly for somewhere that was a “closed city” for so many years, off-limits to most foreigners – this was recorded by generations of Western European observers, some of whom, like Blanch, went in search of eternal exotic Russia, but others of whom went to find what they considered to be the planned, socialist industrial future. In this essay, we'll pass first from the original city – the one where the landscape of extreme Russianness has been supplemented but never obliterated by generations of Soviet Modernism, then re-evoked by post-Soviet Postmodernism – to the vast city-within-a-city of the Avtozavod district, where the world of golden domes and sleighs is very distant indeed. We'll see this as recorded by various foreign eyes – those of writers, to be sure (including the present one) but also of trade unionists, activists, industrialists, in a city which now appears as a battleground between modernisation and tradition.
Modernisation, from the Kremlin Outwards
The Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin is an excellent place to begin this story, precisely because within its walls you can find everything from the semi-imaginary traditional architecture of Holy Russia to the most radical Constructivism. The citadel was begun in the fourteenth century, and what is there now is an early-sixteenth-century design by the Italian architect Pietro Francesco, when the walled city had to be reinforced during a war with the Tatar Khanate of nearby Kazan. So far, so straightforward for late-medieval Europe, right down to the hiring of an Italian for complex matters such as architecture and planning. The Moscow Kremlin's (also Italian-designed) towers are, however, notoriously exotic in their shape, something often ascribed to the influence of the Tatars; the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin is a bit more squat and lumbering, but there is also something in the design here that you wouldn't find in Western Europe.
The city's Kremlin bridges the divide between Nizhny Novgorod's strongly defined “Upper” and “Lower” towns, with its redbrick walls mounting a steep incline. Some of the towers that mark its gates, particularly the heavy, decorative Demetrius Gate, are free fantasies, part military, part Florentine, part Islamic, topped by a triangular copper peak — but this is actually auto-exoticisation. They look as alluring as they do because they were reconstructed in the late nineteenth century in the “neo-Russian” style; the Demetrius Gate, for example, was remodelled to become an art museum. Within these walls, little more survives from pre-revolutionary Russia than the small, seventeenth-century Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel. Unlike the Moscow Kremlin, which was meticulously preserved — the revolutionary Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, threatened to resign when he heard that parts of the Kremlin had been damaged in the fighting in the city in Moscow 1917 — the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin is a citadel of the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow, enclosing an administrative centre of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, inherited, but not significantly added to, by the oligarchic, statist capitalism of the Russian Federation.
Despite its historic significance, Nizhny Novgorod was never on the Soviet tourist itinerary, never on the tours of the “Golden Ring” of Muscovite citadels organised by Intourist, never with a Progress Publishers Guidebook translated into the major world languages. That's largely because it became an industrial city in the late nineteenth century, and became even more of one in the USSR, with the motor manufacturing industry concentrated here — the Soviet Detroit, or more appositely, Turin. It became a “closed city” under Stalin due to the amount of military engineering here. Sakharov was famously exiled to Gorky from Moscow. Being exiled to Gorky sounded terrifying at the time to non-Russian ears, but in terms of relative distance, it's roughly the equivalent of being sent to Coventry. All this may be one reason why the Soviets were so careless with this Kremlin — no tourists were meant to be here anyway, and preserving it all for the people of Gorky was hardly a priority. There were tourist cities and there were industrial cities, and only the great metropolises like Leningrad, Moscow and Kyiv were allowed to be both. Well into the Russian interior, Gorky was a place foreigners weren't even allowed into unless they had special dispensation. A certain paranoia evidently lingers. The English editor of the notably Russia-friendly website The Calvert Journal was deported from Nizhny Novgorod in 2016; he was lecturing at Arsenal, an art gallery built into the Kremlin's old arms store, with guest rooms to sleep in above.
First to go, when the Kremlin was redeveloped by the Bolsheviks, was the nineteenth-century Transfiguration Cathedral, replaced by the House of the Soviets, a Constructivist local government HQ, completed in 1931. It is a rare pleasure to find a building of the Soviet avant-garde within such a citadel of ancient Russian power, their rationalist, technocratic Year Zero forcefully asserted on the ruins of backwards, superstitious, autocratic Muscovy. It is mounted on a ridge, sheltered by pine trees, a grey-rendered concrete building, using one of the abstract pin-wheel plans that the Constructivists favoured. A ribbon-windowed, curved volume marks the entrance, hauled up on thin pilotis borrowed from Le Corbusier. In its clarity and confidence, it is as radical as any European or American building of the time. Few of the later additions to the Kremlin are as exciting — lumpy official architecture of the 1950s and 1970s dominates.
There is also an excellent Art Museum, with a first-rate collection of the abstract painting that immediately preceded and for a while, succeeded the October Revolution, with major work by Malevich, Popova and others; so sure, when I visited with a friend in 2014, were the people who work here that nobody would want to visit this room that we found one staff member had spread herself out on the floor, painting flowers and bunnies. Hostility to modernism, which stamped its concrete and glass on the Transfiguration Cathedral's golden domes, is obviously still the norm. The gallery markets itself on its collection of work by the turn-of-the-century painter Boris Kustodiev, and a room full of his ripe, colourful paintings of merchants and their curvaceous wives in pretty, exotic cityscapes is the museum's main attraction. However, at the other end of the Kremlin, the Great Patriotic War memorial's eternal flame features interesting etched figures in the “severe style” of the Khrushchev era, expressive and modern. Gorky was far from the front, but was still bombed by the Luftwaffe; the Kremlin suffered major damage. From the war memorial, you have a magnificent view of two rivers: the Oka, which has industry and housing clinging to its banks, and the Volga, which has been left untouched, with marsh and steppe visible as far as the eye can see.
The Upper Town is a regular Russian-Soviet city. The pedestrianised Bolshaya Pokrovskaya street features good examples of twentieth-century architecture from most eras; some art nouveau, some Stalinist classicism, some very mild Constructivism, and the State Bank, whose tented roof and cantilevered steps are again in the neo-Russian style, from the nation-building era when everywhere in Europe had to accentuate its local vernacular, after centuries of international classicism (it is also politically promiscuous, with the Tsarist eagle on the main gable, and a gold globe with the hammer and sickle on top of the tower). The late-Soviet era experimented in a similar vein — the Academic Puppet Theatre features a 1980s entrance façade slotted across the side wall of an earlier classical palazzo, with a spiky roof and a relief sculpture of pipers and puppets under an abstracted old Russian skyline; next to it, the all-glass, international modernist Technical Museum is capped by a colourful mosaic of folksy cockerels, suns and lions. More official structures, such as the red sandstone classicism of the local KGB — now FSB, with no major change in function — or the early 1930s “Post-Constructivism” of the post office, where classical details fill in the modernist lines, are drab by comparison with these goofy, enjoyable games with the local style.
Walk a little further into the side streets, and you'll find that you're still in a town of tiny, one-storey wooden houses. Given that they're less drastically dilapidated and mostly cared for as a historic townscape, they're somewhat less distressing. One is well-kept as one of several Maxim Gorky House Museums, several are falling apart rather elegantly, one contains a sex shop, its sign rudely placed alongside the exposed logs of the structure. This sudden fall into seediness is especially noticeable given that Bolshaya Pokrovskaya itself is an affluent, modern street of sushi bars, department stores and cafes, with only the preserved façade of the Sverdlov family shop left as a nod to the past — and that’s because of the family's favourite son, Iakov, the Bolshevik leader who in some accounts ordered the killing of the Tsar and his family in 1918. At the end of the pedestrianised street is a green square with a giant statue of Gorky, sculpted by Vera Mukhina — tall, gaunt and defiant — and the only Metro station in the older part of the city, on the east side of the Oka. It had just been opened when I visited — until then, the Gorky Metro built in the 1980s and abandoned in the 1990s only served the industrial, western side.
The recommended means of getting to the Lower Town is not via the Metro — it isn't covered at all — but via the Chkalov Steps which lead from the Kremlin to the Volga. These are one of the sights of the city, built between 1943 and 1949, partly by German prisoners of war, and at enormous expense even for the time. They begin with a statue of the titular Chkalov, local boy and transatlantic aviator, then descend in three curved, sweeping flights, with each level marked by obelisks and benches, for those exhausted by the climb. It is three times the height of the Potemkin Steps in Odessa, which must make it one of the tallest public stairways in Europe. At the end, you can see nothing but the steppe on the other side, but turn left, and you're in the pretty, well-preserved Lower Town. Some of what it has — such as the River Station — is typical Soviet fare, but the streets are delicate and classical, like a miniature St Petersburg. There is a hipster bar which serves fresh fish and whose staff seemed very pleased to encounter foreigners. The churches are what really makes the Lower Town memorable, and so completely unlike anything west of Brest. This is really the exotic Russia that Lesley Blanch imagined she'd find in the Russia of her 'mind's eye', an architecture of colour, strangeness and cruelty: a 'mirage', where she sees 'birches merge with belfries, snowstorms swirling round little wooden izbas and granite palaces; there, under the black skies of a painted Palekh box, gigantic brass samovars puffed like volcanoes, dwarfing the surrounding villages and their blue-domed churches in some topsy-turvy vision recalling an early painting by Chagall at Vitebsk.'4
These are the Assumption Church, with five gold onion domes, and the fabulous Stroganov Church, founded by local merchants at the end of the seventeenth century. This is in the style often called “Naryshkin Baroque”, but it doesn't resemble the faithfully Italian-style Baroque of, say, Poland in the same period. Russian architects plundered Baroque's rich details and added them to the clusters of onion domes that defined Russian sacred architecture. The twisted, whipped domes themselves, on the Stroganov Church, are amazing confections, faceted, multicoloured and fruity, with the highest dome inset with gold nuggets. The provenance of these romantic skylines — ushered in with St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow — is speculative, with claims that the idea came from Tatar mosques; no matter how much Russian architecture was designed by Italian architects, it looks distinctly, inescapably “other”. Whether this joyful architectural originality denotes a substantially different civilisation to that of its Western neighbours is deeply questionable — a serf in Poland and a serf in Russia was a serf either way, whether their masters’ architects directly copied Italian designs for their churches, or came up with their own style. Already, when the Stroganov Church was built, Peter the Great was on his way back from Deptford to found a city on the Baltic modelled on Amsterdam. The persistence of this more piquant style is sign of backwardness and insularity or of confidence, of refusing to copy and replicate, depending on your view.
When you cross the bridge to the other side of the city, the side with a Metro and factories and the main railway station, and turn back to look at the skyline, you'll get a shock. As expected, there's all those polychromatic bulbs and onions below and the Kremlin above, straight from a Kustodiev painting — but on the highest ridge, a single, standardised square tower of flats has been placed, as some sort of deliberate insult to townscape. The main monuments, when you've crossed the bridge, are another “neo-Russian” complex of the late nineteenth century, the sprawling Nizhny Novgorod Trade Fair; a huge square with a concrete hotel and a colossal Lenin monument, one of at least half a dozen in the city; a yellow neo-Russian church; and the Moscow railway station, connected to the Moskovskaya Metro station. Below is a clone of the Moscow Metro, with a classical hall and trains taking a leisurely journey out to Avtozavod, the district where Gorky's industrial might is, or was, concentrated.
Directly in front of the station is Revolution Square. Here, unlike in most of the Upper and Lower Town, you can examine some of the more recent architecture of Russian capitalism. McDonalds is housed in a 1990s Postmodernist building, erected especially. Nizhny Novgorod had a respected “school” of Postmodernist architects, and their approach here involves a slightly lumbering approach to form, borrowed from the bulges and curves of the “neo-Russian” idiom, but with little non-structural devices and features pulled away from the building and emphasised, an “advertising-architecture” — the golden arches are mounted on a little plinth, ceremonially.5 As commercial architecture, it is more lively than either the lumbering classicism of the Soviet GUM department store or the Norman Foster-style glass blandness of the Republic shopping mall, on the other side of this extremely mis-named square.
The McDonalds tries to complete a small “traditional” shopping street, ending in the dynamic corners of another Constructivist building, housing a bingo hall, but the effect is futile, as the street is sliced in half by a flyover. The dilapidated high-rise headquarters of the Metro, opposite, look like a lot of office space to run a single line; the car is king round here - Motorcity USSR. Within the station, you can be dazzled by a mosaic of war and revolution, filling every inch of each of its walls. In the roof is an outsized chandelier and a suspended ceiling, and these, I'm told, were the sole contribution to the city's public infrastructure of one-time governor, the liberal playboy and later, assassination victim Boris Nemtsov. In a straight line east from here, the next big city is Kazan, and you are in the Republic of Tatarstan. But if you take a tram or a Metro, you leave this semi-imaginary world of capital-R Russian architecture, and come instead to one of the most extensive comprehensively planned city districts of the interwar years anywhere in the world, a state socialist microcosm - Avtozavod.
Model Workers of the Model Motordistrict
Few 20th century company towns were so ambitious, or so freighted with ideology and cross-cultural exchanges and misunderstandings, as the Avtozavod district of Nizhny Novgorod. An entire new city of over 100,000 people, all of whom were working in or around a vast automobile plant built by an American company with American technology, housed – at least at first – in an experiment in collective living. Workers flocked there, frequently from outside the Soviet Union, and labour leaders visited to find out what this 'workers' paradise' was actually like, and to discover in what ways a district built for Ford factory workers in the USSR differed from one built for Ford factory workers in the US or UK, like Becontree or Dearborn. Most of the Socialist City or 'Sotsgorod' still stands today, and though altered and relatively depopulated, it is still a three-dimensional showcase of what a Soviet socialist company district was meant to be like.
From the centre of Nizhny Novgorod the Avtozavod district is best reached by that one-and-a-bit-line Metro, built between 1977 and 1985. Simply in terms of infrastructure, the new industrial district is considerably better served than comparable British examples – comparing like with like, you might note the fact that in 2014, the 1930s workers' garden suburb of Wythenshawe on the outskirts of Manchester, a similarly sized city to Nizhny, is only now being connected with the rest of the city by a tram, and never had a rail connection. By contrast, somewhat rickety trams go through Avtozavod every minute or so, and the more infrequent but certainly more impressive Metro serves it with five stops. But once you get out at the other end, you notice some other differences with British practice. One, that the factory is still working, albeit at massively reduced capacity and with a far smaller workforce; two, that the factory is still adorned with a whole series of various ideological artworks and decorations; and three, that even now, the best workers and citizens of the district are still immortalised on billboards, hoisted up on the lamp-posts. 'Model Workers', People of Avtozavod', both can get their name and a photo on a billboard.
The permanent monuments include a faintly cheap-looking plastery Lenin, the first truck produced here mounted on a plinth made up of the number '1932' in concrete numerals, and most impressive of all, two large mosaic panels produced in 1982 for the factory's 50th anniversary, depicting lone figures waving banners in the foreground, with smaller workers behind, in overalls and protective masks building the automobiles on one panel, making and driving tanks on the other, all pieced together with glittering blue, red, orange stones. The fact that the factory has long been a totally capitalist proposition - owned by oligarch and friend of Peter Mandelson, Oleg Deripaska - hasn't led to any 'de-communisation' of the visual rhetoric and street furniture around the red granite factory gates. Far from it, with recent printed photo-panels telling the story of the factory, with due attention to the role of iron-fisted bosses such as Stalin's Minister of Industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the efficacy of its tanks built by women during the Great Patriotic War, and a fleet of black Volgas on Westminster Bridge. You don't get things like this outside the Ford factory in Dagenham. Clearly, here being able to put together a car on a production line had an ideological meaning somewhat different from the American one as signifier of freedom and individuality.
That's ironic, given that this was a Soviet-American co-operation from the very start. The factory was a project of the Ford Motor Company, and for a time early on the Ford logo even accompanied the medallion of Lenin on the factory gates. The factory was closely modelled on Ford's structures in Detroit and elsewhere, only with the difference that this time, it wouldn't be owned by them – the Great Depression meant the famously union-bashing, right-wing Ford assented to building nationalised factories for Communists. The construction of the city itself was managed by the Austin Company, an engineering firm based in Cleveland, Ohio (not to be confused with the English motor company). Richard Stites, in his compendium of early Soviet utopias Revolutionary Dreams, disparagingly refers to it as one of the partial, unsuccessful, botched attempts to realise the various new collective environments envisaged in the first post-revolutionary years. 'The workers' city of the Nizhny Novgorod Plant was designed by Americans and approved by the Soviets, with centralised schooling, clubs, hospitals, bakeries, kitchens, laundries and other services for its 18,000 employees in communal blocks of 300 residents each – a symmetrical phalanstery on a modern industrial site. An entire village of 3000 people was moved to make way for its construction. Yet as late as 1932 there were not enough beds and the premises had no water. These sites were parodies of the bright dreams of the clean, rational, community building homes envisioned by the architects and planners of the 1920s.'6
The utopian dream here came up against the messy reality of a rural, 'backward' country undergoing forced, rapid industrialisation. In this particular case we have a document which makes it clear how complex the interactions between the American industrialists and Soviet architects actually were, and how far from inevitable this decline into Potemkin modernism actually was. The Sotsgorod's history has been told by Richard Cartwright-Austin, the son of the head of the Austin company, in his book Building Utopia. He points out how the design was based on an architectural competition at the 'Soviet bauhaus', VKhUTEMAS, the winner of which constituted several collective blocks in a parallel arrangement, with open space between, an interconnecting walkway between each, and all of them fully equipped with collective facilities. This was then adapted by the Austin Company's engineers, who recognised that all this concrete and glass was way beyond the Russian building industry's capabilities, replacing it with subtly detailed brick and smaller windows, but with no changes, at first, to the programme. In fact, it seems to have elicited some enthusiasm from the Methodist engineering firm. The head of the project, Allen Austin, wrote in 1931 for the New York Times Magazine of the communalisation planned for the new city – 'the fourth floor of each building is composed of larger rooms, the size of a double and single room combined. These are intended to be occupied by 'Communes' – groups of three or four young men or women who study, live or work together'.7 When this failed to be actualised, it was less because of the direct importation of American morality and conformism, nor a 'totalitarian' insistence on collectivity, but the demographic tumult created by the Five Year Plan itself, specifically by its massive underestimation of the population shift to the cities and industrial centres.
Cartwright-Austin quotes a contemporary report by an American journalist, Milly Bennett, in terms which, aside from the exoticising tone, immediately evokes the peri-urban 'maelstrom' of breakneck industrialisation: 'the Russian workers come to the plant from the villages, husky peasant men and women with packs on their backs. They live in long, rude barracks. And, impatiently, they move into the unfinished model houses of the Workers City, 300 families strong, and camp there.'8 This occurred, she points out, before electrical and other services were finished in the flats. Cartwright-Austin notes the unpopularity of the Communal flats, but it seems unlikely that ideology had much to do with this – in fact, 'some of the scheduled communal facilities were never provided.' A comparative image in the book of the Workers' City over the course of the '30s shows the aesthetic becoming more conservative after the design passed out of the Austin engineers' hands, with pitched roofs added to the new blocks and the experiment with communal walkways not repeated. The end of this Soviet-American ideal industrial settlement came the same year the first car was produced – 'the utopian city of 1930 was overtaken by economic necessity. It was finally abandoned in 1932...workers in the new automobile factory would live very much as industrial workers in other parts of the world'.9 As a place to live, he was probably right. Writer and scion of the Avtozavod Kirill Kobrin writes in his short story The Last European of how an encounter with Dublin nightlife immediately 'tipped him back, into the Soviet proletarian '70s', and a memory of 'women chipped with alcohol, their eyes full of yearning. Sharp-nosed urchins, shiveringly wrapping themselves in cheap jackets. Lads always ready for drinking and fighting. On Mondays, the irrepressible stink of puke in the streets. Gorky. Avtozavod'.10
The several streetblocks that make up that first part of the Avtozavod are still lined with those short rows of tenements, their brick facades sometimes in their original state, sometimes with cheap corrugated metal balconies, and sometimes with rather alarming red roofs with built-in attic floors which look very recent indeed. As architecture, their heritage in Constructivism is invisible, but as space, you can spot it – this is a collective city in a garden, with easy, rather informal tree-lined boulevards running through it, without much obvious activity save some vague strolling. It's quiet, and quite pretty, not a garden suburb but a suburb in a park. The difference with Becontree or Wythenshawe is most obvious in the collectivity of the housing. There, as in the US, the single-family house with a big front and back garden, with lots of domestic space inside, was the model; here, the green space is all exterior, public. Bar a tiny colony built for the American engineers, there are no single-family houses at all.
The mass unemployment of the Great Depression coinciding with the full employment in the Soviet Union meant that the Avtozavod district was, for a time, a magnet for workers and socialist activists, both trade union leaders and their rank-and-file. Among the latter were the brothers Victor and Walter Reuther, who didn't find conditions there to be particularly different from those in the USA. They were both blacklisted after leading a strike at Avtozavod, and on their return to the USA would be prominent in the then-militant United Autombile Workers, and became the best known leaders of the General Motors strike of 1936. As in Nizhny – renamed Gorky in 1933 – they suffered a blacklist in the USA, not to mention beatings and assassination attempts, but here at least they won, managing the unionise the auto industry for the first time. The brothers later wound up Khrushchev during a meeting with American labour leaders as part of his visit to America in 1959, by asking him - in Russian - 'is the Gorky Automobile Works still named after Molotov?', soon after the former Foreign Minister's purging. 'Can you give us one single example', asked Walter Reuther, getting the chance to ask the questions he couldn't in Gorky, 'in which one of your unions ever disagreed with government policy?' 'Why poke your nose into our business?' retorted Khrushchev.11
But another observer, from the other side of the trade union movement gave more attention to the living conditions of the Avtozavod workers. The then-leader of the British TUC, Sir Walter Citrine, was keen to contrast the conditions of the recently uprooted peasant workforce of the Soviet city with the council houses, large rooms, gardens and municipal facilities enjoyed by many workers in the UK, due to the lobbying of the trade union movement. He called his travelogue of a 1935 trip round the USSR I Search for Truth in Russia, and found the truth in the Sotsgorod to be muddy. 'We visited the Socialist City', he writes, 'and found it to be exceptionally well-planned, with good, wide streets, which some day, I hope, will be concreted. At present, they are a mass of slush, and I could not help wondering whether they will ever be anything different. These people rush to put up buildings but never seem to finish them. They never seem to have time'. He is puzzled that the streets are not paved but trees have been carefully planted, obviously not considering that asphalt and concrete were far more scarce at the time than seeds. With marvellously English discomfort, he notes 'I did not like to think we were going to visit apartments with our boots simply ankle deep in mud. We did so, however.'12 He found in them flats of five and a half square metres a head, admittedly in advance of three and half in rest of Gorky – and families of four taking up two rooms, with the kitchen shared with the neighbours, a version of collective life somewhat less well-serviced that which had been planned in the ateliers of VkhUTEMAS. He doesn't say so much about the facilities themselves, largely because they weren't finished at the time of writing, but it's here that the difference is most obvious.
At Wythenshawe, for instance, the main architectural interest for those not so fascinated by pretty arts and crafts houses is expressionist churches and streamline modern cinemas or shopping parades. Obviously there were none of the former in this deliberately godless city, but cinema and consumption had a role. The main department store or Univermag, designed in 1935 by L.M Nappelbaum, is in the 'Post-Constructivist' style, that is, with modernist simplified, glazed volumes given a slightly classical dressing. The grandly curved central glass stairwell is still very impressive, with its neatly crafted balustrade unaffected by its dividing up into the usual tacky, chaotic Russian mini-mall. There are no small shops but for impromptu recent kiosks, but then big Co-Ops were equally dominant in the company towns and giant estates of '30s England. They had super-cinemas too, but there are no Odeons quite like the Gorky Avtozavod's Kinoteatr Mir, another 1935 building, this one by A.Z Grinberg. A square, coffered portal dressed in dark granite forms the entrance, and a wing with restaurants and other facilities is topped by a row of finely detailed Socialist Realist figures, athletic men and curvaceous women, both detailed with a fine, sinuous plasticity.
Opposite is the Palace of Culture, one of those comprehensive centres for theatre, music and general improving activity that were as important here as they were in a parternalist garden suburb like Bourneville, although here on a much greater scale. It's a banal piece of Stalinist architecture, a massive block whose linear mass is detailed with randomly applied classical detail. Inside, however, past a grand neo-classical central atrium that has been subject to some rather unsympathetic renovation, is a series of murals of the Thaw era. A central mosaic of Lenin is flanked by two panels where all the heaviness of the building disappears, replaced with vivid, light, colourful images of revolution, construction, science, football and general leaping about and frolicking . All the images are of activity, activity, activity. Panels are being hoist to make buildings. Smoke swirls from chimneys. Men row in long dinghys. Youth sit around campfires. Female scientists peruse test-tubes. At the head of it all, at the top of stairwell's ceiling, is a drawing of Vera Mukhina's 'iconic' sculpture 'Worker and Collective Farm Woman', the Soviet Union's nearest thing to a Statue of Liberty. Together the murals are a society's idealised self-presentation, in three distinct styles – the 'sports' murals are realist but bright and stark, the ceiling mural has a similar simplified, cartoonish, modern line to the work of an American post-war illustrator like Saul Steinberg. Opposite the murals were realist paintings of the nearby river Volga, a subject on which contemporary and Soviet aesthetics could agree.
Some of the activities depicted in the murals can still today be enjoyed at the mini-Gorky Park adjacent, a typical piece of 'amenity', perhaps not too different from the parks spread across the company towns and council estates of the interwar years in the west, although with a little more heroic sculpture and a bit more tolerance for kitsch, one part municipal park and one part funfair; the architectural highlight is the derelict 1970s Cafe Tarelka, a rustic flying saucer whose combination of futurism, rough construction and decay encompasses the qualities of this place. Surrounding the Park Kultury are later, neoclassical blocks of flats, the hierarchical, monumental architecture that succeeded the collective ambitions of Constructivism – some of it designed by former Constructivists, like a gigantic crescent of flats with curved balconies, an unexpected product of the Vesnin brothers. Running linear to the park are crumbly prefab 'Khrushchevkas', a ruined power station and a series of identical red-brick clad point blocks. Dilapidation is ubiquitous. Yet, for all the unemployment, inequality, decay and decline, one of the most obvious things about the Avtozavod district is not discontinuity, but the way certain things have endured. Not necessarily the more attractive aspects of the Soviet past such as rent at 5% of income or full employment, but still some of those aspects most alien to the Fordist towns in the west. Of course there's those banners of the good citizens of Nizhny, hung up all the way down the boulevard. But at the end of the Park Kultury, there's something that is more continuation than survival.
Opposite the park's edge is an impromptu beach, centred around a lake carved out of an old industrial pit. On a sunny day this May, it was strewn with litter, but also full of people enthusiastically using the beach, flirting, sunbathing topless, sitting around, drinking, perhaps much as they would if there were a beach in Dagenham. We sat down on the benches provided, at least until it (inevitably) started to rain. Framing the beach is an immense development of repeated tower blocks, visibly system-built, in a linear structure like a wall surrounding the other side of the water to the beach. They look like they were built in 1980, but were erected in the 2010s – no longer given away nearly free to industrial workers, but following almost identical architectural and spatial precepts to those blocks that did. It's a 21st century microrayon. All the 'social' aspects of socialism are abandoned except as a residuum, but its aesthetics and technologies have, evidently, proven surprisingly useful.13 Maybe the new tenants of these hulking towers will be lucky enough to have their face on a poster, as one of the Model Workers of Avtozavod.
***
1 See here Slavenka Drakulic, Cafe Europa (Abacus, 1996)
2 Lesley Blanch, Journey Into the Mind's Eye (Elend, 2005), ebook, loc 412
3 Blanch., loc 640
4 Blanch, loc 2435
5 For a sympathetic account of the Nizhny Novgorod school, see Bart Goldhoorn and Philip Meuser, Capitalist Realism – New Architecture in Russia (Dom Publishers, 2009)
6 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford 1989), p237-8
7 Richard Cartwright-Austin, Building Utopia – Erecting Russia's First Modern City 1930 (Kent, 2004), p54
8 Cartwright-Austin, p166
9 Cartwright-Austin, p56
10 Kirill Kobrin, The Last European (3am Press, 2013), unpaginated
11 Peter Carlson, K Blows Top (Public Affairs, 2009), p147
12 Sir Walter Citrine KBE, I Search for Truth in Russia (Routledge, 1936), p149
13 For an account of this conundrum, see Max Sher and Sergey Novikov, Infrastructures (Recurrent Books, 2019)
