Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings by Hatherley Owen

Author:Hatherley, Owen [Hatherley, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141975900
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-06-03T21:00:00+00:00

Half-lit chandeliers at Pushkinskaya, Kharkiv

So how was it that the underground labourers’ nights remained so exhausting? One explanation can be found in the depths of the Leningrad Metro. The response there to the ‘embellishments decree’ was to concentrate on technology rather than decoration. Most stations of the 1960s expansion of the line have a system known as ‘horizontal lift’, which Londoners who use the Jubilee Line will know via the more cynical term ‘suicide doors’. If you wait at a station like Gostiny Dvor, Moskovskaya or Mayakovskaya, you have the same vaulted halls, but the arcades are blocked, so you feel as if you’re in a tunnel rather than a ballroom, unable to see the tracks. The walls ‘open’ along the arcades, offering entry to the trains. This entailed a high level of automation for the Soviet 1960s, involving an impressive precision to get all the various components to line up, and the doors to meet the openings, quite apart from the darker function of stopping the line from slowing down because of people killing themselves. There are still a few decorative details on these stations, fittingly of a more peppy, Modernist form. One suspects that Mayakovsky would have been less disturbed by the jagged, glinting red mosaics of ‘his’ outpost in Leningrad than the splendour of ‘his’ Moscow station. The bigger clue is in Technological Institute 2 station, an interchange with one of the Line 1 palaces. Each pillar is decorated with an inscription in chic 1960s letters recalling some particular Soviet technological triumph, and one of the most prominent reads: ‘1958 – OPENING OF THE FIRST SOVIET AUTOMATED FACTORY’. Automation takes command, as it does in the promise of Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man under Socialism – ‘let the machines do it.’

‘1958 – opening of the first Soviet automated factory’, Technological Institute station, Leningrad

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