Moscow Monumental by Katherine Zubovich

Author:Katherine Zubovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.7: Construction of Moscow State University, 1951. Collection of the Moscow City Archive GBU “TsGA Moskvy.”

Figure 6.8: Construction of Moscow State University, 1951. Collection of the Moscow City Archive GBU “TsGA Moskvy.”

Posters and newspaper reports of the postwar years rarely, if ever, depicted women working in skyscraper foundation pits. Instead, women were shown working as bricklayers or more commonly as stuccoists or modelers (lepshchiki), adding the final decorative touches to a building’s façade. By locating women on the façades of Moscow’s skyscrapers, artists and writers worked to reinforce traditional gender roles after a war during which female combatants and partisans on the frontlines, and women workers on the home front, had interrogated those roles. In a painting created in the late 1940s, for example, the artist Georgii Satel’ pictured a young woman on one of Moscow’s skyscraper sites; wearing summer shoes and a clean white smock over her dress, she is shown taking instruction from an older male craftsman. The painting, titled “The Komsomol-Builders of Moscow,” was shown at the All-Union Art Exhibition in 1949 and published in Ogonek the following year. The men in Satel”s painting give direction and they do the heavy lifting, passing up the premade acanthus leaves that will decorate one of the building’s columns. The woman in white, by contrast, stares intently at a spiral-shaped corner volute of a Corinthian capital while being shown how to carve it. Her clean, white drapery looks nothing like the quilted jackets (telogreiki)—or even the lighter jackets and overalls for warmer weather—worn by the typical vysotnitsa, but this was of little matter. Like so many women draped in white before her, the figure in Satel”s painting is an allegory for peace and the purity of the tasks that lay ahead.

Both women and men worked on the façades of Moscow’s skyscraper construction sites as modelers. Photographs taken on the MGU site in 1951 show a group of workers arranging ceramic tiles atop rows of bricks. One of the workers assembles a floral medallion. All are wearing matching dark coveralls (fig. 6.9–6.10). Elsewhere on the MGU construction site, archival photographs seem to confirm the more idealized images produced by artists like Satel’. In a photograph taken in 1950, women are shown working in clean light clothing and high heels, with hair tied back just so (fig. 6.11); the woman in the white top in the foreground has mislaid her gloves. The contrast in dress and facial expression between the two women in front and the other seven in the back gives the image a staged quality. Whether the women pictured traded in their work boots and headscarves of their own accord, or whether they were asked to do so ahead of the photographer’s visit to the construction site, photographs like this one show the importance of making women visible on the construction sites, even if this visibility was accompanied by unrealistic representation.

Figure 6.9: Construction of Moscow State University, 1951. Collection of the Moscow City Archive GBU “TsGA Moskvy.”

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