The Fall of the Zariad´e: Monumentalism and Displacement in Late Stalinist Moscow

The USSR Council of Ministers issued a decree in January 1947, calling for the construction of eight skyscrapers in Moscow. The decree listed heights and locations for each of the buildings. It assigned Soviet ministries and organizations to build each structure. And it set forth aesthetic parameters for design, stating that "the proportions and silhouettes of these buildings ... must be drawn from the historical character of the architecture of the city and from the silhouette of the future Palace of Soviets."¹ Moscow's skyscrapers would ring around that future Palace of Soviets, serving one or more purposes specified in the decree: residential structure, office tower, or hotel.² These buildings would also supplant the primacy of the city's numerous churches, which had long served, as Blair Ruble writes, as crucial "guideposts in a thoroughly jumbled urban environment."³ Moscow's eight skyscrapers were to transform an 800-year-old cityscape into a modern metropolis worthy of its status as capital of the world's first communist state.

That the locations chosen for Moscow's skyscrapers were not empty—that they were inhabited by tens of thousands of Muscovites—was a fact not addressed in the initial decree of January 1947. Like other elements necessary to the realization of this city-wide urban redevelopment scheme—from labor resources to materials—the enormous tasks of displacement and resettlement were considered only after the skyscraper project was already underway. Each of the construction offices in charge of building Moscow's new towers would thus find itself responsible in the coming years not just for building skyscrapers but also for constructing housing, schools, clinics, and other amenities for displaced Muscovites. By 1949, the resettlement of residents displaced by Moscow's skyscrapers would come to preoccupy Soviet officials at all levels of the bureaucracy, from administrators working in special resettlement offices to Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria, who oversaw the skyscraper project as a whole until his arrest in June 1953.

The displacement of tens of thousands of residents was one of the most significant effects of Moscow's postwar skyscraper construction. Yet when Soviet officials began working on this building project in 1947, the issue of displacement was far from their minds. Focusing initially on the symbolic potential of the new structures, Soviet leaders and architects paid scant attention to the broader implications of their monumental vision for the capital.⁴ Architectural drawings, like those by Arkadii Mordvinov, rendered invisible the lines that connected Moscow's new skyscrapers with the shadow city that the skyscraper plan required. In the distant vanishing point of Mordvinov's drawing of the Hotel Ukraine (Fig. 1), for example, lay the town of Kuntsevo—one of the locations chosen for the resettlement of displaced residents. While Mordvinov included in the foreground of his image soldiers marching in formation across the New Arbat Bridge, a different drawing might have pictured an exodus of Muscovites flooding out of central Moscow in the direction of podmoskov ´e. Looking beyond the frame of images like Mordvinov's, this article considers the experiences of those individuals displaced by buildings like his Hotel Ukraine. Their lives help illuminate the space where socialist realist plan met reality.

This article explores the city that emerged in the postwar years in the shadow of Moscow's skyscrapers. I focus on the most central and most densely populated location chosen for skyscraper development in 1947: the Zariad´e district. The Zariad´e skyscraper was never built to completion, but the location

Figure 1.

Hotel Ukraine on Dorogomilovo Embankment, architect Arkadii Mordvinov, c. 1951

Source: Shchusev State Museum of Architecture.

chosen for the structure was cleared and construction work had begun on the site by 1950. Drawing on letters sent to construction managers and state officials by residents of the Zariad´e, this article examines how resettlement was experienced by those who found themselves unceremoniously exiled from the center of Moscow to its periphery. The article thereby contributes to a growing literature on the development of the outlying districts of Soviet...