An architectural cross section between city and countryside. Notes on constructivist architecture in the agri-food sector between NEP and First Five-Year Plan

Maurizio Meriggi

  1. Old and New

“Old and New” is the title of the documentary film shot between 1926 and 1929 by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Kepley 1974) that documents the transition of the organization of the Soviet countryside between the NEP (New Economic Policy a hybrid model between liberalism and cooperative organization), and Five-Year Planning, a pure socialist model centrally governed (Carr, Davies 1969).

Eisenstein circumscribed his task to the “general line” of the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union addressing rural collectivization: an ideal opportunity to produce a monumental fresco with “agricultural peasant material” (Eisenstein, 1928). In 1928, however, he had to complete “October” for the 10th anniversary of the Revolution. When he moved back to “The General line”, that was the title of the script in 1926, the reality of fast-paced collectivisation had surpassed fiction.

Finalising the movie in February 1929, Eisenstein had to change the film's ending and title: “Old and New” and, on 4 June 1929, condensed his impressions in a letter to the French movie critic Leon Moussinac:

[…] I just had a remarkable run through northern Caucasus and Ukraine. I have seen with my own eyes what ‘building socialism’ means. Nothing could be more heroic and full of pathos! The immense ploughing of the new sovkhozes (founded this year). The huge factories under construction. I went to places where, three years ago, there was nothing but endless plains, and now huge half-finished factories are rising. Not yet covered with roofs, they are already operating; it is amazing, almost impossible to describe. By dint of propaganda, we involuntarily stop believing in what we are promoting. Every cardinal is an atheist. All the sudden we see in pure reality what we said, propagated and wrote […]. (Morandini 1966, pp. 55-56)

“General’naya liniya” was a quote from Lenin, stressing the importance of a voluntary transition towards collectivisation: in some cases, an efficient work organisation by local communities proved more efficient than many centralized institutions (Eisenstein, 1926). In 1929, when collectivisation had became a reality, the new title “Staroe i novoe” (another quote from Lenin) shifted the focus to large-scale industrialisation, ending with the spectacular scene shot in the spring of 1929: columns of tractors and the title “forward… forward… towards socialism” (Eisenstein, October 1929).

“Staroe i novoe,” however, did not differ much from “General’naya liniya” (Fig. 5).

Depicting rural modernisation in a village in Caucasus steppes of the 1920s, where reclamation and agrarian colonization works were then underway (Baranskij 1956), Eisenstein’s protagonists include “the Agronomist,” heralding the scientific organisation of agriculture, “the Bull” (combining animal traction (the New) and fertility (the Old), and “the Tractor” epitomizing mechanisation. In addition to the traditional Russian rural linear village and the sovkhoz scenography by A. Burov, the locations include the tractor manufacturing industry “Putilovsky” in Leningrad and the famous Gosprom building designed by Sergei S. Serafimov in Kharkov, representing the Soviet administrative centre.

The final scene showed columns of “Krasnyy Putilovec” tractors[1] operating in the Gigant State Farm in marching towards socialism in a collectivised countryside, was shot in the Salsk steppes, near the sovchoz Gigant, whose machines were lent for filming, also appearing at the end of the titles of the “interpreters”.

The “Old” of the film, however, was not only the archaic arrangement of rural society in the USSR before the socialist collectivization of Five-Year Planning, but also the very structure of the first Soviet society developed with the NEP. The corrections that Ejzenštejn, accomplishing precise requests of the Party (Kepley 1974), had to bring to the script thus also reflected the change in the project of the socialist settlement set by the Plan with the intensive industrialization, and in forced stages, of the country. The idea of modernization expressed by the scenography of the “futuristic” mechanized farm of constructivist inspiration designed in 1926 by A. Burov (1926b), still linked to the architectural imagination of the NEP, was contrasted with the spectacularism of the mechanization of agriculture of the mass of tractors of the final scene, an expression of the greatness of the Plan. In fact, the form of conducting agriculture was no longer that of the small agricultural cooperatives of the artel of a few dozen hectares that the young Marfa, the komsomolka[2] protagonist of the film, organizes in the village, but had become that of the sovchoz, a state company of exceptional size of 50-100,000 hectares whose heart was the “agricultural machinery and tractor station” (Mašinno-traktornaj a stancija, henceforth MTS) which gathered a battalion of over 300 tractors. Perhaps coincidentally, such concentrations of machines could be found at that time precisely in the Salsk Steppes in the North Caucasus, near which filming of the film had begun in 1926 and where two of the best-known experimental sovkhozes of the First Five-Year Plan, Gigant (which lent the team of tractors for filming) and Verbljud, were under construction since the end of 1928. 

  1. The architectural imagery of the NEP of the reform of agricultural production in the countryside and the city.

The scenography of A. Burov was published in the magazine of the OSA (Association of Modern Architects) “Sovremennaya Architektura” (Contemporary Architecture, henceforth “S.A.”), in 1926, directed by M. Ja. Ginzburg and A. A. Vesnin, leaders of the constructivist movement. 

As if they were the elements of an architectural section of the agri-food sector between the countryside and the city, in the same year of the magazine we find other projects that together with the mechanized farm of Burov fix the points of the perspective of the reorganization of food production and distribution in socialist society in the mid-20s:

- The project of a book kiosk with the function of a peasant club of Alexei Gan for the Sovietized village.

- The mechanized farm of the same scenography as Burov.

- A plant for the industrial production of bread.

- The central wholesale market of food products in Moscow. 

The project of the book kiosk-peasant club of Gan is presented in this framework:

The Sovietization of the countryside follows several paths. The tractor and electrification, the cooperation of the rural population, new forms of land cultivation, political-educational work, and much more, were constituting that colossal socio-cultural activity conducted by the party and proletarian society that was developing in the countryside. The involvement of the peasants in the construction of new social and economic forms, in the absence of sufficient means, continues to grow in the old situation of the rural courts-izbas and also their collective hearths, which are already integral parts of the Soviet countryside (the reading izbas, the clubs, etc.) but which nevertheless remain architecturally undefined. 

In the rural villages of the past only the church occupies, if one can say so, an architectural place. This does not have a rival building in the countryside, which can play a role of agitation for a new lifestyle with its presence in the architectural context of the village. (Novikov 1926)

Gan’s project was therefore functional to define an architecturally identified place in the village, to promote through the acculturation of the peasants the modernization of the structure of the traditional agrarian settlement. The design of the book kiosk/peasant club adopts the compositional clichés of early constructivism, between folkloric tradition and avant-garde, such as that of the pavilions of the Moscow All-Russian Exhibition of Agriculture and Crafts held in 1923 at the end of the Civil War, six years after the October Revolution, where Russian rural stereotypes merged with avant-garde solutions in a scenography of wooden structures that anticipated a possible balance between modernity and tradition (Astaf’eva-Dlugač 1991, pp. 108-117).

Returning to the film “The General Line/The Old and the New”, the heart of agricultural production during the NEP was still that of the medium landowners (the kulaks) and the small owners of the “Slavic village” founded on the ancestral organization of the obšcina, celebrated by nineteenth-century Russian populists such as Bakunin as a communist society in progress 

through the collective management of agricultural property and production (Venturi 1972, p. 405). The film documents the reorganization of the obšcina, where Marfa lives, into a dairy artel. Its modernization is represented in the film by the introduction into the artel before the mechanical skimming machine of milk, and then showing the form that the same artel' could have taken in the future - the mechanized farm of Burov’s scenography - which in the film is called “Sovchoz”, a term that after 1928 will take on a completely different meaning.

Burov himself wrote (Burov, 1926, b) that he had avoided decorative effects, to focus instead the viewer’s attention on the new life and methods of industrialised agriculture, synthesised by a new architecture achieved with new materials and construction techniques (Burov, 1926: 470).

The Soviet city of the end of the NEP that appears from the projects published in the first three years of “S.A.” from 1926 to 1928, is essentially a workers' settlement, on the one hand, and a commercial settlement, on the other. There are many constructivist projects for commercial company headquarters in Moscow that flank those for Soviet institutions and that outline a city of large tertiary complexes, starting with the emblematic Soyuz Center of Le Corbusier in 1928, headquarters of the Union of Consumer Cooperatives through which, during the NEP, farmers could trade 70% of their harvest on their own.

In this context, the two other buildings presented on “S.A.” should be placed, which complete the series of building projects for the agri-food sector of the NEP of the constructivist avant-garde.

The project of the student of the VChUTEMAS I. I. Sobolev (laboratory of A. A. Vesnin) for the “Bread Factory” (Sobolev 1926), is an industrial complex dominated by the mass of the two grain silos (rye and wheat) connected to the railway that serve the mill and the mechanized bakery. The bread factory will become a central theme in the reform of food distribution in industrial cities in the late 20s with the Five-Year Planning, with a type, however, totally reformed.

The Moscow “Wholesale Food Market” is the graduation project at VChUTEMAS by M. Barshch and M. Sinyavsky (rel. A. A. Vesnin; Barshch, Sinyavsky, 1926), replacing the ancient Balotny annonario market (of vegetables, grains and spirits) located significantly in front of the Kremlin's power center on the island between moskva and the Vodootvodnij canal. The complex combines in two planimetric variants of the gallery of wholesalers’ shops, a series of blade buildings for commercial offices.[3]

The “Wholesale Food Market” was not realized because a few years later, with the Five-Year Plan, the distribution system of food products changed radically with the disappearance of the "market" of small producers and distributors replaced by centralized distribution at prices set by the State.[4]

  1. The new form of agricultural production of the Five-Year Plan – the Sovchoz

Eisenstein himself, on 16 October 1928, admitted that the sovkhoz scenography impressed even the technicians engaged in rural modernization, so much so that the Zernocentr (Grain Centre) called upon Andrei Burov to design a huge sovkhoz – ‘Zernovoy fabrik’ – near Rostov ‘in image and likeness’ of the movie set (Khazanova, 1973: 468).

This assignment announced to Burov was not followed up but in the steppes of Salks in the Rostov-on-Don Region (Fig. 07), two experimental granary sovchoz (Zernosovchoz) by Zernotrest[5] were built from the beginning of 1929 to 1931, whose project of the central settlement (central’naya usadba) was entrusted to the company “Teplobeton” of Moscow (Kazus 2009, p. 99), with another famous constructivist architect P.A. Golosov[6] acting as consultant.

The plan of the “central settlement”, as well its buildings, designed by the “Teplobeton” company for Gigant in 1928, were repeated by the same team of architects and engineers in variants in other two Sovkhoz designed in 1929 and 1930: the experimental-educational sovkhoz of Verblyud in Salsk steppes and Karabalyk in Kazakhstan (Eramishancev, 1930: 13).

All these settlements were assembling the same standard buildings flanked by the production nucleus of the Mashinno-traktornaya stantsiya (MTS, Fig.9a), with the mechanical workshop for the repair of machinery, and the logistic node with grain silos (the high-rise of the sovchoz), which were the engines of the production system that replaced the traditional one of the small and medium agricultural funds of the villages. The common residences with the related services of the central settlement replace the form of the Slavic village of the obšcina presented in “The Old and the New”.

The greatest part of central blocks the state grain sovkhoz central settlements were occupied by collective residential buildings, forming a kind of unique complex with their green areas, facilities and cultural buildings facing a system of squares. Verblyud and Karabalyk sovkhozes were including also a higher educational institution, including also student dorms. In Gigant also was built a lower level of educational institution Institut Agrotekhnikum, a vocational secondary school for farmers also providing training courses for tractor drivers – like the “tractorist” of the film.

Gigant – the large-scale production unit

Zernosovkhoz Gigant, established in 1928, originally stretched across 127.078 ha (Fig. 13), with its central settlement at Tselina (Abrosimov and Koval’, 1939: 6, 32-34).

The new central settlements built from 1929 to 1931 near Trubeckaya railway station (170 km from Rostov and 19 km from Salsk), later named Gigant, was equipped with MTS with an initial allocation of 300 tractors. In 1934, the land was subdivided into three different sovkhozes, of which Gigant covered 48.671 ha. Initially, in 1929, the sovkhoz employed 771 permanent farmers and 1.600 seasonal workers from the surrounding communes, kolkhoz, and agricultural artel’, and organised training courses for 800 tractor drivers (Strumilin, 1930).

The population of Gigant in 1938 amounted to 6.600 inhabitants of which 4.655 concentrated in the central settlement and the remaining 1945 lived in eight secondary settlements (usadba otdeleniya). These latter reproduced the traditional linear village with a population of nearly 200-220 inhabitants each, whereas the central nucleus was a workers’ settlement (rabochikh poselok), including the students of the training activities.

The 1928 scheme envisaged the central settlement (Fig. 14) made up of into five parallel functional strips – logistics, production, facilities, housing and leisure – connected by three perpendicular axes starting from the two production units of the MTS. The two outermost axes extended southwards into two bridges across the river to reach the dairy plant and the southern portion of the sovkhoz. The central axis instead extended northwards across the railway into the Rostov-on-Don/Salsk road, which reached the logistic area of the railway yard including the grain silos.[7]

The production sector (proizvodstvennyj sector) corresponded to the MTS, and included garages, repair workshop, fire brigade. Another diagonal axis stemmed from the passenger railway station, which, before reaching the central square, aggregated all public buildings: Sovkhoz direction, kitchen factory (Fabrika kukhnya), department store (Universal'nyy magazin), school and workers’ club. A green buffer zone separated productive from residential units, which also included some multi-storey communal buildings, terraces of single-storey houses of a traditional type, and the Agrotekhnicum student dorm designed by P.A. Golosov, and replicated in Verblyud. The embankments of the ponds near the dairy plant catalysed the resort area.

Verblyud – the “educational town” and its American experts

Against the same steppe background, Gigant and Verblyud central settlements had a rather different character. Sovkhoz Verblyud spanned over 50,000 ha: 30,000 near the central settlement at Verblyud railway Station and 20,000 corresponding to Zlodeyskaya and Egorlykskaya railway stations (Eramishancev, 1930: 12; Fig. 4). Verblyud was established as an “Educational-experimental grain state farm” (Uchebno – opytnyj zernosovkhoz) in line with plans by the “American agronomist and manager” Harold Ware[8], who was enrolled in 1928 as a consultant of Zernorest to set up a network of scientifically managed farms in northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan. In his capacity of Verblyud Deputy Director of Production and Training, from 1929 to 1932, Ware invited American experts to work as adviser and trainers of Russian staff, or else as teachers in the first agricultural-engineering university in USSR, namely the “Institute for mechanical engineers of socially-owned farms” for 1000 students (Institut inzhenerov-mekhanikov socialisticheskogo zemledeliya)[9] established in Verblyud in 1930.

The presence of American experts materialised in their assigned houses: six cottages (Tokarev, 2017: 45; Fig. 16b) designed as a kind of semi-detached Russian izba. Vasilij Eramishancev[10] who designed Verblyud along with other grain state farms, explained that Verblyud had a special character, not only due to its “rationally organized mechanized economy”, but also because provided cadres for standard state farms. These included tractor drivers, machine operators and mechanical engineers from the school of theoretical training, who knew all the processes of machine processing. State farms were implemented and managed in accordance with a broader program, thereby acting as cultural, training and scientific centres (Eramishancev, 1930: 11).

The initial construction program of Verblyud foresaw 1.200 residents, an Institute for 200 students and an agro-technical laboratory. Courses for 500 students were launched as early as spring 1930, which, by the end of that year, were upgraded into a university training of 1.000 machine engineers of socialist agriculture. To meet these new requirements, the settlement expanded to 4.000 inhabitants (Eramishancev, 1930: 11) and in 1939 accommodated 8800 people.

The Plan of the “Central Settlement of Verblyud” (Fig. 15) materialised its “scientific” character along the axis stretching from the railway Station to the Park of Culture. This narrative sequence included the Institute of mechanical engineers of socially owned farms (equipped with a dedicated Laboratory, the Mechanical workshop of the MTS, and the sovkhoz Direction), the square of collective facilities (kitchen factory, club-school, and department store) and that of the Palace of Culture (with the Park of Culture encompassed by schools and hospital).

Unlike Gigant central settlement, the sectors of the town were not parallel to the railway but inclined of 45°, to optimize the buildings exposure to insolation and winds.

The Institute of mechanical engineers of socially owned farms and its laboratories differed from the rest due to strong constructivist character of their Architecture. In comparison with those of Gigant, the residential buildings of Verblyud, are more varied, responding to a more articulated social composition. In fact, they include a large student dorm, a small hostel for singles and small families, 2 and 3 rooms apartments and the cottages for guest experts.

Agrarian Constructivism

The two experimental Zernosovkhoz Gigant and Verblyud stood out from other rural settlements realised in the 1920s and 1930s due to their constructivist design, marking a clear break with traditional layouts and architecture made up of linear terraces and izbas.

Yet, the central settlement diluted constructivist architecture into traditional elements and building types. The school, the department store, the workers’ club and the dorm in Gigant (Fig. 12, a) resemble other buildings of the same type built in the industrial towns of URSS during the first Five Years Plan. The residential units instead were a simplified version of the houses found in linear Slavic villages (Fig. 12 b).

The dorm and the other collective apartment buildings designed by P.A. Golosov at Gigant and Verblyud (Fig. 17-18) featured the same volumetric composition enhanced by flat roofs with bower, just like the contemporary designs by Ilya Golosov for the industrial city of Ivanovo-Voznesensk in central Russia. During the implementation, however, pitched roofs replaced flat roofs.

Facing this “domestication of form” P. A. Golosov elaborated a “color plan” of the facades that exalted their abstract and constructivist composition.

The adoption of pitched roofs, so common in Russian rural architecture, in the constructivist sovkhoz buildings was probably coping with the need to differentiate industrialised agricultural settlements from industrial towns.

The founding settlements of Gigant and Verbljud in 1928-29 were a real laboratory during the making of the First Five-Year Plan.

The theoretical debate on the socialist city began at the beginning of 1929 (Ceccarelli 1970) while the Five-Year Plan, as Eisenstein observed while concluding the filming of “The Old and the New”, was already producing a radical transformation of the territorial and urban planning with the two sovkhozes of the Salsk steppes now under construction. The two sovkhozes were thus able to offer a concrete example for the elaboration of theoretical models of socialist cities.[11]

  1. The landscape transformation of the urban workers’ terminal of mechanized agricultural production of the First Five-Year Plan.

Countryside reorganization with sovkhoz and kolkhoz systems from the First Five-Year Plan, with the mechanization of agriculture and the production of a surplus of agricultural products to feed a growing urban working population,[12] also changed the organization of the distribution of food products in the cities comparing with the years of the NEP. During the initial years of the First Five-years Plan, still in a frame of experimentation with architectural typologies that should have characterized the socialist city, two new types are developed in the agri-food sector: the kitchen-factory and the bread factory, the latter in a radically reformed version compared to the past (Fisenko, Volchok 2018).

The model of the First Five-Year Plan socialist city working-class district is illustrated in a propaganda manifesto by Aleksandr A. Deyneka entitled “Let's transform Moscow into the socialist model city of the proletarian state” of 1931. The slogan divides the space into three sectors: the area of production, the residential area, and the area of consumption, linked together by the transport network. The residential part illustrates an animated scene of the residential complexes gathered around the green space of the services.

The “socialist facilities” area is in the green space; it consists in park surrounded by buildings for culture, like workers' club and the school, closed by the large complex of the factory-kitchen in the background. Among the different examples of this type of socialist civic center, one of the most accomplished of the time is the complex of Stachek Square in Leningrad in the Kirovsky district (Kirikov, Shtiglic, 2008); in this discrict were located the famous “Putilovsky” plant producing the tractors of the final scene of “The Old and the New”.

Around the square, we find the Gorky Palace of Culture and the adjoining building of the “House of Technical Studies”, (Kirikov, Štiglic, 2008, pp. 94-103) on one side and the House of Cooperation on the opposite one. The latter includes a kitchen factory capable of distributing 84,000 meals a day, to which is attached a shopping center (universal’nij magazin), cafes, and restaurants.[13]

The large complex had the most sophisticated mechanical systems for meal production and distribution at that time.

The other protagonist of the new form of food distribution is the large bread factory, of which the most important example of the time is that of the factories built with the “system” of the engineer G. L. Marsakov, constituted by a compact cylindrical organism that uses ring conveyor belts for the different stages of production, distributed on different levels connected by belts and elevators.

Five plants in Moscow and two in Leningrad following the “Marsakov system” were built. Corresponding to the size they were able to produce from 30-60-100 and up to 180 tons of bread per day. 

Marsakov also designed a kitchen-factory based on the same system as circular conveyor belts.

Compared to the bread factory project of 1926 with which we opened the sequence in this type of plant, the mill, and the silos are now ideally located in Sovkhoz agro-industrial complex. In this new complex, the vertical landmark of the silo has disappeared and appears otherwise as a distinctive landmark of the reformed agrarian landscape. The other element that disappeared from the urban landscape is the wholesale market replaced by complexes of the type of the Leningrad “House of Cooperation”.

Concluding note

In presenting these projects as a whole as an architectural section between city and countryside in the USSR of the 20s and 30s, we tried to highlight the extremes of architectural research that imagined, on the one hand, the construction of an articulated system with typological specifications identified at all scales, and on the other tried to picture a specific expressive of modern rural architecture.

With the Socialist realism in art and architecture, after 1933, the avantgarde project for the socialist countryside and for the socialist city in the USSR, had been forcibly abandoned.

At this juncture, reinterpretation, and reproduction (in the worst case), of the Slavic village's traditional models of architecture became the only admitted research address in the countryside.

This phenomenon is evident in the soviet literature dedicated to countryside architecture from the second half of the 30s until the Khrushchev Thaw.

In this context, the ideal architectural section that linked the city and countryside in the avant-garde project was divided into two different sheets: “vernacular” became the term epitomising countryside architecture, and “engineering” the term epitomising the urban food distribution facilities.


Notes

[1] A Russian production of the “Fordson” model (Cohen, 2020).

[2] The Komsomol was the Soviet communist youth organization.

[3] The two architects built in 1929 the famous building of the Moscow Planetarium, one of the icons of architectural constructivism.

[4] In the Soviet system, food products were collected in warehouses (ovashchaya basa) that provided for distribution to state food stores. The area of the historic Balotny Market was partly transformed into a park, and in the area of the Spirits Market the "House on the Riverfront" was built, the large residential complex intended for the cadres of the Soviet state, built by B. Iofan in 1929-31.

[5] Zernotrest: State Association of Soviet Grain Farms, existed from 1928 to 1931.

[6] Pantelemon Aleksandrovich Golosov (1882 – 1945), brother of better-known Ilya, also member of the OSA.

[7] The actual settlement differs in the disposition of collective residential buildings.

[8] An agronomist and member of the Communist Party USA, in the early 1920s Harold M. Ware (1889–1935) worked in the Soviet Union, in Perm in the Urals. In 1926-1928, he organized the Russian Reconstruction Farms, a joint Soviet-American venture supporting training and experimental farms. Ware was also plenipotentiary representative in the USSR of major American producers of agricultural machinery. Moving back to USA in 1932, Ware became a Soviet agent but died in a car accident in 1935 (Carr and Davis, 1969; Harris, 1986; Fitzgerald, 2003; Nikulin, 2010).

[9] Today «Azov-Black Sea State Agro-engineering Academy of Sciences» (Taranov and Zaydiner, 2012: 7).

[10] Vasilij I. Eramishancev (1875-1958), in 1927 worked in the Supreme Council of the National Economy and was engaged in the design of workers' settlements for Zernotrest in North Caucasus and Kazakstan. See: Kazus’, 2009: 189, 488; Eramishancev,1929: 782-785; Eramishancev, 1930: 11-13

[11] We have developed a detailed reconstruction on this aspect in a contribution in printing progress entitled "Old and New. Delving into the origins of collectivization" (Meriggi, 2022).

[12] The model of economic development set by the Five-Year Planning aimed, as well known, to accelerate the industrialization of the country. In general, the strengthening of agricultural production was functional to produce a surplus of foodstuffs intended to feed the working population in the industrial cities, composed of former peasants released from rural work thanks to mechanization. See Baransky 1956.

[13]By A. K. Barutčev, I. A. Gil'ter, I. A. Meerzon and Ja. O. Rubančik, of 1929-1931, authors in the same years of other factories-kitchen in the main working-class neighborhoods of Leningrad. See: iidem, 1933; Kirikov, Štiglic, 2008, pp. 104-108.

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