Newsreel of daily life in Zaryadye in 1934, from the newsreel "Moscow in the past and present"
In April 2018, an architectural studio led by Ivan Zholtovsky was established in Moscow to set out a modern course of urban development in the capital of the “first proletarian state”. In 1920, a promising plan for the redevelopment of Moscow’s central district was published by Alexey Shchusev. The plan combined the concept museum-ifying the most estimable historical buildings with the popular idea of creating a garden city. The plan set out to preserve the city’s historical structure — Shchusev’s vision preserved the capital city as it was in the 17th century before Peter the Great’s reign. The plan incorporated the existing radial network of streets without a radical break in historic planning. Shchusev’s city plan limited the heights of building in the center and outskirts. According to Shchusev’s plan, the Kremlin would become a historical and cultural museum and there would be no new construction on the premises. The two sides of the Moscow river would be linked by several new bridges. The project proposed demolishing a large portion of the cheap construction from Zaryadye in the 19th century and erecting new buildings. The Kitay Gorod wall and the most treasured historical buildings and architectural monuments would be fully preserved. In his article Moscow of the Future, published in the magazine Krasnaya Niva in 1924, Shchusev presented his vision of Zaryadye in 1950 to include “American-style buildings with elevators and moving walkways connected by skyways. Moscow’s forcible industrial potential has long been considered a foreign market.”
The first master Soviet city plan — although it didn’t become an official decree — greatly shaped the development of Moscow.
Zaryadye in the 1920s: Site for urban planning competitions
In its first fifteen years, the new capital of Soviet Russia developed without any major invasions or breaks in the existing urban landscape. Everyday small-time trade and handicraft in Zaryadye under the New Economic Policy (NEP) differed very little from prerevolutionary times, but the district was destined for a radical transformation in the new era.
In 1925, the Moscow Architectural Society and the All-Union Textile Association held a competition to design a 10-story office building for the House of the Textiles. The project was allotted a plot of land in the westernmost part of Zaryadye (the area located near Varvarka, Moskvoretskaya, and Zaryadevsky streets. The project was led by renowned architects Moisei Ginzburg, Ilya Golosov, and Nikolay Ladovsky. The front face of the building was supposed to look out onto Red Square. The project never came to a culmination, the same site was submitted for the next architectural competition.
In the 1920s, the Supreme Council of National Economy, which oversaw all manufacturing and industry across the USSR, moved into one of the largest pre-revolutionary office centers, Delovoy Dvor (in Russian, Business Courtyard) on Varvarka Square (today, this is house number 2/3 on Slavyanskaya Square). But the sprawling department that was overseeing the forced industrialization of the country needed a new building. The first design competition for the new building was held at the end of the 1920s. Land in the western part of Zaryadye was selected as a construction site. According to the contest specifications, the height of the building was limited to 9 floors. In the 1920s, considering the level of technological advancement, this was practically a skyscraper. The architects were given a relatively practical task of creating the necessary office space and administrative offices. Initially, the architects discussed how to imbue the achievements and greatness of the Soviet Union into the building, but in the end, these themes were not incorporated.
All seven of the designs submitted for the “House of Manufacturing” office building embodied the modern avant-garde style. Architect Ivan Leonidov submitted a visionary project proposal which anticipated many amenities of the modern office.
an office layout to improve workers’ productivity as well as physical health.
Leonidov despised corridors and connected rooms, instead preferring a large internal space with greenery and water. The tall and open glass style only became popular 15 or 20 years after Leonidov’s proposal, avant-garde architectural researcher Selim Omarovich Khan-Magomedov noted.
Leonidov’s project was described by critics as “eclectic” and as “pushing a Constructivist set of aesthetic /local/templates/.default/zaryadyebeta_magazine/history/en/build/images such as circles, dots and zigzags: it was pure architectural idealism and shiftlessness”. Needless to say, his design was pulled from the competition, and this moment marked the start of an open persecution against Ivan Leonidov.
Neither the Supreme Council of National Economy nor the House of Manufacturing projects in Zaryadye even made it to the construction stage, and the Supreme Council itself ceased to exist. It was replaced by the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom) in 1932, which was a much larger industrial government apparatus that was responsible not only for manufacturing, but also mining and defense goods. The department was headed by Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a close friend and ally of Stalin during the revolutionary struggle. His first deputy was longtime Bolshevik Georgy Pyatakov. The new Commissariat continued to occupy its pre-revolutionary office in Delovoy Dvor.
The Narkomtiazhprom Building: First design contest in 1934
At the end of 1933, according to official documents from the USSR Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), the Narkomtiazhprom leadership, under the direction of Georgy Pyatakov, got permission from the Sovnarkom to construct a new building for the Narkomtiazhprom and its affiliated offices. The decree was issued by Sovnarkom for allocation of funds and construction, which was scheduled to begin in 1934. One of the first construction sites considered was in Zaryadye, but in the end, land near the upper trading stalls, near the modern-day shopping center GUM, was selected.
The parameters for the new architectural design contest required more than just designing a modern and comfortable administration building.
a project that incorporated motifs of the country’s accelerated industrialization.
It was within the framework of this particular architecture contest that Zaryadye was first imagined as a park space to be filled with recreational areas sloping down to the Moscow River. But in the end, the jury decided not to build the colossal NKTP structure on Red Square.
1935 General Plan and the second design contest in 1936
In 1935, the Soviet leadership had more or less approved the Moscow reconstruction General Plan, which defined the urban transformation of the Soviet Union capital city for decades to come. According to the plan, Red Square would no longer be an open space and would turn into a “boulevard of buildings”. The square was planned to double in size, and the Kitay Gorod area would no longer be home to small-scale construction. Instead, several colossal buildings of public importance would be built, one of which was the Narkomtiazhprom building.
In 1936, the second stage of the Narkomtiazhprom design contest began. The construction site was again moved back to Zaryadye. One contest after another yielded no results or concrete plans for the Narkomtiazhprom building to be built in Zaryadye. In September 1936, the bureaucratic instigator of the new building, Georgy Pyatakov, was dismissed from all his posts, expelled from the party, arrested, and executed in January 1937. In the same year, resources were scarce as the state directed them towards more important tasks in “building communism”. As a result, the construction of the ’House of Manufacturing’ was postponed and then later completely removed from the agenda. But this was only a small reprieve for future development in historic Zaryadye.
The second Sovnarkom building in 1940
On May 16, 1940, Sovnarkom issued decree No. 778 “On the construction of the second building of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars in Zaryadye.” Land in the quarter was set aside for the construction of the second building by the highest executive authority of the USSR. The first Sovnarkom building was constructed in the early 1930s on Okhotny Ryad, where today the State Duma stands.
The result — according to several contemporary architects and architectural historians — was the most dreary of all the competition submissions, a sad reflection of the state of Soviet architecture in its final “final struggle against formalism.” But at the time, proposals were evaluated by the commission on the basis of their “realistic approach to solving the problem.” The design competition was won by the Vesnin brothers. According to the project guidelines, the building would occupy almost 14 acres, corresponding to the present-day size of Zaryadye Park. At the end of 1940, citizens of Zaryadye began to be resettled and historic buildings on Mokrinsky, Ershov, and Zaryadevsky streets were demolished to clear space for the construction site. All the historic buildings of Zaryadye were slated to be torn down, but the war halted construction.
