ABSTRACT
THE METRO METROES: SHAPING SOVIET POST-WAR SUBJECTIVITIES IN THE
LENINGRAD UNDERGROUND
by James Allen Nealy, Jr.
The thesis explores the relationship between the spatial relations of the first line of the Leningrad
Metro system, completed in 1955, and subjectivity in the post-war Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. Soviet subways were not simply mechanisms by which one travelled; often referred
to as “underground palaces,” these facilities featured art and architecture that informed
passengers about the history, and the future, of the Soviet Union. Thus, the metro offers a
glimpse of how the USSR conceived of itself and its position along the dialectical path to
communism. I argue that the messages in the underground’s walls, and the memoirs of the
workers who constructed them, suggest that many of the reforms often associated with Nikita
Khrushchev’s Thaw period were actually well under way during Iosif Stalin’s lifetime.
THE METRO METROES: SHAPING SOVIET POST-WAR SUBJECTIVIES IN THE
LENINGRAD UNDERGROUND
A Thesis
Submitted to the
Faculty of Miami University
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Department of History
by
James Allen Nealy, Jr.
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2014
Advisor________________________
(Dr. Stephen Norris)
Reader_________________________
(Dr. Robert Thurston)
Reader_________________________
(Dr. Margaret Ziolkowski)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………… 1
CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………………10
CHAPTER TWO……...…………………………………………………………………………35
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………….56
APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………………...59
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………….60
ii
For the industrial workers of the worldabove all my grandfather, Edwin Earl McGee, and my father, James Allen Nealy, Sr.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, I would like to thank my wife, Phuong Nguyen, for tolerating my shock-work. I would also
like to thank Dr. Stephen Norris for his mentorship since I arrived in Oxford two years ago; Dr.
Robert Thurston for many enlightening and insightful conversations; Dr. Margaret Ziolkowski
for helping me dramatically improve my ability to read and translate Russian; and finally, Dr.
Karen Dawisha and the Havighurst Center for Post-Soviet Studies for helping me to spend time
in St. Petersburg, Russia in September 2013.
I would also like to thank Ivan Mikhailovich Grek, Tatiana Vladimirovna Kireenok, Natalia
Petrovna Grek, Petr Kirrilovich Grek, Antonina Petrovna Grek, and Vladimir Grigorievich
Ivanov.
iv
Introduction
In November 1955, the Soviet Union celebrated the opening of the first line of its second
underground transport system, the V.I. Lenin Leningrad Metropoliten.1 Similar to its “brother
metro” in Moscow, which opened in 1935, the Leningrad Metro stations featured elaborate
architecture and art that often elicited comparison to “palaces.”2 In addition to providing
aesthetically pleasing environments for its passengers, these characteristics also offered lessons
in socialism, inculcating passengers with the values and priorities of Soviet Communism. But the
USSR had changed considerably between the interwar period and the post-war era, and the
messages in the walls of the underground differed accordingly. Whereas the Moscow system
reflected the interwar Stalinist commitment to portraying Soviet Communism’s radiant future
(svetloe budushchee), the first line of the Leningrad Metro focused on the story of the polity’s
theretofore development, what might be referred to as the “consolidation of Stalinist gains,” and
the mythologizing of the USSR’s own historical trajectory.
The Leningrad Metro stations venerated Russo-Soviet history by celebrating its art,
domestic progress, and military triumphs, perhaps envisaging a relaxing of tensions and an
emphasis on domestic issues. This view challenges traditional periodization of Soviet history that
tends to see Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw (ottepel’) as a liberal departure from Late Stalinism.3
Simply put, the art and architecture in the Leningrad underground space suggests that, in many
ways, the path to relative liberalization, particularly in the form of a relaxation of pressures on
workers, was laid in Leningrad, during Iosif Stalin’s lifetime, under his nose though it may have
1
“Leningradskii Metropoliten Vstupil imeni V.I. Lenina v Stroi,” Leningradskaia Pravda, November 16, 1955, 1.
For “brother metro” see K.A. Kuznetsov, “Metrostroevtsy Idut Vpered,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I.
Lenina, (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956), 22.
3
In some ways, this work builds on Stephen V. Bittner’s The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and
Memory in Moscow’s Arbat, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), especially pp 8-9. With regard to
“liberalization” see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 404-407; Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev: A Biography, trans. Brian Pearce,
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984); Pia Koivunen, “The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating a New,
Peaceful Image of the Soviet Union,” in Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev, Melanie Ilic and Jeremy
Smith (eds.), (New York: Routledge, 2009), 48-49; Donald Filtzer, The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinization and the
Limits of Reform in the USSR, (London: Macmillan, 1993) and Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. The
Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Product Relations, 1953-1964, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992). For Stalinist totalitarianism see Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and PostStalin Change: Revised Edition, (New York: WW Norton, 1972).
2
1
been, and at least some of the characteristics often associated with the Thaw were in fact rooted
in the Late Stalin period.4
First, the metro improved people’s daily lives by dramatically increasing their mobility
throughout Leningrad, allowing for a more convenient commute to and from work, and
providing them with easy access to the city’s cultural center. Second, by encouraging the metro’s
passengers to consider the stations’ historical messages, architects and city-planners
foreshadowed a cultural “breathing spell” from the breakneck pace of industrialization,
militarization, warfare, and fixation on the future that had characterized the early Soviet epoch.
Whether this development was a response to, or an endorsement of, post-war demands for a
better life, its genesis occurred before Stalin’s death.5 Finally, artists adorned subterranean
stations with images of Vladimir Lenin and dedications to the October Revolution, sometimes
with nary a mention of Stalin, suggesting that post-war re-Leninization, typically associated with
de-Stalinization, was an important part of public discourse in the Late Stalinist period.6
But the Leningrad underground served another ceremonial function. Both termini of the
first line, Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia and Avtovo, rest upon reclaimed spaces once controlled by the
vanquished foes of Soviet Communism, tsarism in the case of the former, and Nazism in the
latter. The corresponding underground spaces below these hubs are dedicated to the memory and
cultural legacy of these victories. Thus, the first line of the Leningrad Metro is not merely a
series of “palaces” or homage to Russo-Soviet cultural heroes and history; it is the culmination
of a gathering of Bolshevik lands, and a monument to the two wars that shaped the Soviet
century.
Michel Foucault once described the train as “an extraordinary bundle of relations because
it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from
4
Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk have suggested that some reforms were considered in the political apparatus
but were frustrated by Stalin’s presence in Cold Peace Stalin and the Ruling Circle, 1945-1953, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 61-62, 166-167. Anna Krylova has argued that it would be unwise to assume that Soviet
political thought was necessarily bifurcated between “pro-Stalin” and “anti-Stalin” in “The Tenacious Liberal Self in
Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 1 No. 1 (Winter 2000), 119-146.
5
Joon-Seo Song, “The Legacy of World War II on the Stalinist Home Front: Magnitogorsk, 1941-1953,” (PhD
dissertation: East Lansing: Michigan St. University, 2007), 195; Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes,
Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957, (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998), 59, 84.
6
For “return to Leninism” see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, (New York: WW Norton,
2003), 272; Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After
Stalin, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 83; Helene Carlbäck, “Lone Mothers and Fatherless Children:
Public Discourse on Marriage and Family Law,” in Soviet State and Society, 94.
2
one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by.”7 By virtue of its inherent
qualities, the metro’s form simultaneously complicates and simplifies Foucault’s observations.
On the one hand, the underground adds yet another dimension to the relationships between
passenger, vehicle, and space by serving as a constructed space, complete with its own artistic
and architectural “bundle of relations,” to which one must go for the purposes of accessing a
commuter train and from which one departs after having done so. On the other hand, a metro’s
space is absolute and rigidly defined. The underground’s borders are anything but imagined;
despite architects’ best efforts to create structures which provide the illusion of cohesion with the
outside world, the metro’s ceiling is very real. Thus, as Henri Lefebvre might say, it is subways
and trains with their tunnels, viaducts, and tracks that represent “activity in space” that “is
restricted by that space,” par excellence.8 The history of public transportation, in this case the
Leningrad Metro, would therefore seem ideal for exploring Foucault’s “bundles.”9
The construction of the Leningrad Metro provides a prism through which numerous
themes may be explored. The building project necessarily complicates conventional
chronometry. Though plans for the subway’s construction were approved in the late-1930s, they
were not completed until well after Stalin’s death; ergo, while the building of the Leningrad
Metro was a Stalinist post-war scheme, it was not a re-construction project. Furthermore, the first
line’s completion was celebrated eleven days after Khrushchev publicly criticized excesses in
architectural design and construction, and just months before his “Secret Speech” at the
Twentieth Party Congress.10 Therefore, the project also provides a view of the production of
7
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics Vol 16, No 1 (Spring, 1986), 23-24.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
1991), 143.
9
Thus far, transportation remains a rather understudied topic in the history of the Soviet Union. In Cars for
Comrades (Ithaca, 2011), among the first forays into the “life of the Soviet automobile,” Lewis H. Siegelbaum notes
the dearth of scholarship on two forms of vehicles, motorcycles and tanks, of particular significance in the history of
the former USSR. Furthermore, the history of the Soviet airplane has, so far, been largely dominated by
examinations of the vehicle’s military functions (Scott Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the
Fate of Modern Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006 and "Icarus, East: The Symbolic Contexts of
Russian Flight,” The Slavic and East European Journal Vol. 49 No. 1 (2005); Jay Bergman, "Valerii Chkalov:
Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man".Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 33 No. 1 (January 1998); John Buckley, Air
Power in the Age of Total War. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Richard Overy, The Air War, 19391945, (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005)).
10
Nikita Khurshchev, Postanovlenie Tsentral’nogo Komiteta KPCC i Soveta Ministrov SSSR 4 Noyabria 1955 g.
“Ob Ustranenii Izlishestv v Proektrovanii i Stroitel’stve,” in KPCC v Rezolyutsiiakh i Resheniiakh c”ezdov,
konferencii i plenumov TsK chast’ 4 izdanie sed’moe, (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi
Literatury, 1960), 112-122.
8
3
post-war Soviet space. The metro’s construction is additionally complicated due to its location in
Leningrad, a space of great symbolic importance both to Russian and Bolshevik cultural
identities.
If during the Soviet period the extravagant Moscow Metro overshadowed its sibling in
Leningrad, the same can certainly be said about the treatment of the two projects in Western
historiography, where the former has been the topic of some scholarly investigation, and the
latter languishes in relative obscurity.11 Though the literature that examines the Moscow Metro
has tended to remain divided between explorations of the sociopolitical nuances of the
construction and studies of the propagandizing effects of the system’s architecture, both
approaches suggest that the underground served multiple purposes, only one of which was
transportation.
Sheila Fitzpatrick once remarked that the “pervasiveness of the state” in the Soviet
interwar era makes writing a “bottom-up” history of the period problematic, if not impossible.12
Similarly, the architectural features of the Moscow underground are an imposing and seductive
force that demands attention even from those who expressly intend to avoid them altogether.13
The first scholarly exploration of the Moscow Metro in the English language, William Wolf’s
“Russia’s Revolutionary Underground” offers a history of the labor and political process of the
metro’s construction. For Wolf, the Metro system provided the Stalinist leadership with an
example of the superiority of Soviet socialism over capitalism by virtue of its lavishness and the
speed with which it was constructed.14 His focus on labor and politics notwithstanding, Wolf
concludes that the decorative elements of the project gave it an iconographic quality that
provided evidence of the future glories of Soviet Communism.15
11
Karen Kettering, “An Introduction to the Design of the Moscow Metro in the Stalin Period: “The Happiness of
Life Underground.” Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000), 2-20; Jane Friedman,
“Soviet Mastery of the Skies at the Mayakovsky Metro Station,” Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 7, No. 2
(Spring-Summer 2000), 48- 64; Mike O’Mahony, “Archaeological Fantasies: Constructing History on the Moscow
Metro,” Foreign Language Review, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Jan. 2003), 138-150.
12
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
13
William Wolf, “Russia’s Revolutionary Underground: The Construction of the Moscow Subway, 1931-1935,”
(PhD dissertation: The Ohio State University, 1994), 2.
14
Wolf, “Russia’s Revolutionary Underground,” 1, 3-4.
15
Wolf, “Russia’s Revolutionary Underground,” 1.
4
Andrew Jenks, meanwhile, has placed these iconographic qualities at the center of his
research. Jenks’ “A Metro on the Mount” provides an insightful look at how the Stalinist
leadership, through an intricate system of architecture, images, and technologies, used the
USSR’s first underground system to remake Moscow, the workers who produced it, and the
citizens who utilized its services.16 For Jenks, the metro was an “exemplar of Soviet
technological display” that infused its passengers with the “ethos of Stalinist civilization” and its
mythology.17 In the depths of the underground, the Moscow Metro served the function of a
school that would aid in the development of the New Soviet Man.18
The implications of Jenks’ argument are significant. Among the more developed threads
in recent historiography of the USSR is the debate over subjectivity during the Stalinist epoch.
And while this scholarship has certainly brought new and innovative arguments to the fore, it has
tended to privilege textual “laboratories of the soul” over spatial and vocational variables,
sometimes ignoring the latter two considerations altogether.19 Though he does not make the
connection explicitly, Jenks harks back to one of the foundational tenets of Bolshevism- that the
advancement of culture, technology, and work were each part and parcel of the cumulative,
grandiose dialectical process that would lead to the elimination of Russian “backwardness.”
Much of this advancement, from the doldrums of backwardness to the glories of the
radiant future, was predicated on a desired shift in peoples’, but especially industrial workers’,
mentalities, from a loose collection of individuals that composed a class an sich, existing but not
yet conscious of itself, to a class fuer sich, for itself and for its interests.20 But mentality, or
subjectivity, was only part of the equation. Of at least equal importance was the formation of a
competent and skilled labor force. Lenin’s statement that electrification would “enlighten”
Russia was therefore a double entendre.21 As the primary agent of progress in all facets of
society in the Soviet Republic, it was thus the Bolshevik Party’s responsibility, Lenin wrote, to
16
Andrew Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization,” Technology and
Culture Vol. 41 No. 4 (2000), 697-724.
17
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 699.
18
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 697.
19
For “laboratories of the soul” see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 53-114. Two obvious exemptions from this trend are works by the cofounders of the subjectivity debate: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995) and David L. Hoffman’s Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow,
1929-1941, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
20
Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Second Edition), ed. by David McLellan, (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 231.
21
V.I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 42, (Moskva: Gosizdat Politicheskoi Litaratury, 1970), 159.
5
“realize this change” (osoznat’ etot perelom) and to “stand at the head of the exhausted people”
and “lead them along the true path, along the path of labor discipline.” Russia, Lenin said, must
“learn to work.”22
But processes are, by definition, dynamic. As Lewis H. Siegelbaum has noted, the Soviet
leadership’s goal to improve labor production, as well as culture, vis-à-vis their capitalist
counterparts did not end after the Great Patriotic War, or even after Stalin’s death in 1953.23 And
as recent work has shown, the Soviet approach to managing social evolution changed
considerably throughout its seventy-four year existence.24 Ultimately, Jenks’ work suggests that
one way to explore how the administration of this growth was modified may be through
examining messages encoded in the art and architecture of Soviet spaces.
The few works on the Leningrad Metro have tended to focus almost entirely on the
propagandistic elements of the edifice’s design.25 For example, Karen L. Kettering has observed
that the architects of the Leningrad underground, like those who worked on the subway in
Moscow, intended to create a spacious and elaborate structure that fostered “feelings of joy and
happiness.”26 Other scholars have complemented this continuum thesis. W. Bruce Lincoln once
described the Leningrad Metro as a luxurious “People’s Palace” which allowed “every citizen”
22
V.I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 36, (Moskva: Gosizdat Politicheskoi Literatury, 1962), 189, 201.
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2.
24
Julianne Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, (London and New
York: Routledge, 2006); Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the
Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cold War, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Polly Jones,
ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
25
For their part, political scientists, economists, and geographers have offered significant contributions to the study
of the Leningrad Metro and the development of Soviet transportation in general. Holland Hunter’s Soviet
Transportation Policy (Cambridge, 1957) has suggested that Marxist theory, particularly the disdain for uneven
economic development, held considerable influence on the development of Soviet infrastructure, a notion supported
by J.N. Westwood’s “Transport” in The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945, ed. R.W. Davies,
Mark Harrison, and S.G. Wheatcroft, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 158-181). Martin Crouch,
however, has suggested that this attention to theory amounted to little; for him, the twenty year gap between the
completion of the Moscow and Leningrad subways was a direct product of an “uneven pattern of development that
prevailed under Stalin as in the nineteenth century” (“Problems of Soviet Urban Transport,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 31,
No. 2 (April 1979), 231-256). Crouch’s thesis has been supported by Denis J.B. Shaw who has argued the Soviet
Union’s inability to correct Leningrad’s issues with uneven development both placed a great deal of importance on
the services offered by the city’s metro system, as well as created problems with overcrowding (Denis J.B. Shaw,
“Planning Leningrad,” Geographical Review, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), 1983).
26
Kettering, “An Introduction to the Design of the Moscow Metro in the Stalin Period,” 8.
23
6
to experience the life of a “prince or princess of the future,” remarks that certainly resemble
descriptions of the Moscow underground.27
More recently, two scholars, Karen Ohlrogge and Julia Bekman Chadaga, have posited,
in accordance with Jenks, that the architectural approach to the construction of Soviet metro
systems sought to serve both a pragmatic purpose, the transportation of people, and a political
agenda, including the suggestion of a radiant Soviet future, conveyed through sculptures and
art.28 Where their arguments diverge, however, is in their interpretation of the content forged to
create Soviet identity. For Ohlrogge, the adornment of the metro with symbols, such as the sickle
and hammer, signaled the triumph of the Soviet era over St. Petersburg’s imperial past.29 This
argument challenges an entire faction of modern historiography that has highlighted a perceived
Russification of Soviet imagery and culture which began in the 1930s and intensified after the
defeat of Nazi Germany.30 For Ohlrogge, the initial design of the stations of the Leningrad Metro
suggests a prevailing commitment to the promotion of socialist ideology that challenges the
claims made by those who have supported the Russification thesis.31 Chadaga, meanwhile,
buttresses the notion of Russification, without expressly saying so, by suggesting that the transfer
of raw materials, from the periphery to the center, made the metro a “microcosm of imperial
spaces.”32 Though both Ohlrogge and Chadaga acknowledge the metro architects’ stated goal to
27
W. Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, (New York: Basic Books,
2000), 316- 317. For comparisons to “palaces” see V.S. Sorokin, “Samyi Bystri, Samyi Udobnyi” in Gorodskoe
Khoziaistvo i Stroitel’stvo Leningrada za 50 let, eds. Zavarukhin, Iu., and R.S. Zakasov, (Leningrad: Lenizdat,
1967), 237.
28
Karen Ohlrogge, “Stalins letzte Kathedralen: Die älteste Metrotrasse als Erinerrungsraum,” in Sankt Petersburg:
Schauplätze einer Stadtgeschichte, eds. Karl Schlögel, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, and Markus Ackeret, (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus, 2007), 235; Julia Bekman Chadaga, “From Lenin’s Tomb to Avtovo Station,” in Rites of Place:
Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds. Julie Buckner and Emily D. Johnson, (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2013), 170.
29
Ohlrogge, “Stalins letzte Kathedralen,” 228-230, 232.
30
Ohlrogge, “Stalins letzte Kathedralen,” 235, 237. For scholarship on the Russification of the post-war Soviet
Union see Steve Maddox, “Healing the Wounds: Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of Leningrad’s
Imperial Heritage, 1941-1950,” (PhD. Dissertation: University of Toronto, 2008); David Brandenberger and Kevin
M.F. Platt, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison, WI.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the
Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002);
Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
31
Ohlrogge, “Stalins letzte Kathedralen,” 238. Though Ohlrogge acknowledges the motifs dedicated to inherently
Russian themes- such as Aleksandr Pushkin, she does not indicate that this is a result of any sort of privileging of
Russian ethnicity or culture (238-239). Furthermore, it is worth questioning whether or not “Soviet Socialist” and
“Russian” are mutually exclusive categories. Ohlrogge does not comment on this matter.
32
Chadaga, “From Lenin’s Tomb to Avtovo Station,” 170.
7
honor important historical events in Leningrad’s history, they nonetheless argue that the system
of constructed spaces, like its predecessor in Moscow, predicted the inevitability of the svetloe
budushchee. Looking back in time while foreshadowing the future, Ohlrogge and Chadaga see a
“Janus-faced” message in the art and architecture of the first line of the Leningrad Metro.
Due to the nuances of the Leningrad underground’s form, it may be appropriate to adopt
an approach that, while accounting for a multitude of relationships, is particularly suitable for
analyzing a “bundle of relations” between spaces, metro stations, and subjects, the metro’s
passengers. One methodology that lends itself to accomplishing such a task derives from the
work of Martin Heidegger, whose fourfold offers a totalizing conception of space that
encapsulates consideration for multiple relationships.33 Explicated in his “Building Dwelling
Thinking,” the fourfold is built upon the notion of human dwelling, a notion integral to the
human condition that is akin to being in a familiar, as opposed to a “foreign,” place.”34 One’s
dwelling-space reveals itself as such when it exhibits the natural elements of the earth and the
sky, as well as the cultural components Heidegger calls the mortals, or human beings, and the
immortals, who are the heroes and heritages of a given culture.35 These elements, however, are
not divulged independently of one another; each component is an essential attribute of the same
“one”- what Heidegger calls the “primal oneness of the four.”36
In order for the fourfold to be present, its essence must be gathered by “the thing.”
Heidegger offers several examples of objects capable of gathering; the most useful for the
purposes of the argument that follows are the highway bridge and the jug. Due to its position
within a rising and falling system of avenues which “leads” mortals from one space to another,
always “before” a peoples’ divinities, the highway, Heidegger explains, provides a “location,”
33
The utilization of the fourfold to examine cities has thus far been almost entirely unique to the field of
environmental geography, which has utilized it to consider the natural city. For example, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
and Stephen Bede Scharper, eds., The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment, (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2011); Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Safeguarding Our Common Future
Rethinking Sustainable Development, (New York: SUNY Press, 2000). However, as Jeff Malpas has argued, what is
and is not “natural” is not readily apparent (Topology, 237 see full citation 32n ).
34
Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter,
(New York: Harper Colophone Books), 147-149; Julian Young, “The fourfold,” in Cambridge Companion to
Heidegger, ed. by Charles B. Guignon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 373, 380. The fourfold
concept is also discussed in other essays including “Language;” and “...Poetically Man Dwells,” both are included in
Poetry, Language, Thought.
35
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 147-149. This interpretation of the “divinities” or “gods” is supported
by Young in Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge, 2006); Damon A. Young in “Being Grateful for
Being: Being, Reverence, and Finitude,” Sophia, Vol. 44 No. 2 (October 2005), 39; and Jeff Malpas Heidegger’s
Topology: Being, Place, World, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 274.
36
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 147.
8
within which the oneness of the four can be examined.37 Although many fourfolds exist, their
common characteristics include the equal gathering of the material (earth and sky) and the
subject (mortal) before his or her cultural heritage (divinities) within a defined space (however
big or small).
It would be incorrect, Heidegger informs us, to conceive of space as something that
“faces” us, is forced upon us, or is experienced by us; rather, humanity is an essential component
of space’s formation and therefore the two cannot be separated.38 It is thus through building,
which produces the locations that grant space its “being,” such as a bridge or, as will later be
shown, a metro, whose vestibules, wagons, tracks, and stations conjunctively and independently
create “an extraordinary bundle of fourfolds” that exhibit the characteristics of both “the bridge,”
and “the jug,” where gathering may occur, that brings man closest to understanding space and its
genesis.39
The original Leningrad Metro stations qua Heideggerian locations held their own cultural
icons, shaped into the underground by mortals, before which the latter poured throughout tunnels
and across the city. As Heidegger might say, “the Metro metroes.” The most prevalent of historic
immortals depicted underground was Lenin, who is featured, in some way, in half of the first
line’s eight stations. But the people were also featured prominently, and their likenesses showed
themselves in a unique form of Russo-Soviet immortals in the underground space. Individual
stations, dedicated to the progressive social qualities of the theretofore Soviet experiment’s
history, workers, sailors, builders of technology, and the like, then portrayed these subjects in
and on bas-reliefs and sculptures, making cultural heroes out of the people themselves. The result
was a “bundle” that might confirm Nietzsche’s contention that even “the hands of the greatest
artist-thinkers” can only hope to produce images of themselves.40
37
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 150, 152. Young (Cambridge, 2006, 388) has challenged the notion
that a highway bridge might “thing.” This reading is not universal, however, as seen in Michael E Zimmerman, “The
End of Authentic Selfhood in the Postmodern Age?” in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds. Heidegger,
Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus Vol. 1, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 128.
Similarly, the pouring of wine during a celebratory event gathers grapes from the earth, grown under the sky,
consumed by mortals, in order to celebrate the divinities. (Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper Colophone Books), 169-171).
38
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 154.
39
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 156.
40
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 218.
9
Chapter 1: “A Journey Through the Fourfolds of the Leningrad Underground.”
Although the entirety of the first line of the Leningrad Metro was conceived of holistically,
architects of the individual stations were permitted some level of autonomy in the planning.41
The result is that, collectively, the first eight stations of the metro can be “read” like a history of
significant people and events in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution to the victory in
the Great Patriotic War.42 Designed to invoke feelings of relaxation, satisfaction, and ease, these
“cultural” spaces were, according to primary architect A.M. Sokolov, expressly intended to
“continue the tradition” of the Moscow subway’s design by highlighting the “ideological content
of our Soviet era.”43 Marshal Kliment Voroshilov confirmed this notion by remarking that the
metro and its architecture would have a “beneficial effect” on each passenger, who, by dwelling
within it, would “be inspired to become a better person, to behave as if in a gentlemanly
society.”44 Put another way, passengers’ cultural level would improve, and along with it, their
work. But “continuation” (prodolzhaia) is not synonymous with “mimicry,” and while the
Leningrad Metro did seek to politically educate its passengers, the messages it advanced were
quite different from those encoded in the walls of the Moscow Metro. The chapter that follows
will explore each of the eight individual stations of the first line of the Leningrad Metro, in order
to elucidate the evolution of the Soviet socio-cultural polity in the post-war and Late Stalinist
periods.
Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia
Station Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia, the northernmost station of the first (red) line of the
Leningrad Metro, stands at the heart of St. Petersburg in a city space, Square of the Uprising, that
was gradually Bolshevized throughout the Soviet period. Square of the Uprising, Znamenskaia
Square during the tsarist period, had been a vital locale for early twentieth century
revolutionaries, who viewed the entire space as a “sacred” one for the imperial regime.45 The
space, located at the conjoining of Nevskii Prospekt, which Gogol once called “the making of the
city,” and Ligovskii Prospekt, took on a sacredness for the revolutionaries too when, on February
41
F. Kozlov, “Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina,” Pravda, Nov. 11, 1955, 2.
Kozlov, “Leningradskii Metropoliten,” 2; Sorokin, “Samyi Bystri, Samyi Udobnyi,” 236-237; A.M. Sokolov,
“Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad: Lenizdat: 1956), 204.
43
A.M. Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po
stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture, 1957), 21.
44
“Vruchenie Ordena Lenina Lenmetrostroyu,” Leningradskaya Pravda, December 18, 1955, 1.
45
In order to avoid confusion, the station Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia will be referred to as such; the square by the same
name will be referred to as “Square of the Uprising.”
42
10
26, 1917, fifty people were shot and killed by a tsarist army regiment.46 Given the importance the
Bolsheviks placed on symbolism, the incorporation of this space must have been ceremonial for
Soviet leadership.47
Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia itself rests atop land once occupied by the Znamenskii Monastery,
demolished in 1940, and overlooks the space where, from 1909 until 1937, the “equine statue” of
Alexander III, among the favorite targets of the demonstrators during the February Revolution,
formerly stood.48 Across from the station is Moskovskii Vokzal, the terminus of the Moscow-St.
Petersburg Railway and a landmark of sorts in its own right; as Grigory Kaganov has observed
when examining nineteenth century depictions of the city’s landscape, it is this structure, then
named for Tsar Nicholas I, that most clearly allows for the differentiation between St. Petersburg
and “some provincial city.”49 Steven Maddox has recently asserted that, during the post-war
period, the Leningrad Communist Party leadership emphasized the protection of the history and
appearance of Leningrad by prioritizing the reconstruction of imperial-era monuments.50 The
CPSU’s renovation of Znamenskaia Square suggests that, in at least some cases, post-war city
planners did not shy away from creating utilitarian monuments of their own, sometimes where
imperial constructs once stood.
The gathering of Bolshevik lands had its limits in post-war Leningrad. As Jenks and Wolf
have argued, during the construction of the Moscow Metro, builders set out to fundamentally
change Moscow from “a city of medieval churches to a fitting symbol of world socialism;” the
46
Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999), 31-32, 37-38, 42; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, (New York:
Penguin Books, 1996), 312-313; E.N. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in
Petrograd, trans. Donald Raleigh, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 112, 125, 129-130, 183; Nikolai
Gogol, “Nevsky Prospekt,” in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol: Volume 1, ed. Leonard J. Kent, (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1985), 207; Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 30.
47
Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 70; Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian
Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945, (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2006).
48
Catriona Kelly, “Socialist Churches: Heritage Preservation and ‘Cultic Buildings’ in Leningrad, 1924-1940,”
Slavic Review Vol. 71 No. 4 (Winter 2012), 793; Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, trans. by
Antonina W. Bouis, (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 215-216; Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian
Revolution, 37; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian
Revolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, (New York:
Basic Books, 2001), 371 n1; Putevoditel’ Leningrad (1986), (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986), 126.
49
Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and the Verbal Arts, trans. Sidney Monas,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 129; Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, 138, 300.
50
Maddox “Healing the Wounds,” 3.
11
plan for Leningrad, however, differed altogether.51 As Maddox has pointed out, the preservation
of Leningrad’s aesthetic beauty was, in fact, paramount for architects in the post-war period.52
This was certainly true for the builders of the metro stations. According to Sokolov, planners
remained mindful of their responsibility to maintain the city’s “international reputation” and took
measures to ensure that none of the above ground edifices disrupted the “harmony” of the city’s
architectural atmosphere.53
The maintenance of the St. Petersburg aesthetic might have ramifications regarding how
the post-war USSR is viewed more generally. As Alexander Etkind has recently shown, the
Russian colonial experience was a unique one in that the colonizer colonized itself.54 One aspect
of this dialectical paradox was the process of Russification, which entailed reshaping places and
people into more Russian-like subjects. By virtue of its origins, St. Petersburg was often at the
center of this course of action. Built during Peter the Great’s reign in the early eighteenth century
to represent Russia’s place within the European continent, the St. Petersburg-PetrogradLeningrad space has always been a unique one for Russians.55 Whether this distinctiveness is a
positive or a negative trait tends to correspond with one’s view of Europeanness vis-à-vis
Russianness. What for Alexander Pushkin was a “window to the west” that “put Moscow in the
shade” was, for Fyodor Dostoevsky, an “abstract and intentional city” which, by virtue of its lack
of national characteristics, had nothing at all in common with authentic Russianness.56
Alexander III and Nicholas II tended to agree with Dostoevsky and, in trying to cope with
their plight as Russian autocrats in a European capital, tried to reshape the city to suit their own
tastes.57 Efforts to mutate the city notwithstanding, it is rarely debated that St. Petersburg has,
51
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 702; Wolf, “Russia’s Revolutionary Underground,” 8. See also Taubman,
Khrushchev, 90; O’Mahony, “Archaeological Fantasies,”141.
52
Maddox “Healing the Wounds,” 3.
53
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 21. According to Ohlrogge, the architects complemented Leningrad’s
architecture so effectively, in fact, that even its interior is befitting of the city-space, prompting her to compare the
lighting in Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia to that in a church, creating a feeling that “Lenin is always present” within (232).
54
Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, (London: Polity, 2011), 2, 251.
55
Katerina Clark, St. Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45.
56
Alexander Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” Translation and Literature Vol. 7 No. 1, trans. John Dewey,
(1998), 60; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Mirra Ginsburg, (New York: Bantam Books,
1992), 5; Volkov, St. Petersburg, 52-53.
57
Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the
Abdication of Nicholas II, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 290, 437 n14. As Wortman notes, twenty
“Russian style” churches were constructed in the city between 1881 and 1914.
12
architecturally at least, more in common with the West than with Russia’s Byzantine lineage.58
That the Leningrad Metro’s architects would take special measures to ensure the city’s European
stylings would not be compromised by the underground’s construction complicates the argument
put forward by some scholars that, in the post-war setting, the Communist Party had adopted its
own form of overt Russocentrism, a nuanced process meant to foster a “usable past” around
Russian history.59 At the very least it would seem to call into question the universality of its
application as well as the duration of its enforcement.60
Underground, Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia looks back on the October Revolution, prominently
featuring the key events in the revolutionary life of the highest of Soviet immortals- Lenin.
Bronze sculptures adorn both sides of the tunnel, depicting the famous pillars of the triumphs of
Leninism.61 In order, the bas-reliefs display the cultural hero’s arrival at Finland Station; his
moments of reflection during the July Days; the apocryphal shot from the Aurora, an event that,
for Sokolov, “heralded a new era in the history of mankind;” and finally, the Bolshevik seizure
of power at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917.62 Frederick C. Corney
has recently asserted that Bolshevik myth-making was predicated on creating “multiple
possibilities” for citizens to view the October Revolution “as both a personal and historical
foundational event.” 63 Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia, with its careful depiction of the formative
58
Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 8-9.
David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin,
1927-1941, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 5.
60
For proponents of the USSR’s decision to move away from Socialism, however defined, and toward Russification
see Maddox “Healing the Wounds” (Toronto, 2008); Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 5; Nicholas
Timasheff The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: EP Dutton, 1946) and
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. by Max Eastman, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004). For
opponents see David L. Hoffman, “Was There a ‘Great Retreat’ from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture
Reconsidered,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 5 No. 4 (Fall 2004), 652; Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley, 2005). Two examples of the debate over the development of nationalism in Russia
include Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998),
which argues that Russian nationalism did not exist until the collapse of the USSR. In contrast to Hosking is
Norris’s A War of Images, which utilizes lubki to suggest that Russian nationhood existed at least as early as the
nineteenth century.
61
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 33-34; V.A. Garyugin, A.T. Denisov, V.I. Tuft, S.P. Shchukin, eds.,
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, (Liki Rossii: Sankt Peterburg, 1995), 61.
62
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 33. For different accounts of the events in October see Figes, A People’s
Tragedy, 484-500; Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd,
(Bloomington, 2007), 8-13; E.H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1,
(New York: WW Norton and Company, 1978), 98-101; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), 4-5.
63
Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004), 2.
59
13
moments of the revolution, would have offered one such opportunity for thousands of
Leningraders every day.
This portrayal of the revolution as a historical event is in stark contrast with the version
told at Ploshchad’ Revolutsii in Moscow. While the dramatic sculptures in Ploshchad’ Revolutsii
certainly reflect historical figures, sailors and tractor drivers for example, it would be incorrect to
describe them as icons of a static period.64 Positioned under arches, these figures are affixed in
crouched positions, almost imposing in their form, that betray the CPSU’s contemporary sense of
urgency. Furthermore, as Jenks has noted, Ploshchad’ Revolutsii includes depictions of a
traditional family, a group which would have been anathema before the mid-1930s.65 Moreover,
Mike O’Mahony has shown that the sculptures of revolutionary and partisan fighter appear aged
and haggard; by contrast, the depictions of students, families, and industrial workers appear
young.66 The inclusion of these figures, at least two of which are rightfully associated with the
equivocally called “Great Retreat” era, may have served to remind passengers that, in the late
1930s, the revolution had not yet been fulfilled and that its successes were concomitant with their
resiliency.
Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia, like Avtovo Station, discussed later in this chapter, is an important
part of a reconstitution of spatial relations in an area of Leningrad once dedicated to an enemy of
Bolshevism. Above ground, functional monuments to Bolshevism supplanted former imperialera structures, buttressing Ohlrogge’s argument that the aesthetic elements of the metro’s space
represent socialist victory over empire. But Late Stalinist architects did not have carte blanche to
completely redesign Leningrad. In fact, builders made concerted efforts to ensure that new
structures did not disturb the city’s European qualities, characteristics not generally associated
with Russianness, suggesting the limits of Russification. And given the fact that Ploshchad’
Vosstaniia connected the most densely populated region of Leningrad with the industrial region
near Avtovo, the station must have immediately and tangibly improved peoples’ lives by
minimizing travel time. This undermines the suggestion that Soviet leadership did not make
attempts to better the material lives of its citizens until the Khrushchev period. Underground, the
lessons on the station’s walls turn away from the “radiant future” promised in Moscow’s Metro
64
O’Mahony, “Arcaeological Fantasies,” 140.
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 711; Karen Kettering, “Sverdlov Square Metro Station: “The Friendship of the
Peoples” and the Stalin Constitution,” Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 7 No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000), 23-25;
Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 142.
66
O’Mahony, “Archaeological Fantasies,” 146-148.
65
14
and instead invoke the Bolshevik past, mythologizing the revolution’s trajectory and the
revolutionary life of its primary cultural hero, Lenin. This too would seem to foreshadow tactics
employed by the CPSU in the post-Stalin era, which sought legitimacy by drawing on its
Leninist origins.
Vladimirskaia
Originally, Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia was meant to connect directly with the Vitebsk
Railway Station at Pushkin Station. However, for technical reasons, it was determined that
another station, Vladimirskaia, was needed to serve as a link between Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia and
Pushkin Station. As a consequence of its unique role in the metro’s first line, Vladimir Station is
characterized by its smaller stature and its “understated simplicity.”67 Simple or not, the station
possesses an excellent example of a Late Stalinist era ode to Soviet nationalities in the form of a
large mosaic above the escalators in the ground hall.
Kettering has recently remarked that Moscow’s Kiev Station portrayed life for Soviet
national groups as so “joyful, spontaneous, and harmonious that it could be represented as a
dance.”68 In Vladimir Station, life in the national regions is depicted as one of plenty in a mosaic
that occupies the space over the station’s escalator shaft. Titled “Abundance” (Izobilie), the
artwork shows the myth of the development of collective farming in Central Asia, fraught with
Orientalist tropes that portray Asiatic and Caucasian peoples in ethnic costumes, delivering
wheat, furs, and produce.69 This depiction of Central Asians brought a glimpse, one that closely
resembles interwar depictions of the non-Slavic peoples, of Soviet ethnography to Leningraders,
perhaps providing a post-war extension of what Francine Hirsch has called the “virtual tourism”
of the 1930s.70
Stalin and nationalities policy are, for good reason, inextricably linked. And while it
would be a stretch to assert that the USSR had answered its national questions by the time of the
completion of the first line of the Leningrad Metro in 1955-1956, a framework was established
67
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 214-215. Sokolov’s position on the “simplicity” of Vladimirskaia relative to
the rest of the metro is expounded upon in E.S. Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii LeningradskogoPeterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002 gg: goy, sobymiya, lyudi, (Sfinks SPb Metronom: Sankt Peterburg, 2004),
36-37; and Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 62.
68
Kettering, “Svredlov Square Metro Station,” 36-37, 40-41.
69
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 215; Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 46. An image of the mosaic is
published in Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 63; Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), 273.
70
Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005), 188-189.
15
that would go without serious alteration until the collapse of the USSR in 1991; and even then
the Soviet era borders remained largely intact.71 “Izobilie” does not portray a radiant future of
plenty for the peoples of Central Asia. Instead, it depicts the past, however mythologized, in
which the region’s political organization was remade along national lines and its economy
altered via collectivization.72
Pushkinskaia Stantsiia
Pushkin Station, named for the poet Alexander Pushkin, is the only station along the first
line of the Leningrad Metro that is entirely devoted to an immortal from the Tsarist era.
Pushkin’s image underwent several changes in the Soviet period. Once deemed a “monarchist”
by the fledgling Soviet government and its supporters, Pushkin’s path to Soviet immortal began
by 1921, when the state allowed the organization of a series of readings that celebrated his life
and works.73 Thereafter, with the help of the Soviet leadership, the poet’s already substantial
reputation developed into something almost cult-like. In 1934, Maxim Gorky and Nikolai
Bukharin spoke of Pushkin’s genius at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress;74 in 1937, at the
Pushkin Jubilee in Moscow, Strastnaia Square was renamed for Pushkin;75 in 1950, Pushkin
Square in Moscow was “purified” when a church was removed and subsequently replaced by a
statue of Pushkin, affording the poet preeminence over “his” space;76 that same year, Andrei
Platonov published “Pushkin and Gorky,” an essay which declares that Lenin had been heir to
Pushkin’s cultural and intellectual legacy.77 Thus, while the Pushkin cult may have peaked in the
late 1930s, by the time the poet’s station opened in 1956, his renown was anything but waning.
Pushkinskaia Stantsiia, the last station on the line to open after serious problems with
quicksand delayed its fully operational status until April 30, 1956, is perhaps the most distinctive
71
Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 319; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the
Soviet Union, 1923-1939, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 461.
72
For collectivization of central Asia see Daniel Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central
Asia, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 325; Marianne Kamp and Russell Zanca, “Writing the History of
Collectivization in Uzbekistan: Oral Narratives,” (Seattle: The National Council for Eurasian and East European
Research, 2008), http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2008_818-08g_Kamp.pdf.
73
Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, 319; Clark, St. Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution, 155-161.
74
Maxim Gorky et al., Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), for Gorky, 59; for
Bukharin, 257-258.
75
Karl Schlögel, Moscow 1937, (London: Polity, 2012), 158-159.
76
Schlögel, Moscow 1937, 159; Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2011), 82.
77
Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 238.
16
of those along the first line.78 The architects of the station set out to create a mood that would suit
Pushkin’s “clear and concise style” of writing.79 The centerpiece of the station is the monument
to Pushkin, which stands in a “poet’s corner” near the entrance to the escalators; he is portrayed
seated on a bench, clutching flowers before a mural of Catherine Park in Tsarskoye Selo, the
town where he spent his adolescence.80 A bas-relief medallion hangs above the escalators,
featuring an image of the poet’s profile.81 The Pushkin Station, then, represents an “art for art’s
sake” milieu which is, save for the loosest of definitions, devoid of political or revolutionary
sentiment.
This type of station would have been impossible on the first line of the Moscow Metro, a
product of the Chernyshevskii school of thinking that declared art without a political purpose
useless.82 True to this form, the Soviet Union’s premier metro paid homage to poetry at
Maiakovskii Station, named for V. Maiakovskii, a futurist who attempted to create a proletarian
poetry unencumbered by bourgeois influence.83 In essence, Maiakovskii Station is a tribute in
name only. As Jane Friedman has observed, the station focuses on military defense and
aviation.84 Even the material, stainless steel, used for decor in the station was inspired by these
themes.85 In accordance with the tenets of Socialist Realism, a concept one scholar has
summarized as the “synthesis of the arts,” a description that brings to mind Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk, thirty-five mosaics, depicting mechanized farming, electrification, and
aviation, among other things, line the inside walls of the station.86
The Leningrad Metro’s tribute to poetry is markedly different. Perhaps Pushkin Station’s
purer form of art explains why it is common, even today, for visitors to place flowers at the feet
of their beloved immortal Pushkin. The apolitical motif was certainly embraced by other artists,
78
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 64-65.
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 214; Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii LeningradskogoPeterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002, 35-36.
80
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 214.
81
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 57.
82
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 705-707.
83
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 697 n1.
84
Friedman, “Soviet Mastery of the Skies at the Mayakovsky Metro Station,” 48.
85
Friedman, “Soviet Mastery of the Skies,” 51-52.
86
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 698, 712. For “a synthesis of the arts” quote see Friedman, “Soviet Mastery of
the Skies,” 53. For Socialist Realism see Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic
Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. by Charles Rougle, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Evgenii
Aleksandrovich Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007);
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1989).
79
17
who created similar pieces, dedicated to the station no less, devoid of all but political subtleties.
Vs. Azarov, for example, wrote a poem extolling the virtues of the station that perhaps best
exemplifies Pushkin’s position as an immortal underground:
Here, where the steel lines run
We meet with a dear friend
He was the same when we met in Pushkin
His image is gently kept in our hearts.
Thoughtful, clutching leaves in his hand
He is with us, he is very close to each of us
And behind his shoulder, Pushkin's shady
Garden, is reflected in the clean water,
And anyone who rushes into the busy life
Will stop here, at least for a moment, amused (by)
An unexpected encounter…
Hello my friend, from far away
To you we come from all sides
From the Baltic Station, from Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia
From the shops, schools, and decks of ships
And we bring sensitive consideration to you,
And our love for your poetry.87
True, one might detect a trace of industrialism in the phrases “where the steel lines run”
and “from the shops, schools, and decks of ships.” But these hints, if indeed that is what they are,
pale in comparison to the odes to the Moscow Metro produced just twenty years earlier, some of
which included stanzas such as:
Our wise Stalin,
And his disciple
Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich,
Have created many miracles for us,
Under the earth, thirty meters deep.
They’ve built such stations
And they’ve introduced street cars,
And put airplanes in the airWhen their engines start up,
They want to set out into space.88
87
88
Vs. Azarov in Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 65. See appendix for Russian transliteration.
“Pro lesnitsu-chudesnitsu,” Pravda, December 25, 1935, 4.
18
What is significant about this comparison is not the artistic stylings of the former or the
panegyric in the latter, but the focus of the respective authors. Azarov looks backward in time,
with admiration for the career and influence of an immortal who helped shape Russian language
and literature; the second poem focuses on the contemporary period of rapid industrialization and
a future of space exploration. If it is true that the Leningrad Metro told a history of the USSR
while the Moscow Metro depicted the svetloe budushchee, then these works might suggest that
these messages were clearly understood by passengers, or at least contemporary poets who
travelled on the first line.
Teknologicheskii Institut
The Dionysian nature of the Soviet twentieth century notwithstanding, scientific literacy
and technical prowess among the population had vastly improved by the time of Stalin’s death in
1953. Khrushchev recalled that, just twenty years before the Leningrad Metro was completed,
Soviet engineers and workers did not have even the “vaguest idea of what the job [metro
construction] would entail. We thought of a subway as something supernatural. I think it's
probably easier to contemplate space flights today than it was for us to contemplate the
construction of the Moscow Metro in the nineteen-thirties.”89 For the Moscow scheme, the
solution to the problems associated with the dearth of experienced personnel led project
managers to solicit assistance from the West.90 By the time the Leningrad Metro was built, the
USSR had no shortage of scientists and laborers with metro construction experience to draw
on.91 Workers and managers from the Moscow Metro were so influential in the construction that
the manager of the Lenmetrostroi, K.A. Kuznetsov, referred to the first Soviet subway as the
Leningrad underground’s “brother metro” (brat metropoliten).92 These relations occasionally
bore out in the artistic themes in respective stations, including Teknologicheskii Institut.
Whereas Pushkin Station’s design represents a departure from the Party’s dogmatic
separation of science and art, Station Technological Institute embodies it. Located adjacent to the
89
Taubman, Khrushchev, 94; Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little Brown & Company
1970), 64; quoted in Jenks, 700.
90
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 717. For Western firms in the Soviet Union see Anthony C. Sutton, Western
Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930-1945, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971).
91
Voroshilov, “Vruchenie Ordena Lenina Lenmetrostroyu,” 1; Kuznetsov, “Metrostroevtsy Idut Vpered,” 14.
92
Kuznetsov, “Metrostroevtsy Idut Vpered,” 22. Jenks has referred to Moscow as the USSR’s “Mother Metro”
(722).
19
former Leningrad Technical Institute, the station pays tribute to various important Russo-Soviet
immortals of science by emblazoning their profiles on bas-reliefs along its walls.93 Among the
twenty four scientists heralded underground are Ivan Michurin, a prominent botanist; Ivan
Pavlov, a psychologist; Alexander Karpinskii, a geologist; and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a
pioneer in astronautics.94 Between the bas reliefs are large laurel wreaths, academic symbols of
science, styled after similar emblems that formerly “adorned” (ukrasheno) an old portion of
Moscow State University.95 Originally, the central hall featured depictions of “great luminaries
of science” (velikikh korifeev nauki)- Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.96
As a part of the Soviet leadership’s determination to infuse science with politics and
politics with art, the three variables often coalesced in propaganda and architecture. As Jenks has
shown, science first made its appearance in the Moscow underground in the 1937-1938 lines.97
To assert that, in the Moscow Metro, scientists represent a progression is to advance something
of an ambiguity. In Jenks’ reading, the metro walls suggest that not only would science improve
the technological basis of society, but it would do so as a part of a new generation of Soviet
people, including athletes, students, and collective farmers. The inclusion of a more diverse
conglomeration of citizens on the walls of Teknologicheskii Institut represents a move away from
the 1935 line’s emphasis on only “soldier, sailor, worker, collective farmer” in the representation
of the Soviet- promised radiant future.98
The depictions of science and scientists in the station are not at all similar to their
counterparts in Moscow. Of those subjects memorialized in bronze medallions in Station
Technology Institute, just over one-third experienced the Soviet period for any length of time,
none were alive to see the Great Patriotic War, and all are depicted in their twilight years.
Whereas Jenks has suggested that the minutiae of the Moscow Metro depictions may be a tribute
to, or perhaps simply an acknowledgment of, the influx of young people into Soviet urban
93
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 6.
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 211; Sokolov, Stantsiia Leningradskogo Metre, 70.
95
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 211.
96
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 68; Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 34.
97
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 711.
98
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 711; Catherine Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future’: Responses of
Soviet Architecture,” Journal of Design History Vol. 20 No. 2 (1997), 137; Wolf, “Russia’s Revolutionary
Underground,” 16, 242; O’Mahony, “Archaeological Fantasies,” 148; Taubman, Khrushchev, 94; Kettering,
“Sverdlov Square Metro Station,” 30.
94
20
spaces, the depiction of older generations of scientists at Teknologicheskii Institut reads more
like recognitions of the accomplishments and contributions of the past.99
Some historians have suggested that the advancement of Russocentric images, like those
in Pushkin Station and Station Technology Institute, may have been merely a product of Stalinist
efforts to promote Russian nationalist sentiment. Often this narrative suggests that, after the
CPSU failed to develop a federation-wide Soviet identity, the leadership turned to the promotion
of a distinctly Russian form of nationalism in the 1930s, a campaign that carried over into the
post-Stalin period, in an effort to locate a digestible “usable past.”100 Without completely
rejecting the notion of Russification, it might also be true that the CPSU had little choice in the
matter. As Hegel once wrote, “In history, thinking is subordinate to the data of reality,”101 and
the reality was that the Soviet Union was comprised of territories that had been subject to
centuries of imperial rule which, despite its own host of problems, produced writers like Pushkin
and scientists like Tsiolkovsky. Thus, when the USSR told its own story in the Leningrad
underground, as well as elsewhere, what was usable was limited by what was available.
Furthermore, recognition of achievement under a capitalist system was not inherently
anti-Bolshevik. Lenin, ever the dialectician, had, after all, once remarked that advancement
“must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the
yoke of capitalist, landowner, and bureaucratic society.”102 From the beginning then, the USSR
conceived of itself as the benefactor of the entirety of human experience and knowledge,
including the tsarist period. In the mid-1950s, this socialist fatherland could count, warts and all,
the world’s first socialist revolution; a wildly successful literacy program; industrialization;
victory over Fascism; the rapid expansion of its sociopolitical system; and a somewhat
successful, though painful, rebuilding project, among its victories. And, as Hegel might say, the
reality was that Pushkin was a central figure in the cultural foundation of that fatherland, and
many Russian scientists were integral to its technological successes. In this way, the history told
in the Leningrad underground celebrates what might be called the “consolidation of Bolshevik
gains.”
99
For the insurgence of youth into the metropolitan centers Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis, 115-117. In 1961,
Teknologicheskii Institut 2 was opened. Included among the decor were inscriptions of various scientific advances
made during the Soviet epoch (Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 70).
100
Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 5; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 23, 136.
101
G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. by Robert S. Hartman, (Upper Saddler River: Prentice Hall, INC, 1997),
10.
102
V.I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobrannie Sochinennii 41, (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1981), 304.
21
Dialectics aside, as David L. Hoffman has argued, there was a rational explanation for the
promotion of nationalism in the Soviet context. Simply put, the Soviet Union had provided the
proletariat with a socialist fatherland, for which it was perfectly logical and theoretically sound
to express nationalist support.103 That nationalism was exacerbated by victory in a mechanized
form of warfare predicated upon industrialization and science, the bases for all that was
Bolshevik. Teknologicheskii Institut would therefore seem a fitting commemoration to the
available history of Russian scientific development that, for the CPSU, laid the groundwork for
the maturation of science and victory over Fascism.
Baltiskaia Stantsiia
Though Baltiiskaia Stantsiia is sometimes described as the “simplest” (samaia prostaia)
and most “modest” (skromnaia), station along the first line, Sokolov called it “a fine monument
to the valor and revolutionary courage of the Baltic sailors.”104 The station is located directly at
the Baltiiskii Vokzal, which links St. Petersburg with the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania, who became SSRs shortly before, and again after, the Great Patriotic War. Above the
ground-level lobby entrance are images of Russian admirals.105 Until the XX Congress in 1956 a
large monument of Stalin stood on a pedestal near the ground lobby.106 The hall of the
underground station is characterized by an “illusion of spaciousness,” created through an absence
of colors or decorations on the walls along the side of the walkway, and a lighting effect,
borrowed from Moscow’s “Palace of the Soviets” and “Novokuznets,” that makes the large
columns seem “light and airy” (legkimi, vozdushnymi).107
The walkway leads to a large mosaic called “1917” (1917 god), which was made from
marble and stones. Intricately detailed, the image portrays the actions of the Baltic Fleet in the
October Revolution and in the Bolshevik foundational myth.108 In the center of the depiction is a
group of sailors that surrounds a cannon and a red flag; one sailor’s hand is raised, gesturing
forward while the others look on, a pose Victoria E. Bonnell has equated with a suggestion of
103
Hoffman, “Was There a “Great Retreat” from Soviet Socialism?,” 671.
Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 33; Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 90.
105
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 72. The admirals included are S.O. Makarov, P.S. Nakhimov, V.A.
Kornilov, M.P. Lazarev, F.F. Ushakov, Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 34.
106
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 72.
107
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei, 210; Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 33.
108
Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 33-34.
104
22
“forward movement.”109 Behind the sailors, a group of soldiers, apparently caught up in
revolutionary fervor, charges forth. In the background, revolutionaries storm across the Neva, a
significant event due to Provisional Government leader Alexander Kerensky’s purported order to
close the bridges to prevent just that, toward the Winter Palace, where the October Revolution
was ultimately consummated.110 There is no discernible difference between the ages of the
sailors and the students; “1917” is a portrayal of a revolution that has already occurred. The
second of four stations that evoke the October Revolution, Baltiiskaia Stantsiia represents
another example of the Late Stalinist effort to equate post-war Soviet rule with the Leninist
legacy.
Narvskaia Stantsiia
Narvskaia Stantsiia is located across from the Narva Triumphal Arch, itself a war
monument constructed to honor Russia’s victory over Napoleon. One hundred years after the
gate’s erection, the area had become a factory suburb “famous for its long revolutionary
tradition” (slavilis’ svoimi davnimi revoliutsionnymi traditsiiami).111 True to the architects’
mandate to avoid compromising the city’s aesthetic characteristics, the fixtures above the ground
lobby’s doors match the deep green of the arch itself.112 It is to the workers of this suburb, and
the proletariat in general, that the station is dedicated.
Narvskaia Stantsiia tells a conflicting story about de-Stalinization. Originally called
Stalinskaia Stantsiia, the name was changed before the first line’s opening in November 1955,
during what Elena Zubkova has called an “interlude” after Stalin’s death in 1953, but well before
Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956.113 However, a mosaic of Stalin, titled “Stalin on the
Platform” (Stalin na Tribune), survived until after the XXII Congress in 1961.114 “Stalin na
Tribune” featured the vozhd’ behind a podium, with an outstretched hand that suggested
pragmatism and a welcoming, but stern, disposition, and was to be accompanied with the
109
Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin, (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 145.
110
Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 33-34; Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 19171932, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 57; John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, (New York: Boni
and Liveright, 1922), 73, 334; Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Max Eastman, (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2008), 59, 83, 812.
111
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 93; Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 76; Lisa A.
Kirschbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1945: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 114.
112
Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 32.
113
Zubkova, Russia After the War, 32-33.
114
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 77.
23
inscription “Do not rule out the possibility that Russia will be the country to lay the road to
socialism...We must discard the antiquated idea that only Europe can show us the way.”115
Today, in place of Stalin’s likeness, are two doors and an air conditioning unit.
Upon descent into the underground, visitors are welcomed by a high-relief (gorel’ef),
titled “The Glory of Labor,” (Slava Truda) which shows Lenin, frozen in what Nina Tumarkin
might call an “active” position, in the midst of an oration to dozens of workers who hoist flags
and listen attentively.116 Jenks has noted that change in Soviet demography, primarily from older
revolutionaries to younger “New Soviet” people, was depicted in the increased number, from
four to eight, of “categories” of people portrayed in sculptures between Moscow’s premier 1935
line and its first extension in 1937-1938.117 In the walkway underground, the station’s pillars are
topped by sculptures of twelve different professions, created in quadruplicates (v chetyrekh
ekzempliarakh) and mounted throughout the station for a total of forty-eight works of art.118 The
twelve groups represented at Narvskaia, however, do not appear especially youthful; instead,
they are able adults at the zenith of their professional lives, perhaps a metaphor for the
emergence of “mature socialism” in the late Stalinist period.119
The Great Patriotic War, in Amir Weiner’s words, “affected every Soviet individual,
family, and community,” loyal Communists and former class enemies alike.120 And many former
enemies of the people also contributed, in one way or another, to the victory over Germany.
Without arguing that post-war Soviet society was a paragon of inclusiveness, the peoples’
efforts, in some sense, were depicted in Narvskaia, reflecting a change in the post-war sociopolitical atmosphere. As Fitzpatrick has argued, for example, even the old class prejudices
generally did not prevent people from declaring themselves a Soviet person in the post-war
115
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 77; Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 32. This quote
is taken from 1919 in a debate between Stalin and Yevgeni Probrazhensky. I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia tom 3, (Moskva:
Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1946), 186-187.
116
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 94; Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 78; Pavlov, Letopis’
Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 32; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 107.
117
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 711; O’Mahony, “Archaeological Fantasies,” 148.
118
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie Pod Zemlei,” 209. The professions engraved are artists, or cultural workers (deyateli
iskustv), farmers (kolkhozniki), shipbuilders (korablestroiteli), students (uchashchiesia), breeder, or plant selector
(selektsionery), metro-builder (metrostrevtsy), textile workers (tekstil’shchitsy), foundry workers, or casters
(liteishchiki), sailors (moryaki), doctors (vrachi), Soviet War (sovetskie voiny), and builders (stroiteli) (Sokolov,
Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 94); Pavlov, Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii, 32.
119
Julianne Fürst, “Introduction: Late Stalinist Society: History, Policies, and People,” in Late Stalinist Russia, 15.
120
Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12.
24
setting; for those who assisted in the struggles against Nazi Germany, in production or in
combat, “Sovietness” was almost taken for granted.121 Put simply, part of the process of reinclusion, which was probably never completed, actually began, as evidenced by a greater
representation of “categories” of people, in the Late Stalin period.
Stephen Norris has shown that the Soviet leadership often borrowed images from
previous eras of Russian history to galvanize support for war efforts or to express nationalist
sentiment.122 At Narvskaia, the same practice was employed to make cultural heroes out of men.
The most striking example of this is the metro-builder (metrostroevets). The figure stands tall,
holding a miniature rendition of a metro station close to his person, a pose that brings to mind
centuries-old Russian icons. In this way, the Leningrad Metro, where thousands of worker
mortals, would, on a daily basis, pour through underground stations that made immortals out of
their own likenesses, challenges Lefebvre’s charge that the Soviet Union failed to create a
“socialist space” vis-à-vis capitalist forms.123 It would certainly be hard to imagine a subway
system in the mid-twentieth century West with stations dedicated entirely to industrial workers.
Narvskaia Stantsiia would seem to perfectly exemplify the quandary in which the Soviet
Union found itself after Stalin’s death in 1953. Try as it might to distance itself from Stalinism,
by renaming cities, metro stations, and removing mosaics, the Soviet polity could not escape the
Stalinist past. Though builders did not engrave Stalin’s words into the walls, his direct
connection to the station, in particular his statue outside the ground lobby, remained until eight
years after his death. What is more, the station’s focus on industrial workers, a motif inextricably
linked with Stalin, probably rendered a complete break with Stalinism impossible. The station
would thus seem to confirm Robert Service’s observation that “Stalinism would outlast
Stalin.”124
Kirovskii Zavod
Station Kirovskii Zavod stands within a short walk from the plant, the embodiment of
socialist industry, Azarov declared, for which it is eponymously named.125 Due to its proximity
to the factory, the station must have had a profound impact on workers’ lives and their
conceptions of space. According to V.A. Azetov, a former plumber’s assistant on the Moscow
121
Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Conclusion: Late Stalinism in historical perspective,” in Late Stalinist Russia, 272.
Norris, A War of Images, 10.
123
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 54, 124, 421.
124
Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 500.
125
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 82, 83.
122
25
Metro cum Leningrad Metro machinist, one could travel the entire length of the first line, from
Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia to Avtovo, discussed in the next section, in just 16.5 minutes.126 This
would have made a trip to the city center, which previously required much “jostling for space”
and considerable time aboard a tramvai, much more convenient and feasible, a point emphasized
by I.M Pastukhov, a shaft-sinker (prokhodchik) on the construction project.127 Thus workers,
many of whom lived in dormitories associated with their respective place of employment, were
within a short walk and a roughly fifteen minute underground ride to Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia at
Nevskii Prospekt, the most populated area of the city and its premier cultural space.128
Kirovskii Zavod, appropriately dedicated to the theme of industrialization, is designed in
a classical manner that resembles Greek temples complete with forty-four Doric columns
(doricheskie kollony) and a granite staircase.129 Below ground, the station’s walls are made of a
Caucasian light gray marble, designed to mimic the interior of a factory.130 The high-reliefs that
rest above the underground columns are dedicated to the four pillars of heavy industry- coal, iron
and steel industry, and electrification- a central theme of Stalinism, which Sokolov called “the
unshakable economic fundamentals of our socialist state” (nezyblemye osnovy ekonomiki nashei
sotsialicheskoi derzhavy).131 A special configuration of light diffusers (svetovykh plafonov)
arranged along arches combine with so-called “eyelet punching” (liuversnoe osveshchenie)
allowed for the “illusion” of an open sky.132 The fourfold is gathered at the end of the station’s
hall, where mortals, having walked through earth, under the manufactured sky, met a massive
bust of Lenin, Soviet immortal par excellence.
Kirovskii Zavod represents the final homage to Lenin in the V.I. Lenin Leningrad
Metropoliten. This recurring Leninist theme is striking. Jan Plamper has recently posited that the
126
V.A. Azetov, “Pervii Poezd,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad: Leninzdat, 1956),
220, 224.
127
I.M. Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nosto,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad:
Leninzdat, 1956), 66.
128
For housing, Donald Filtzer, Soviet workers and late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist
System After World War II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 138-139, 143-144; Lincoln, Sunlight at
Midnight, 315-316, 327. Whether or not laborers took advantage of the metro’s services for these reasons is a topic
that cannot be discussed here. The point is, spatial constructs for those who lived and worked would have been
completely remade by Station Kirovskii Zavod.
129
Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002,
31; Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 82.
130
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 105-106; Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii
Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002, 31.
131
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 106; Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii
Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002, 31-32.
132
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 106.
26
Khrushchev years represented a return to the Party’s “Leninist origins.”133 Similarly, Tumarkin
has suggested that it was not until 1956 that Khrushchev “introduced a new cult of Lenin.”134
The Leningrad Metro problematizes both claims and suggests that, while the Lenin cult might
have been dormant for some time during the Stalinist, but particularly post-war, period, it was
not removed entirely. As evidenced by the Leningrad Metro, when Khrushchev exalted the
merits of Leninism in 1956 and thereafter, he was not restoring the Lenin cult as much as he was
restating what had already occurred during the Late Stalin period.
Avtovo
Though the Moscow’s Metro stations certainly include images of reverence for warheroes, for example Park Pobedy and Elektrozavodskaia, it would be disingenuous to suggest
that any are equivalent to Avtovo. The first line’s southernmost terminus, Avtovo is located in a
former suburb of St. Petersburg that underwent considerable change during the early part of the
twentieth century. What was once, in Sokolov’s words, a collection of “wastelands” (pustyrei)
during the imperial period was turned into a modern space with highways (prolozheny shirokie
magistrali) and multi-story buildings (mnogoetazhnye doma) by the end of the 1930s.135 During
the Great Patriotic War, Avtovo was a part of the sixth and final zone of fortification against Nazi
aggression; the workers in the region had orders to destroy their plants in the event that they
were unsuccessful in their mission.136 Eventually, Avtovo did become a focal point of
belligerence.137 The fighting there was so intense that Pravda once referred to Avtovo as the
region through which “the main defense line passed.”138 The suburb’s role in the defense of
Leningrad and the USSR served as the inspiration for the design of Avtovo Station.139 As such, it
stands as a monument to Leningrad’s war efforts and the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi
Germany.
133
Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 201.
Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 256.
135
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 117; Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 206.
136
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 206; Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 19411944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 195-196.
137
Ksenia Makianova Matus, “Interview, July 1996,” in Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries,
Memoirs, and Documentary Prose, ed. by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2002), 156.
138
M. Kurtynin and I. Vedensky, “Stroitel’stvo Leningradskogo Metropolitena,” Pravda, Oct. 1, 1955, 2.
139
“Stroitel’stvo Leningradskogo Metropolitena,” 2; Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii
Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002, 25.
134
27
In the post-war period, the Avtovo space was remade yet again. Among the most densely
populated suburban areas of Leningrad, linking Avtovo to Nevskii Prospekt had long been an
integral component of the scheme of the first line.140 By 1951, thirty six-story apartment
buildings had been built and plans had been made to develop an additional thirty-five by the end
of the following year there. However, according to I. Grishmanov, then Deputy to the Leningrad
City Soviet, roads in the area were few and those that existed were in poor condition.
Furthermore, the area lacked basic infrastructure requirements such as access to hospitals and
telephones.141 In order to alleviate some of these problems, the ground lobby was placed near
neighborhoods, “against a backdrop of apartment buildings” (na fone zhilykh domov), until
planned developments eventually surrounded it.142 As with the other stations, builders aimed to
complement the extant architecture of Avtovo rather than remake it.143
Although the ground lobbies at other stations feature decorative elements, none are quite
as intricate as Avtovo. Outside, a pair of high-reliefs honors two Soviet military victories, the
defense of Red Petrograd in 1919 and the repulsion of Nazi forces in 1945, particularly
significant for the St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad space.144 In concert with sculptures in the
other stations of the Leningrad Metro, both groups of soldiers are depicted as adults; the most
vivid difference between the images is the advances made in equipment between the
revolutionary period and the 1940s. The revolutionaries, for example, do not wear any armor and
rely on rifles while their counterparts don helmets and are supported by large tanks in the
background. As the shallowest of all stations, Avtovo is the only one that lacks escalators.145
Windows run underneath the lobby’s dome structure, allowing for natural light to partially
brighten the interior, but perhaps more importantly, illuminate the inscription that traces the
inside of the structure: “Glory to the heroic defenders of Leningrad centuries, in the battle to
defend the hero-city” (Slava v vekakh doblesnym zashchitnikam Leningrada, v boyakh
otstoiavshim gorod-geroi). Inside the Avtovo Station lobby, the fourfold is gathered beneath the
erection’s domed ceiling.
140
I.S. Novikov, “V Khody!” in Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956), 230.
I. Grishmanov, “Tribuna Deputata,” Izvestia, June 3, 1951, 2.
142
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 206.
143
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 117.
144
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 117-118.
145
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 207; Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 86.
141
28
Two rows of forty-six columns line the underground hall at Avtovo.146 While the thirty
bare pillars are elegant enough in their own right, it is the remaining sixteen that demand the
most attention. Very detailed glasswork depicts the “emblem of victory” (emblemy pobedy) that
adorns sixteen of the columns.147 By lining the pillar itself with a thin gold flagella (tonkimi
zolotymi zhgutikami), artists, architects, and scientists were able to protect the glass from
otherwise inevitable cracking due to its affixture with concrete pillars.148 In order to alleviate
reflection from the glass’s transparency, physicists determined that artists needed to cut the
interior of the glass at an eighty degree angle. This practice allows for one to see only the glass
and its etchings unburdened by the pillar within.149 The tops of the furnished columns are lined
by symbols of the Soviet Order of the Great Patriotic War. Originally, all forty-six were to be
uniformly covered in glass. One recent publication has claimed that “technical difficulties”
(teknologicheskimi trudnostiami) with design prevented the final thirty from being decorated;150
it seems just as likely, however, that Khrushchev’s mandate to curb excesses in architecture
influenced the decision to stop at sixteen.151
The glass-lined columns also produce an iridescent effect that contributes to the
atmosphere of the station. For Chadaga, this lighting represents a continuation of the Moscow
Metro’s radiant future theme that dominates the 1935-1938 stations.152 But as Jenks, and Wolf
before him to some degree, showed, the svetloe budushchee was contingent upon much more
than simply lighting. The Moscow Metro’s radiant future was one that advertised the
forthcoming era of the New Soviet Man, embodied by youthful sculptures that contrasted with
the older depictions of the revolutionary generation and the former’s participation in cultural
events and technically skilled vocations; military prowess; industrial output; evolving
demography; and so forth. In complete contrast, the Leningrad Metro does not depict any age
discrepancy of any consequence and most of its figures are of roughly the same age. Moreover, it
displays a poet and a collection of scientists from the tsarist period; symbols of the foundations
146
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 119-120; Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 86; Pavlov,
Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002, 25-26.
147
Kozlov, “Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina,” 2.
148
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemlei,” 207; Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 120.
149
Sokolov, “Puteshestvie pod Zemeli,” 207.
150
Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002,
29-30.
151
Khurshchev, “Ob Ustranenii Izlishestv v Proektrovanii i Stroitel’stve,” 112-122.
152
Chadaga, “From Lenin’s Tomb to Avtovo Station,” 170.
29
of an industrial economy that had long since been established; and homages to the completed
military victories that defined the Soviet century, one of which the Moscow Metro all but
predicted. The radiant future topos is one that encompassed many variables beyond lighting, and
none of them are present in the first line of the Leningrad underground.
Figure 1. Avtovo Station Postcard ca. 1968. The white pillars have not been decorated with glass.153
The Soviet approach to monument building was therefore markedly different than that
employed by its Allied counterparts. According to George L. Mosse, the United Kingdom
anguished over the question of the form, purely ornamental or utilitarian, its World War II
monuments would take.154 Ultimately, the UK’s “principal” monument to the war, the National
Land Fund, consecrated in 1946, was comprised of “great country houses and areas of nature”
153
“Leningradskii Metropoliten im. V.I. Lenina Stantsiia “Avtovo” Perronnyi Zal,” Metrootkrytki Metrokalendariki
Metrokonverty Website. http://metropostcards.narod.ru/spb/sets/html_lm1968/lm1968_avtovo_1.htm (accessed
April 12, 2014).
154
George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990), 220-221.
30
that served the dual purpose of commemorating the war dead and providing a public space that
allowed for the entire nation to enjoy its “rural heritage.”155 Mosse notes that, for the British, the
National Land Fund was a utilitarian memorial in that it was devoid of abstract symbols that had
characterized monuments to previous wars, and because it was something that the masses could
enjoy, and interpret, “long after the war.”156 More specifically, Mosse suggests that British postWorld War II tributes were intended to honor individual soldiers and “democratize” the
mourning of the dead via widely accessible monuments; in fact, among the stated goals of the
British War Memorial Advisory Council was to produce a monument that was
“indistinguishable” from non-monuments.157 In other words, collective venerations for the
general population were shunned in favor of more personal expressions of sacrifice and sorrow.
While the celebration of the self was not necessarily exclusive to the United Kingdom, it was
certainly an expression of classical liberalism that runs counter to the sorts of common
memorials intended for popular audiences in the USSR, where such an ideology was anathema.
Moreover, by purposefully avoiding images of soldiers and national heroes, as well as an
emphasis on one “specific location,” the National Land Fund could not have met the requisites
for gathering Heidegger’s fourfold.
In contrast, Soviet World War II memorials, as seen in the example of Avtovo Station,
were decidedly illiberal, emphasized collectivism and were focused on specific locations that
prominently featured cultural heroes, allowing for such a gathering. The depiction of improved
armaments in the high-reliefs at Avtovo, for example, is no doubt a celebration of the Stalinist
industrialization project that provided the material basis for the Soviet military victory.158 In
other words, the Great Patriotic War was to be remembered as a victory over Nazi Germany
made possible via heavy machinery and industrial production, a necessarily collectivist endeavor
achieved by the Soviet nation-state. Like the National Land Fund in the UK, the Leningrad
Metro was a war memorial and a public space meant for mass consumption. But the metro was
no park or organic space- it was a massive monument that defined and redefined urban space, in
many ways complementing Mosse’s assertion that the Soviets were concerned with constructing
155
Lord Chalfont, quoted in Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 221.
Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 221.
157
Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 221.
158
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 117-118.
156
31
“mammoth memorials” to their war dead.159 But the metro’s form was lent additional
significance by virtue of the Soviet fetish for heavy industry. Specifically, the metro was an
industrial edifice that expressly connected Soviet power with industrial power and industrial
power with military victory. The Soviet Union, in some ways, celebrated its victory in the same
way that it achieved it- via large, public industrial projects.
Ohlrogge’s contention that the Leningrad Metro represents “Stalin’s Last Cathedral” is
most apt at the end of the underground hall at Avtovo. While Kirovskii Zavod was de-Stalinized,
at least aesthetically, in 1961, any such effort in Avtovo would have been impossible without
removing a mosaic that, even today, possesses the most anodyne of Stalinist-era quotations. In a
radio address on June 22, 1941, V.M. Molotov stated, on behalf of the Soviet leadership and
Stalin himself “Our cause is just. The enemy will be defeated. Victory will be ours.”160 The
image at Avtovo includes a variant of this statement, “Our cause is just- We Won” (Nashe pravoe
delo- My pobedili), on a wreath below a mother, who holds her child on her left shoulder. The
artwork, titled “Rodina-Mat’,” (Motherland) is completed by two shields that note the years,
1941 and 1945, that demarcate the era of the Great Patriotic War.161 While the mother-child
motif might suggest some focus on the future, it is important to consider that the mother is the
dominating centerpiece of the mosaic, not the child, who rests on her shoulder. In other words,
the image emphasizes the mother’s ability to raise her child safely rather than the child’s right to
experience a safe childhood.
Avtovo Station, qua war memorial, depicts warfare in an altogether different way than its
forebear in Moscow, which portended the inevitable conflict with the capitalist world. At
Maiakovskii Station, Red Army planes “rumbled in formation” across the inside of the
structure’s walls, images that denoted growing Soviet military strength.162 Friedman describes
parachuters whose parachutes are shown wide open in mid-flight, and Red Army pole vaulters
depicted at the height of their jump.163 In the Moscow Metro’s stations, even when military
personnel are not shown in official regalia, they are in motion. Avtovo, by comparison, has no
159
Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 213.
“Vystuplenie po-radio Zamestitlya Predsedatelya Soveta Narodnikh Komissarov Soyuza SSR i Narodnova
Komissara Inostrannikh Del tov. V.M. Molotova,” Pravda, June 23, 1941, 1.
161
Pavlov, Letopis’ Suzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo Metropolitena 1955-2002,
25.
162
Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount,” 697.
163
Friedman, “Mayakovsky Metro Station,” 59.
160
32
such images. The soldiers in the bas-reliefs, for example, hold weapons while standing upright,
in an apparently stationary position; others have put their weapons away entirely. Meanwhile,
swords that line the left side of the track underground are shown in their sheath. This is not a
prognostication of a radiant future ripe with military victories; it is a commemoration of a war
already fought.
Avtovo, in its entirety, served several functions during the Soviet epoch. As a metro
station, it allowed for the movement of people throughout the Leningrad city-space; as a cultural
device, it depicted the heroes of the Soviet Union in its bas-reliefs; as a political tool, it taught of
the USSR’s successful industrialization; and as homage to the victors and the dead, it stood as a
monument to the efforts of the soldiers and the hero-city itself. Finally, it was a bookend to the
historical narrative begun by the dedication to the October Revolution at Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia
and explicated collectively by the first line of the Leningrad Metro.
Conclusion
Elidor Mehilli has recently remarked that the decade-long period after Stalin’s death in
1953 was partially characterized by the “realization” of “a system that had programmed its own
planners.”164 The resulting “bundles of relations” between the planner, plan, and manifestation,
which began with the establishment of the Soviet state and continued throughout its existence,
was not immune to dialectical processes, and were necessarily adapted to suit contemporary
developments. Simply put, while the Party leadership may have programmed planners, the
blueprint itself was not a static one. As a part of the plan, Soviet metro systems provided
passengers with instructions in Soviet socialism through magnificent artwork and architecture in
“palace-like” metro stations.
By virtue of the era in which it was completed, the spatial relations created by the stations
of the first line of the V.I. Lenin Leningrad Metropoliten offer a glimpse of how the CPSU
conceived of itself during the post-war era; when “read” alongside similar features of the
Moscow Metro, it displays evidence of how this understanding had changed over time. The
“bundle of relations” in these stations suggests that, by the Late Stalinist period, part of the
method of programming was predicated on the formulation of a cohesive Soviet historical
narrative. Some facets of that story, the cult of Lenin and the mythology of the storming of the
164
Elidor Mehille, “The Socialist Design: Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union,” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 13 No. 3 (Summer 2012), 637.
33
White Palace, for example, would have been familiar for those who experienced the early Soviet
era; other aspects, such as the veneration of scientists and military leaders from the tsarist-period,
as well as the acceptance of an apolitical artistic motif, would have been less so.
Most significant, however, is the absence of the promise of the radiant Soviet future, a
central feature in the Moscow stations, in the first lines of the Leningrad Metro. By focusing its
“lessons on socialism,” on the events and accomplishments of the available Soviet past, these
stations suggest a consolidation of revolutionary gains, cultural progress, industrial proficiency,
and military victories that may have laid the groundwork for subsequent changes in the Thaw
period. Nietzsche, who once wrote that “Historical education” is only worthwhile “in the service
of a powerful new life-giving influence,” may have understood the decision to orient these
lessons around such achievements, thereby providing early passengers, most of whom
experienced the painful and violent interwar period, with “the capacity to live unhistorically,” or
the ability to be “forgetful of the whole past,” in order that they might know some peace.165 The
first line of the Leningrad Metro, qua Bolshevized space, was itself one such attainment, erected
atop land once claimed by the peoples’ enemies. No longer inundated with notions of future
glories, metro riders were encouraged to think about the past and appreciate the present. This
may have contributed to the rise of Thaw-era demands that life be more enjoyable, a request
Kristin Roth-Ey has suggested the CPSU took seriously.166
Myriad factors may have produced this shift away from focus on the future.
Domestically, as Vladimir Andrle has suggested, post-war Soviet society was composed of
educated citizens hungry for “rising living standards and civilian normality.”167 Simultaneously,
the USSR’s efforts in the Great Patriotic War, as seen from inside the country, afforded it
considerable international esteem, superpower status, and the apparent expansion of its own
political model. This sort of consolidation strategy would not be unprecedented in Soviet history
and does not necessarily suggest an abandonment of the goal of spreading the Soviet system
further; a comparison with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, a “breathing spell” that the Bolsheviks
hoped would provide “internal stabilization” before a renewal of revolutionary vigor, might be
165
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. by Peter Preuss,
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 14, 11, 9. [Italics mine- JAN]
166
Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 16, 201. See also Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd (eds.), The Thaw: Soviet
Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
167
Vladimir Andrle, A Social History of Twentieth Century Russia, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 215-216.
34
appropriate.168 Without positing that the Leningrad Metro was a harbinger of a Late Stalinist
liberalization period, which would be an absurd claim considering the homages to Stalin that the
original decor contained, these points should alter traditional temporal organization by
suggesting that some of the characteristics associated with the Thaw period in fact began during
Stalin’s lifetime.
Chapter 2: “Building Tunnels, Building Workers”
This chapter will consider the published testimonies of workers from the Late Stalinist-early
Thaw era who labored on the construction of the first line of the Leningrad Metro. It will attempt
to elucidate certain characteristics regarding worker subjectivities on the eve of Nikita
Khrushchev’s reforms. The chapter argues that the workers of the Lenmetroproekt practiced
what Anna Krylova has called an “individualising discourse” to frame themselves and their
identities. Specifically, laborers tended to focus on their own individualized, personal
contribution, particularly their developing professional skills, to the collective endeavor to build
a metro in Leningrad and aid in the improvement of the city at-large. The focus on personal
efforts should not be viewed as an indication of an abandonment of collectivist values; rather,
workers emphasized how their individual skills enabled them to more effectively serve the
aggregate collective. Finally, workers’ testimonies exhibit no indication of any inner-struggle to
prove one’s self an ideologically pure, conscious citizen.
By strict Marxist terms, the Soviet population of 1917 was not one comprised of a large,
conscious proletarian class. As a consequence of this less than ideal demographic circumstance,
the task of reshaping of workers’ mentalities from individual, atomized laborers preoccupied
with trivial immediate concerns to “conscious” New Men defined by an illiberal, collectivist
commitment to building Communism fell to the Bolshevik Party itself.169 And while this
endeavor was often designed, with varying success to be sure, to appeal to the broadest masses of
workers, via clubs, libraries, and so forth, wholesale transition “from darkness to light” was
complicated by the economic and political backwardness inherited from the Tsarist regime; 170
168
Leon Trotsky, From October to Brest-Litovsk, (New York: The Socialist Publication Society, 1919), 98. Also see
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 636.
169
Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind, 16.
170
Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia, (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 117.
35
the violence of World War I and the civil war that followed; and famine.171 Moreover,
“consciousness” was itself a rather slippery concept, best described, by one scholar, “not as a
fixed entity” or “selfhood” or “something one could possess once and for all.”172 Maintaining
this temperament, therefore, necessitated “an ongoing effort to situate oneself” via a “locus of
discourse” in a world that itself remained ever-changing.173 Thus, while general guidelines for
what did and did not constitute consciousness certainly existed, the ideal Soviet mentalité
changed according to society’s position within the dialectic; in other words, it was determined
largely by place and time.
Despite its prevalence for the better part of a quarter century, scholarship on Soviet
subjectivities has not yet fully addressed the topic’s inherently transitory attributes. Pioneered by
Stephen Kotkin in the mid-1990s, the debate over subjectivities has, like the aggregate subfield
of Soviet Studies, tended to focus its attention on the 1930s. For Kotkin, Stalinist “civilization”
created new and, more importantly, voluntarily accepted categories of identity that were largely
framed discursively.174 In establishing these identities, which were determined by the Leninist
understanding of Marxism, Soviet people utilized the linguistic tropes of the revolution, a
practice Kotkin calls “speaking Bolshevik,” to position themselves as loyal subjects on the path
to becoming the New Soviet Man.175 Once adopted as a de facto temporal dialect, the language
of Bolshevism proved ready-made for both expressing grievances and denouncing traitors. What
it lacked, according to David L. Hoffmann, was the requisite discursive elements to allow for
genuine resistance against the Stalinist leadership, a point that was later challenged by Jeffrey
Rossman.176
The Bolshevik course of action was, of course, predicated on Marxist class
categorizations that were particularly problematic for revolutionary Russia given the fact that the
proletariat was in disarray, dispersed throughout the countryside in relative anonymity, after the
171
Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization, 4.
Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind, 350; Igal Halfin, Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self., (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2011), 9.
173
Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind, 350; Halfin, Red Autobiographies, 9. Anna Krylova also touches on this in
her “The Tenacious Liberal Self in Soviet Studies,” 27.
174
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 151-152, 223-225
175
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220-225.
176
Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis, ch. 7, especially 205, 211-219; Jeffrey J. Rossman, “The Teikovo Cotton
Workers’ Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender and Identity Politics in Stalin’s Russia,” Russian Review Vol. 56 No. 1
(January 1997), 69n.
172
36
calamities of the civil war.177 For Russia in the 1920s then, the practice of determining exactly
who was and was not of the desired class conscious mindset took the form of a ritualized,
dialectical process between purportedly conscious Soviet citizens and the ultimate arbiter of such
a quality, the Bolshevik Party.178 Inspired by Kotkin, Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck have
primarily concerned themselves with analyzing this development, which they collectively treat as
the Bolshevik attempt to “engage individuals with their soul” in order that citizens might
“understand the Communist program” and help usher the USSR along the eschatological road to
the radiant future (svetloe budushchee) of Soviet Communism.179 Where Fitzpatrick sees the
interrogation process as one designed to overcome the pragmatic, “technical” problem of
locating the working class requisite for the construction of their proletarian dictatorship, Halfin
sees a logical, theoretically consistent rubric for determining a subject’s “readiness to fulfill his
eschatological role.”180 While one’s relationship to the means of production may have made the
development of consciousness more likely, Halfin explains, it did not necessarily guarantee it; as
it turns out, workers who did not develop a collective disposition were denied Party membership,
cast asunder as “eschatological waste.”181
Because both Halfin and Hellbeck seek to explain how the transition from “darkness”
(atomized individuation) to “light” (collective consciousness) occurred for the individual subject,
both place ideology at the center of their work or, as the former once remarked, “move Marxism
from the status of subject to the status of object of historical analysis.”182 This emphasis on
Marxism-Leninism as a linguistic ritual that defined one as “class-conscious,” or otherwise, has
led both scholars to challenge a prevailing Western supposition that the Soviet subject conceived
of the private-public bifurcation intrinsic for the development of an “identity distinct from the
political system.”183 Throughout their analyses of Russian Marxism from the late nineteenth
177
Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” The Journal of
Modern History, vol. 65, no. 4. (Dec. 1993) ,749.
178
Halfin, Red Autobiographies, 17-68.
179
Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin's "Magnetic Mountain" and
the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, 3 (1996): 458.
180
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 23.
181
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 22-23.
182
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 2.
183
Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939),” Jahrbücher für
Geschichte Osteuropas, 44, 3 (1996): 344; Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 127 and Red Autobiographies, 10.
37
century Legal Marxists184 to New Economic Policy (NEP) era Party admissions reports185 to
1930s era diaries, which Hellbeck tellingly refers to not as “private” documents but as texts
produced “outside the public,” both scholars point to a consistent rejection of the notion of
liberal identities and an apparently genuine aspiration to become the New Soviet Man.186
Cumulatively, this scholarship has tended to buttress Kotkin’s assertions that the Stalinist period
fostered new categories of identity and that the language of Bolshevism severely limited a
subject’s ability to espouse anti-Stalinist sentiment.187
In response, Anna Krylova has argued that the subjectivities debate has itself been
determined by, to borrow a notion from Pierre Bordieu via Kotkin, the “little tactics of the Cold
War habitat” that led American scholars on a decades-long quest to locate vestiges of Russian
liberalism.188 Krylova argues that both Kotkin and Hoffmann have erred in their appraisals by
assuming that Soviet actors had a pre-existing, essentially liberal-Western, sense of self which
naturally yearned to develop, a sentiment that would seem to lend itself to arguments made by
Halfin and Hellbeck.189 For her, this perspective has had the effect of creating three primary
categories for the Stalinist subject: the deceased liberal self (the Stalinist subject is a helpless
victim of his nation’s tyrannical government), the so-called careerist (who accepts the Stalinist
system because it provides him with an opportunity to improve his relative position in society),
and the dissenter (who is brave enough to oppose the Stalinist system and, more often than not,
emigrate to the West).190 Ultimately, Krylova is particularly concerned with perceived
limitations placed on the theretofore understanding of Soviet subjects, in particular the notion
that a “static” identity was at all possible in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.191 In other words,
Krylova rejects the suggestion that, at any point, Soviet society was a frozen, unchanging one
comprised of singular, political like-mindedness.
Though few would challenge the merits of pursuing the study of Soviet subjects, the
debate is not without its detractors. Elena Zubkova has remarked that the contemporary usage of
184
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 149-204
Halfin, Red Autobiographies, 17-45.
186
Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul,” 344, 372-373.
187
Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review
Vol. 60 No. 3 (July 2001), 347-348.
188
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), ch. 3; Kotkin, Magnetic
Mountain, 147-157; Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Self in Soviet Studies,” 2.
189
Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Self in Soviet Studies,” 24-25.
190
Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Self in Soviet Studies,” 27.
191
Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Self in Soviet Studies,” 27.
185
38
autobiographies and diaries has only served to reify stereotypes of Soviet people and their era.192
Eric Naiman has challenged Halfin’s thesis that to analyze a Stalinist-era diary is to consider the
Soviet soul by questioning whether or not it was the soul that “was the object of Communist
Inquisition.”193 Alexander Etkind has questioned Halfin’s and Hellbeck’s supposition that
Stalinism was, in any way, “successful.”194 And Rossman has noted that Hellbeck’s claims were
made using a “narrow milieu” of source material that cannot provide a sufficiently large picture
of the number of identities Soviet people perceived available to them.195
Perhaps the most obvious criticism of the debate on Soviet subjectivities, however, is that
work on the theme has failed to properly explore the topic in the post-war setting.196 What is
more, as Krylova has recently pointed out, many discussions of Soviet post-war subjects have
tended to apply scholarly frameworks used to consider the 1930s period, specifically “speaking
Bolshevik,” to the post-war period, a development that effectively denies the possibility of any
process of change in the USSR and obfuscates understanding of its post-war history, a period
characterized by fundamental socio-economic and cultural change.197 What remains then, is an
unfinished picture of the transition to consciousness that was, at least according to Bolshevik
orthodoxy, the sine qua non of the building of Soviet Communism.
In an effort to better understand the post-war Soviet subject, Krylova offers what she
calls “post-Bolshevism,” a “modern socialist discourse that encompasses the individual and the
social.”198 This “individualising discourse” should not be viewed as contrary to the collectivist
goals of the Soviet experiment.199 Rather, the process of “re-individualization” of Soviet subjects
was intended all along; in 1936, for example, Alexei Tolstoy remarked that the development of
192
Elena Zubkova, “Istoriki i ochevidtsy: Dva vzgliada na poslevoennuiu istoriiu,” Svobodnaia
Mysl’, no. 6 (1995), 106.
193
Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review Vol. 60 No. 3 (July
2001), 312.
194
Alexander Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History, Vol. 6 No. 1 (Winter 2005), 174.
195
Jeffrey Rossman, Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class Revolution and the Shop Floor, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2005), 15.
196
Among the few post-war examinations of Soviet subjectivities are Jeffrey Jones, “People Without a “Definite
Occupation:” The Illegal Economy and Speculators in Rostov-on-Don, 1943-1948,” in Donald Raleigh (ed.),
Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2001), 236-254; Elena Iarskaia-Smirnov and Pavel Romanov, “At the Margins of Memory: Provincial Identity and
Soviet Power in Oral Histories, 1940-1953,” also in Provincial Landscapes, 299-329.
197
Anna Krylova, “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,” Contemporary European
History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2014), 181, 183, 172-179, 186.
198
Krylova, “Soviet Modernity,” 191.
199
Krylova, “Soviet Modernity,” 170-171, 190
39
the New Soviet Man would be contingent on a “personality, nourished by the collective and, in
turn, nourishing the collective.”200 In other words individuals, fostered by the collective and
through developing collectivist values, would necessarily acquire individual characteristics that
were, in turn, beneficial to the collective. Hence, Leon Trotsky’s vision of a future in which
“average” people would “rise to the type of heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”201
Thus, “individualising discourse” can be seen as a product of social and cultural growth made
possible by the so-called “alternative modernization” project of the 1930s. Stagnation was not, it
turns out, the order of the Soviet century.
This chapter aims to contribute to filling this historiographical lacuna by exploring the
subjectivities of industrial workers who built the Leningrad Metro, a project that was completed
during the Communist Party’s second interregnum (1953-1956) in 1955. Taking cues from both
Krylova and Halfin, it will take Marxist-Leninist ideology seriously, in particular its purported
efforts to “lead” workers through the incremental stages of constructing Communism. Halfin
finds the suggestion that the First Five Year Plan was motivated by the “consolidation of social
groups” problematic and instead suggests that the decision to end the NEP was inspired by the
Bolshevik estimation of the USSR’s eschatological position. Put simply, by 1925, the Soviet
economy had been largely rebuilt, allowing for the Party to usher Soviet society forward into the
“next stage” on the road to Communism.202 What followed was a period that was, at least
ostensibly, “closer to full-blown Communism,” complete with the termination of the relative
class-tolerance that characterized the NEP era and therefore required the Party to demonstrate
that a “pure proletariat” had come into fruition.203 As Hellbeck has shown, the result was an era
partially defined by “work-in-progress” Soviet subjects burdened with advancing, vis-à-vis the
Soviet state, and the responsibility to exemplify the “full-fledged personality” of the New Soviet
Man, complete with the requisite qualities of (socialist) heroism, collective consciousness, and
“social leader(ship).” This subject was itself “historically determined” and thus restricted by the
conceptual limitations of his or her respective epoch.204 Mere knowledge of the dialectic’s
functionality, it would seem, does not preclude one from being subject to its designs.
200
Quoted in Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 243.
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. by William Keach, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 207.
202
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 336.
203
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 336.
204
Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, 281, 256.
201
40
If, as Halfin has suggested, the rubric the Communist Party utilized to estimate its
position along the path to the svetloe budushchee was gross economic output, a notion Donald
Filtzer would likely accept as valid, then the Late Stalinist period might offer an opportunity to
analyze subjectivity at yet another stage of eschatological development.205 According to Filtzer,
the Soviet economy “began to reach prewar levels of production” at least as early as 1948, a
condition that resulted in improved standards of living; fewer corrective labor sentences; and,
after 1950, a “relaxing of pressure” on the typical Soviet worker.206 Though he stops short of
suggesting that the Last Stalinist period represents, in any way, a “liberalizing” period in Soviet
history, Filtzer nonetheless argues that, for workers, the period was marked by “less fear of direct
repression” and a newfound security in their material survivability, characteristics Zubkova sees
as part of a transition “toward an open society.”207 Whether changes in Soviet society were
products of a new stage of development, consolidation of relative domestic stability, or
something else entirely, worker accounts from the period reveal linguistic practices that buttress
Krylova’s assertions of a post-war cultural “shift” in the “relationship between the socialist self
and society” toward an accepted “differentiation between the two.”208
Where this study differs with previous studies of subjectivities is in its utilization of
published documents, particularly a brigade diary containing metro workers’ recollections of
their lives and their labor on the first line of the underground. Followed to its logical ends, the
notion of the illiberal self not only affects how scholars understand the Soviet subject but also
necessitates a reconsideration of what does and does not constitute a worthwhile source base.
Specifically, Hellbeck has argued that scholars who eschew analysis of texts produced for
general readership on the grounds that they could not have represented authentic beliefs err by
205
True, by the late 1940s, and certainly into the 1950s, the rubric the Soviets used to determine the aggregate
success of its form of socialism was direct competition with the West, specifically the American form of liberal
capitalism. But the acceptance of “Socialism in One Country” meant that eschatological stages within the USSR
were not entirely dependent on the relative advancement of global, or even regional, social and cultural
development, much less those of its dialectical opposite. More specific to the topic at hand, as the introduction to
this thesis notes, plans for the development of a subway system in Leningrad dated, tangibly, to 1938, well before
the beginning of the Cold War; thus, the decision to follow through with such a plan cannot reasonably be reduced
to one exclusively motivated by the desire to compete with Western urban development.
206
Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, 258. For Filtzer, the USSR’s notion of what constituted economic
success and by extension “recovery,” was predicated almost entirely on gross output. See Filtzer, Soviet Workers
and De-Stalinization, 21, 28, 106-107, 116, 136, 162, 187,
207
Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, 260; Zubkova, Russia After the War, 164. No doubt some of this
“relaxation of pressure” was a consequence of the fact that many men had died in the war; thus, male workers were
comparatively difficult to come by. For example, see Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR,
1941 to the Present, (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).
208
Krylova, “Soviet Modernity,” 191.
41
“project[ing] a liberal understanding of selfhood into the Soviet context.”209 The suggestion that
Soviet citizens would have sought out and explored a private sphere for self-realization is, for
him, a flawed one in that such a quest would have been anathema for the evolving New Soviet
Man.210 In a civilization that viewed fetishism for private thoughts and actions as remnants of
bourgeois indulgence, it would be a mistake to assume that personal notations provided a view of
more genuine Soviet-era beliefs.211
What is more, published materials were an integral tool for the spread of ideology for the
Communist Party. Workers who did not, or could not, read were unable to “learn to work,”
speak, or think as conscious laborers, thereby slowing the drive toward Communism. Ergo,
circulated publications, be they books, pamphlets, brigade diaries, or newspapers, written by and
about industrial workers, might offer a glimpse of how this group purported to see themselves
and how they, along with the Party, thought others in their position should identify themselves as
well. Because the Communist Party’s eschatological ends were tied to the relative allegiance of
these workers and their inexorable convergence with the intelligentsia in the form of the New
Soviet Man, such a focus may prove particularly effective for estimating where Soviet leadership
saw itself along the dialectical path to Communism, a goal Miriam Dobson has suggested the
CPSU took quite seriously throughout the Late Stalin period.212 At the very least, as Halfin might
say, such documents provide insight into “what a [conscious] worker should be like.”213
The first chapter of this study explored how the art and architecture of the first line of the
Leningrad Metro imparted a sense of history and cultural memory, predicated primarily on reLeninization, a focus on the Great Patriotic War, and an estimation of contemporary political
values, devoid of an emphasis on the svetloe budushchee, on its passengers. Influenced by
Heidegger’s notion of the fourfold, it posited that, in the USSR, spatial surroundings were
essential elements in the developing of the subject’s notion of self. But if, as Heidegger suggests,
human mortals are a fundamental component in the gathering of the fourfold, then the language,
godheads, and cultural symbols contained therein must necessarily be those with which the
subject, or the “reader,” is intimately familiar. Put simply, it was workers, fluent in the language
209
Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind, 85-86.
Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind, 86.
211
Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind 85-88, 96.
212
Halfin, From Darkness to Light, particularly 396-399; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 7.
213
Igal Halfin, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” Slavic Review Vol. 62 No.
1 (Spring 2003), 40. [Italics are my own- J.N.]
210
42
of “post-Bolshevism,” who constructed the Leningrad Metro stations that were designed to shape
the mid-twentieth century Soviet subject.214
Accordingly, this chapter will complement the first by exploring the subjectivity of the
workers who built the subterranean fourfolds of the first line of the Leningrad Metro. For
workers, the construction of the Leningrad Metro was a cultural event in and of itself. First and
foremost, the underground-workplace culture was one based on a particular kind of work, the
building of a thing or a location, which, Heidegger suggests, brings mankind closest to
understanding space and its genesis.215 As evidenced by their accounts, the workers of the
Lenmetroproekt came to understand their place both within, and as producers of, this space.
What is more, their experiences were unique to time and place, lending credence to Krylova’s
assertion that Soviet society was anything but a static one. First, their writing suggests that many
took the Nineteenth Party Congress’ mandate, a product of the Late Stalinist period that went
unaltered throughout the metro’s construction, to “innovate,” focus on technical progress, and
prioritize the collective seriously, thereby confirming their position at the head of the assault on
production. Moreover, through their building of location, they perceived their labor as a process
that would improve their own individual lives, their families’ lives, and the lives of other Soviet
citizens, thereby confirming themselves as cultured workers and possessors of an individualized
collective consciousness. And as they developed technical prowess and applied experience
through labor, they developed, individually, as professionals, as prokhodchik, tyubingshchik, or
metrostroevts, the most highly-skilled worker at the top of a benign underground social
hierarchy, thereby defining their personal role in the building of space and the transformation of
Leningrad. What is more, they had fulfilled the Leninist mandate that they “learn to work.”
Simply stated, as the workers made the metro, the metro made the workers.
In December 1955, Kliment Voroshilov, then the Chairman of the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet of the USSR, celebrated the completion of the Leningrad Metro, the Soviet
Union’s most recent “labor victory,” (trudovuiu pobedu) by presenting the collective of
Leningrad subway builders with the Soviet Union’s most prestigious honor, the Order of Lenin.
In all, over one thousand medals and awards were presented to the metro builders of the
214
Here the term “post-war” refers to the period after the war more broadly rather than the immediate post-war
period (1945-1948/1949). As Amir Weiner has argued, the war had such a profound influence on Soviet history that
the epoch can be logically delineated between two periods: pre-war and post-war. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 7.
215
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 156.
43
Lenmetroproekt and the enterprises that assisted in the construction process.216 During his
speech, Voroshilov hailed these “active and energetic” workers who, “with great skill peculiar to
the Soviet people,” showed “a spirit of innovation” while completing a construction project that
was previously thought impossible.217 The working people of the metro, the Chairman went on to
say, were an avatar of the conjoined “front” of “science, technology, and work” in the USSR that
had produced the Leningrad Metro, a “major contribution to Soviet culture.”218
Pierre Bourdieu has argued that “cultural competence” cannot evolve into “cultural
capital” until it becomes “inserted into the objective relations set up between the system of
economic production and the system producing the producers.”219 Bourdieu’s requisites were
“inserted” into the Lenmetroproekt at the Nineteenth Party Congress of 1952 which placed great
emphasis on “introducing advanced technology in all branches of the national economy,
improving the organization of labor and raising workers’ level of skill and technical knowledge,”
particularly in industry and construction.220 And while some positions certainly paid more than
others, engineer and factory director were particularly lucrative positions, the contemporary
production campaign, through its stated emphases, diversification of skill and innovation, created
the parameters within which those individuals who mastered the greatest number of professions
carried with them a certain cultural allure. Thus, the Leningrad Metro construction project
created its own form of cultural standard bearers, the metrostroevtsy, or metro-builders.221
216
“Vruchenie Ordena Lenina Lenmetrostroyu: Rech’ tovarishcha K. E. Voroshilova pri vruchenii ordena
stroitelyam Lenmetrostroya,” Leningradskaya Pravda, December 18, 1955, 1; “Vrucheniem Ordena Lenina proekta
stroitel’stva Leningradskogo Metropolitena,” Pravda, December 18, 1955, 2.
217
“Vruchenie Ordena Lenina,” Leningradskaya Pravda, December 18, 1955, 1
218
Ibid.
219
Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 124-125.
220
“Dirketyvi XIX s”ezda partii po pyatomu pyatletnemu planu razvitiya SSSR na 1951-1955 gody,” Pravda,
August 20, 1952, 1-3. Some historians have attributed this restructuring of product relations to Nikita Khrushchev
and so-called “de-Stalinization” (Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization, 3.) However, several of the
characteristics commonly associated with Khrushchev, fraternalism between workers, worker “innovations” and
technical proficiency, increased mechanization, and “an improvement in the organization of labor” were, in fact,
emphasized at the Nineteenth Party Congress, the last such convening of Stalin’s life.
221
Harry Schwartz, “Soviet Economy Offers Contrast,” New York Times, November 8, 1955, 3. According to
Schwartz, factory directors were paid (on average) 4,000- 5,000 rubles per month; experienced engineers 2,0003,000; and beginning engineers 800. For reference a loaf of bread cost 1.70 rubles; sausage 16.70- 40.50; and a ten
inch television 2,700. One year before the completion of the project, the average salary of all non-agricultural
workers was 8,650 per year (Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1963, 109). Between 1940-1955 the number of industrial employees grew 158.5 percent;
construction 202.3 percent; and transport and communication 145 percent (Naum Jasny, The Soviet 1956 Statistical
Handbook: A Commentary, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957, 167).
44
For the mortals of this collective “front,” the construction of the Leningrad Metro was
indeed culturally significant. N.A. Tverdokhlebov, a railway worker with experience in electrical
engineering before working on the metro construction project, was an enthusiastic proponent of
diversification of skills, or what he called “interchangeability” (vzaimozameniaemosti).222
Tverdokhlebov’s first day underground was in March 1951, when he was approached by an
“already famous” (uzhe togda proslavlennogo) metrostroevts who assigned him the task of
hauling rocks.223 Within days, Tverkholebov recalls, he was moved to another crew to learn the
skill of the tyubingshchikov (tube-workers) where he noted that training was conducted “while
working” and through an emphasis on hands-on practice.224 Later, Tverdokhlebov was among
the first groups to learn the functionality of a mechanized shield for tunneling, a machine that
proved particularly helpful for the prokhodchikov; and, in 1952, he accepted the responsibility of
leading his own team, an accomplishment he could not have achieved, he remarked, without the
“exceptional love” his foreman showed him by sharing with him “experience and knowledge”
when Tverdokhlebov was but a novichka.225
When his cohort later won the Red Banner of the Lenmetrostoi, an event which brought
“universal joy” to the entire team, Tverdokhlebov attributed this success to the “collective”
which carried the values that “no work” should be considered “shameful,” as well as its
characteristic “friendly support” of all comrades.226 Though Tverdokhlebov’s brigade completely
rejected concentration on “individual records,” a fetish of previous labor production movements,
that was likely to, in his view, disrupt production by shifting the priority away from the
collective, they nonetheless organized labor in such a way that considered, first and foremost, the
individual worker. Specifically, while the underground work culture certainly placed a priority
on the diversification of labor skills, laborers were not forced into acquiring new professions
before their respective abilities made such a decision prudent; instead, the brigade simply waited
until an individual worker had met certain criteria that established that he or she had mastered a
given skill before moving on to the next.227 Ergo, “mutual aid” (vzaimopomoshch') from one
222
N.A. Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” Leningradskii Metropoliten imenna V.I. Lenina ,(Leningrad: Lenizdat,
1956), 142.
223
Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” 142.
224
Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” 143.
225
Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” 143; M. Chesnokov, “Noveishaya Tekhnika,” Gudok, Nov. 5, 1955, 3.
226
Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” 143-144.
227
Ibid., 147.
45
individual worker to another was the basis of the “strength of the collective,” through which
individualized skillsets improved, contributing to the efficacy of the brigade at large.228 For
Tverdokhlebov personally, learning to work “on the basis of precise technical calculations”
(osnovyvaias’ na tochnom tekhnicheskom raschete) brought immense “satisfaction” to the entire
brigade.229 Finally, his view of the individual-collective relationship is perhaps best summarized
in his commentary on his acquired skills: “Needless to say,” Tverdokhlebov wrote, “all the new
things that I have mastered in the courses were immediately the property of the whole brigade”
(Samo soboi razumeetsia, vse novoe, chto osvaival na kursakh, nemedlenno delalos’ dostoianiem
vsei brigady).230
In his early years on the metro’s construction, Tverdokhlebov wrote, the prokhodchik was
commonly viewed as the single most important laborer on the job site.231 As work, and along
with it workplace culture, progressed, however, crews learned that the “construction of the
subway is not just sinking tunnels;” metro-building was, in fact, “the most complex and diverse
form of work,” which relied equally on a number of trades.232 Thus, the prestige of a mastery of
a single profession declined, while the versatile worker’s esteem climbed. Only those who had
mastered “a wide variety of specialities,” vital for building the metro earned the “highest honor”
of the title- metrostroevets. Despite performing at least four such types of labor, Tverdokhlebov
did not refer to himself as a metrostroevets, yet he nonetheless observed the esteem they enjoyed
in the underground. 233
Others noticed the particular pride with which the metrostroevtsy performed their duties.
228
Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” 144; “Shchkola Zhizni n Masterstva,” Izvestiia, Nov 15, 1955, 2. As Hiroaki
Kuromiya has shown, during the early days of the drive toward industrialization, the Communist Party promoted the
tactics of shock-workers (udarniki), typically young, male skilled workers, eager to build a new, mechanized
society, in order to instill labor discipline and improve production (Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution, 19281932, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102). By 1930, the Party, ever willing to explore means to
produce more and do so quickly, began experimenting with Taylorism, the management system eponymously
named for its creator Frederick A. Taylor, which was based on the delegation of many highly specialized tasks to
large numbers of workers (Kuromiya, 155). To some extent these two concepts, both of which were part of the
broader practice of “socialist competition,” shock-work and the emphasis on specialized functions, coalesced during
the second Five Year Plan, giving rise to the Stakhanovism, a largely political movement that emphasized individual
“norm-breaking” as a method of increasing production (Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Production,
295-296).
229
Tverdokhlebov, “Sila Kollektiva,” 143
230
Ibid.
231
Ibid., 147.
232
Ibid.
233
Ibid.
46
V.I. Volkov, a Party official who also worked on the construction project, observed that the
cross-training had a notable effect on workers’ conceptions of themselves. When Volkov asked
laborers to describe their profession, he received replies of as many as “five or six specialities”
per person, all of which had been “mastered” (osnovatel’no ovladel).234 These workers were,
unlike Tverdokhlebov, quick to proudly proclaim themselves metrostroevtsy.235 Similarly, V.G.
Shartsev, a Lenmetrostroi chairman, noticed that an increasing number of people referred to
themselves as such as work progressed; these workers, whom he distinguished from the
aggregate collection of metro-workers (stroitelei metro), were “able to do everything.”236
According to Lewis Siegelbaum the post-war rebuilding effort “recapitulated and
combined pre-war techniques” toward labor production, including socialist competition, a notion
remained a hallmark of the Soviet economy until its ultimate demise.237 Socialist competition, it
seems, necessitated the existence of some form of Stakhanovism, which Siegelbaum suggests
took the form of the “communist attitude toward labor” as exemplified by “collectives of
communist labor” in the Late Stalinist period.238 And while the metrostroevtsy can certainly be
seen as an extension of the Stakhanovite movement, these workers remained quite different in
fundamental ways. First, an individual’s right to proclaim himself metrostroevts was not
determined by quantifiable sets of data such as “norms.”239 A worker who mastered four skills
did not suddenly become a metrostroevts once he perfected a fifth. Furthermore, unlike
Stakhanovites, metrostroevtsy were not subject to vacillating production quotas that might
“relegate” them from “honored-worker” to mere shock worker. In other words, while the
movement certainly required that all of its members meet base qualifications, most notably a
diverse set of professional skills, it was nonetheless almost entirely a discursive category.
Second, perhaps as a consequence of the fact that the metrostroevtsy eschewed normbreaking, their performance did not foster resentment among “non-member” workers in the way
234
V.I. Volkov, “Kommunisty Odnogo Stroitel’stva,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten imenna V.I. Lenina,
(Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956), 110.
235
Ibid.
236
V.G. Shartsev, “Sila Primera,” in in Leningradskii Metropoliten Imenna V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad: Lenizdat,
1956), 130-131.
237
Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity, 305-306.
238
Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity, 307.
239
I use the term “himself” here as a product of the fact that I did not find an example of a metrostroevka. This
should not suggest they did not exist, merely that I did not locate evidence of one.
47
that sometimes Stakhanovism did.240 To be sure, the noticeable lack of antipathy toward
metrostroevtsy could be a result of censors or the fact that, as Siegelbaum has elucidated, such
behavior ceased once it was readily apparent that Stakhanovism was but “one in a series of
campaigns” that would become key to Soviet product relations.241 But reaction against the
movement could also have been influenced by its form. Devoid of the pressures of meeting
quantifiable standards and instead motivated by the mastering of skills, the metrostroevtsy were
necessarily also lacking the characteristics of Stakhanovism that, according to Joseph S. Berliner,
made the latter movement so wasteful, the result of which was, in many cases “overwork”
leading to “increased subquality output.”242 What is more, the construction of the first line of the
Leningrad Metro was a relatively short term event; it could not, of course, continue after the
completion of the line, though workers could definitely utilize their newfound skills in other
projects, or be applied to other work environments the way that Stakhanovism could. In other
words, the metrostroevtsy were particular to a unique space and time within the dialectic.
But it was not only the metrostroevtsy who testified to the advantages of the restructuring
of labor. I. M. Pastukhov was raised on a collective farm (kolkhoz) in the Khmelnytsky region of
Ukraine. As an adult, he wrote fondly of his childhood, recalling his love of music and his dream
of becoming a professional singer or a dancer in an ensemble. Though Pastukhov never
abandoned his love for song, in his words, “the industrialization of the country, erected in the
first five year plans,” afforded him the option to adopt a profession that was “more befitting of
[his] desires” (bolee svoistvennye moim zhelaniiam).243 Upon completion of military service in
the Great Patriotic War, where he was, incidentally, his company’s lead singer (zapevalov),
Pastukhov became a prokhodchik, a profession Voroshilov called part of the “backbone” of the
construction project, responsible both for digging the metro’s vast tunnels and simultaneously
performing the work of an assistant surveyor.244
Pastukhov described his own work in literary terms, comparing the work of the
240
For anti-Stakhanovism see Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism in the Politics of Productivity, 179-209, especially pp 194201.
241
Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity, 201.
242
Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 139-140;
for comment on “subquality output,” 274.
243
Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu,” 62.
244
V.A. Fridye, “Tak Dostigaetsia Pobeda,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten imenna V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad:
Lenizdat, 1956), 101.
48
prokhodchiki to that performed by the laborers in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.245
In Verne’s book, scientists and engineers design a massive cannon buried in the earth for the
purposes of launching three men into outer space. The workers in this fictitious tale, Verne’s
prokhodchiki so to speak, were tasked with the chore of boring a mine strong enough to hold the
spaceborne projectile in place, but brittle enough to break apart to allow it to ascend into space.
The metro’s prokhodchiki, Pastukhov explained, had to achieve the inverse; their shafts had to be
strong enough to withstand any sort of increase in soil pressure in order that the metro’s tubings
might stay in place.246
That Pastukhov referenced Verne, whose popularity in Russia transcended both
generational and demographic divides, is significant for a number of reasons.247 First, according
to Terry Martin, just one generation before the grand opening of the Leningrad Metro, less than
forty-two percent of those living in Ukraine were literate in any language.248 Yet Pastukhov, the
product of a Ukrainian kolkhoz, had not only read, he did so with some sophistication, as
evidenced by the fact that he drew vivid parallels between his own individual labor and work in
Verne’s novel. Thus, whether Pastukhov’s reading of From the Earth to the Moon suggests an
increased sophistication of the proletarian class; the increased proletarianization of Soviet
culture; or simply that the genealogy of Verne’s readership was quite diverse, Pastukhov remains
an archetype of the success of the Soviet literacy campaign.249
What is more, it would not be a stretch to conclude that Pastukhov, whose account of the
metro construction project is titled “Dreams Become Reality” (Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu),
saw himself and his fellow prokhodchiki as revolutionaries, vanguards in their own right, in the
245
Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu,” 63; Jules Verne, The Annotated Jules Verne: From The Earth to
the Moon, (ed. by Walter James Miller), (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Publishers, 1978, 79-82.
246
Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu,” 63.
247
For example, Konstantin Sluchevskii paid homage to Verne’s character Captain Nemo in his short story “Kapitan
Nemo v Rossii,” Sochineniia v 6 tomakh. Vol. 4, (St. Petersburg: A.F. Marks, 1898), 3-62; Donald Rayfield has
noted that Anton Chekhov wrote one parody of Verne that was rejected due to the latter’s popularity in Russia.
Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov's Prose and Drama, (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 9; Katerina Clark has argued that, during the pre-revolutionary period, Verne’s work had
considerable influence on the St. Petersburg avant-garde (Katerina Clark, St. Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution,
47.); and, Catriona Kelly has suggested that Verne’s work was equally significant for working class children during
the same era, and even more so post-Stalin (Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 452, 132).
248
Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 127.
249
For literacy see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After
Collectivization, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 226.
49
realm of transportation construction. After all, they had forged a path through the unforgiving
depths of the Leningrad marsh, a notion that, much like a flight from earth to the moon, was once
thought unrealistic, to create an elaborate system for convenient and fast mobility throughout
Leningrad, a city of extraordinary political and cultural importance for Russians; and they had
done so only one decade after emerging victorious from the most devastating war in human
history.250
Finally, the theme of space travel is worth considering. Science fiction has held a
prominent place in Russian culture since at least the late Tsarist period when authors such as
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a rocket scientist who developed the so-called “Tsiolkovsky rocket
equation,” wrote classics about interstellar exploration.251 During the Soviet period, the genre of
science fiction increased, owing largely to the Communist Party’s lionization of science and the
espousal of the notion that everything is reducible to one, unifying scientific theory- MarxismLeninism; the subsequent treatment of science, complete with terminology such as “proletarian
science” in newspapers, schools, books, and so forth had the effect of reifying this vaunted
position.252 Less than two years after the opening of the Leningrad Metro and the publication of
Pastukhov’s article, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, making his the last
generation to merely dream of spaceflight and taking the first significant step toward turning
Verne’s mechta into reality.253
If the priority placed on diversification and education played an important role in
workers’ culture underground, it contemporaneously solved the immediate concerns of the
Lenmetroproekt management. The building of the metro was no exception to Filtzer’s
250
For wartime destruction in the USSR see Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, German Troops and the
Barbarisation of Warfare (Second Edition), (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History
of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945, (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 288; B.V. Sokolov, “The Cost of War:
Human Losses of the USSR and Germany, 1939-1945,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1996), 156-171;
Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, (New York: Picador, 2006); N.N.
Nikulin, Vospominaniia O Voine, (Sankt Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Yermitazha, 2010); Leningrad v
Osade: sbornik dokumentov, (Sankt Peterburg: Liki Rossii, 1995).
251
“Sputnik Has Long History,” The Science News-Letter, Vol. 72, No. 16 (Oct. 19, 1957), 245; George Gibian,
Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954-1957, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1960), 31.
252
Gibian, Interval of Freedom, 30-31; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 19211934, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 231-232; David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of
Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 70. Nils RollHansen, The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science, (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005), 15.
253
“Pervii v mire iskusstvennii sputnik Zemli sozdan v Sovetskoi strane!,” Pravda, October 6, 1957, 1.
50
supposition that “chronic labour shortages” were among the defining characteristics of the Soviet
epoch, leaving managers burdened with the tasks of locating an adequate number of skilled
workers.254 In accordance with the Nineteenth Party Congress directives, crews turned to crosstraining, producing a bevy of individual workers with a diverse set of skills to solve this problem.
According to the manager of the Lenmetrostroi, K.A. Kuznetsov, it became commonplace for a
prokhodchik to become (stanovilis’) a “fitter, then a concrete reinforcer, then an insulator, and a
finisher.”255 The aggregate effect was, Kuznetsov claims, the development of a “mass character
in our mastery of many specialties,” an emphasis embodied by the individual metrostroevts.256
The fulfilment of the metro builders’ goals was, at least according to Pastukhov, largely a
product of efforts toward developing “innovations” that improved worker efficiency and speed.
“We cannot work,” he plainly remarked, “without creativity” (bez tvorcheskoi initsiativii).257 For
the prokhodchikov this included improvements to equipment, construction edifices, building
methodology, and tunnel excavation, all of which contributed to the realization of a “better life”
for Pastukhov’s family, whom he thought of while writing, as well as his fellow Leningraders
who would soon enjoy a “more convenient” method of travelling home, to work, or to the city
center as a direct result of his labors.258 In recognition of his contribution to these efforts, the
Leningrad Communist Party organization elected Pastukhov to serve as a delegate at the
Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, an event he attended with “great joy” and “a
thrilling feeling...imbued with Lenin’s eternally living ideas” (proniknuty vechno zhivymi
leninskimi ideyami).259
N.S. Ryakov was another worker who lauded the process of cross-training. A native of
Siberia, Ryakov had already been trusted with the task of supervising a small team of workers at
a foundry repair plant at the age of seventeen.260 After serving in the war, he moved to
Leningrad, the “city of metalworkers,” to find employment; three days later, he was
underground, participating in what he described, in militarized terms like many of his colleagues,
254
Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, 202.
Kuznetsov, “Metrostroevtsy Idut Vpered,” 19.
256
Ibid.
257
Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu,” 63.
258
Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu,” 63-66.
259
Pastukhov, “Mechta Stala Deistvitel’nost’yu,” 67.
260
N.S. Ryakov, “V Zaboe,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten Imenna V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956), 115.
255
51
the “attack on the thickness of the soil.”261 Eventually, Ryakov’s team was entrusted with the
tasks of concrete workers, and though the work was initially foreign to them, in time his team
was recognized as a “sort of school-masters of prokhodchiki and concrete workers,” that later
produced numerous team leaders.262 Ryakov continued to learn and advance, adding the skill of
oblitsovshchik, or wall-tile specialist, to his repertoire.263 When describing his own team, Ryakov
commented, with some ambivalence, “We were prokhodchiki, we were concrete workers.”264 For
him, the opportunity to learn multiple trades and, at the behest of the chief of construction, be a
part of the solution to labor problems was “a great honor” because it signified not only trust but
an indication that management “believed in” him (uvereny v tebe).265 It is significant here that
Ryakov uses the singular, familiar form of you (tebe), suggesting that management’s approval
was predicated on a belief in his individual ability to perform tasks that benefit the collective,
despite the fact that he conceived of himself as part of a collection of highly-skilled workers.
Some workers insisted that the renewed sense of comradely spirit allowed for the
fulfillment of other, more individual goals, including the pursuance of education. In Behind the
Urals, John Scott describes a Magnitogorsk bustling with energy and adult students “hurrying to
and from school with books and notebooks” in tow.266 For some metro-workers, the fourfold of
the metro possessed similar qualities. Those with vocational ambitions, but particularly the
metrostroevtsy, over six hundred of whom finished some sort of educational training between
1950 and 1955, had the opportunity to combine their on the job training with technical schooling,
emerging from the underground “highly qualified professionals, craftsmen, and shift supervisors
(nachal’niki sten).”267 This effort to educate and train the metrostroevtsy was a deliberate one. As
one party organizer of the project stated, “it is in work and study that our metrostroevsty grow”
(vot tak v trude i uchebe rastut nashi metrostroevtsy).268
Others, including some women, reported that the comradely environment underground
261
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 118-119.
263
Ibid., 119.
264
Ibid.
265
Ibid.
266
John Scott, Behind the Urals An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, (Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, 1989), 219.
267
V.G. Shartsev, “Sila Primera,” in Leningradskii Metropoliten Imenna V.I. Lenina, (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956),
130-132.
268
M. Makeev, “Vsegda Vperedi,” Gudok, Nov. 11, 1955, 3.
262
52
helped them to prepare for jobs outside of the underground. Z. Makarycheva, an insulation
worker (izolirovshchika), had been denied entrance into university after performing poorly on an
entrance exam. Through diligent study, and with the help and encouragement of her comrades,
she was soon admitted to the Institute of Economics. According to Makarycheva, others also
spent their time off studying, including at least two of her team members.269 Though
Makarycheva was not, and did not intend to be, a metrostroevka, she nonetheless expressed pride
and comradely appreciation for the collective’s accomplishments. “When the metro starts
operating it is especially good for the soul when you know your work and your friend’s work
brings people joy,” she wrote.270 That a woman not only performed vital labor in the
underground but was able to work her way into an improved occupation would seem to
contradict Filtzer’s claims that, during the Late Stalin period, women workers had “no prospects
for upgrading their skills” and little to no opportunity to “advance to better jobs.”271 According to
Makarycheva this was no aberration; her friend and co-worker, Nina Nikolaeva, also studied and
aspired to attain a new position once construction was completed.272
If whether or not a Soviet citizen’s commentary necessarily corresponded with genuine
belief, or even reality, was less important than their ability to utilize the linguistic tropes of a
given period, then the memoirs of the workers of the Leningrad Metro suggest that a key
component of the language of “post-Bolshevism” was an emphasis on collectivism and a diverse
set of individualized working skills. This is an important distinction vis-à-vis Kotkin’s notion of
pre-war “Bolshevik-speak,” which evidently tended to accept the language of “innocent peasant”
and other lapses into linguistic “errors” as apropos for an epoch that re-launched the ongoing
“process” of forming the New Soviet Man.273 By the 1950s, however, that language had changed
quite significantly. Most workers had apparently absorbed collectivist notions sufficiently
enough that erstwhile “errors” became insignificant, if not non-existent; and their updated
vernacular was one defined by the conceptualization of how individual priorities and goals might
benefit the collective-minded socialist self. Put succinctly, the new, “mature” form of “postBolshevik” speech took collectivized identities for granted while allowing room for personal
269
Z. Makarycheva, “Khorosho na Dushe,” Izvestiia, Nov. 15, 1955, 2.
Ibid.
271
Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Product
Relations, 1953-1964, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 188.
272
Makarycheva “Khorosho na Dushe,” 2.
273
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220.
270
53
autonomy within. Individualism, which for Filtzer was the result of the particular form of Soviet
product relations, may have instead been the manifestation of more complex cultural
developments in the form an emerging “individualist-collective” Soviet subject, an explanation
that would help to provide some explanation of Hellbeck’s observations that, after the Great
Patriotic War, the Soviet citizens’ focus on “the conflict of origins and deeds” dissipated
rapidly.274 The language of “post-Bolshevism,” it seems, was largely devoid of the urgent
concerns for the purity of one’s collectivist-self, a change that, at least in discursive practice,
allowed for the conceptualization of pursuing individual success in order to benefit the
collective’s existence.
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel wrote that “the labour of the individual
for his own needs is just as much a satisfaction of the needs of others as of his own, and the
satisfaction of the needs of others as of his own needs he obtains only through the labour of
others.”275 For Hegel, these “needs” are both materially and culturally significant. And yet a
laborer’s individual output is necessarily a collective effort that benefits those outside one’s self;
it is not exclusively an individual pursuit to achieve individual aims. Labor is, in Hegel’s words,
the “desire and work in which consciousness finds confirmation of that inner certainty of itself”
through the pleasure taken in “the form of independent things.” Without an understanding of the
relationships between humanity and work; work and its “independent things;” humanity and
“independent things;” and humanity and humanity, the “Unhappy Consciousness merely finds
itself desiring and working, relegated to “a still incomplete self-certainty,” devoid of
“confirmation” of itself achieved through work.276 The metro-workers, metrostroevets or
otherwise, of the Leningrad Metro construction project seem to have met Hegel’s requirements
for a “conscious self.” Each communicated an awareness of the metro’s “bundle of relations”between themselves and their profession(s); their profession(s) and the “independent thing” they
produced (the metro); how humanity would benefit from such a thing; and how humans had
helped humans to build a place where the fourfold may be gathered. Put simply, as the workers
made the metro, the metro made the workers.
274
For “mature socialism” see Alec Nove, Marxism and “Really Existing Socialism,” (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001),
21; Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization, 223; Hellbeck, Revolution on
my Mind, 220.
275
G.W.F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 213.
276
Ibid., 132.
54
Historians have, perhaps to their detriment, traditionally treated the accounts and
commentary of Soviet citizens like those discussed above with some skepticism. As Krylova has
observed the “believing Soviet subject” has been either forgotten, as was the case during the
“totalitarian school” era, or denied altogether, deemed unfit to function as a “reliable interpreter
of reality.”277 Such treatment has the effect of, in Hannah Arendt’s words, denying subjects’
“self-understanding” and “self-interpretation” and, ultimately, “robb[ing] them of the very
faculty of speech.”278 This is not to deny the problematic nature of the published documents used
in this thesis. First, the workers who built the Leningrad Metro worked on a massive engineering
and construction project, over forty hectares at an average depth of between 1500 and 2300
meters, a condition that required sensitive handling in the press.279 Second, metro construction
occurred in Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second city, so to speak, the site of colossal damage
during the Great Patriotic War. It would therefore be a mistake to assume that developments
there were an indication of change across the entirety of the Soviet space. Ultimately, while
brigade diaries might provide little more than a view of the most idealized industrial workers,
this view reveals a change in what constituted an exemplary Soviet worker in the first place.
Soviet workers’ notion of self did not stagnate in the 1930s; the memoirs of the laborers of the
Leningrad Metro indicate that, by the mid-1950s, Soviet workers wrote about themselves as
individuals with individual concerns and priorities and, perhaps most importantly, with
individual skills that allowed them to contribute significantly to the greater collective good.
277
Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Self,” 13, 26.
Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, (New York:
Schocken Books, 1994), 338.
279
Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre, 6, 8.
278
55
Conclusion
Construction on the first line of the Leningrad Metro began in the early 1940s, before Operation
Barbarossa and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Delayed by the fighting thereafter,
construction was not completed until 1955, two years after Iosif Stalin’s death and one year
before Nikita Khrushchev delivered his not-so “Secret Speech.” Thus, the metro stations’ art and
architecture provides a unique lens through which one may consider a period of transition in the
Soviet century. Perhaps the last structure to take such a form, the first line’s design was a product
of the Stalinist-era practice of using art and architecture to help develop a particular type of
“conscious” citizen. The spatial qualities of the underground’s stations therefore offer clues
regarding how the Communist Party leadership envisioned society’s progress along the
dialectical path to socialism.
The art adorning the walls of the first line of the metro suggests that by the 1950s, at least
in Leningrad, the newest stage of development was partially characterized by an emphasis on the
USSR’s history, predicated largely on the mythical origins of the Soviet state, and the
“consolidation of Stalinist- era gains,” specifically industrialization, collectivization, and military
victories. But this history also included Tsarist-era cultural and scientific heroes. Recently,
Michael David-Fox has asserted that the so-called Iron Curtain in fact behaved more like a
“semi-permeable membrane” through which distilled information was allowed to enter and exit
the USSR’s borders.280 The Late Stalin-early Thaw period filtered Tsarist-era history in much the
same fashion. Influential poets, like Pushkin, and scientific luminaries, like Tsiolkovsky, were
acceptable in the underground stations; images of the glory of empire and Orthodoxy were not.
With the firm establishment of Soviet power and the successful industrialization of the country,
it was perhaps appropriate for the CPSU to encourage a broader celebration of the past. Broader
view of history or not, the metro’s narrative prioritized the accomplishments of the Soviet period.
Both termini, after all, of the first line were built atop space formerly controlled by the most
reviled of Soviet enemies- Tsarism and Nazism.
But the first line also addressed the contemporary period. Stations included depictions of
280
Michael David-Fox, “The Iron Curtain as Semi-Permeable Membrane: The Origins and the Demise of the
Stalinist Superiority Complex,” in Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (eds.), Cold War Crossings: International
Travel and Exchange Across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014).
56
a large collection of professional laborers as well as multiple venerations of the Red Army’s
victory over Nazi Germany. The diversity of workers, specifically with regard to age, suggests a
reverence for the mature, skilled workers who rebuilt the country after the devastation of the war.
The soldiers, meanwhile, are shown as the USSR’s modern day liberators who embody the
Soviet epoch. Their weapons, specifically the swords that represent their efforts, are depicted
sheathed in defense rather than readied for combat. Theirs is not an aggressive responsibility, but
a reactive one. Collectively, the workers and soldiers suggest a Leningrad region that fixed its
reverence on both the workers who constructed the metro and rebuilt the city after the war, as
well as the soldiers who made general rebuilding possible.
The decision to orient the metro’s design around the past and the present stands in
marked contrast to the focus of the messages of similar structures completed in earlier periods of
Soviet history. The Moscow Metro, the USSR’s first such system, completed during the 1930s,
possessed qualities that exclusively highlighted the Soviet radiant future (svetloe budushchee), a
characteristic consistent with place, time, and the contemporary concentration of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. The Leningrad Metro, meanwhile, does not at all concern itself with
the future; the svetloe budushchee is completely absent from Leningrad Metro stations. Rather
than focusing on the future, the art and architecture of the first line invited passengers to reflect
on past Soviet glories and sacrifices, allowing for a relaxation of the pressure of building for
tomorrow, thereby permitting some consideration for the quality of contemporary existence. That
these sorts of messages lined the walls of a Late Stalinist era structure suggests that the roots of
Thaw-era reforms may be found in events that took place during Stalin’s lifetime.
Changes in Late Stalinist culture are reflected in the testimonies of workers who labored
in the construction of the first line of the Leningrad Metro. This is particularly significant given
the CPSU’s long-standing emphasis on the significance of labor in the development of a
conscious citizen. In 1934, for example, Maxim Gorky criticized the bourgeois tendency to
ignore the labor processes’ role in “creat[ing] the basic elements of culture” by suggesting that,
in the Soviet Union, workers had been “armed with the full might of modern technique,” in order
to allow work to become “easier and more productive, raising it to the level of an art.” For
Gorky, Soviet labor was, in fact, synonymous with “creation.” Through work as a creative outlet,
he claimed, Soviet workers exhibited a “Socialist individuality” which represented the “flower of
57
the working class,” a personal and collective growth which would, inevitably, produce, in terms
Heidegger would have understood, “a beautiful dwelling place for mankind.”281
Without denying the pitfalls of employing such a source, memoirs written by a collection
of workers from the first line’s construction corroborate these notions of change in a way that is
largely consistent with the suggestion that, in Leningrad at least, the Late Stalinist era
represented a new stage in Soviet development. By focusing on a diversification of professional
skills and work, many of the workers from the Leningrad Metro project echoed the priorities of
the Late Stalin period. More significant, however, is the language they used to describe these
values. Workers’ accounts suggest that individual development and personal goals were not at all
anathema in the Late Stalin-early Thaw era. Instead, testimony suggests that individualized
endeavors were often pursued with the intent of benefitting the collective. In other words, the
collective educated, shaped, and informed individuals who subsequently necessarily possessed a
sense of self primarily based on collectivist values. In “post-Bolshevik” Soviet society,
individualist pursuits and collectivist ideology were not mutually exclusive concepts. Largely,
though certainly not entirely, free from the concentration on building the svetloe budushchee, the
workers of the first line of the Leningrad Metro seemed to have embodied Gorky’s vision of a
“Socialist individuality” defined by the determination to achieve collectivist ends.
281
Gorky, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, 25-69. [Italics are mine- JAN].
58
Appendix
Zdes’, gde begut stal’nye magistrali,
My povstrechalis’ s drugom dorogim.
Takim ego i v Pushkine, vstrechali,
Takoi on v serdtse berezhno khrapim.
Zadumchivyi, v ruke szhimaia list’ia,
On vmeste s name, kazhdomy rodnoi.
A za plechami Pushkina tenistyi
Sad, otrazhennyi yasnoyu vodoi.
I kazhdyi, kto sneshim v lyudskom potoke,
Zdes’ khot’ na mig pomedlit, izymlen,
Nezhdannoi vstrechei…
Zdravstvui, drug dalekii,
K tebe prokhodim my so vsekh storonC Baltiiskogo i s ploshchadi Vosstan’ya,
Iz tsekha, shkoly, palubkorableiI my prinosim chutkoe vhiman’e,
Svoyu lubov’ k poyezii tvoei!
Vs. Azarov.282
282
Vs. Azarov in Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995, 65.
59
Bibliography
Newspapers
Gudok
Izvestiia
Leningradskaia Pravda
New York Times
Pravda
The Science News-Letter
Published Primary Sources
Gorky, Maxim, et. al. Soviet Writers’ Congress, 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.
KPCC v Rezolyutsiiakh I Reseniiakh s’ezdov, konferensii I plenumov TsK chast’ 4 izdanie
sed’moe. Moskva: Gosizdat, 1960.
Lenin, V.I. Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 36. Moskva: Gosizdat, 1962.
Lenin, V.I. Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 41. Moskva: Polizdat, 1981.
Lenin, V.I. Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 42. Moskva: Gosizdat, 1970.
Leningrad v Osade: sbornik dokumentov. Sankt Peterburg: Liki Rossii, 1995.
Leningradskii Metropoliten imeni V.I. Lenina. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956.
Scott, John. Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989.
Sokolov, A.M. Stantsii Leningradskogo Metre. Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1957.
Stalin, I.V. Sochinennia tom 3. Moskva: Gosizdat, 1946.
Secondary Sources
Andrle, Vladimir. A Social History of Twentieth Century Russia. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Arendt, Hanna. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism.
New York: Schoken Books, 1994.
Bartov, Omer. The Eastern Front: 1941-1945, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare
(Second Edition). New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Bergman, Jay. “Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man.” Journal Contemporary
History 33, No. 1 (January 1998): 135-152.
Berliner, Joseph S. Factory and Manager in the USSR. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
60
1957.
Bidlack, Richard and Nikita Lomagin. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New
Documentary History from the Soviet Archives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Bittner, Stephen V. The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in
Moscow’s Arbat. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Bonnell, Victoria E. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Brandenberger, David. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of
Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Brandenberger, David. Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror
Under Stalin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1965.
Buckley, John. Air Power in the Age of Total War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Burzhdalov, E.N. Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd.
Translated by Donald Raleigh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
Carr. E.H. A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 1. New York: WW Norton,
1978.
Chapman, Janet G. Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1963.
Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Clark, Katerina. St. Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1998.
Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange Across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s.
Edited by Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer. College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
2014.
Cooke, Catherine. “Beauty as a Route to “the Radiant Future”: Responses of Soviet
Architecture.” Journal of Design History 20, No. 2 (1997): 137-160.
Corney, Frederick C. Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution.
61
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Debreczeny, Paul. Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: The Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the
Khrushchev Era. Edited by Polly Jones. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Dobrenko, Evgenii Aleksandrovich. Political Economy of Socialist Realism. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007.
Dobson, Miriam. Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform
After Stalin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. New York:
Bantam Books, 1992.
Ecksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age. Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989.
Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda. Edited by
Brandenberger, Kevin M.F. Platt. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2006.
Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. London: Polity, 2011.
Etkind, Alexander. “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation.” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6 No. 1 (Winter 2005): 171-186.
Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924. New York: Penguin
Books, 1996.
Figes, Orlando and Boris Kolonitskii. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and
Symbols of 1917. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Filtzer, Donald. The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinization and the Limits of Reform in the USSR.
London: Macmillan, 1993.
Filtzer, Donald. Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System
of Soviet Product Relations, 1953-1964. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Filtzer, Donald. Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist
System After World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia.” The
Journal of Modern History 65, No. 4 (Dec. 1993): 745-770.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in
the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
62
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After
Collectivization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986): 22-34.
Friedman, Jane. “Soviet Mastery of the Skies at the Mayakovsky Metro Station,” Studies in the
Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000): 48-64.
Fürst, Julianne. Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature
Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Gibian, George. Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954-1957.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960.
Gogol, Nikolai. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol: Volume 1. Edited by Leonard J. Kent.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Gorlizki, Yoram and Oleg Khlevniuk. Cold Peace and the Ruling Circle, 1945-1953. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Gorodskoe Khoziaistvo i Stroitel’stvo Leningrada za 50 let. Edited by Zavarukhin, Iu. and R.S.
Zakasov. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1967.
Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond.
Translated by Charles Rougle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Halfin, Igal. “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self.” Slavic
Review 62, No. 1 (Spring 2003): 34-40.
Halfin, Igal. From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary
Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.
Halfin, Igal. Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2011.
Halfin, Igal. Terror in my Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Halfin, Igal and Jochen Hellbeck. “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s “Magnetic
Mountain” and the State of Soviet Historical Studies.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas
44, No. 3 (1996): 456-463.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Hegel, G.W.F. Reason in History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. Upper Sadler River:
Prentice Hall, NC, 1997.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York:
Harper Colophone Books, 2000.
63
Hellbeck, Jochen. “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939).”
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, No. 3 (1996): 344-373.
Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006.
Hellbeck, Jochen. “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts.”
Russian Review 60, No. 3 (July 2001): 340-359.
Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet
Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Hoffmann, David L. Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994.
Hoffmann, David L. “Was There a Great Retreat from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture
Reconsidered.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, No. 4 (Fall 2004): 651674.
Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Jasny, Naum. The Soviet 1956 Statistical Handbook: A Commentary. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1957.
Jenks, Andrew. “A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilzation.”
Technology and Culture 41, No. 4 (2000): 697-724.
Kaganov, Grigory. Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts. Translated by
Sidney Monas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Kamp, Marianne and Russell Zanca, “Writing the History of Collectivization in Uzbekistan: Oral
Narratives.” Seattle: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, 2008.
http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2008_818-08g_Kamp.pdf
Kelly, Catriona. Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Kelly, Catriona. “Socialist Churches: Heritage Preservation and ‘Cultic Buildings’ in Leningrad,
1924-1940.” Slavic Review 71, No. 4 (Winter 2012): 792-823.
Kettering, Karen. “An Introduction to the Design of the Moscow Metro in the Stalin Period: The
Happiness of Life Underground.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000),
2-20.
Kettering, Karen. “Sverdlov Square Metro Station: “The Friendship of the Peoples” and the
Stalin Constitution.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000): 21-47.
Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. Edited by Strobe Talbott. Boston: Little Brown
and Company, 1970.
Kirschbaum, Lisa A. The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1945: Myth, Memories, and Monuments.
64
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As Civilization. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995.
Krylova, Anna. “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament.”
Contemporary European History 23, No 2 (2014): 167-192.
Krylova, Anna. “The Tenacious Liberal Self in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian
and Eurasian History 1 No. 1 (Winter 2000): 119-146.
Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin’s Industrial Revolution, 1928-1932. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention. London and New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson- Smith. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1992.
“Leningradskii Metropoliten im. V.I. Lenina Stantsiia “Avtovo” Perronnyi Zal.” Metrootkrytki
Metrokalendariki Metrokonverty Website.
http://metropostcards.narod.ru/spb/sets/html_lm1968/lm1968_avtovo_1.htm (accessed April 12,
2014).
Lincoln, W. Bruce. Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia. New
York: Basic Books, 2000.
Lovell, Stephen. The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to Present. Oxford: John
Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Maddox, Steve. “Healing the Wounds: Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of
Leningrad’s Imperial Heritage, 1941-1950.” PhD Dissertation: University of Toronto, 2008.
Malpas, Jeff. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Marx, Karl. Selected Writings (Second Edition). Edited by David McLellan. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
Medvedev, Roy. Khrushchev: A Biography. Translated by Brian Pearce. Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1984.
Mehille, Elidor. “The Socialist Design: Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet
Union.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13. No. 3 (Summer 2012): 635665.
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York:
Picador, 2006.
65
Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, 1955-1995. Edited by V.A. Garyugin, A.T. Denisov, V.I. Tuft,
S.P. Shchukin. Liki Rossii: Sankt Peterburg, 1995.
Mosse, George. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Naiman, Eric. “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them.” Russian Review 60, No.
3 (July 2001): 307-315.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by RJ
Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Translated by
Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980.
Nikulin, N.N. Vospominaniia O Voine. Sankt Peterburg: Gosizdat, 2010.
Norris, Stephen M. A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National
Identity, 1812-1945. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006.
Northrop, Daniel. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004.
Nove, Alec. Marxism and “Really Existing Socialism.” Abingdon: Routledge, 2001.
O’Mahony, Mike. “Archaeological Fantasies: Constructing History of the Moscow Metro,”
Foreign Language Review 98, No. 1 (Jan 2003), 138-150.
Overy, Richard. Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945. New York:
Penguin Books, 1997.
Overy, Richard. The Air War, 1939-1945. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005.
Palmer, Scott. Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Palmer, Scott. “Icarus, East: The Symbolic Contexts of Russian Flight.” The Slavic and East
European Journal 49 No. 1 (2005): 19-47.
Pavlov, E.S. Letopis’ Sluzhby Tonnel’nykh Sooruzhenii Leningradskogo-Peterburgskogo
Metropolitena, 1955-2002 gg: goy, sobymia, lyudi. Sfinks SPb Metronom: Sankt Peterburg,
2004.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Plamper, Jan. The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2012.
Priestland, David. Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter66
war Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953. Edited by Donald
Raleigh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
Pushkin, Alexander. “The Bronze Horseman.” Translated by John Dewey. Translation and
Literature 7, No. 1 (1998): 59-71.
Putevoditel’ Leningrad (1986). Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986.
Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Rayfield, Donald. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
Reed, John. Ten Days That Shook the World. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe. Edited by Julie Buckner
and Emily D. Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013.
Roll-Hansen, Nils. The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books,
2005.
Rossman, Jeffrey J. “The Teikovo Cotton Workers’ Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender, and
Identity Politics in Stalin’s Russia.” Russian Review 56, No. 1 (January 1997): 44-69.
Rossman, Jeffrey J. Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class Revolution and the Shop Floor.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Roth-Ey, Kristin. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost
the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Sankt Petersburg: Schauplätze einer Stadtgeschichte. Edited by Karl Schlögel, Frithjof Benjamin
Schenk, and Markus Ackeret. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007.
Schlögel, Karl. Moscow 1937. London: Polity, 2012.
Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2004.
Siegelbaum, Lewis H. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2011.
Siegelbaum, Lewis H. Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
67
Sluchevskii, Konstantin.” Kapitan Nemo v Rossii.” Sochineniia v 6 tomakh, Vol. 4. St.
Petersburg: A.F. Marks, 1898.
Sokolov, B.V. “The Cost of War: Human Losses of the USSR and Germany,1939-1945.”
Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1996): 156-171.
Song, Joon-Seo. “The Legacy of World War II on the Stalinist Home Front: Magnitogorsk 19411953.” PhD Dissertation: Michigan State University, 2007.
Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953. Edited by Katerina Clark and
Evgeny Dobrenko. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Soviet State and Society Under Khrushchev. Edited by Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith. New
York: Routledge, 2009.
Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian
Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sutton, Anthony C. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930-1945.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
Taubman, William. Khruschev: The Man and His Era. New York: WW Norton, 2003.
The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s. Edited by Deniz Kozlov and
Eleonory Gilburd. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Timasheff, Nicholas. The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia.
New York: EP Dutton, 1946.
Trotsky, Leon. From October to Brest-Litovsk. New York: The Socialist Publication Society,
1919.
Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. Translated by Max Eastman. Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2008.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Edited by William Keach. Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2005.
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. Translated by Max Eastman. Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2004.
Tucker, Robert C. The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change: Revised Edition.
New York: WW Norton, 1972.
Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997.
Verne, Jules. The Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. Edited by Walter James
68
Miller. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Publishers, 1978.
Volkov, Solomon. St. Petersburg: A Cultural History. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New
York: The Free Press, 1995.
Weiner, Amir. Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Wolf, William. “Russia’s Revolutionary Underground: The Construction of the Moscow
Subway, 1931-1935.” PhD Dissertation: The Ohio State University, 1994.
Wortman, Richard S. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter
the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. Edited by
Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.
Young, Damon A. “Being Grateful for Being: Being, Reverence, and Finitude,” Sophia 44, No. 2
(October 2005): 31-53.
Zubkova, Elena. “Istoriki I ochevidtsy: Dva vzgliada na poslevoennuiu isoriiu.” Svobodnaia
Mysl’ 6 (1995).
Zubkova, Elena. Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957.
Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1998.
69