Palace of Soviets - Utopian project of the USSR

I have long wanted to write a post about the Palace of Soviets - an unfulfilled utopian project of a colossal administrative building, which was to be built in Moscow and was to symbolize the victory of socialism in a single state. According to the plan of Soviet architects, the Palace of Soviets was supposed to be the tallest building in the world at that time - above the skyscrapers in New York.

For the construction of the Palace of Soviets, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was destroyed - the Bolsheviks blew it up in 1931, and in 1932 they began preparatory work for the construction of the Palace of Soviets. The colossus foundation was completed by 1939, but due to the outbreak of World War II, the project was completely frozen.

First, a little history. The idea of ​​building a colossal palace arose back in 1922 - it was voiced by Sergey Kirov at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets - it seemed to him that "the sounds of the international no longer fit in the old buildings and in place of the palaces of bankers, landowners and tsars, a new palace of working peasants needs to be erected."

That it would not be a “palace of the peasants” at all, but a palace for meetings of the Soviet nomenclature, to which peasants would not be allowed to take a cannon shot, was modestly silent in a fiery speech. But Kirov did not hide the expansionist plans of the Bolsheviks in relation to Western countries - "the magnificent building will become an emblem of future power, the triumph of communism, not only here, but also in the West!"

These articles were published in the Soviet press of those years. For comparison, it was drawn exactly how much the Palace of Soviets will become higher than the famous skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

A competition was held to select the final project, the requirements for the palace building were as follows - there should be two rooms inside, Big and Small, each of the rooms should accommodate several thousand people. Among the competitive works, the project of Dmitry Iofan (as "restoration-eclectic") and the project of German Krasin ("the upper part resembles a church dome") were rejected. In total, about 160 projects were considered - they were considered in two stages, and as a result, the work of Boris Iofan won.

According to the designers, the Palace of Soviets was to become the tallest building in the world, the top of the building was to be crowned with a giant 100-meter statue of Lenin - thus, the Palace of Soviets itself was simultaneously a building, and something like a colossal pedestal for the monument. The mass of the full-sized statue of Lenin was to be 6000 tons, and the length of his index finger would be 4 meters.

By the way, the construction of the Palace itself also planned to completely rebuild the center of Moscow, destroying the old quarters - something similar was later done by the conductor Ceausescu in Bucharest. Between Red Square and Sverdlov Square (now Teatralnaya) it was planned to build a wide highway. The authors of the project noted that "the idea embedded in the architectural solution of the squares of the Palace of Soviets is the idea of ​​open, broadly inviting squares that embody socialist democracy." I don’t know what is so “democratic” in open spaces - most likely, we would have obtained gigantic, not corresponding to the scale of a person and suppressing areas in which a person feels like a bug.

This is how the Palace should have looked in modern Moscow, had it been built.

Little information has been preserved about the interiors of the planned palace - it is only known that they should be finished with polished granite and decorated with sculptures. Places for spectators in the Great Hall were planned to be covered with leather, the height of the Great Hall was to be 100 meters with a diameter of 140 meters. The small hall was supposed to be 32 meters high, and the foyer of the Palace was to be called the "hall of the Stalinist constitution."

Intended view of the interior of the Great Hall:

Foyer, "Hall of the Stalinist Constitution":

In 1939, they finished building the foundation - it was built so long because the alleged palace was supposed to have a gigantic weight - about 1.5 million tons. The head of the construction of the Palace, Vasily Mikhailov, was repressed and executed by the end of the construction period. Reality knocked on the doors of Soviet projectors with the outbreak of World War II - anti-tank hedgehogs had to be made from metal blanks for the foundation for the defense of Moscow, and the rest was used to build bridges on the railway.

In the post-war years, the Soviet Union did not leave the idea to finish building the Palace of Soviets - however, the project was significantly shrunk and seriously blown away - the height of the building should have been not 415, but 270 meters, the areas of internal halls and their decor were substantially cut. In 1947, the famous "Stalinist skyscrapers" began to be built in Moscow, and they completely forgot about the Palace of Soviets.

In my opinion, the Palace of Soviets was originally a utopian project, which shows what happens when the government completely controls the country's finances - instead of such a giant expensive construction, the infrastructure of several Soviet cities could be completely modernized.

What do you think about this?

Watch the video: Palace of the Soviets - the unfinished Soviet skyscraper (March 2024).

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