Owen Hatherley on the secret history of Moscow’s mass housing experiment
The public square just off 60th Anniversary of October Street in the Moscow suburb of Novye Cheryomushki (New Cherry Town) is a very ordinary, if unusually placid, place. Trees, playgrounds, benches, mothers pushing prams and the odd middle-aged boozer circle around a small statue of Lenin. Beyond them, the four-storey apartment blocks look a little worn.
The sense of quiet torpor here is fitting given that Russians call their suburbs “sleeping districts” – not much more than cubicles to come home to at the end of a day’s work. Yet Novye Cheryomushki is certainly one of the more attractive places to sleep, and live, with low-rise buildings, lots of social facilities, and a metro station nearby. It is also the common ancestor of every mikrorayon (micro-district) in Moscow; the forefather of nearly every suburb in the capital and far beyond.
For the centre of Novye Cheryomushki bears witness to an extraordinary architectural competition between seven blocks of flats. Each of these seven blocks, built in 1958 at record speed, employs a different prefabricated construction system, usually of concrete panels slotted into place like toy building blocks. Each was assessed on expense and speed of construction, and then one lucky block of flats, codenamed “K7”, was chosen as the winner.
K7’s reward was to be replicated in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, all across the Soviet Union. Thus began the largest experiment in industrialised housing in history, where homes would become mass-produced commodities like cars, fridges and TVs. Industrialised housing made up 75% of all Soviet housing stock by 1991 – this is where the overwhelming majority of Muscovites live; not in the Tsarist-Stalinist oligarchgrad within the inner city, nor the hipster enclaves of Chistye Prudy or Gorky Park. These suburbs may look monolithic, but the stories they tell are not.
The programme was necessitated by the housing catastrophe that the Soviet Union faced by the 1950s. The Russian Empire was 80% rural in 1917, but under Stalin the fastest and probably most brutal industrial revolution in history was forced through between 1929 and 1940. Moscow filled with rural migrants fleeing a famine-ridden countryside to work in the new factories. Many lived in barracks, basements, tents, even trenches. This housing crisis was barely under control when the war compounded the problem, with the Third Reich’s war of extermination against the USSR making millions homeless.
However, attempts to redress this under Stalin were almost whimsical. Grandiose, richly decorated apartment blocks were built lining wide, Haussmannesque boulevards; enormous resources were diverted into skyscraping luxury hotels, or grace-and-favour flats for artists and bureaucrats. The first independent act of Nikita Khrushchev after becoming General Secretary on Stalin’s death was to force through a decree “On Architectural Excess”, demanding industrialised construction rather than bespoke masterpieces as a means of solving the crisis.
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