I found this travelogue of Danish author Hans Scherfig’s 1950 trip to the USSR. I think it will be of interest to people here so I have translated it. The illustrations are by Scherfig himself.

In chapter 5 Scherfig tells about the rapid reconstruction of Moscow and defends socialist realist architecture as suitable for a socialist political economy. He describes the Moscow metro and describes the Red Square. Scherfig is far from impressed with the splendour of the tsars on display inside the the Kremlin.

Travels in the Soviet Union

Table of Contents

Novodevichy Convent, Moscow 1950

Chapter 5

From Lenin Hill, which is no mountain but a ridge a hundred metres high, one looks out over the giant city with its golden and green onion domes, its red towers and yellow skyscrapers and black factory chimneys and gasometers. In times past it was known as Sparrow Hill, and from here Napoleon looked out over the conquered and burning city. Hitler did not get that far, and the nervous supermen who now fantasise about crusades to the east will probably not get any further than the poor American Secretary of War who, in his nightshirt, ran screaming around Fifth Avenue shouting: To arms! The Russians are coming! before he was taken to an asylum[1].

The new Moscow is developing in the direction of Lenin Hill. Looking down, you see the new wide ring boulevards, the green belts of parkland, the new bridges over the Moskva River. You also see remnants of the old Moscow’s chaotic town plan, with low wooden houses scattered about as if shaken from a toy box, and between the wooden houses new residential quarters are rising with buildings of twenty and thirty storeys. In the foreground you see the wonderful Novodevichy Convent with its many towers and chapels, where domes are sprouting like mushrooms in all sizes, and you see numerous steel skeletons of new skyscrapers. Far away in the mist, you catch a glimpse of the Kremlin’s towers and domes.

Here on the hill itself, they are building Moscow’s new university; the steel frame has already climbed twenty storeys skyward, and by next year the whole thing is to be finished. The old university downtown has long been too small; now the science departments are to be moved out here to the hill, for the new skyscraper complex will offer ample space; were its rooms to be contained in an ordinary five-storey building, it would have to be twelve kilometres long. From the plans the new university looks fantastic, the latest technology united with old Muscovite style elements in the same way as is aimed at in all of Moscow’s new buildings. Once finished, these houses appear more beautiful and natural than on paper. The new Moscow is a very festive city. Around the whole of this vast metropolis, a park belt ten kilometres wide is being laid out, and later three mighty wedge-shaped parks are to thrust themselves inward toward the city centre from this outer park ring.

Moscow’s urban plan has been the subject of a long and heated discussion. In 1931, on Stalin’s initiative, a commission was appointed to draw up a general plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, and its chairman, Kaganovich, became for Moscow what Baron Haussmann had been for Paris in his day. There were architects who wanted to preserve the old picturesque Moscow as a museum city and build a completely new city outside the old one. There were others who wanted to erase the old city and lay out the new one in a chessboard grid.

There were those who wanted the city laid out as a system of satellite cities. Some wanted to check the city’s growth, so that it would never have to accommodate more than one million people; others wanted to expand it to embrace ten million inhabitants.

Traffic assistant, the metro, Moscow 1950

The final decision stated that the city’s historic plan must be the point of departure, but that a comprehensive reorganization of streets and squares should create conditions for a rational placement of residential districts, industries, railways, warehouses, and water supply. Normal and healthy conditions for the inhabitants are to be created by reducing the population density; an architectural unity is to be sought in the design of squares and streets, parks and river embankments; and the construction of both housing and public buildings should accommodate the elements of classical as well as modern architecture and exploit all the possibilities of modern construction techniques.

Western architects will no doubt be sad that the new Moscow is not being built in the functionalist style. The style that is natural to us does not satisfy Soviet citizens. Functionalism is a true expression of the liberal economy. It is the style of capitalism, which has at last been clarified after nearly a century of stylistic chaos. It is the machine-style, which avoids everything superfluous, which expresses utility and function and economy. Beauty is made identical with utility, economy becomes the precondition of aesthetics. The architects who pioneered this style among us fought against the feudal remnants in bourgeois architecture. Baroque and rococo, so natural to an absolute monarch, became a caricature in a bourgeois society. Yet it is hardly reasonable to demand that the socialist workers’ society should simply take over the economic functionalism of bourgeois society.

When you look at the Moscow metro with its stations, which are underground palaces of coloured marble, the first thought for a Westerner is: This line can never pay for itself! These subterranean palaces will never turn a profit! In Western Europe and America a transit system must be able to pay for itself; in the Soviet Union, a railway must simply move people in the fastest, most comfortable way possible. The Moscow metro is no business. It is the people’s railway. The trains run every other minute, they are clean, elegant, comfortable and almost soundless. Sixty metres underground the air is as fresh as in the Alps, and the lighting is like daylight. At every station, three broad escalators carry passengers down, and three more carry them up. Two million people are transported every day in the most convenient and comfortable manner. This railway is the pride of the city, and the two million who use it every day have a daily joy. All the stations are different like the halls in the Kremlin, each new station is a festive experience, colossal pillared halls and vaults which alternate in colours and patterns, composed of a couple of hundred different kinds of stone. They are festival halls which do not have to “pay for themselves,” but simply be festive; the costly materials must not yield a return, it is not functionalism in the Western economic sense, but it functions well, it is the celebration of everyday life.

The great red ruby stars that shine above the Kremlin’s towers like a constellation in the summer sky presumably serve no economic function either, and would without doubt be condemned as a superfluous ornament by architects back home, whereas a Coca-Cola advertisement would be embraced as an emblem of freedom. We see these crimson stars from our hotel windows, and the constellation casts a wondrous sheen across the Red Square and Lenin’s mausoleum and the peculiar Church of St. Basil. This monstrosity of a church was built by Ivan the Terrible, and it is said that he had the Italian builder’s eyes put out so that he could never again build anything so strange; the story cannot be true, since there was not one but two builders, and they were not Italians but Russians, and they built other strange churches afterwards. From this gnarly structure the domes rise like mushrooms, or rather like artichokes and pineapples, all different in size and shape, some have gone to seed and sprouted a tiny new cupola at the tip. The holy Basil after whom the church is named was called Vasily Blazhenny in Russian, and he was so holy that he went naked as Adam all year round and so pious that for Christ’s sake he refused to exercise his reason.

The name the Red Square is not new. The square has been called that for centuries. It was Moscow’s old marketplace, and it was the tsars’ execution ground. On a platform of red granite beside St. Basil’s Church they struck off people’s heads; Peter the Great inaugurated the executions of the Streltsy[2] by personally beheading two hundred, while the foreign ambassadors looked on in bewilderment, several hundred Streltsy were hanged on the Kremlin’s red wall, and Peter let the corpses hang through the winter. Well into the nineteenth century this was an execution ground. Peasants from the outskirts of the city came here to sell their produce, the square was built up with stalls and sheds. The large ugly building opposite the Kremlin wall was a bazaar with more than a thousand sales outlets; now it is being converted to other purposes. Behind it lies the old city, Kitay-gorod, called “Chinatown” for some reason, though no Chinese ever lived there. This was the old merchants’ quarter, which gradually became a slum. The “Chinese wall” around Kitay-gorod has now been torn down; only a few picturesque fragments of it remain, and a couple of the old gates. Kitay-gorod is being redeveloped, and in a few years this part of old Moscow will have vanished.

We had the finest view of the Red Square from Mogens Fog’s windows. Perhaps it was because he was chairman of the delegation that he had been given a room with an extra salon, which the rest of us naturally envied him. But we visited him often to enjoy the view, and I tried to draw a sketch of the Kremlin from there.

Vasily Blazhenny cathedral, Moscow 1950

It was the ever-vigilant Anker Kirkeby who one day asked one of the VOKS men: “Couldn’t we get inside the Kremlin?” And perhaps some members of the delegation were surprised to be answered: “Why yes, you may very well, if you wish.”

View from Hotel National, Moscow April 1950

The Kremlin is a city with streets and squares. There are fortresses and houses and palaces in every style from the time of Ivan the Terrible onward. There are Byzantine and Tartar buildings, there are palaces from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there is the last tsars’ “great palace” with its endless staircases and mirror-glass halls. There is a considerable collection of churches: the little old whitewashed “forest church”, Spas-na-boru[3], built back when this place was still a wooded hill; the peculiar Verkho-Spassky Cathedral, where half a dozen golden onions of varying sizes grow in a row upon its flat roof; the enormous Ivan Veliky with its brilliant golden dome eighty metres up; the Archangel Cathedral with its golden onions bundled like leeks; the chalk-white Uspensky Cathedral, and so on and so forth. The tsars were baptised in one church and crowned in another and buried in a third, and inside the gloomy oriental fortresses they kept their private little chapels, lined with gold. We walked through low vaulted chambers and narrow passages constructed for assassins; we saw Ivan the Terrible’s murky chambers and Tsar Nicholas’s tasteless halls. We saw treasuries piled with gold objects and thrones encrusted with diamonds, golden crowns and golden carriages. A museum like the Rosenborg collection[4], but of enormous dimensions, a hoard of outrageous gifts from European princes — from the old Christian IX[5] there were some ugly silver pieces as well.

Verkho-Spassky Cathedral, Moscow 1950

There are several museums in the Kremlin, and they are naturally open to the public; we met several groups of people being shown around. There are historical collections and many curiosities. There is the enormous bell, Tsar-kolokol (the tsar of bells), which could never ring, and the enormous cannon, Tsar-pushka (the tsar of cannons), which could never fire. There is also a church bell that was once locked away because it had rung at the wrong time, and the disobedient bell’s clapper was sent to Siberia for six years.

The government offices are in the Kremlin as well, and it is said that a number of high-ranking officials have their residences there. I do not know whether Stalin has a private apartment there; at any rate, we were not invited, which some might interpret as intolerable secretiveness. But we were in the Supreme Soviet’s great white meeting hall and in its lobby, which connects with the state rooms of the tsar palace. There was nothing secretive about it.

The old Kremlin will remain unchanged, while the new Moscow rises. An old Russian proverb has it: Over Moscow looms the Kremlin, and above the Kremlin there is nothing but heaven. But in the heavens above the Kremlin, the ruby-red five-pointed stars shine like a new constellation over a new world.

Original Danish text

Rejse i Sovjetunionen

  • Hans Scherfig

V.

Fra Lenin-bjerget, som ikke er noget bjerg, men et 100 meter højt bakkedrag, ser man ud over kæmpebyen med dens gyldne og grønne løgkupler, dens røde tårne og gule skyskrabere og sorte fabriksskorstene og gasbeholdere. I gamle dage hed det Spurve-bjerget, og herfra så Napoleon ind over den erobrede og brændende by. Hitler nåede ikke så langt, og de nervøse supermænd, der nu fantaserer om krigstog mod øst, vil nok ikke nå længere end den stakkels amerikanske krigsminister, som i nattøj løb skrigende rundt på Fifth Avenue og råbte: Til våben! Russerne kommer! inden man bragte ham til et sindssygehospital.

Det nye Moskva udvikler sig i retning af Lenin-bjerget. Man ser ned over de nye brede ringgader, de grønne parkbælter, de nye broer over Moskva-floden. Man ser også rester af det gamle Moskvas kaotiske byplan med lave træhuse, der ligger som rystet ud af en legetøjsæske, og mellem træhusene vokser de nye boligkvarterer op med bygninger på 20 og 30 etager. Man ser i forgrunden det forunderlige Novodevitjij-kloster med dets mange tårne og kapeller, hvor kuplerne spirer frem som champignons i alle størrelser, og man ser de mange stål-skeletter til nye skyskrabere. Langt ude i disen skimter man Kremls tårne og kupler.

Heroppe på selve bjerget er man ved at bygge Moskvas nye universiter; stålskelettet er allerede nået en snes etager i vejret, til næste år skal det hele være færdigt. Det gamle universitet inde i byen har længe været for lille; nu skal de naturvidenskabelige afdelinger flyttes herud på bjerget, der bliver plads nok i det nye skyskraber-kompleks; hvis lokalerne skulle rummes i en almindelig fem-etages bygning, måtte den være 12 kilometer lang. Efter tegningerne ser det nye universitet fantastisk ud, den nyeste teknik forenet med gamle moskovitiske stilelementer på samme måde, som det er tilstræbt i alle Moskvas nybygninger. Færdige virker disse huse smukkere og naturligere end på tegningerne. Det nye Moskva er en meget festlig stad. Uden om hele kæmpebyen er man ved at anlægge et ti kilometer bredt parkbælte, og senere skal tre vældige kileformede parker skyde sig ind mod byens centrum fra denne ydre park-ring.

Moskvas byplan har været genstand for en lang og bevæget diskussion. I 1931 blev der på Stalins initiativ nedsat en kommission, som skulle udarbejde en generalplan for Moskvas ombygning, og kommissionens leder Kaganovitj kom til at betyde det samme for Moskva, som i sin tid baron Haussmann for Paris. Der var arkitekter, der ville bevare det gamle maleriske Moskva som en museumsby og bygge en helt ny by uden for den gamle. Der var andre, der ville udslette den gamle by og anlægge den nye efter skakbrædt-mønster.

Nogle ville have byen anlagt som et system af planet-byer. Nogle ville standse byens vækst, så den ikke kom til at rumme mere end een million mennesker, andre ville udvide den til at omfatte 10 millioner indbyggere.

I den endelige beslutning hedder det, at man skal gå ud fra byens historiske plan, men ved en gennemgribende regulering af gaderne og pladserne skabe betingelser for en hensigtsmæssig placering af boligkvarterer, industrier, baner, lagerrum og vandforsyning. Der skal skabes normale og sunde forhold for beboerne ved at formindske folketætheden, der skal tilstræbes en arkitektonisk helhed ved udformningen af torve og gader, parker og flodkajer, og man skal både ved opførelsen af beboelseshuse og offentlige bygninger til passe den klassiske og den moderne arkitekturs elementer og udnytte alle den moderne byggetekniks muligheder.

At det nye Moskva ikke bliver bygget i funkis-stil vil vel bedrøve vesterlandske arkitekter. Den stil, som er naturlig for os, tilfredsstiller ikke sovjet-borgerne. Funktionalismen udtrykker rigtigt den liberalistiske økonomi. Det er kapitalismens stil, som omsider er blevet afklaret efter næsten et århundrede af stil-kaos. Det er maskin-stilen, som undgår alt overflødigt, som udtrykker nytten og funktionen og økonomien. Det skønne bliver identisk med det nyttige, økonomien bliver æstetikkens forudsætning. De arkitekter, som hos os var banebrydere for denne stil, kæmpede imod de feudale rester i den borgerlige arkitektur. Den barok og rococo, som var naturlig for en enevoldskonge, blev en karikatur i et borgersamfund. Men det er ikke rimeligt at forlange, at det socialistiske arbejdersamfund uden videre skulle overtage borgersamfundets økonomiske funktionalisme.

Når man ser metroen i Moskva med dens stationer, som er underjordiske paladser af farvet marmor, er den første tanke for en vesterlænding: Denne bane kan aldrig betale sig! Disse underjordiske slotte kan aldrig forrente sig! I Vesteuropa og Amerika skal et bybaneanlæg kunne svare sig; i Sovjetunionen skal en bane befordre folk afsted på den behageligste og hurtigste måde. Metroen i Moskva er ingen forretning. Det er folkets bane. Togene løber hvert andet minut, de er rene og fine og bekvemme og næsten lydløse. 60 meter under jorden er luften frisk som i Alperne, og belysningen er som dagslys. På hver station bringer tre brede rullende trapper folk ned, og tre andre trapper ruller folk op. To millioner mennesker bliver befordret hver dag på den bekvemmeste og behageligste måde. Denne bane er byens stolthed, og de to millioner, der benytter den hver dag, har hver dag en glæde. Alle stationerne er forskellige ligesom salene i Kreml, hver ny station er en festlig oplevelse, kæmpemæssige søjlehaller og hvælvinger, som veksler i farver og mønstre, sammensat af et par hundrede forskellige stenarter. Det er festsale, som ikke skal »betale sig«, men bare være festlige; de kostbare materialer skal ikke forrentes, det er ikke funktionalisme i vestlig økonomisk forstand, men det fungerer godt, det er dagliglivets fest.

De store røde rubin-stjerner, som lyser over Kremls tårne som et stjernebillede på sommerhimlen, har vel heller ingen økonomisk funktion og ville vel blive fordømt som overflødig pynt af hjemlige arkitekter, medens en lysreklame for Coca Cola ville blive anset for et frisindets symbol. Vi ser disse blodrøde stjerner fra vores hotelvinduer, og stjernebilledet giver et forunderligt skær over den røde plads og Lenins mausolæum og den sælsomme Basilius-kirke. Dette monstrum af en kirke blev bygget af Ivan den Skrækkelige. og det påstks, ar han lod øjnene stikke ud på den italienske bygmester, for at han aldrig mere skulle kunne bygge noget så underligt; historien kan ikke være sand, eftersom der ikke var een, men to bygmestre, og de var ikke italienere, men russere, og de har bygget andre underlige kirker siden. Fra denne knudrede bygning vokser kuplerne frem som svampe eller snarere som artiskokker og ananas, alle forskellige i størrelse og form, nogle er gået i frø og har afsat en lille ny kuppel i toppen. Den hellige Basilius, som kirken fik navn efter, hed på russisk Vasilij Blazjennyj, og han var så hellig, at han gik nøgen som Adam året rundt og så from, at han for Kristi skyld vægrede sig ved at bruge sin fornuft.

Betegnelsen Den røde Plads er ikke ny. Pladsen har hedder sådan i århundreder. Det var Moskvas gamle markedsplads, og det var tsarernes henrettelsesplads. På en platform af rød granit ved Basilius-kirken huggede man hovederne af folk; Peter den Store indledte henrettelserne af Strelitserne ved personligt at afhugge to hundrede hoveder, mens de udenlandske gesandter så undrende til, flere hundrede Strelitser blev hængt på Kremls røde mur, og Peter lod ligene hænge vinteren over. Helt ind i det nittende århundrede var her henrettelsesplads. Bønderne fra byens omegn kom her og solgte deres produkter, pladsen blev tilbygget med boder og skure. Den store grimme bygning over for Kreml-muren var en bazarbygning med mere end tusind udsalgssteder, nu er den ved at blive bygger om til andre formål. Bagved den ligger den gamle by, Kitajgorod, af en eller anden grund kaldet for »kineserbyen«, skønt der aldrig har boet kinesere. Der var den gamle købmandsby, som efterhånden blev slumkvarter. Den »kinesiske mur« uden om Kitajgorod er nu revet ned, der er kun bevaret enkelte maleriske stumper af den og et par af de gamle porte Kitajgorod er under sanering, og om få år vil denne del af det gamle Moskva være forsvundet.

Den fineste udsigt over Den røde plads havde vi fra Mogens Fogs vinduer. Måske var der fordi han var delegationens formand, at han havde værelse med en ekstra salon, som vi andre naturligvis misundte ham. Men vi besøgte ham ofte for at nyde udsigten, og jeg prøvede at tegne en skitse af Kreml herfra.

Det var den altid årvågne Anker Kirkeby, som en dag spurgte en af VOKS-mændene: »Kan vi ikke komme indenfor i Kreml?« Og måske har det forundret nogle af delegationens medlemmer, at der blev svarer: »Jo, det kan De da godt, hvis De har lyst.«

Kreml er en by med gader og torve. Der er borge og huse og paladser i alle stilarter fra Ivan den Skrækkeliges tid og fremover. Der er byzantinske og tartariske bygninger, der er paladser fra det 17. og 18. århundrede, og der er de sidste tsarers »store palads« med de endelsse trapper og spejlglas-sale. Der er en større kollektion af kirker: Den lille gamle hvidkalkede »skovkirke«, Spas-na-boru, som blev bygget allerede dengang dette sted var en skovklædt bakke, den besynderlige Verkho-Spasskij-katedral, hvor en halv snes gyldne løg af forskellig størrelse vokser i række på det flade tag, den vældig store Ivan Velikij med sin strålende guldkuppel 80 meter oppe, Arkhangelskij-katedralen med sine gyldne løg sammenbundtet som porrer, den kridhvide Uspenskij-katedral osv. o.s.v… Tsarerne blev døbt i een kirke og kronet i en anden, og blev begravet i en tredie, og inde i de skumle orientalske borge havde de deres private små kapeller, foret med guld. Vi gik gennem lave hvælvede rum og snævre gange, konstrueret for snigmordere, vi så Ivan den Skrækkeliges skumle gemakker og tsar Nikolajs smagløse sale. Vi så skatkamre med dynger af guld-sager og troner, besat med diamanter, og guldkroner og guldkareter. Et museum som Rosenborg-samlingen, men af enorme dimensioner, en ophobning af forrykte gaver fra europæiske fyrster — også fra den gamle Christian den Niende var der nogle grimme sølvsager.

Der er flere museer i Kreml, og de er naturligvis tilgængelige, vi mødte flere grupper af folk, som blev vist om. Der er historiske samlinger og mange mærkværdigheder. Der er den kæmpemæssige klokke, Tsar-kolokol (klokkernes tsar), som aldrig kunne ringe, og den kæmpemæssige kanon, Tsar-pusjka (kanonernes tsar), som aldrig kunne skyde. Der er også en kirkeklokke, som engang blev spærret inde, fordi den havde ringet i utide, og den ulydige klokkes knebel blev sendt til Sibirien i seks år.

I Kreml er også regeringskontorerne, og der siges, at en del højere embedsmænd har deres bolig der. Jeg ved ikke, om Stalin har en privat lejlighed der; vi var i hvert fald ikke inviteret, hvad man måske vil udlægge som utåleligt hemmelighedskræmmeri. Men vi var i den øverste sovjets store hvide mødesal og i dens vandrehal, som står i forbindelse med tsar-paladsets repræsentations-sale. Der var ikke noget hemmelighedsfuldt ved det.

Det gamle Kreml vil forblive uforandret, mens det nye Moskva vokser op. Det hedder i et gammelt russisk ordsprog: Over Moskva er intet uden Kreml. Over Kreml er intet uden himlen. Men på himlen over Kreml lyser de rubin-røde femtakkede stjerner som et nyt stjernebillede over en ny verden.

  1. Scherfig must be thinking of James Forrestal, the US Secretary of Defense who were alleged to have had a similar mental health incident in Florida in 1949 shortly before his resignation. ↩︎

  2. The Streltsy were infantry units and a social class who rebelled in 1698. ↩︎

  3. Scherfig can not have visited the Spas-na-boru church as it was demolished in 1933. He must be referring an older source. ↩︎

  4. Museum in Copenhagen housing among other things the Danish crown jewels ↩︎

  5. Christian IX, king of Denmark from 1863 to 1906 ↩︎