Millions of you. We are darkness, and darkness, and darkness.
Try it and fight us!
Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians
With slanted and greedy eyes!

It is not known whether the American specialists who worked on the construction of the DneproGES knew these lines by Alexander Blok, but they joked in approximately the same spirit. “Truly Russians are Scythians,” the “specialists” said. “They are building their Dnieper hydroelectric power station the way the Scythians built their mounds 2000 years ago - by hand...”

The Dnieper, as a source of cheap and unlimited energy, has long attracted energy specialists. At the beginning of the 20th century, experts began developing a project for the energy use of the rapids section of the Dnieper between Aleksandrovsk and Yekaterinoslav (that is, between modern Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk). Until 1917, a dozen and a half projects were drawn up. The construction of two to four dams was envisaged, while the planned total capacity of hydroelectric power stations did not exceed 160 thousand kW. However, these plans remained plans. The Dnieper still calmly rolled its waters, not paying attention to all the changes happening around.

In the GOELRO plan adopted in 1920, the construction of a powerful hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper was identified as one of the most important tasks of electrification. The construction of this station would not only provide cheap electricity to mines and metallurgical enterprises under construction in the Donbass, but also solve a number of other problems. The flooding of nine rapids in the area from Zaporozhye to Dnepropetrovsk made it possible to open shipping traffic along the entire length of the Dnieper, provide electricity to the railway and solve the problem of irrigating arid lands.

The design of the Dnieper station was entrusted to the talented power engineer and hydraulic engineer Ivan Gavrilovich Alexandrov. The single-dam option presented by Alexandrov was impressive in its grandeur - the specialist proposed building a giant dam 750 meters long in the area of ​​Khortytsia Island, while the level of the Dnieper would rise by more than 35 meters, immediately blocking all the rapids. Of course, such a daring project had many opponents, but the party leadership and Lenin personally approved the grandiose plan.

In January 1921, by decree of the Supreme Council of National Economy, the design and survey organization "Dneprostroy" was created, which carried out topographical, geological and hydrological studies at the station construction site, as well as detailed development of the design of the DneproGES itself and other auxiliary structures. This gigantic work required almost six years; only the ninth version of the project was recognized as optimal and satisfying the terms of reference.

The issue of building the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station was finally decided at a meeting in the Kremlin, held in December 1926. And here there were some disputes and doubts about the possibility of building a colossal power plant. “On a winter day, about two dozen specialists were called to the Kremlin. There is a question about the construction of the Dnieper hydroelectric station. “We cannot recommend building it yourself. The matter is too big, we have no experience in these matters,” this is what the majority say. Three spoke out against it, including me completely unconditionally: “If we are given the necessary equipment, we will do it ourselves.” The decision has been made: the three of us will be assigned to work.” These three were energy builder B. E. Vedeneev, who supervised the construction of the first Volkhov hydroelectric power station in the Union, P. P. Rottert, a famous Ukrainian builder, under whose leadership the Kharkov House of State Industry and the Moscow metro were built, and the author of the above lines, A. V. Winter, subsequently appointed head of construction of the DneproGES.

On March 15, 1927, on the banks of the Dnieper, on a rock called “Love,” a red flag was raised with the inscription “Dneprostroy has begun!” 60 thousand people came to the banks of the Dnieper to bring to life the “ambitious idea” (as foreign journalists called the construction of the Dnieper HPP). However, many did not come of their own free will - at the DneproGES, as at other Soviet “constructions of the century,” prisoner labor was widely used. Which, in general, is not surprising. During the construction of the DneproGES, 8 million cubic meters of soil were moved and 1,200 thousand cubic meters of concrete were laid. And all this by hand, using only picks and shovels. Concrete laying work was especially difficult. Even now, using modern technology, the volume of concrete laid in the body of the DneproGES dam seems incredible. But at the end of the 20s, Soviet builders could only dream of concrete mixers and vibrators for laying concrete. The main tool was... legs. “The tub was opened by hand and kneaded in rubber boots, canvas trousers were put on,” Maria Safronovna Grechenko, a concrete worker from the DneproGES, said in an interview with the Inter channel. And this “dance” continued day and night. Naturally, with all the Komsomol enthusiasm, there were not enough volunteers for such hard labor...

On May 1, 1932, at 6:30 a.m., the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station produced its first kilowatts of electricity. At this moment, the hydroelectric generator of the DneproGES was launched. The first stage of the station, consisting of five power units, was put into operation on September 27, 1932. The opening of the station was scheduled for October 1, but Comrade Stalin, without whom not a single such event could take place, referred to being busy with government affairs and proposed postponing the opening of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station to October 10. The date was chosen for a reason - it was the highest favor on the part of the “Father of Nations” towards the builders of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station. “Random” coincidence - it was on October 10, 1878 that the head of the construction of the power plant, Alexander Vasilyevich Winter, was born. So the Soviet leaders also knew how to give “gifts” to their subjects. The DneproHES reached its design capacity of 560 thousand kW on April 19, 1939, when the ninth power unit of the station was launched. According to Soviet tradition, the station was named after V.I. Lenin.

In August 1941, the DneproGES was captured by German troops. The station personnel remained in their places until the last moment, and only when the German tank column came close to the dam did the power engineers flood the turbine room and disable the generators. The Nazis really wanted to restore the operation of such an important facility as the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station, the Fuhrer himself paid tribute to the station, but the Germans, despite all their efforts, failed to obtain a single kilowatt.

In 1943, retreating from the left bank of Zaporozhye, the Nazis completely destroyed the turbine hall of the DneproGES and planned to blow up the dam. The Germans prepared 200 tons of explosives to destroy the station. 40 tons of explosives and 100 aerial bombs weighing half a ton each were carefully placed in the body of the dam. If all this exploded, the dam would not stand. However, there was no explosion...

Immediately after the troops of the Soviet Army drove the Germans out of the DneproGES, restoration work. At the dam, workers and engineers discovered the body of a Soviet soldier. He had no documents with him, and his name remained unknown. The unknown soldier was buried with full military honors on the territory of the station, and the Eternal Flame was lit near his grave. It was believed that it was this warrior who, at the cost of his life, prevented the explosion of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station.

However, experts understood that one person could not cope with two battalions of Germans guarding the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. It was clear that such a task could only be carried out by a well-trained reconnaissance group with experience in such operations. And only in the early 60s, a report was found in the archives of the USSR Ministry of Defense, which stated that a group of 19 people under the command of Lieutenant Karuzov was sent to the DneproGES. It seemed that this document would finally allow us to establish the truth and find those who actually saved the Dnieper hydroelectric station. However, in the lists of units operating in the Zaporozhye region at the end of 1943, there was no person with that name...

In the heat of battle, it was not always possible to write a report accurately. This was the reason that historians and journalists could not find “Lieutenant Karuzov” for a long time. Only in 1964 did a Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent manage to find, alive and well, the commander of that same reconnaissance group. It turned out that his name is Nikolai Gordeevich Kuruzov and he lives not far from the DneproGES, in the city of Novomoskovsk, Dnepropetrovsk region.

Older readers probably remember the feature film “Major Whirlwind,” shot in 1967, about the rescue of Krakow, which had been mined by the Nazis, by Soviet intelligence officers. The same film, full of drama, could have been made about the DneproGES. It took Captain Soshinsky’s group more than a month (he carried out general guidance operation, Lieutenant Kuruzov commanded the team that directly disarmed the explosives) in order to find the cable leading to the explosive device. By blowing up the DneproGES, the Germans hoped to flood the vast area around the station and thus disrupt the advance of the Soviet troops. Realizing this and trying to prevent the final destruction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station, the Soviet command was forced to wait for the end of the operation to save the station. Only after Lieutenant Kuruzov and privates Yamalov and Starodubov cut out several tens of meters of wires, thus de-energizing the explosive device, was the order to attack given, and soon the Nazis were driven out of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station.

Thanks to unparalleled courage Soviet intelligence officers It was possible to prevent the complete destruction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station, but the station was in a deplorable state. The station equipment, generators were completely destroyed, the roadway and bridges connecting various sections of the dam were destroyed. Moreover, the Germans took away all the documentation and archives of the station, which slowed down the pace of restoration. Only in 1945, all technical documentation was discovered in Czechoslovakia and returned to their homeland.

The restoration of the station began with the laying of suspension bridges. By 1945, the bridge over the lock was restored. The electrical equipment was gradually replaced. On March 3, 1947, the hydroelectric power station produced the first industrial current - the first unit was launched. By the end of the year, two more generators were put into operation. The station reached its full design capacity in June 1950, when the operation of all nine power units was restored. By the way, in post-war years DneproGES performed another function - transport. The bridges across the Dnieper were destroyed, and while they were being restored, traffic flowed through the station dam from one bank of the Dnieper to the other.

At the end of the 60s, a new stage began in the history of DneproGES. Calculations by hydropower engineers showed that behind the dam on the left bank of the Dnieper it is possible to place another hydroelectric station. At the same time, it was planned to increase the capacity of the locks and the roadway of the dam. Work to implement the Dneprostroy-2 project began in 1969. 8 hydrogen generators with a capacity of 103.5 thousand kilowatts each were installed in the new turbine hall. The total power of the station increased to 1.5 million kilowatts. In the history of hydropower, such a scheme was used for the first time - without stopping the old station, a more powerful new one was built nearby. The design of the new single-chamber lock, built next to the old three-chamber one, was also unique. The length of this hydraulic structure- 300 meters, width - 18 meters, water drop height - more than 40 meters. The commissioning of the new lock made it possible to reduce locking time by three times, and also made it possible to pass large river-sea vessels through this section of the Dnieper, essentially giving direct access to the sea not only for Zaporozhye, but also for Kyiv. Reconstruction of the station was completed in 1980.

The DneproGES is still in operation, although it has not escaped the problems characteristic of recent years. The station still regularly produces kilowatts, now to the power grid of independent Ukraine. But DneproGES is not just a power plant, not just a hydraulic facility. This is a symbol of the era and a monument to the people who built this unique object.

And I see - beyond the capital there is a capital
Grows from the boundless strength of the Union;
Where the crows hovered and croaked over the carrion,
Bandaged in railroad tracks.
Ukrainian Kharkov is buzzing with its capital,
Living, working, reinforced concrete.

This is how Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote about post-revolutionary Kharkov in his poem “Three Thousand and Three Sisters.” After 1917, the city began to change rapidly. The former provincial center (not seedy, but not one of the first in Russian Empire), a merchant, banking and university city overnight became the capital of a huge union republic. Kharkov had to acquire the appearance of a metropolitan city, and, in addition, there was an urgent need for premises for a staff of thousands of officials. Until 1928, some government institutions were located in the building of the former Salamandra insurance company, and some rented premises in private houses. Overcrowding and the disunity of bureaucratic offices in different parts of the city caused a lot of problems for the young capital. These problems had to be solved. Decide in a revolutionary way quickly, in one fell swoop. This is how the idea of ​​building the House of State Industry was born, which was to become the largest building in Europe at that time. On March 21, 1925, the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) announced an all-Union competition to develop a project for such a building, which, as stated in the resolution, “should become a building of a new type, corresponding to the new tasks of socialist construction.”

The project, bold in its concept, aroused great interest among the most famous architects. The creator of the Lenin Mausoleum A.V. Shchusev, architects A.N. Beketov and I.A. Fomin and others presented their projects to the competition. Three months later, 17 projects were presented to the competition commission. The winner of the competition was... “Uninvited Guest.” This was the name of the project of the Leningrad architects S. S. Serafimov, S. M. Kravets and M. D. Felger. In June 1925, the “Uninvited Guest” was officially approved as a construction project for the State Industry Industry. Dozens of young architects, mostly students and graduates of the Kharkov Institute of Technology, worked on the working drawings.

Even before the start of the construction of Gosprom, in 1924, a preliminary sketch plan for the development of the territory adjacent to the central street of the city, Sumskaya, was developed. Since after the revolution the land passed from private hands into state ownership, architects had the opportunity to implement the most daring projects in scale, which “were supposed to erase the last features of capitalism from the architectural face of the city.” In those years, the territory of the current Freedom Square was, in fact, a city outskirts, practically a wasteland, so architects could not limit themselves in the scope of their urban planning plans. Among several proposals, the project of the young talented self-taught architect Viktor Karpovich Trotsenko was chosen, according to which it was planned to lay out blocks in the area of ​​​​Sumskaya Street in the form of three concentric rings separated by radial streets. The main node of this scheme was a round square on the site of a vacant lot behind the University Garden. It was decided to build the House of State Industry on this square. The project of Serafimov, Kravets and Felger fit very well into the site allocated for construction and the general development scheme of the territory. During construction, the building plan changed somewhat, for example, the largest area in Europe (currently it occupies 12 hectares of land, and its length along the longest axis is almost 750 meters) from round acquired an unusual shape, reminiscent of a chemical retort.

On November 21, 1926, a solemn ceremony of laying the foundation of the main building of Gosprom took place, which was attended by members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the government of the Ukrainian SSR. Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Grigory Petrovsky, who spoke at the rally, said that the new building was named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. And then, to the sounds of the “Internationale” (by the way, one of the legends associated with Gosprom says that if you look at the building from a bird’s eye view, you can see the first notes of the “Internationale” in its silhouette), the distinguished guests laid the first trolleys of concrete into the foundation . A mortgage board was immured in it with the inscription: “In 1926, on the 10th year of the October Revolution, in the presence of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee G.I. Petrovsky, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V.Ya. Chubar, Chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions comrade. Radchenko laid the main building of the House of State Industry named after Comrade. Dzerzhinsky".

The construction of Gosprom took 1,315 wagons of cement, 3,700 wagons of granite, 9 thousand tons of metal, and more than 40 thousand square meters of glass. But what is most amazing is that all construction was carried out almost by hand. More than 5 thousand workers, working in three shifts, using shovels, wheelbarrows and stretchers, built the largest building in Europe in just 2.5 construction seasons! The only “machines” that helped people were horses. By the way, such an accelerated pace of construction did not affect the quality of work. Derzhprom was built very firmly. During the Great Patriotic War, hundreds of shells and bombs fell on Gosprom, and attempts were made to blow up the building several times. Derzhprom suffered greatly - parquet floors, doors, and window frames burned out, but the monolithic reinforced concrete structure survived.

Let us recall that in the second half of the 1920s the country’s economy was dominated by the NEP, and therefore, in order to raise funds for the design and construction of such a gigantic facility as Derzhprom, a characteristic of the new economic policy structure - share joint stock company. In addition to the state, all Ukrainian industrial trusts became shareholders. But the funds collected by the trusts were not enough. The legendary Felix Dzerzhinsky, who visited the construction site shortly before his sudden death, helped Gosprom. At the suggestion of Dzerzhinsky, the government decided to provide extraordinary financing for the construction of the House of State Industry. The design estimate for construction was 9 million 50 thousand rubles, but in the end this amount was exceeded by more than 5 million rubles.

The first stage of Gosprom was commissioned in 1927, on the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. A year later, construction was completely completed. Derzhprom housed the apparatus of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Ukrainian SSR, the State Planning Committee, the People's Commissariat for Land, the Central Department of Statistics, the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, the trusts Khimugol, Yugostal, Koksobenzol, Industroy and many others. In addition to institutions, the Gosprom building had its own telephone exchange, several first-aid posts, a canteen and buffets, a hairdresser, a hotel, and several workshops. In 1934, when the capital's functions were transferred to Kyiv, institutions of republican subordination and trusts left Gosprom. Regional authorities moved into the vacated premises.

Let us remember another line from Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Let’s throw reinforced concrete into the sky!” - the poet wrote in 1922. Yes, Derzhprom really became an incredibly powerful and grandiose “architectural blow.” “I tried to design the House of State Industry as a particle of the organized world, to show a factory, a factory that has become a palace... With every step of the viewer, the building changes its appearance thanks to the contrasts of the masses, the play of chiaroscuro, rich in nuances of glazing... Space breaks the building, permeates it, as if dissolving it in itself "- wrote Sergei Savvich Serafimov about his brainchild. A giant with a volume of 347 thousand cubic meters. m and a usable area of ​​67 thousand sq. m - the Soviet Union has never seen anything like this. But, despite its monstrous size, Gosprom does not look like some kind of “monster” made of glass and concrete. Leningrad architects managed to successfully assemble a building of nine buildings different heights(from 6 to 13 floors), combined into three large blocks. Nine entrances with lobbies, wide staircases and elevators provided convenient communication between the various institutions located in the building. The central block is connected to two side closed passages at the level of the third, fifth and sixth floors.

Gosprom is the brightest representative of constructivism; it is not for nothing that in the World Architectural Encyclopedia the article “Constructivism” is illustrated with an image of this building. Constructivism, according to the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, “sought to use new technology to create simple, logical, functionally justified forms and expedient structures.” Indeed, the Gosprom building is distinguished by extreme laconicism - strict lines, no decorations, everything is subordinated to strict functionality. The distinctive features of Gosprom are beautiful and clear proportions, an original combination of volumes, monumentality and at the same time airiness, which is especially surprising given such an impressive size of the building.

At the end of the 20s, around the Gosprom building under construction there were clay huts with thatched roofs, and above them towered a reinforced concrete giant, sparkling with hundreds of windows. And therefore one can understand the delight of the “petrel of the revolution” Maxim Gorky when he saw with his own eyes the miracle under construction. “This is a wonderful harmony, an expression of the powerful spirit of the working class. Dear comrades, my beloved people! Continue to build just as strong, high, and wide!” - the writer called on those gathered at the rally in honor of the builders of State Industry. Other masters of words also visited Gosprom. The American novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote about the “miracle seen in Kharkov.” And worldwide fame came to Gosprom after the magazine Le Monde published a series of articles by the French writer Henri Barbusse, “The Organized Mountain,” where he enthusiastically talked about his impressions of what he saw at the Soviet “construction site of the century.”

Nowadays, Derzhprom houses the regional executive committee and various design institutes. Kharkov television center and television studio, telephone call center and other institutions.

Unfortunately, even such a giant as Gosprom is defenseless against time. According to experts, the building now needs urgent major repairs, which have not been carried out even once since the post-war restoration. It is necessary to restore or replace reinforced concrete floor slabs, load-bearing structures of passages, parapets and fences, balconies and canopies on facades. The engineering equipment of the building is on the verge of complete destruction: power supply, heating and water supply systems, sewerage, elevator facilities. The complete restoration of Derzhprom requires significant funds that are beyond the reach of regional budget. And although in 2003 the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine included Derzhprom in the list of objects that should be financed through centralized capital investments, there are still not enough funds. Before the celebration of the 350th anniversary of the founding of Kharkov, the symbol of the city was slightly updated: the main facades were restored, the roof, windows and part of the pipes in the building were replaced. However, there is still a long way to go until the complete restoration of Derzhprom. And yet, I want to believe and hope that Derzhprom, which was once the “construction project of the century,” in our time will not turn into a “reconstruction of the century”...

Hotel "Moscow"

Mid-20s... The young Soviet state is gradually forgetting the devastation, hunger and cold of the first post-revolutionary years. Universal abundance is still a long way off, but the economy is on the rise and growing rapidly. Thanks to the NEP and private initiative (what a pity that this prosperity did not last so long), not only bread, but also other products became available to ordinary Soviet citizens. The situation in construction is also changing. The state gets the opportunity to implement bold and large-scale projects.

Before the revolution, St. Petersburg was famous for the best hotels in the country. “Astoria” and “European”, built according to the designs of the architect Lidval, were considered masterpieces of the hotel business and were not inferior in comfort to the best hotels in the world. Moscow could boast of the Metropol and National, in the design, construction and decoration of which the best architects of Russia took part.

The first Soviet high-class hotel was supposed to be “Moscow”. The government decision determined the location for the construction of the hotel - Okhotny Ryad Street, on the site of the former merchant rows, just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin. A competition for the best hotel project was announced among the country's most titled architects. As a result, the project of architects L. I. Savelyev and O. A. Stapran was considered the most suitable. Later, the luminary of Soviet architecture, author of the Lenin Mausoleum project, Alexey Shchusev, joined the work on the final project of the Moscow Hotel.

“1) Avoid the luxury of bad taste, but make the hotel beautiful and comfortable at the same time. 2) Provide truly modern and high-quality hotel equipment with alarms, heating, ventilation, sanitary equipment, etc. 3) Design and build all rooms, especially luxury rooms, with the latest technology, and all work must be carried out on our own and from Soviet materials.” So, in his article, Alexey Shchusev wrote about the tasks that were set for the designers and builders of the Moscow Hotel. The tasks, it must be said, are not easy. Soviet specialists did not have much experience in designing and constructing such facilities; they also lacked the necessary construction and finishing materials of Soviet production. Some experts believe that the construction of “Moscow” could not have happened without the help of foreigners and the use of imported building materials. Even if so, this does not at all detract from the merits of Soviet architects and builders, thanks to whom “Moscow” was born.

In 1932, the Moscow Hotel project was approved, after which construction began. From the very first days, the history of construction was surrounded by various legends, rumors and mysterious cases. One of the most famous myths is that “Moscow” was supposedly built with different facades... due to an oversight. The facade on Revolution Square was significantly different from the facade that faced the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. And all because the architects Savelyev and Stapran presented a preliminary design with different facades to Stalin for signature. Stalin approved this option, and the architects, having discovered the mistake, were afraid to correct the project already signed by the leader. True, not all experts believe in this version of the appearance of the asymmetrical facades of the Moscow Hotel.

“Most likely, this beautiful legend was invented by Shchusev himself,” Alexey Klimenko, a member of the presidium of the Expert Advisory Council under the Chief Architect of Moscow, said in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper. - Construction of the Mossovet Hotel began in 1932... Just at this time, Soviet architecture switched to imperial classics, so Academician Shchusev was assigned to correct the facade of the already half-built building. According to the original project, the hotel was supposed to occupy the entire block, but only half was built before the war. The new building was finalized by other architects and appeared in the mid-70s. This is how Moscow became a victim of time and fickle fashion.”

There is also no consensus regarding the various secret objects allegedly located in “Moscow”. One of the corner rooms, which looked no different from the others, had walls one and a half meters thick that no jackhammer could take. Naturally, the assumption arose that this number was nothing more than the secret hideout of Lavrentiy Beria. There were also many rumors that the “leader of the peoples” Joseph Stalin’s bunker was allegedly located in the basements of “Moscow”. One way or another, no documentary evidence of these facts was found.

For the first time in the USSR, a separate construction department was created for the construction of the Moscow Hotel. Initially, it was planned that “Moscow” would be built by the Metallostroy association, but it did not even have time to start work when the construction was transferred to Mosstroy in March 1932. And five months later, a separate economic structure was created with direct subordination to the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet. The top leadership of the USSR also paid serious attention to the construction of the first Soviet hotel. The entire complex of work, starting from the design stage, was under the personal control of Lazar Kaganovich, who until 1935 served as first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee. “An exclusive role in the design of the building belongs to Comrade. L. M. Kaganovich, who repeatedly gave the most valuable instructions to designers and builders,” wrote Soviet newspapers. It is difficult to say whether Lazar Moiseevich really gave “the most valuable instructions” or whether it was ordinary Soviet propaganda, but control was strict, financing was paramount, and the supply of building materials, equipment and labor was uninterrupted. The situation did not change after Nikita Khrushchev replaced Kaganovich as the “first person” of the capital.

Of course, the scale of the work, even by the standards of the gigantomania of the first five-year plans, was amazing. The magazine “Moscow Construction” wrote in 1935: “During the construction of the Moscow Hotel, 65,621 m 3 of earth was removed. 23,000 m3 of concrete laid. 4000 tons of metal were consumed. Painting work was carried out on 150 thousand m2. 11 thousand cars of construction materials were consumed, glass - 5890 m 2. Covered with tiles 10,700 m2. 62 km of metal pipes were installed. 165 thousand m2 plastered. Laid: 20 thousand m2 of parquet, 450 km of electrical wires and cables, 7700 m2 of granite and marble.”

At the end of 1935, the first stage of the Moscow Hotel was put into operation. It really was a miracle, never seen before Soviet man. Visitors were greeted by a brightly lit lobby, decorated with the finest marble floors, the most modern elevators of the time that quickly ascended to the desired floor, and the most modern auxiliary equipment. The Moscow numbers deserved special attention. Each, even the simplest room of the Moscow, was equipped with a radio, telephone, bath or shower and decorated with paintings by the best contemporary artists - an unprecedented luxury at that time. The decoration of the facades and interiors, which were created according to the author's designs, amazed the imagination. Hundreds of craftsmen from all over the Union manually embodied these projects in stone.

For a long time, for an ordinary Soviet citizen, even those with money, “Moscow” was an almost impregnable fortress. Only the elite could be admitted to the best Soviet hotel. The most famous people in the country and the world stayed at “Moscow”: pilot Valery Chkalov, writer Ilya Erenburg, marshals Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky, great actors Mikhail Zharov, Arkady Raikin, Juliet Mazika, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Gina Lollobrigida, Nobel laureates physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie and writer Pablo Neruda and many, many others.

In 1968, construction began on the second stage of the Moscow Hotel, designed by architects A. B. Boretsky, I. N. Rozhin and D. S. Solopov. In this regard, in 1976, the “Grand Hotel”, or “Big Moscow Hotel”, located in the house of the merchant Korzinkin, built in 1879, was demolished. It is unlikely that in the 70s of the last century anyone could have imagined that a quarter of a century later the same fate would befall “Moscow”...

Yes, in terms of the level of comfort, room decoration, safety requirements and other parameters, the once best hotel in the country at the turn of the millennium could no longer compete with more modern hotels. And more than once opinions have been heard that “Moscow” is a symbol of the totalitarian era, a monument to Stalinism, and it has no place in the modern capital of Russia. In addition, representatives of the Moscow authorities argued that the hotel building was fragile, unsafe and could collapse at any moment. Perhaps so, but at the same time, the builders took two months longer than planned to dismantle the “Moscow” - the supposedly “fragile” walls and ceilings were so powerful.

Of course, attempts to defend “Moscow” were made more than once. But it immediately became clear that supporters of preserving the first hotel built in the USSR had practically no chance, the outcome of the “battle for Moscow” was a foregone conclusion. The land in the center of the capital was too expensive, and too many high-ranking officials were interested in the land occupied by the hotel finally becoming vacant. By August 2004, on the site of the symbol of the Soviet era, where the first Soviet hotel stood, there remained an empty area the size of a football field...

Metropolitan

“Is it possible to allow this sinful dream? Will not man, created in the image and likeness of God by an intelligent creature, humiliate himself by descending into the underworld? And what is there, God alone knows, and a sinful person should not know...” - so at the beginning of the 20th century, a certain Moscow bishop frightened respectable Moscow inhabitants by objecting to the construction of the first metro in the Russian Empire. The world's first subway, built in London in 1863, had been operating for forty years; underground trains ran in New York, Budapest, Vienna and Paris. And nowhere were “cases of discovering devils underground” recorded, and none of the passengers, thank God, fell into the underworld. But a deep fear still remained: what if something like this happens in Orthodox Moscow, “which a sinful person should not know about”?

In 1902, the American entrepreneur Gough received permission to conduct research papers and explore the possibility of building a metro in Moscow. The American company even began digging tunnels for future lines, but in the end the Moscow City Duma did not allow the construction of underground lines. Around the same time, engineers P.I. Balinsky and E.K. Knorre presented their project. The idea was striking in its grandeur - the total length of the metro lines was to be 54 kilometers (although this also included a significant ground part of the road), and the cost was more than 150 million rubles. But the project of Russian engineers suffered the same fate as the project of an American entrepreneur.

Of course, the church, despite its enormous influence, would hardly be able to independently resist the construction of the metro. However, the development of underground transport was not part of the plans of the Moscow authorities. The metro would require huge investments, moreover, it would take away a significant part of the passengers from the tram, and in those years the tram lines brought their owners (who, by the way, had good connections in the Moscow power elite) millions in income.

Attempts by enthusiasts to build a metro in other cities of the country were unsuccessful. In Kyiv, for example, it was planned to run trains underground back in the 80s of the 19th century. True, at that time we were not talking about the metro, but about part of the railway. The tunnel was supposed to start at Poshtova Square and reach the surface in the Bessarabka area. And in September 1916, the city authorities were presented with a project for the construction of the metro itself. The initiative came from the Kyiv representative office of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. The “city fathers” did not object in principle to the construction of underground transport, but the approval of the project and bureaucratic correspondence dragged on for too long, and as a result, due to the revolutionary events of 1917, the idea of ​​the Kyiv metro remained unrealized.

During Soviet times, the idea of ​​building a metro was returned to in the mid-20s. The increase in the number of cars and rapid construction have led to the fact that ground urban transport is increasingly difficult to cope with the transportation of an increasing number of passengers. The streets of large cities, especially Moscow, were overloaded. The situation was especially difficult in the central part of the capital. By the end of the 20s average speed the movement of trams and buses on the narrow streets of the center of Moscow did not exceed 6–7 km/h. The only solution The transport problem was the subway.

“Immediately begin preparatory work for the construction of a metro in Moscow as the main means of solving the problem of fast and cheap human transportation” - this decision was made in the summer of 1931 by the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which considered the current situation with passenger transportation in Moscow. On September 23, 1931, by government decision, Metrostroy was organized, and in November of the same year, the first experimental survey work was carried out on Rusakovskaya Street in the capital to study the conditions of underground construction.

Preparations for the construction of the first metro line continued in 1931–1932, and in 1933 the construction of the first underground line from Sokolniki station to Park Kultury with a branch began. Okhotny Ryad" - "Smolenskaya". The first stage of the metro had a total length of 11.2 km and included 13 stations.

“It seems to me that the people who, in construction such as the metro, attach such great importance to luxury and light and thus create not only useful, but also pleasant things, have already built the main thing and are confident in their future,” - so on the pages of the newspaper “ Paris Soir" Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about the construction of the Moscow metro. Of course, the brilliant French writer did not see everything that was happening outside the metro, but the metro really should have become a kind of showcase that would reflect the grandiose achievements of the Soviet state. The stations were not just places for boarding and disembarking passengers, but monumental architectural complexes, decorated with statues and bas-reliefs. A. V. Shchusev, A. A. Deineka, P. D. Korin, M. T. Manizer and other famous sculptors and architects took part in their design and decoration.

There were not enough tools and mechanisms, but this was compensated by incredible enthusiasm. The pace of construction was amazing. If at the beginning of 1934 about 35 thousand people worked at the construction site, then by May this number doubled. “The Soviet metro should become the best in the world” - this was the task given by the party and the government, and no effort or money was spared to achieve this goal. Even senior party leaders were ready to sacrifice some parts of their bodies in order for everything to work flawlessly in the subway.

It was like this. In those days, all ground urban transport was equipped with doors that opened manually, but for the subway, given its increased danger, such a scheme was not suitable. These are now the words “Caution, the doors are closing!” and the hissing of doors that follows this is the most common phenomenon for us, which you simply don’t pay attention to. And in the 1930s, automatic doors were a novelty. Naturally, the metro builders were worried whether the closing doors would cause injury to a passenger caught between them. One day, to check the safety of the doors, an entire delegation of the Moscow City Party Committee, led by First Secretary Lazar Kaganovich, went underground. At first they placed between the doors various items, however, Kaganovich was not convinced. He put his foot in the doorway and demanded: “Close!” At that time, a bruise on the body of the first secretary of the MG VKP(b) could be qualified as “an attempt on the life of a Soviet and statesman,” and therefore it is clear that the designers of automatic doors tried in every possible way to dissuade Kaganovich. However, he was adamant: “Close it!” The doors closed. Those gathered looked intensely at Kaganovich. "Fine!" - he finally said. And then Lazar Moiseevich began to place his arms and legs between the doors and eventually took off his cap and stuck his head through the doorway. And every time after the doors closed, he said with satisfaction: “It’s normal!” In general, the “running” tests of automatic doors were successful.

On October 15, 1934, the first test train was launched from the Komsomolskaya station to the Sokolniki station, consisting of two cars: No. 1 - motor and No. 1001 - trailed. At this section, drivers and other metro workers learned to drive trains and manage the most complex process of movement.

On February 4, 1935, trial traffic was opened along the entire line of the first stage of the Moscow metro. The first passengers were delegates of the VII All-Union Congress of Soviets. And on May 15, 1935, at 7 a.m., all 13 stations opened their doors to residents and guests of the capital. The metro has become not just a new type of urban transport, but the pride of the capital. In the first year of operation, a trip underground for Muscovites was somewhat similar to a family visit to a museum, and for guests of the capital, going to the metro was an obligatory ritual, the same as visiting the Mausoleum or the Tretyakov Gallery.

By the way, in continuation of this topic, the list of places that a modern person must visit, published in 2003 by one of the most popular American news sites MSNBC (a joint project of Microsoft and the NBC television channel), looks very interesting. So, the Moscow metro entered the top ten of this list; At the same time, Americans especially recommend visiting the Mayakovskaya, Kievskaya and Komsomolskaya stations.

Immediately after the commissioning of the first line, construction began on the second stage of the Moscow metro, 9.6 km long: from the Sverdlov Square station to the Sokol station. Since then, the construction of new tunnels near Moscow has not stopped for a single day; even during the war years, construction of the third metro line continued, which was put into operation on January 1, 1943. At the very hard days During the German offensive on Moscow and the daily raids of fascist aviation, the metro worked as a bomb shelter. As soon as the “Air Raid!” signal sounded, the movement of trains stopped, the voltage was removed from the contact rail, and people descended into the stations and tunnels. Thanks to the metro, thousands of lives were saved.

In pre-war times, the Moscow metro remained the only one in the USSR. In Kyiv, experts proposed starting construction in the mid-20s, but only in 1938 did the city council give the go-ahead for survey work. Due to the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, the matter did not advance beyond the preparatory stage. In 1949, the Kievmetrostroy management began laying the first Svyatoshinsko-Brovary line in the Ukrainian capital. On November 6, 1960, a 5.2 km long section between the Vokzalnaya and Dnepr stations was put into operation. In 1965, the two banks of the Dnieper were connected by a metro bridge. In December 1976, the first section of the Kurenevsko-Krasnoarmeyskaya line was commissioned, and on the eve of 1990, traffic opened on the third line of the Kyiv metro - Syretsko-Pecherskaya. Now the length of the Kyiv metro is more than 60 km.

The Kharkov metro became the second in Ukraine and the sixth in the Soviet Union. The issue of building a metro in Kharkov was raised in the early 60s. The city was developing rapidly, and, as was the case in other large cities, urban transport was increasingly finding it difficult to cope with the growing passenger flow. In addition to the metro, city authorities considered high-speed tram and monorail projects as an option to solve the problem, but they were considered unsuitable for Kharkov conditions.

On December 12, 1962, the first secretary of the Kharkov regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine N.A. Sobol, at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, expressed his opinion on the need to build a metro in Kharkov, and in March of the following year the city council discussed and approved “Considerations on the need to build a metro,” presented by the organization “Kharkovproekt” " This document, in addition to the project for laying a conventional intracity metro, proposed the option of connecting the underground line with suburban sections of the railway. To do this, it was necessary to build tunnels of larger diameter and long platforms, and use complex technical solutions. As a result, the designers settled on a simpler and cheaper option.

On April 29, 1968, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Resolution on the construction of the first stage of the metro in Kharkov. On July 15, metro builders from Kyiv and Baku and miners from the Donetsk and Moscow Region coal basins began construction of the first section of the tunnel. The Kharkov metro began with the laying of a trunk on Slavyanskaya Street not far from the South Station. The work was carried out in difficult conditions - metro builders had to overcome quicksand, build tunnels under the Kharkov and Lopan rivers, under densely populated city blocks full of underground communications.

On the evening of July 30, 1975, the first test train passed along the Sverdlovsko-Zavodskaya line, and on August 21, the State Commission signed an acceptance certificate for a section 10.4 km long. Eight new stations - “Sverdlova Street”, “South Station”, “Central Market”, “Sovetskaya”, “Gagarin Avenue”, “Sportivnaya”, “Malyshev Plant”, “Moskovsky Prospekt” - received their first passengers. Two years later, the second section was launched from the Moskovsky Prospekt station to the Proletarskaya station.

In August 1977, construction began on the second line of the Kharkov metro, and seven years later its first section of five stations was put into operation. And by this time the Kharkov metro builders had already prepared a project for the next, third metro line. Soon it also received trains... For the 350th anniversary of the city, two more stations were opened, and construction continues.

In Soviet times, when constructing the metro, the following principle was in effect: “The metro should not only be comfortable and functional, but also beautiful.” This good tradition is still observed today; the new stations are in no way inferior in artistic design to those built during the USSR. Unfortunately, another good tradition - financing the construction of the metro on time and in full - is a thing of the past. In recent years, the construction of the Kharkov subway, due to lack of funding, progressed with great difficulty, sometimes stopping altogether. The situation is no better in other cities of Ukraine, where a metro already exists or is planned to be built.

"Worker and Collective Farm Woman"

“I managed to get into the room where the plans for the Soviet pavilion were kept secret. Two sculptural figures, 33 feet tall, mounted on a high pedestal, marched triumphantly towards the German pavilion. Therefore, I designed the building in the form of a cubic mass, also elevated, which was supposed to hold back this pressure...” These words belong to Albert Speer, Nazi criminal, who served 20 years under the sentence of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Speer, an architect by training, supervised the construction of the German pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937. He enjoyed Hitler's boundless trust, he was even called "the Fuhrer's personal architect." By that time, two tyrants, Hitler and Stalin, had already begun a competition “who will win?”, and therefore Speer was faced with a task: the German pavilion at the exhibition must necessarily be higher than the Soviet one, albeit a little, but the swastika must rise above the hammer and sickle.

The Soviet pavilion stood on the Quai Passy on the banks of the Seine, and opposite it, on the other side of Warsaw Square, was the German exhibition. When construction was completed, it turned out that the Germans managed to get ahead of the Soviet architects. “The Germans waited for a long time, wanting to know the height of our pavilion along with the sculptural group,” recalled Vera Mukhina, who in that struggle had to resist the German onslaught. “When they established this, they built a tower ten meters higher than ours above their pavilion. They planted an eagle at the top.” Formally, the Germans won. But only formally. The eagle with the swastika at the height looked pitiful and unsightly. And the twenty-five-meter steel giants created by Vera Mukhina seemed to soar in the sky, towering over Paris. Albert Speer was unable to hold back “the pressure of two figures marching triumphantly towards the German pavilion.”

In Paris, everything was symbolic - the Soviet Union and Germany, standing opposite each other, between them Poland, which in two years would become the prey of two predators. Probably, some of the visitors to the World Exhibition guessed that soon the architectural competition between the two tyrants would turn into a much more terrible competition... They say that the authors of Soviet sculpture were inspired to create a paired composition by the idea of ​​​​an ancient statue by the Greek sculptors Critias and Nesiot. This sculpture was also called very symbolically - “Tyrant Fighters”...

Soviet architects began preparing for the Paris World Exhibition long before its opening. The sadly memorable year 1937 was the year of the twentieth anniversary of Soviet power, and therefore the party wanted to use the exhibition in the French capital to demonstrate the advantages of socialism being built in the country and the power of the Soviet state. Stalin also had his own “personal” architect, Boris Zakharovich Iofan, who was educated at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Rome and the Roman School of Engineers, he enjoyed the special patronage of the leader. That is why Iofan was entrusted with the responsible task of designing the Soviet pavilion.

“In my idea, the Soviet pavilion was depicted as a triumphal building, reflecting in its dynamics the rapid growth of the achievements of the world’s first socialist state, the enthusiasm and cheerfulness of our great era of building socialism,” recalled Boris Iofan. - This ideological orientation The architectural concept had to be expressed so clearly that any person, at the first glance at our pavilion, would feel that this is the pavilion of the Soviet Union... Very soon I had an image of a sculpture, a young man and a girl, personifying the owners of the Soviet land - the working class and the collective farm peasantry. They raise high the emblem of the country of the Soviets - the hammer and sickle...” Boris Iofan was always attracted to “large forms”; it was he who designed the never-built Palace of the Soviets, which was to be crowned with a hundred-meter statue of Lenin.

Boris Iofan was an architect; only the idea of ​​the composition belonged to him. Therefore, in the summer of 1936, a competition was announced among the most famous Soviet sculptors, in which V. A. Andreev, M. G. Manizer, I. D. Shadr and V. I. Mukhina took part. The competition was won by the sketch of Vera Ignatievna Mukhina.

This woman was called the “stone oracle of the Stalinist regime.” But all her life Vera Mukhina hated this regime. And it is no coincidence that as a prototype for its own famous sculpture she chose a group of ancient tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Only in this way, in a veiled way, and to few people in an understandable form, she could take revenge on the regime in her own way. Vera Ignatievna knew firsthand what the cruelty of tyrants was. In the early 30s, she and her husband, doctor Alexei Zamkov, tried to escape to the then bourgeois Latvia, where she was born in 1889. It didn’t work out, the NKVD arrested them right at the station. In those years, for trying to escape from " happy life"in the country of the Soviets there was only one punishment - capital punishment. And if it were not for the intervention of several very high-ranking officials, then most likely this would have happened.

The fact is that Doctor Alexey Zamkov is a unique personality, in his way one of the symbols of that era. They say that it was he who became the prototype of Professor Preobrazhensky from Mikhail Bulgakov’s story “The Heart of a Dog.” Of course, Alexey Zamkov did not transplant the pituitary gland and did not turn a dog into a person, but he was truly a magician in the treatment of infertility and impotence. His clients were Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and the “petrel of the revolution” Maxim Gorky. They stood up for the arrested doctor. At first, only he was released, but the doctor said that as long as his wife was in Lubyanka, he refused to work. This had an effect: Vera Ignatievna was soon released.

Later, the authorities showered Mukhina with awards and prizes, but she never changed her attitude towards this government. However, in order to survive, one had to submit and endure. It just so happened that it was Vera Mukhina who became the author of one of the most famous symbols of that era.

In her sketch, Vera Ignatievna used the general concept proposed by Boris Iofan: male and female figures taking a step forward and raising a hammer and sickle above their heads. But Mukhina was against the frozen triumphalism of the figures. “Having received the pavilion design from the architect Iofan,” recalled Vera Ignatyevna, “I immediately felt that the group should express, first of all, not the solemn nature of the figures, but the dynamics of our era, that creative impulse that I see everywhere in our country and which I so dear... I turned the solemn step into an all-crushing impulse...".

On November 11, 1936, Vera Mukhina’s sketch was finally approved for work in the material. Initially, the statue was planned to be made of duralumin, but Professor Pyotr Nikolaevich Lvov, a well-known specialist in metal science and the author of the method of resistance spot electric welding of stainless steel, proposed stainless chrome-nickel steel as a material for “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman.”

The basis of the statue’s design was a steel frame, and the sculpture itself was assembled from separate steel sheets connected to each other into large blocks, which were then welded to the base. The manufacture of parts of the sculpture and its assembly took place at the pilot plant of the Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Metalworking (TSNIIMASH), and the frame was made by specialists from the Stalmost plant.

Vera Mukhina spent a lot of time in the studio, working with sitters. People said that the worker was portrayed by a metro builder, and the collective farmer was portrayed by a ballerina. In fact, it was the other way around. The worker's model was professional sitter Igor Basenko, who had previously left ballet due to injury. And the “collective farmer” was an employee of the Moscow “Metrostroy” whose last name was... Mukhina. The sculptor accidentally saw her namesake Zoya Mukhina at a parade of athletes and invited her to her workshop. True, Basenko and Mukhina served as models only for the figures. When work on the sculpture came to an end, it turned out that the heads of the figures could not be converted into steel by stencil enlarging plaster models, as previously assumed. Then Mukhina and her assistant Z. G. Ivanova had to make plaster heads right at the factory. Everyone who passed by was used as models. “Everyone served us in kind,” said Vera Ignatievna. - A fireman passes - “Wait a little, I’ll take a look at your nose.” An engineer walks by - “Turn around, bow your head.”

In Paris, the construction company "Gorzhli", with which the Soviet government entered into a contract, was already finishing construction, and the sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" still remained in Moscow. We had to work at an accelerated pace, everyone understood that if the statue was not in place by the opening day of the exhibition, then... Apparently, fearing that the deadline for the production of the statue would be missed, the director of the TsNIIMASH plant, Tambovtsev, decided to “insure himself” and wrote a denunciation against his colleagues. Now the director’s words would be perceived as the ravings of a madman, but then any utter nonsense was taken quite seriously. Tambovtsev argued that the model for the worker’s head was not just anyone, but “the most important enemy of the people,” Leon Trotsky (!); moreover, the sculptors veiledly placed his profile in the folds of the collective farmer’s skirt (!!!). All this reached Stalin, who one night decided to check for himself whether his sworn enemy was hiding somewhere in the clothes of the figures. Powerful spotlights illuminated the statue, Stalin examined it and, without saying anything, left. The next morning, Mukhina and her colleagues were informed that the Soviet government was satisfied with the work done and the sculpture could be sent to France.

The assembled statue was disassembled into 65 parts and loaded into 28 carriages of a special Moscow-Paris train. When we passed through Poland, it turned out that some blocks did not fit through the tunnels, and they had to be urgently cut with an autogenous machine. In Paris, a special crane was installed to assemble the statue. One morning, when the sculpture was almost assembled, the workers discovered that one of the tension cables had been filed and was barely holding the crane stand. The stand could collapse right on top of the statue at any moment. It was never found out who exactly cut the cable, but from that moment on, 24-hour security was installed near the “Worker and Collective Farm Woman,” and they decided to speed up the assembly of the statue in order to avoid such troubles. Instead of the planned 25 days, the sculpture was installed two weeks faster.

In Paris, Mukhina's brilliant work created a sensation. The sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” quite naturally received a large gold medal Grand Prix It was not just its scale that was striking (the 24-meter statue was installed on the roof of a 35-meter pavilion), but the admiration of the audience was caused by the swiftness of the two figures, the dynamism of the image, and the clear connection of the statue with the architecture of the entire Soviet pavilion. “The perception of this group against the backdrop of the Parisian sky showed how active sculpture can be, not only in the general ensemble of the architectural landscape, but also in its own way psychological impact, - recalled Vera Mukhina. “The highest joy of an artist is to be understood.”

The exhibition ended, the fanfare died down, and “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” had to return home. Initially, they planned to install the sculpture on the Volga, on a dam near Rybinsk. But after “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was admired in Paris, Rybinsk seemed an “undignified” place for the sculpture, and they decided to install it in Moscow at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV). Vera Ignatievna Mukhina sharply objected to this, believing that the pedestal, which is three times lower than the exhibition pavilion, destroys the artistic perception of the sculptural group: “The figures crawl, not fly.” The author dreamed of seeing her creation on Vorobyovy Gory, where, in her opinion, it would look from an advantageous angle. But “art in the USSR belongs to the people,” and therefore no one was particularly interested in the author’s opinion...

By the beginning of the 21st century, one of the most famous and recognizable symbols of the Soviet era in the world was in a deplorable state. The huge, majestic and seemingly durable monument is rusted through and through. In 2003, it was dismantled and restoration began. Unfortunately, the former greatness will not return to “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” - it was decided to abandon the idea of ​​repeating the architecture of the Paris pavilion for the pedestal. True, it is planned to make it higher and place a cinema and concert hall in it - after all, the sculpture is the emblem of the Mosfilm film studio. And on the site around there will be a shopping and entertainment zone. Which is also symbolic in its own way.

Kremlin Palace of Congresses

Until the early 60s, congresses of the CPSU and other similar events were held in two places: the meeting hall of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the Grand Kremlin Palace or in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, the former Assembly of the Nobility. Under Stalin, on especially solemn occasions, the party and Soviet elite gathered at the Bolshoi Theater. This continued until Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev decided that a separate building needed to be built for party congresses - it was no good, they say, for communists to “take over other people’s corners” for their meetings.

So, in 1959 the issue was decided unequivocally - there would be a new palace of conventions. But where to build? On the territory of the Kremlin? Khrushchev insisted on this, because there, as he said, was the center of the state, which means that party congresses should be held at this place. Architects, historians, and people from the Secretary General’s inner circle tried to object to this (as far as possible). Even non-specialists understood that the new modern building would not fit into the architectural ensemble of the Kremlin, and its construction, one way or another, would require the demolition of historical buildings. There was a proposal to build the Kremlin Palace on the site of the bombed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But Khrushchev made the decision virtually single-handedly. Later this was recalled to Nikita Sergeevich as one of the manifestations of that same “voluntaristic style of leadership.”

Officially, the design and construction of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was supervised by Alexey Nikolaevich Kosygin, then deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee. But everyone understood that the “construction of the century” was under the direct control of Khrushchev himself. Naturally, the best architectural forces of the country were brought in to design the Kremlin Palace. First of all, it was necessary to determine the preliminary dimensions of the building. And here the requirements of the main customer grew with amazing speed. At first it was planned to build something quite modest and small. However, then the project grew like a snowball, because in addition to the meeting room itself, the palace had to have a large number of office premises, rest rooms, wardrobes, buffets and restaurants, toilets, etc. A lot of space was also occupied by support systems - a separate electrical substation, an air conditioning system , elevator facilities. In addition, the designers received another task - the palace will be used not only for meetings, but also as a structure for theater and ballet performances. Consequently, it was necessary to provide space for a stage and stage equipment, artistic dressing rooms, and rooms for decorations. As a result, the modest building turned into a huge multifunctional complex.

At the design stage, by personal order of Kosygin, several groups of architects and designers were sent to Europe, the United States and China. They say that the idea of ​​​​building the palace came to Khrushchev after traveling abroad and visiting buildings of this type. The Secretary General was especially impressed by the building of the National People's Congress, built in 1959 for the 10th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, with a huge conference hall with 10 thousand seats.

As the designers recalled, the controversy surrounding the project of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was quite heated. Several groups of architects submitted their proposals for approval. A competition was held, and as a result, the project of a team of four people - Mikhail Posokhin, Ashot Mndoyants, Evgeny Stamo and Pavel Steller - was approved by order of the Moscow City Council. It must be said that Mikhail Vasilyevich Posokhin was appointed chief architect of the Kremlin Palace not by chance - it was Khrushchev’s personal choice. Khrushchev and Posokhin knew each other well; Mikhail Vasilyevich built government dachas, including for the Secretary General. In the midst of construction of the palace, Mikhail Posokhin was appointed chief architect of the capital.

The construction site was chosen next to the Trinity Gate of the Kremlin; opposite these gates was the main entrance to the palace. Archaeologists were the first to appear on the construction site. It must be said that the designers tried to interfere as carefully as possible with the historical development of the Kremlin, and therefore serious archaeological excavations were carried out at the site of the future foundation pit. The conclusion of the archaeologists was unequivocal - there are no objects of particularly historical value at the construction site of the Kremlin Palace. True, as some experts now claim, then archaeologists “did not notice” the underground parts of the so-called “chambers of Natalya Kirillovna,” the mother of Peter the Great, which existed until the mid-18th century. When digging the pit of the Palace of Congresses, the basements of the chambers were excavated and destroyed. And on the surface it was not possible to do without losses: during the construction of the Kremlin Palace, builders demolished the old building of the Armory Chamber and several service premises of the 18th–19th centuries, including the Cavalry (suite) buildings of the imperial palace.

16 months from the start of design to the commissioning of the facility - such a short period of time was given to designers and builders for the construction of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. In the spring of 1961, the XXI Party Congress was to take place, which was planned to be held in the new palace. The gigantic volumes of work and record-breaking short construction times required uninterrupted financing and provision of necessary materials and equipment. From the very beginning of the construction of the Kremlin Palace, Khrushchev regularly appeared at the construction site. Naturally, with such a patron and such control, problems with financial and material support the performers never had.

The builders tried their best to complete the construction of the Kremlin Palace by the spring of 1961, in time for the opening of the 21st Party Congress. The work went on almost around the clock; naturally, the emergency pace could not but affect the quality of construction - there were a lot of shortcomings. If the project had not been delivered on time or the State Commission had not accepted it due to numerous deficiencies, many would have lost their posts. But the builders were lucky - there was very little time left before completion, when the opening of the 21st Congress was postponed to the fall. It was just a gift - the builders had a break, an unexpected opportunity to bring the project to fruition. By August 1961, the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was ready to be handed over to the State Commission. The commission members had no serious complaints. Particularly impressive were the tests of the building's roof for snow loads, as well as the floors in case of large crowds of people. At the end of summer, snow could not be found even for the main party palace, and therefore it was decided to conduct tests with the help of soldiers (previously, the reliability of the roof of the sports complex in Luzhniki was tested in the same way). According to the designers' calculations, in order to conduct full tests, it was necessary to involve 30 thousand people! This was too much even for the most important party palace. It would have taken a long time to get such a huge mass of people through the Kremlin gates, and it would also have been necessary to block traffic in the center of Moscow for a long time. In the end, they decided to halve the number of “testers” at the Kremlin Palace. On the roof, the “role” of the fallen snow was played by two thousand soldiers, eight thousand were placed in the banquet hall, the remaining five were placed inside the hall and on numerous balconies. The commanders ordered “Right!” Step march!”, and in a single impulse thousands of feet, dressed in heavy tarpaulin boots, stamped. The builders watched what was happening with bated breath. But everything turned out well, and by an act of the state commission the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was accepted into operation.

Since then, the Kremlin Palace has become the main ideological platform of the Soviet Union. All party congresses, meetings and events dedicated to various special occasions, and international conferences took place within its walls (the meeting room was equipped with acoustic equipment, which made it possible to translate speeches into 12 languages). Famous musicians, theater and ballet artists performed on the stage of the Kremlin Palace. And for the younger generation, the Palace of Congresses was associated with the famous Kremlin New Year tree, a ticket for which, along with a trip to Artek, was considered the most desirable reward for every Soviet schoolchild.

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• Stalin's Arctic project, Kalinin V.. Throughout the twentieth century, bright and tragic events took place in Russia. Among them are the great construction projects of communism, which transformed the appearance of our country, making it one of the world leaders in...
• Stalin's Arctic project, Kalinin V.A.. Throughout the twentieth century, bright and tragic events took place in Russia. Among them are the great construction projects of communism, which transformed the appearance of our country, making it one of the world leaders in...

The title of the largest state on the planet obliged the Soviet authorities to comply with it in literally everything, and real estate was no exception to this rule. The Free Press collected some interesting facts about the most ambitious of them in its material.

The largest water mirror of the era

This is exactly what the capital’s guides said, receiving guests from all over the world, about the Moscow outdoor swimming pool, built almost on the same spot where the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which had been under construction for 44 years and blown up in 1931, had stood for 48 years. It is noteworthy that at this site they first tried unsuccessfully for 10 years to build the tallest building in the world at that time. But the construction of the 415-meter Palace of the Soviets was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, and an open public bath designed by the architect Dmitry Chechulin with a diameter of about 130 meters, accommodating up to 2000 people at a time, was opened only in 1960.

It was originally planned that the pool would be filled with salt water from the underground sea located at a depth of about one and a half kilometers. However, the drilling work that began in 1958 was curtailed, mainly due to its high cost. But even without that, the site had enough unique features. So, you could swim in it all year round (although, according to contemporaries, you often had to dive in the cold because your head was covered with ice). To visit Moskva, a doctor’s certificate was not required, and the system of sanitary control, purification and disinfection of water was so well organized that for all 33 years not a single complaint was recorded from visitors.

The popularity of the outdoor pool among the population was very high. There was even a joke that only in “Moscow” the famous law of Archimedes operates in a special way: a body immersed in it is pushed out by another body. True, it is worth noting that this popular love was periodically overshadowed by rumors that a group of “stokers” was operating in the pool (especially in winter), taking revenge on ordinary people for desecrating the holy place.

The final reason for the closure of the Moscow pool in 1993 was precisely its gigantic size. Firstly, due to the fact that in the cold season the water temperature in some sectors reached +34 degrees, and the area of ​​the water surface was 13,000 square meters, in winter there was a dense wall of steam around it, which caused severe corrosion of nearby buildings. Employees of the nearby Pushkin Museum have repeatedly complained that exhibits are seriously damaged due to high humidity.

Secondly, by that time, due to the difficult economic situation, the city authorities simply did not have enough funds to pay for the resources necessary for its functioning. For the past three years, it has stood without water, which led to severe deformation of the expansion joints of the bowl and corrosion of the pipelines.

825GTS

Built between 1953 and 1961 at the suggestion of Joseph Stalin, the submarine base in the then Soviet Balaklava, perhaps, had every chance of being called the largest military engineering structure of the twentieth century. Builders of the highest qualifications had a hand in its creation, including the capital’s metro builders, who worked around the clock in four shifts.

According to some sources, about 67 million Soviet rubles were spent on the construction of the base (or facility 825GTS), and during the work at sea, about 120 thousand tons of rock were secretly removed and scuttled on barges. But all the efforts were worth it: the structure, hidden under Mount Tavros, could easily withstand a direct hit from an atomic bomb with a power of 100 to 150 kilotons (for reference, the power of the “Baby” dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was from 13 to 18 kilotons of TNT equivalent) . Several nuclear submarines (according to various sources from 7 to 14), personnel of up to 1.5 thousand people, as well as ammunition depots and all the necessary infrastructure for maintenance and repair of submarines were freely located inside.

Some enthusiasts are still confident that in the event of a nuclear bombing, the base could be used as a bomb shelter for the local population, and the period of its autonomous existence could reach three years.

Soon after construction was completed, in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the base to be repurposed into a wine cellar, but the initiative was never implemented. After the collapse of the USSR in 1993, security of the facility ceased and over the next 7 years it was simply looted, absolutely all structures containing even the slightest hint of non-ferrous metal content were taken away. In 2000, Vladimir Stefanovsky, who headed the Sevastopol “Maritime Assembly”, took the initiative to turn the base into the “Cold War Museum”. As a result, three years later, the official opening ceremony of the naval museum complex as a branch of the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of Ukraine took place in Balaklava.

By the way, back in 2010, when the peninsula was part of the “Nezalezhnaya” Peninsula, some Russian media, citing the leadership of the Black Sea Fleet, reported that the military was seriously considering the possibility of restoring the combat potential of the museum and the likelihood of its use for its intended purpose. However, Konstantin Grishchenko, who at that time held the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, decisively denied such a scenario for the development of events as contrary to the Constitution of the country. It is likely that now, after the population of Crimea has made fateful decisions, representatives of the Russian Navy will return to this project.

Volga-Don Canal

VDSK (Volga-Don Shipping Canal) was officially opened on July 27, 1952. It is noteworthy that the four-year construction work, which was crowned with success, was not the only attempt in history to connect the waters of two great rivers at the point of their closest approach. At first, according to chronicle sources of the 16th century, the Turkish Sultan Selim II thought about this. However, the army of 22,000 Turkish soldiers he dispatched in 1569 stopped all work within a month. According to the Turks, the entire population of Turkey would not have been able to cope with this task at that time even in 100 years. The second was Peter I, inviting the foreigner Johann Breckel as construction manager in 1697. However, he soon simply ran away, realizing the futility of his efforts. Perhaps the Englishman Perry who replaced him would have been able to bring the undertaking to completion, but the outbreak of the Northern War in 1701 put an end to the project.

Only in the 20th century, as a result of the titanic efforts of over 700 thousand civilian workers, 100 thousand prisoners of war of the German army and 120 thousand Gulag prisoners, the 101-kilometer canal project was implemented under the leadership of academician Sergei Zhuk. During the entire construction of VDSK, more than 150 million cubic meters of earth were excavated and more than 3 million cubic meters of concrete were poured; walking excavators and other advanced special equipment at that time were widely used in the amount of 8,000 units.

Many interesting facts of Russian history are associated with VDSK. For example, 15 thousand prisoners were immediately released “for hard work”, and another 35 thousand had their sentences reduced. This, in particular, is mentioned by Professor Nikolai Buslenko, referring to the Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Armed Forces found in the archive (with the stamp “Without publication in print”) “On benefits for prisoners who distinguished themselves in the construction of the Volga-Don Shipping Canal named after V.I. Lenin". An interesting detail is that 3,000 prisoners received various awards, 15 of them received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. By the way, it was at VDSK that the abbreviation “zek” (“zk” - “prisoned canal army soldier”), which has firmly entered our lexicon as an independent word, was born.

Also, immediately after the opening and naming the object after Lenin, a giant monument to Stalin was erected on the shore of the first lock. Nine years later, in 1961, in just one night, it was dismantled. For a long time, the 30-meter pedestal was empty, and only in 1973 a 27-meter monument to Lenin was installed on it, which was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest monument in honor of real people.

Unfortunately, in the last decade, the depth of the canal has noticeably decreased (according to the project - 3.5 meters), and cases of ships running aground have become more frequent. In this regard, traffic flow has been reduced by half, and draft restrictions do not allow ships to be fully loaded. Two years ago, representatives of Rosmorport announced the allocation of 400 million rubles to deepen the canal to 4.5 meters. Since April 2007, at the instigation of Vladimir Putin, the option of constructing a second branch of the Volga-Don Canal (the so-called Volgodon-2) has been considered in order to increase the cargo flow of the facility to 35 million tons per year. True, some experts argue that these works will cause irreparable damage to the Russian fisheries industry. In particular, the construction of the Bagaevsky hydroelectric complex planned as part of the project will completely block the spawning passage of fish in the Don. In addition, the population of some fish species in the Northern Caspian could decline catastrophically.

Photo at the opening of the article: a view of the Moscow swimming pool under open air, 1977 / Photo: Ivan Denisenko / RIA Novosti

Construction projects in the Soviet Union were large-scale, as were the ambitions of this state. Nevertheless, no one ever thought about human destiny on a large scale in the USSR.

Algemba: About 35,000 people died!

Stalin is traditionally considered the most cruel ruler of the Soviet Union, who violated the behests of Ilyich. It was he who is credited with creating a network of camps (GULAG), and it was he who initiated the construction of the White Sea Canal by prisoners. They somehow forget that one of the first construction projects took place under the direct leadership of Lenin. And it is not surprising: all materials related to Algemba - the first attempt of the young Soviet government to acquire its own oil pipeline - for a long time were classified.

In December 1919, Frunze's army captured the Emben oil fields in Northern Kazakhstan. By that time, more than 14 million pounds of oil had accumulated there. This oil could be the salvation for the Soviet republic. On December 24, 1919, the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense decided to begin construction of a railway through which oil could be exported from Kazakhstan to the center, and ordered: “Recognize the construction of the Alexandrov Gai-Emba broad-gauge line as an operational task.” The city of Alexandrov Gai, located 300 km from Saratov, was the last railway point. The distance from it to the oil fields was about 500 miles. Most of the route ran through waterless salt marsh steppes. They decided to build the highway at both ends simultaneously and meet on the Ural River near the village of Grebenshchikovo.

Frunze's army was the first to be sent to build the railway (despite his protests). There was no transport, no fuel, or enough food. In the conditions of the waterless steppe there was nowhere to even place soldiers. Endemic illnesses began and developed into an epidemic. Towards construction in forcibly The local population was involved: about forty-five thousand residents of Saratov and Samara. People almost manually created an embankment along which rails were later to be laid.

In March 1920, the task became even more complicated: it was decided to build a pipeline in parallel with the railway. It was then that the word “Algemba” was heard for the first time (from the first letters of Aleksandrov Gai and the name of the deposit - Emba). There were no pipes, like anything else. The only plant that once produced them has been standing for a long time. The remains were collected from warehouses; at best, they were enough for 15 miles (and it was necessary to lay 500!).

Lenin began to look for an alternative solution. At first it was proposed to produce wooden pipes. The experts just shrugged: firstly, it is impossible to maintain the necessary pressure in them, and secondly, Kazakhstan does not have its own forests, there is nowhere to get wood. Then it was decided to dismantle sections of existing pipelines. The pipes varied greatly in length and diameter, but this did not bother the Bolsheviks. Another thing was confusing: the collected “spare parts” were still not enough even for half the pipeline! However, work continued.

By the end of 1920, construction began to choke. Typhoid killed several hundred people a day. Security was posted along the highway because local residents began to take away the sleepers. The workers generally refused to go to work. Food rations were extremely low (especially in the Kazakh sector).

Lenin demanded to understand the reasons for the sabotage. But there was no trace of any sabotage. Hunger, cold and disease exacted a terrible toll among the builders. In 1921, cholera came to the construction site. Despite the courage of the doctors who voluntarily arrived at Algemba, the mortality rate was appalling. But the worst thing was different: four months after the start of construction of Algemba, already in April 1920, Baku and Grozny were liberated. Emba oil was no longer needed. Thousands of lives sacrificed during construction were in vain.

It was possible even then to stop the pointless activity of laying the Algemba. But Lenin stubbornly insisted on continuing construction, which was incredibly expensive for the state. In 1920, the government allocated a billion rubles in cash for this construction. No one has ever received a full report, but there is an assumption that the funds ended up in foreign accounts. Neither the railway nor the pipeline were built: on October 6, 1921, by Lenin's directive, construction was stopped. A year and a half of Algemba cost thirty-five thousand human lives.

White Sea Canal: 700 deaths a day!

The initiator of the construction of the White Sea Canal was Joseph Stalin. The country needed labor victories and global achievements. And preferably - without extra costs, since the Soviet Union was experiencing an economic crisis. The White Sea Canal was supposed to connect the White Sea with the Baltic Sea and open a passage for ships that previously had to go around the entire Scandinavian Peninsula. The idea of ​​​​creating an artificial passage between the seas was known back in the time of Peter the Great (and the Russians have been using the portage system along the entire length of the future White Sea Canal for a long time). But the way the project was implemented (and Naftaliy Frenkel was appointed head of canal construction) turned out to be so cruel that it forced historians and publicists to look for parallels in slave states.

The total length of the canal is 227 kilometers. On this waterway there are 19 locks (13 of which are two-chamber), 15 dams, 49 dams, 12 spillways. The scale of construction is amazing, especially considering that all this was built in an incredibly short period of time: 20 months and 10 days. For comparison: the 80-kilometer Panama Canal took 28 years to build, and the 160-kilometer Suez Canal took ten.

The White Sea Canal was built from start to finish by prisoners. The convicted designers created drawings and found extraordinary technical solutions (dictated by the lack of machines and materials). Those who did not have an education suitable for design spent day and night digging a canal, waist-deep in liquid mud, urged on not only by supervisors, but also by members of their team: those who did not fulfill the quota had their already meager ration reduced. There was only one way: into concrete (those who died on the White Sea Canal were not buried, but were simply poured haphazardly into holes, which were then filled with concrete and served as the bottom of the canal).

The main tools for construction were a wheelbarrow, a sledgehammer, a shovel, an ax and a wooden crane for moving boulders. Prisoners, unable to withstand the unbearable conditions of detention and backbreaking work, died in the hundreds. At times, deaths reached 700 people per day. And at this time, newspapers published editorials dedicated to the “reforging by labor” of seasoned recidivists and political criminals. Of course, there were some additions and fraud. The canal bed was made shallower than was calculated in the project, and the start of construction was pushed back to 1932 (in fact, work began a year earlier).

About 280 thousand prisoners took part in the construction of the canal, of whom about 100 thousand died. Those who survived (every sixth) had their sentences reduced, and some were even awarded the “Order of the Baltic-White Sea Canal.” The entire leadership of the OGPU was awarded orders. Stalin, who visited the opened canal at the end of July 1933, was pleased. The system has shown its effectiveness. There was only one catch: the most physically strong and efficient prisoners earned a reduction in their sentences.

In 1938, Stalin, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, raised the question: “Did you correctly propose a list for the release of these prisoners? They leave work... We are doing a bad job disrupting the work of the camps. The release of these people, of course, is necessary, but from the point of view of the state economy it is bad... The best people will be released, but the worst will remain. Isn’t it possible to turn things around differently, so that these people stay at work - give awards, orders, maybe?..” But, fortunately for the prisoners, such a decision was not made: a prisoner with a government award on his robe would look too strange ...

BAM: 1 meter – 1 human life!

In 1948, with the beginning of the construction of the subsequent “great construction projects of communism” (the Volga-Don Canal, the Volga-Baltic Waterway, the Kuibyshev and Stalingrad hydroelectric power stations and other objects), the authorities used an already proven method: they built large forced labor camps that served the construction sites. And finding those to fill the vacancies of slaves was easy. Only by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of June 4, 1947, “On criminal liability for theft of state and public property,” hundreds of thousands of people were brought into the zone. Prison labor was used in the most labor-intensive and “harmful” industries.

In 1951, USSR Minister of Internal Affairs S.N. Kruglov reported at the meeting: “I must say that in a number of sectors of the national economy the Ministry of Internal Affairs occupies a monopoly position, for example, the gold mining industry - it is all concentrated here; the production of diamonds, silver, platinum - all this is entirely concentrated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs; mining of asbestos and apatite is entirely carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. We are 100% involved in the production of tin, 80% of the share is occupied by the Ministry of Internal Affairs for non-ferrous metals...” The minister did not mention only one thing: 100% of radium in the country was also produced by prisoners.

The world's greatest Komsomol construction project - BAM, about which songs were composed, films were made, and enthusiastic articles were written - did not begin with a call to youth. In 1934, the prisoners who built the White Sea Canal were sent to build the railway, which was supposed to connect Taishet on the Trans-Siberian Railway with Komsomolsk-on-Amur. According to the Gulag Handbook by Jacques Rossy (and this is the most objective at the moment book about the camp system) about 50 thousand prisoners worked at BAM in the 1950s.

Especially for the needs of the construction site, a new camp for prisoners was created - BAMlag, the zone of which extended from Chita to Khabarovsk. Daily ration was traditionally meager: a loaf of bread and frozen fish soup. There weren't enough barracks for everyone. People died from cold and scurvy (in order to at least briefly delay the approach of this terrible disease, they chewed pine needles). Over the course of several years, more than 2.5 thousand kilometers of railway were built. Historians have calculated: every meter of the BAM is paid for by one human life.

The official history of the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline began in 1974, during the Brezhnev era. Trains with young people reached BAM. The prisoners continued to work, but their participation in the “construction of the century” was kept silent. And ten years later, in 1984, the “golden spike” was driven in, symbolizing the end of another gigantic construction project, which is still associated with smiling young romantics who are not afraid of difficulties.

The above-mentioned construction projects have a lot in common: both the fact that the projects were difficult to implement (in particular, the BAM and the White Sea Canal were conceived back in Tsarist Russia, but due to a lack of budgetary funds they were shelved), and the fact that the work was carried out with minimal technical support, and the fact that slaves were used instead of workers (it is difficult to describe the position of the builders otherwise). But perhaps the most terrible common feature is that all these roads (both land and water) are many kilometers long mass graves. When you read dry statistical calculations, Nekrasov’s words come to mind: “And on the sides, all the bones are Russian. How many are there, Vanechka, do you know?”

(Material taken: “100 famous mysteries of history” by M.A. Pankov, I.Yu. Romanenko, etc.).

The great construction projects of communism - this is what all global projects were called Soviet government: highways, canals, stations, reservoirs.

One can argue about the degree of their “greatness,” but there is no doubt that they were grandiose projects of their time.

"Magnitka"

The largest Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works in Russia was designed in the late spring of 1925 by the Soviet institute UralGipromez. According to another version, the design was carried out American company from Clinwood, and the prototype of Magnitogorsk was the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. All three “heroes” who stood at the “helm” of the construction of the plant - manager Gugel, builder Maryasin and head of the trust Valerius - were shot in the 30s. January 31, 1932 - the first blast furnace was launched. The construction of the plant took place in the most difficult conditions, with most of the work carried out manually. Despite this, thousands of people from all over the Union rushed to Magnitogorsk. Foreign specialists, primarily Americans, were also actively involved.

White Sea Canal

The White Sea-Baltic Canal was supposed to connect the White Sea and Lake Onega and provide access to the Baltic Sea and the Volga-Baltic Waterway. The canal was built by Gulag prisoners in record time - in less than two years (1931-1933). The length of the canal is 227 kilometers. This was the first construction in the Soviet Union carried out exclusively by prisoners, which may be why the White Sea Canal is not always considered one of the “great construction projects of communism.” Each builder of the White Sea Canal was called a “prisoner of the canal army” or abbreviated as “ze-ka”, which is where the slang word “zek” came from. Propaganda posters of that time read: “Hard work will melt away your sentence!” Indeed, many of those who reached the end of construction alive had their deadlines reduced. On average, mortality reached 700 people per day. “Hot work” also influenced nutrition: the more work the “ze-ka” produced, the more impressive the “ration” he received. Standard - 500 gr. bread and seaweed soup.

Baikal-Amur Mainline

One of the largest railways in the world was built with huge interruptions, starting in 1938 and ending in 1984. The most difficult section - the North Musky Tunnel - was put into permanent operation only in 2003. The initiator of the construction was Stalin. Songs were written about BAM, laudatory articles were published in newspapers, films were made. The construction was positioned as a feat of youth and, naturally, no one knew that prisoners who survived the construction of the White Sea Canal were sent to the construction site in 1934. In the 1950s, about 50 thousand prisoners worked at BAM. Every meter of BAM costs one human life.

Volga-Don Canal

An attempt to connect the Don and Volga was made by Peter the Great in 1696. In the 30s of the last century, a construction project was created, but the war prevented its implementation. Work resumed in 1943 immediately after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. However, the start date of construction should still be considered 1948, when the first excavation work began. In addition to volunteers and military builders, 236 thousand prisoners and 100 thousand prisoners of war took part in the construction of the canal route and its structures. In journalism you can find descriptions of the most terrible conditions in which prisoners lived. Dirty and lousy from the lack of opportunity to wash regularly (there was one bathhouse for everyone), half-starved and sick - this is what the “builders of communism”, deprived of civil rights, actually looked like. The canal was built in 4.5 years - and this is a unique period in the world history of the construction of hydraulic structures.

Nature Transformation Plan

The plan was adopted on the initiative of Stalin in 1948 after the drought and raging famine of 46-47. The plan included the creation of forest belts that were supposed to block the path of hot southeast winds - dry winds, which would allow climate change. The forest belts were planned to be placed on an area of ​​120 million hectares - that is the amount occupied by England, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Belgium combined. The plan also included the construction of an irrigation system, during the implementation of which 4 thousand reservoirs appeared. The project was planned to be completed before 1965. More than 4 million hectares of forest were planted, and the total length of forest belts was 5,300 km. The state solved the country's food problem, and part of the bread began to be exported. After Stalin's death in 1953, the program was curtailed, and in 1962 the USSR was again rocked by a food crisis - bread and flour disappeared from the shelves, and shortages of sugar and butter began.

Volzhskaya HPP

Construction of the largest hydroelectric power station in Europe began in the summer of 1953. Next to the construction site, in the tradition of that time, the Gulag was deployed - the Akhtubinsky ITL, where more than 25 thousand prisoners worked. They were engaged in laying roads, laying power lines and general preparatory work. Naturally, they were not allowed to directly work on the construction of the hydroelectric power station. Sappers also worked at the site, who were engaged in demining the site for future construction and the bottom of the Volga - the proximity to Stalingrad made itself felt. About 40 thousand people and 19 thousand various mechanisms and machines worked at the construction site. In 1961, having turned from the “Stalingrad Hydroelectric Power Station” into the “Volzhskaya Hydroelectric Power Station named after the 21st Congress of the CPSU,” the station was put into operation. It was solemnly opened by Khrushchev himself. The hydroelectric power station was a gift for the 21st Congress, at which Nikita Sergeevich, by the way, announced his intention to build communism by 1980.

Bratsk hydroelectric power station

The construction of a hydroelectric power station began in 1954 on the Angara River. The small village of Bratsk soon grew into a large city. The construction of the hydroelectric power station was positioned as a shock Komsomol construction project. Hundreds of thousands of Komsomol members from all over the Union came to explore Siberia. Until 1971, the Bratsk hydroelectric power station was the largest in the world, and the Bratsk reservoir became the world's largest artificial reservoir. When it was filled, about 100 villages were flooded. Valentin Rasputin’s poignant work “Farewell to Matera” is in particular dedicated to the tragedy of the “Angarsk Atlantis”.

Russian seven

P.S. The author of this material provides strange data regarding the construction of two canals: he writes that information about the difficult life of builders was taken from... journalism. I'm surprised! Now a lot of materials from archives have appeared on the Internet, which describe in detail the food and contents of all canal builders. Everything was quite decent, even according to the recollections of the builders themselves! And the figure: 700 people died a day. What does this mean: how many should have died per year? In a month - 21 thousand, in 10 months - 210 thousand. Does the author understand what he wrote? Something like those 40 million who died in the Gulag, according to SolZhenitsyn. What nonsense! What the prisoners later built on the Volga-Don is clear to everyone. And who was supposed to build in those years? So these data are taken from the 90s out of the habit of throwing mud at everything that happened in the USSR.