Hard work and no play
A good-sized Soviet factory usually consisted of up to a hundred industrial divisions, with 200 – 800 workers in each. They had to be accommodated, fed, and often educated, and typically to the Soviet way of doing things, that often wasn’t handled very well. So if you ever wondered what it would be like to be a young engineer at a large factory in the Soviet Russia — please read on.
“New Moscow”, by Tschusev and Zholtovsky, was developed in 1917 – 1924.
We have come across a few private scans of a book “New Moscow” published in 1982. Just after the Revolution of 1917 the new government officials were very keen to change everything around — even more so, they wanted to raze the existing system to the ground and build a new one. So the architects were busy thinking big — and bigger — for the new Soviet country.
The Griboedov Channel. The bridges St Petersburg is so famous for.
By many, St Petersburg (Leningrad in 1924 – 1991) is often considered to be so beautiful due to its architecture of Italian origin. Quite strange to see these fine buildings embellished by the symbols of the Soviet Era. Let’s take a walk around this fine city in the summer almost 30 years ago.
A typical Soviet shop with bare shelves.
One of the main critisisms of the Soviet Union now, from an every day perspective, was the huge deficit of everything. The planned economy failed to supply a constant flow of goods necessary for the well being of people. It was not the matter of incapacity — no, the means certainly allowed to build space shuttles or create extra strong tanks. The shortage for goods was created artificially — due to the reasons of the strange Soviet ideology.
The Soviet Union comprised one-sixth of the earth’s land surface which made the one-family detached houses possible to build, unlike in the countries with the lack of land territories. However, the overall rundown of the country after the WWII had forced the government to commence the mass construction of collective flat blocks in order to accommodate hoards of people who had no roof over their heads.
New buildings with small private apartments replaced miserable wooden cottages where people lived in awful conditions without showers or indoor toilets.
1964. Building of apartment house