Komsomol construction in the USSR. Why the construction of the most grandiose building in the world was stopped in the USSR (1 photo)

Millions - you. Us - darkness, and darkness, and darkness.
Try it, fight with us!
Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians
With slanting and greedy eyes!

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

The Dnieper as a source of cheap and unlimited energy has long attracted power engineers. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, specialists 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 projects were drawn up. It was envisaged to build from two to four dams, while the planned total capacity of hydroelectric power plants 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 taking place around.

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

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

In January 1921, by a decree of the Supreme Council of National Economy, the design and survey organization "Dneprostroy" was created, which carried out topographic, geological and hydrological studies at the construction site of the station, as well as a detailed development of the project 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 question of the construction of the DneproGES was finally decided at a meeting in the Kremlin, held in December 1926. And here it was not without controversy and doubts about the possibility of building a colossal power plant. “On a winter day, two dozen specialists were summoned to the Kremlin. There is a question about the construction of the Dnieper hydroelectric station. “We cannot recommend building by ourselves. The matter is too big, we have no experience in these matters,” the majority says. Three people spoke out against it, including me completely unreservedly: “If the necessary equipment is given, we will do it ourselves.” The decision has been made: the three of us will be assigned to work.” These three were the energy builder B. E. Vedeneev, who supervised the construction of the first Volkhov hydroelectric power station in the Union, P. P. Rottert, a well-known Ukrainian builder, under whose leadership the Kharkov State Industry House and the Moscow Metro were built, and the author of the above lines A. V. Vinter, subsequently appointed head of the 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!". 60,000 people came to the banks of the Dnieper to bring to life an "ambitious idea" (as foreign journalists called the construction of the DneproGES). However, many did not come of their own free will - at the DneproGES, as well as at other Soviet "constructions of the century", the labor of prisoners was widely used. Which, in general, is not surprising. During the construction of the DneproGES, 8 million cubic meters of soil were moved, 1,200 thousand cubic meters of concrete were laid. And all this by hand, using only picks and shovels. The concrete work was especially difficult. Even now, with the use of modern technology, the volume of concrete laid in the body of the DneproGES dam seems incredible. But in the late 20s, Soviet builders could only dream of concrete mixers and vibrators for concrete laying. 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 DneproGES produced the first kilowatts of electricity. At that moment, the DneproGES hydroelectric generator was launched. The first stage of the station, which consisted 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 do, referred to being busy with state affairs and suggested postponing the opening of the DneproGES to October 10. The date was chosen for a reason - it was the highest favor on the part of the "father of peoples" to the builders of the DneproGES. An "accidental" 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 knew how to make "gifts" to their subjects. On April 19, 1939, the DneproGES reached its design capacity of 560 thousand kW, when the ninth power unit of the station was launched. According to the 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, the power engineers flooded the engine room and disabled the generators. The Nazis really wanted to restore the operation of such an important facility as the DneproGES, the Fuhrer himself honored the station with his attention, but the Germans, despite all their efforts, failed to get a single kilowatt.

In 1943, retreating from the left-bank part of Zaporozhye, the Nazis completely destroyed the engine room of the DneproGES and planned to blow up the dam. To destroy the station, the Germans prepared 200 tons of explosives. 40 tons of explosives and 100 aerial bombs weighing half a ton were carefully packed into the body of the dam. If all this had exploded, the dam would have collapsed. However, there was no explosion...

Immediately after the troops Soviet army the Germans were driven out of the DneproGES, restoration work began at the station. At the dam, workers and engineers found the body of a Soviet soldier. There were no documents with him, and his name remained unknown. With full military honors, an unknown soldier was buried on the territory of the station, an 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 DneproGES.

However, experts understood that one person could not cope with two battalions of Germans guarding the Dnieper hydroelectric power station. It was clear that such a task could only be carried out by a well-trained group of scouts who had 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 make it possible to establish the truth and find those who actually saved the DneproGES. However, in the lists of units operating at the end of 1943 in the Zaporozhye region, there was no person with such a surname ...

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

Older readers will surely remember the 1967 feature film Major Whirlwind, which tells about the rescue of Krakow, mined by the Nazis, by Soviet intelligence officers. The same film, full of drama, could have been made about the DneproGES. It took more than a month for the group of Captain Soshinsky (he was in charge of the overall operation, Lieutenant Kuruzov commanded the group that directly defused the explosives) to find the cable leading to the explosive device. By blowing up the DneproGES, the Germans hoped to flood the vast territory around the station and thus disrupt the offensive of the Soviet troops. Understanding this and striving to prevent the final destruction of the DneproGES, 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, the order was given to attack, and soon the Nazis were driven out of the DneproGES.

Through unparalleled courage Soviet intelligence officers managed to prevent the complete destruction of the DneproGES, but the station was in a deplorable state. The equipment of the station, generators were completely destroyed, the roadway and bridges connecting various sections of the dam were destroyed. Moreover, the Germans took out all the documentation and archives of the station, which slowed down the pace of restoration. Only in 1945, all the technical documentation was found 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 had been restored. Gradually, the electrical equipment was replaced. On March 3, 1947, the hydroelectric power station gave the first industrial current - the first block was launched. By the end of the year, two more generators were put into operation. The station reached full design capacity in June 1950, when the operation of all nine power units was restored. By the way, in the post-war years, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station performed another function - transport. Bridges across the Dnieper were destroyed, and while they were being restored, traffic flows went through the station dam from one bank of the Dnieper to the other.

At the end of the 60s, in the history of DneproGES, new stage. Calculations of hydropower engineers showed that behind the dam near the left bank of the Dnieper there is an opportunity 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 on the implementation of the Dneprostroy-2 project began in 1969. In the new engine room, 8 hydrogenerators with a capacity of 103.5 thousand kilowatts each were installed. The total power of the station has grown to 1.5 million kilowatts. In the history of hydropower, such a scheme was applied for the first time - without stopping the old station, a more powerful new one was built nearby. The project of a new one-chamber lock built next to the old three-chamber was also unique. The length of this hydraulic structure is 300 meters, the width is 18 meters, the height of the water drop is more than 40 meters. The commissioning of the new lock made it possible to reduce the locking time by three times, and also made it possible to pass through this section of the Dnieper large vessels of the “river-sea” type, in fact, giving direct access to the sea not only for Zaporozhye, but also for Kyiv. The reconstruction of the station was completed in 1980.

The Dnieper HPP is still in operation, although the problems typical of recent years have not bypassed it. The station still regularly produces kilowatts, now into the power grid of independent Ukraine. But DneproGES is not just a power plant, not just a hydrotechnical facility. This is a symbol of the era and a monument to the people who built this unique object.

And I see - the capital is beyond the capital
Grows from the immense power of the Union;
Where the crows curled, croaked over carrion,
In the railroad tracks bandaged.
Ukrainian Kharkiv is buzzing as the capital,
Living, working, reinforced concrete.

So Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote about post-revolutionary Kharkov in the 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 the Russian Empire), a merchant, banking and university city overnight became the capital of a huge union republic. Kharkov was supposed to acquire a capital look, and, in addition, premises for the many thousands of officials were urgently required. Until 1928, part of the state institutions were located in the building of the former Salamander Insurance Company, and part rented premises in private houses. Overcrowding and disunity of bureaucratic offices in different parts of the city brought a lot of problems to the young capital. These problems needed to be addressed. Decide in a revolutionary way quickly, in one fell swoop. And so the idea of ​​building the House of State Industry was born, which was supposed to be 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 for the development of 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."

Daring in its conception, the project 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 for the competition. Three months later, 17 projects were submitted to the competition commission. He won the competition ... "The Uninvited Guest." That 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 Gosprom. Dozens of young architects worked on working drawings, mostly students and graduates of the Kharkov Technological Institute.

Even before the start of the construction of Gosprom, in 1924, a preliminary sketch diagram of 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, the architects had the opportunity to implement the most daring projects in scale, which "should have erased 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, the city outskirts, practically a wasteland, so that the architects could not limit themselves in the scope of their urban planning ideas. Among several proposals, the project of a young talented self-taught architect Viktor Karpovich Trotsenko was chosen, according to which it was planned to divide the quarters 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 circular square in the place of a wasteland behind the University Gardens. It was decided to build the State Industry House on this square. The project of Serafimov, Kravets and Felger very well fit into the plot allocated for construction and the general scheme of development of the territory. During construction, the building plan has changed somewhat, for example, the most big square in Europe (at the moment it occupies 12 hectares of land, and its length along the longest axis is almost 750 meters) from a round one it has acquired an unusual shape resembling 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-Union Central Executive Committee and the government of the Ukrainian SSR. Speaking at the rally, the Chairman of the VUTsIK, Grigory Petrovsky, 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 concrete trolleys into the foundation . A mortgage board was immured in it with the inscription: “In 1926, in the 10th year of the October Revolution, in the presence of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee G.I. Petrovsky, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V.Ya. Radchenko laid the foundation stone for the main building of the House of State Industry named after comrade. Dzerzhinsky".

The construction of Gosprom took 1315 wagons of cement, 3700 wagons of granite, 9 thousand tons of metal, more than 40 thousand square meters of glass. But what is most striking is that all the 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 "mechanisms" that helped people were horses. By the way, such an accelerated pace of construction did not affect the quality of work. Gosprom was built very solidly. During the Great Patriotic War hundreds of shells and bombs hit Gosprom, the building was blown up several times. Gosprom suffered greatly - parquet floors, doors, window frames burned out, but a monolithic reinforced concrete structure survived.

Recall that in the second half of the 1920s, the NEP dominated the country's economy, and therefore, to raise funds for the design and construction of such a gigantic facility as Gosprom, a structure characteristic of the new economic policy was created - a 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 on extraordinary financing for the construction of the State Industry House. The design estimate for the 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, the construction was completely completed. Gosprom housed the apparatus of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Ukrainian SSR, Gosplan, Narkomzem, the Central Statistics Department, the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party (b) of Ukraine, the Khimugol, Yugostal, Koksobenzenol, Industroy and many others trusts. In addition to institutions, the Gosprom building was equipped with its own telephone exchange, several first-aid posts, a canteen and buffets, a hairdresser's, a hotel, and several workshops. In 1934, when the functions of the capital were transferred to Kyiv, institutions of republican subordination and trusts left Gosprom. Regional authorities moved into the vacated premises.

Let's remember one more line of Vladimir Mayakovsky. "Let's slam reinforced concrete into the sky!" - the poet wrote in 1922. Yes, Gosprom has indeed become an incredibly powerful and grandiose "architectural blow". “I tried to solve the House of State Industry as a particle of the organized world, to show a factory, a plant that has become a palace ... With every step of the viewer, the building changes its appearance due to the contrasts of masses, the play of light and shade, glazing rich in nuances ... Space breaks the building, permeates it, as if dissolving it in itself ”, - Sergey Savvich Serafimov wrote about his brainchild. A giant with a volume of 347 thousand cubic meters. m and a usable area of ​​​​67 thousand square meters. m - the Soviet Union has not yet seen such a thing. But, despite its monstrous size, Gosprom does not look like a kind of “monster” made of glass and concrete. Leningrad architects managed to successfully arrange the building from nine buildings of different heights (from 6 to 13 floors), combined into three big block. Nine entrances with vestibules, wide staircases and elevators provided convenient communication between the various institutions located in the building. The central block is connected with 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 the article "Constructivism" in the World Architectural Encyclopedia is illustrated with an image of this building. Constructivism, according to the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, "sought to use new techniques to create simple, logical, functionally justified forms, expedient constructions." Indeed, the Gosprom building is distinguished by extreme laconicism - strict lines, no decorations, everything is subject to strict functionality. Distinctive features Gosprom are beautiful and clear proportions, the original combination of volumes, monumentality and at the same time airiness, especially surprising with such an impressive size of the building.

At the end of the 1920s, clay huts with thatched roofs stood around the Gosprom under construction, and a reinforced concrete giant towered over them, 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 mighty spirit of the working class. Dear comrades, my beloved people! Just as firmly, high, wide, continue to build! - the writer called on those gathered at the rally in honor of the builders of Gosprom. Gosprom was visited by other masters of the word. The American novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote about the "miracle seen in Kharkov". And worldwide fame came to Gosprom after the Monde magazine published a series of articles by the French writer Henri Barbusse “Organized Mountain”, where he enthusiastically spoke about his impressions of what he saw at the Soviet “construction of the century”.

Now Gosprom hosts the regional executive committee and various design institutes. Kharkiv 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, now the building needs urgent overhaul, which has not been carried out even once since the post-war reconstruction. It is necessary to restore or replace reinforced concrete floor slabs, load-bearing structures of transitions, 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 full restoration of Gosprom requires significant funds that are unaffordable for the regional budget. And although in 2003 the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine included Gosprom in the list of facilities that should be financed through centralized capital investments, the funds are still not enough. 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, the full restoration of Gosprom is still far away. And yet I want to believe and hope that Gosprom, once the “construction of the century”, in our time will not turn into a “reconstruction of the century” ...

Moscow Hotel

The middle of the 1920s… The young Soviet state is gradually forgetting the devastation, hunger and cold of the first post-revolutionary years. There is still a long way to go before universal abundance, but the economy is booming and growing at a rapid pace. Thanks to the NEP and private initiative (what a pity that this prosperity did not last 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 projects 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 "Metropol" and "National", in the design, construction and decoration of which the best architects of Russia took part.

The first Soviet hotel of the highest class was supposed to be "Moscow". The decision of the government determined the construction site of the hotel - Okhotny Ryad Street, on the site of the former merchant rows, just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin. Among the country's most titled architects, a competition was announced for the best hotel design. As a result, the project of architects L. I. Savelyev and O. A. Stapran was recognized as the most suitable. Later, Aleksey Shchusev, a coryphaeus of Soviet architecture, the author of the design of the Lenin Mausoleum, joined the work on the final project of the Moskva Hotel.

“1) Avoid the luxury of bad taste, but at the same time make the hotel beautiful and comfortable. 2) Provide really modern and high-quality hotel equipment with alarm, heating, ventilation, sanitary equipment, etc. 3) Design and build all rooms, and especially deluxe rooms, with the latest technology, and all work must be done on their 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. Tasks, it must be said, are not easy. Soviet specialists did not have much experience in the design and construction of such facilities, they also lacked the necessary construction and finishing materials Soviet production. Some experts believe that the construction of "Moscow" could not have done without the help of foreigners and the use of imported building materials. Even so, this absolutely does not detract from the merits of Soviet architects and builders, thanks to which "Moscow" was born.

In 1932, the project of the Moscow Hotel was approved, after which construction began. From the very first days, the history of construction was overgrown with various legends, rumors and mysterious cases. One of the most famous myths is that “Moscow” was allegedly built with different facades ... through an oversight. The façade on Revolution Square was significantly different from the façade facing the Column Hall of the House of the Unions. And all because of the fact that the architects Savelyev and Stapran submitted a draft design with different facades for Stalin's signature. Stalin approved this option, and the architects, having discovered an error, were afraid to correct the project already signed by the leader. True, not all experts believe in this version of the appearance of asymmetrical facades of the Moskva Hotel.

“Most likely, this beautiful legend was invented by Shchusev himself,” said Alexei Klimenko, a member of the Presidium of the Expert Advisory Council under the Chief Architect of Moscow, in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper. - The construction of the Mossovet Hotel began in 1932 ... Just at that time, Soviet architecture switched to imperial classics, so Academician Shchusev was instructed 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 Moskva became a victim of time and fickle fashion.”

There is no consensus about the various secret objects allegedly located in "Moscow". One of the corner rooms, seemingly no different from the others, had walls one and a half meters thick, which no jackhammer could take. Naturally, there was an assumption that this number is nothing but the secret hideout of Lavrenty Beria. There were many rumors about the fact that in the cellars of the "Moscow" there was supposedly a bunker of the "leader of the peoples" Joseph Stalin. One way or another, no documentary evidence of these facts was found.

For the construction of the Moscow Hotel, for the first time in the USSR, a separate construction department was created. Initially, it was planned that Moskva would be built by the Metallostroy association, but it did not even have time to start work, as in March 1932 the construction was transferred to Mosstroy. And five months later, a separate economic structure was created with direct subordination to the Presidium of the Moscow Council. The top leadership of the USSR also paid serious attention to the construction of the first Soviet hotel. The whole complex of works, starting from the design stage, was under the personal control of Lazar Kaganovich, who until 1935 held the post of first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee. “An exceptional role in the design of the building belongs to Comrade. L. M. Kaganovich, who repeatedly gave the most valuable instructions to designers and builders, ”Soviet newspapers wrote. Whether Lazar Moiseevich really gave “valuable instructions” or was it just ordinary Soviet propaganda is hard to say, but control was strict, financing was paramount, and the supply of building materials, equipment and labor was uninterrupted. The situation did not change even 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 Construction of Moscow magazine wrote in 1935: “During the construction of the Moskva Hotel, 65,621 m 3 of land was excavated. 23,000 m3 of concrete has been laid. 4000 tons of metal was used. 150 thousand m 2 of painting work was done. Used up building materials 11 thousand wagons, glass - 5890 m 2. Lined with tiles 10 700 m 2 . 62 km of metal pipes were installed. 165 thousand m 2 were plastered. Laid: parquet 20 thousand m 2, electric wire and cable 450 km, granite and marble 7700 m 2.

At the end of 1935, the first stage of the Moskva Hotel was put into operation. It really was a miracle hitherto unseen by Soviet people. Visitors were greeted by a brightly lit lobby, floors decorated with the finest marble, state-of-the-art elevators at the time that quickly ascended to the desired floor, and state-of-the-art auxiliary equipment. special attention deserved the number of "Moscow". Each, even the simplest room of "Moscow" was equipped with a radio, telephone, bath or shower and decorated with paintings by the best contemporary artists - an unprecedented luxury for those times. The decoration of the facades and interiors, which were created according to the author's projects, 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 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 in 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 Lolobrigida, Nobel laureates physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie and writer Pablo Neruda and many, many others.

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

Yes, in terms 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. Yes, and more than once there were opinions 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 is fragile, unsafe and could collapse at any moment. Perhaps so, but at the same time, the builders needed to disassemble the "Moscow" two months more than planned - 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 the supporters of preserving the first hotel built in the USSR had practically no chances, the outcome of the “battle for Moscow” was a foregone conclusion. Too expensive land in the center of the capital, and too many high-ranking officials were interested in the fact that the land occupied by the hotel was finally vacated. By August 2004, on the site of the symbol of the Soviet era, where the first Soviet hotel stood, there was an empty area the size of a football field ...

Metropolitan

“Is it possible to admit this sinful dream? Will not a man, created in the image and likeness of God by a rational creature, humiliate himself by descending into the underworld? And what is there, only God knows, and a sinful person should not know ... ”- so at the beginning of the 20th century a certain Moscow bishop frightened the venerable Moscow inhabitants, opposing the construction of the first subway in the Russian Empire. For forty years, the world's first subway, built in London in 1863, operated, underground trains ran in New York, Budapest, Vienna and Paris. And nowhere "cases of detection of devils under the ground" were recorded, and none of the passengers, thank God, did not fall into the underworld. But the dense fear still remained: what if something like this happens in Orthodox Moscow, “what a sinful person should not know”?

In 1902, the American businessman Gough received permission to research work and explore the possibility of building a subway in Moscow. The American firm even began to dig 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 grandiosity - the total length of the metro lines was supposed to be 54 kilometers (although this included a significant part of the 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 the American entrepreneur.

Of course, the church, despite its enormous influence, would hardly be able to resist the construction of the subway on its own. However, the development of underground transport was not included in the plans of the Moscow authorities. The metro would require huge investments, besides, it would take 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 of dollars in income.

The attempts of enthusiasts to build a subway in other cities of the country turned out to be fruitless. In Kyiv, for example, it was supposed to run underground trains back in the 80s of the XIX century. True, then it was not about the subway, but about part of the railway. The tunnel was supposed to start at Postal Square and come to the surface near Bessarabka. And in September 1916, the city authorities were presented with a project for the construction of the subway itself. The initiative came from the Kyiv office of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. The "fathers of the city" did not fundamentally object to the construction of underground transport, however, the coordination 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.

In 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 has led to the fact that urban land 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 1920s, the average speed of trams and buses on the narrow streets of the center of Moscow did not exceed 6–7 km/h. The only solution to the transport problem was the subway.

“Immediately begin preparatory work on the construction of the metro in Moscow as the main means of solving the problem of fast and cheap human transportation” - such a 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 in Moscow with passenger transportation. On September 23, 1931, by decision of the government, Metrostroy was organized, and in November of the same year, the first experimental and survey work was carried out on Rusakovskaya Street of the capital to study the conditions of underground construction.

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

“It seems to me that the people who, in such construction as the metro, attach such great importance to luxury and light, and thus create not only useful, but also pleasant, have already built the main thing and are confident in their future,” so on the pages of the newspaper “ Paris Soire" wrote about the construction of the Moscow metro Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Of course, the brilliant French writer did not see everything that happened outside the subway, but the subway really had to become a kind of showcase that would reflect the grandiose achievements of the Soviet state. The stations were not just places for embarkation and disembarkation of 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, by May this number had doubled. "The Soviet metro must become the best in the world" - such a task was given by the party and the government, and to achieve this goal they spared neither effort nor means. Even the highest party leaders were ready to sacrifice some parts of the body in order for everything to work flawlessly in the subway.

Here is how it was. In those days, all surface 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 “Beware, the doors are closing!” and the hissing of the doors following this is the most familiar phenomenon for us, which you simply do not pay attention to. And in the 30s, automatic doors were a novelty. Naturally, the metro builders were worried that the closing doors would injure the passenger who got between them. Once, to check the safety of the doors, a whole delegation of the Moscow City Party Committee, headed by First Secretary Lazar Kaganovich, descended underground. At first, various objects were placed between the doors, but this did not convince Kaganovich. He put his foot in the opening and demanded: “Close!”. At that time, a bruise on the body of the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks 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!". The doors closed. Those assembled looked at Kaganovich intently. "Fine!" he finally said. And then Lazar Moiseevich began to put his hands and feet between the doors, and in the end he took off his cap and stuck his head in the opening. And every time after the doors were closed, he said with satisfaction: “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 - trailer. On this section, machinists and other metro workers were trained to drive trains and manage the most complex movement process.

On February 4, 1935, trial traffic was opened along the entire line of the first stage of the Moscow metro. The first passengers were the delegates of the VII All-Union Congress of Soviets. And on May 15, 1935, at 7 am, 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 where you must definitely visit, published in 2003 by one of the most popular American news sites MSNBC (a joint project of Microsoft and the NBC TV channel), looks very interesting. modern man. So, the Moscow metro entered the top ten of this list; At the same time, Americans especially recommend visiting the Mayakovskaya, Kyiv and Komsomolskaya stations.

Immediately after the commissioning of the first line, the construction of the second stage of the Moscow metro with a length of 9.6 km began: from the Ploshchad Sverdlova station to the Sokol station. Since then, the laying of new tunnels near Moscow has not stopped for a single day, even during the war years, the construction of the third metro line continued, which was put into operation on January 1, 1943. In the most difficult days of 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 at the station and into the tunnels. Thousands of lives have been saved thanks to the subway.

Before the war, the Moscow metro was the only one in the USSR. In Kyiv, experts suggested starting construction as early as the mid-1920s, 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 progress beyond the preparatory stage. In 1949, the Kievmetrostroy administration began laying the first line in the Ukrainian capital, the Sviatoshynsko-Brovary line. On November 6, 1960, a 5.2 km section between the Vokzalnaya and Dnepr stations was put into operation. In 1965, a metro bridge connected the two banks of the Dnieper. In December 1976, the first section of the Kurenevsko-Krasnoarmeiskaya line was commissioned, on the eve of 1990, traffic was opened on the third line of the Kyiv metro - Syretsko-Pecherskaya. Now the length of the Kyiv metro is more than 60 km.

The second in a row in Ukraine and the sixth in the Soviet Union was the Kharkov metro. The question of building a subway in Kharkov was raised in the early 60s. The city was developing rapidly, and, as it was in other large cities, urban transport was increasingly struggling to cope with the growing passenger flow. In addition to the metro, as a solution to the problem, the city authorities considered the projects of a high-speed tram and a monorail, but they were found to be unsuitable for Kharkiv 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 an opinion on the need to build a subway in Kharkov, and in March of the following year, the city council discussed and approved "Considerations on the need to build a subway" presented by the organization "Kharkovproekt ". In this document, in addition to the project of laying a conventional intracity metro, the option of connecting an underground line with suburban sections of the railway was proposed. To do this, it was necessary to build tunnels of a larger diameter and long platforms, to apply 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 subway in Kharkov. On July 15, metro builders from Kyiv and Baku and sinkers from the Donetsk and Moscow region coal basins began construction of the first section of the tunnel. The Kharkiv 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 quicksands, lay tunnels under the Kharkov and Lopan rivers, under densely populated city blocks, saturated with underground communications.

On the evening of July 30, 1975, the first test train passed along the Sverdlovsk-Zavodskaya line, and on August 21, the State Commission signed an act of acceptance of a section 10.4 km long. Eight new stations - Ulitsa Sverdlova, Yuzhny Vokzal, Central Market, Sovetskaya, Gagarin Prospect, 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, the construction of the second line of the Kharkov metro began, and seven years later its first section of five stations was put into operation. And by that time, the Kharkiv metro builders had already prepared a project for the next, third metro line. Soon, she also received trains ... By the 350th anniversary of the city, two next stations were opened, and construction continues.

In Soviet times, the construction of the subway followed the principle: "The subway should be not only convenient and functional, but also beautiful." This good tradition is observed even now, the new stations in terms of decoration are in no way inferior to those built back in the USSR. Unfortunately, another good tradition - to finance the construction of the metro on time and in full - has remained in the past. AT last years the construction of the Kharkov subway, due to lack of funding, progressed with great difficulty, sometimes it stopped altogether. The situation is no better in other cities of Ukraine, where the subway already exists or is planned to be built.

"Worker and Collective Farm Girl"

“I managed to get into the room where the designs of the Soviet pavilion were kept secret. Two sculptured figures, 33 feet tall, mounted on a high pedestal, marched triumphantly in the direction of the German pavilion. Therefore, I designed the building in the form of a cubic array, also raised up, which was supposed to hold back this pressure ... "These words belong to Albert Speer, a Nazi criminal who served 20 years on sentence Nuremberg Tribunal. Speer, an architect by training, in 1937 supervised the construction of the German pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris. He enjoyed the boundless trust of Hitler, he was even called "the personal architect of the Fuhrer." By that time, two tyrants, Hitler and Stalin, had already begun the “who wins?” Competition, and therefore Speer had 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, there was a German exhibition. When the construction was completed, it turned out that the Germans still managed to get ahead of the Soviet architects. “The Germans waited a long time, wanting to know the height of our pavilion together with the sculptural group,” recalled Vera Mukhina, who had to resist the German onslaught in that struggle. - When they established this, then they built a tower over their pavilion ten meters higher than ours. They put an eagle upstairs." Formally, the Germans won. But only formally. An eagle with a swastika at a height looked pathetic and unattractive. And the twenty-five-meter steel giants, created by Vera Mukhina, seemed to soar in the sky, towering over Paris. Albert Speer never managed to restrain "the pressure of two figures marching triumphantly towards the German pavilion."

In Paris, everything was symbolic - the Soviet Union and Germany, standing against each other, between them Poland, which in two years will 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 to create a paired composition were inspired by the idea of ​​​​an antique statue by the Greek sculptors Critias and Nesiot. This sculpture was also called very symbolically - "Tyrannobortsy" ...

Soviet architects began to prepare for the World Exhibition in Paris long before its opening. The sadly memorable 1937 was 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 a responsible task - to design the Soviet pavilion.

“In my idea, the Soviet pavilion was drawn as a triumphal building, reflecting with 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 of the architectural design had to be so clearly expressed 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 sculpture, a young man and a girl, personifying the owners of the Soviet land - the working class and collective farm peasantry. They raise high the emblem of the country of the Soviets - the hammer and sickle ... ". Boris Iofan was always attracted by "large forms", it was he who designed the Palace of Soviets, which was never built, which was supposed to be crowned with a hundred-meter statue of Lenin.

Boris Iofan was an architect, he owned only the idea of ​​composition. Therefore, in the summer of 1936, a competition was announced among the most eminent Soviet sculptors, in which V. A. Andreev, M. G. Manizer, I. D. Shadr and V. I. Mukhina took part. The competition was won by a sketch by 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 not by chance that she chose a group of ancient tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton as a prototype for her most famous sculpture. Only in this way, in a veiled and little understood form, could she take revenge on the regime in her own way. Vera Ignatievna knew firsthand what the cruelty of tyrants is. In the early 1930s, she and her husband, Dr. Alexei Zamkov, tried to escape to then bourgeois Latvia, where she was born in 1889. It did not work, the NKVD arrested them right at the station. In those years, for trying to escape from " happy life"In the country of the Soviets, the punishment was supposed to be one - the highest measure. And if not for the intervention of several very high-ranking officials, then, most likely, this would have happened.

The fact is that Dr. Alexei Zamkov is a unique personality, in his own 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 "Heart of a Dog". Of course, Aleksey Zamkov did not transplant the pituitary gland and did not turn a dog into a human, but in the treatment of infertility and impotence he was truly a magician. His clients were Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, the petrel of the revolution, Maxim Gorky. It was they who stood up for the arrested doctor. At first, only he was released, but the doctor said that while his wife was at Lubyanka, he refused to work. This worked: soon Vera Ignatievna was also released.

Later, the authorities showered Mukhina with awards and prizes, but she never changed her attitude towards this government. However, in order to survive, it was necessary 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 triumph of the pieces. “Having received the project of the pavilion from the architect Iofan,” recalled Vera Ignatievna, “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 tread into an all-destroying 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 metallurgy and the author of the method of resistance spot electric welding of stainless steel, proposed stainless chromium-nickel steel as the material for the Worker and Collective Farm Woman.

The basis for the construction of the statue was a steel frame, and the sculpture itself was assembled from separate steel sheets, interconnected into large blocks, which were then welded to the base. The details of the sculpture and its assembly took place at the experimental plant of the Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Metalworking (TsNIIMASH), and the frame was made by the specialists of the Stalmost plant.

Vera Mukhina spent a lot of time in the workshop, working with sitters. The people said that the worker was portrayed by a metro builder, and the collective farmer was a ballerina. In fact, it was the other way around. The worker's model was a professional sitter Igor Basenko, who had previously left the ballet due to an injury. And the "collective farmer" was an employee of the Moscow "Metrostroy" by the name of ... Mukhina. The sculptor accidentally saw her namesake Zoya Mukhina at the 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 was coming to an end, it turned out that the heads of the figures could not be translated into steel by stencil enlargement of plaster models, as previously suggested. Then Mukhina and her assistant Z. G. Ivanova had to make plaster heads right at the factory. As models, everyone who passed by was attracted. “Everyone served us in kind,” Vera Ignatievna said. - A firefighter passes - "Wait a bit, I'll look at my nose." An engineer passes by - "Turn around, tilt your head."

In Paris construction firm"Gorzhli", with which Soviet government signed a contract, was already finishing construction, and the sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" still remained in Moscow. I had to work at an accelerated pace, everyone understood that if by the opening day of the exhibition the statue was not in place, then ... Apparently, fearing the failure to meet the deadlines for the manufacture of the statue, the director of the TsNIIMASH plant, Tambovtsev, decided to “keep it safe” and wrote a denunciation to his colleagues. Now the words of the director would be taken as the ravings of a madman, but then any utter nonsense was taken quite seriously. Tambovtsev claimed that no one, but “the most important enemy of the people” Leon Trotsky (!), served as a model for the worker’s head, 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 searchlights illuminated the statue, Stalin examined it and, without saying anything, left. The next morning, Mukhina and her colleagues were informed that the Soviet government had done enough work and the sculpture could be sent to France.

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

In Paris, the brilliant work of Mukhina made a splash. The sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" quite naturally received a large gold medal of the Grand Prix. It was not just the scale that amazed (the 24-meter statue was installed on the roof of the 35-meter pavilion), the audience admired the swiftness of the two figures, the dynamism of the image, 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 psychological impact,” recalled Vera Mukhina. “The highest joy of an artist is to be understood.”

The exhibition ended, the fanfare died down, "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" had to return home. Initially, the sculpture was planned to be installed on the Volga, on a dam near Rybinsk. But after the “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was admired in Paris, Rybinsk seemed an “unworthy” place for sculpture, and it was decided to install it in Moscow at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSHV). 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 Sparrow Hills, where, in her opinion, it would look in a winning perspective. But “art in the USSR belongs to the people”, and therefore no one was particularly interested in the opinion of the author ...

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. Huge, majestic and seemingly so solid monument rusted through. In 2003, it was dismantled and restoration began. Unfortunately, the former greatness will not return to the "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" - it was decided to abandon the idea of ​​repeating the architecture of the Parisian pavilion for the pedestal. True, it is planned to make it taller and place a concert hall in it - after all, the sculpture is the emblem of the Mosfilm film studio. A shopping and entertainment area will be organized around the site. Which is also symbolic in its own way.

Kremlin Palace of Congresses

Until the early 1960s, CPSU congresses and other similar events were held in two places: the meeting room of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the Grand Kremlin Palace or in the Hall of Columns, the former Assembly of the Nobility. Under Stalin, on especially solemn occasions, the party and Soviet elite gathered at the Bolshoi Theater. This went on until Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev decided that a separate building should be built for the party congresses - it was not, they say, for the communists to “remove other people's corners” for their meetings.

So, in 1959, the issue was resolved unambiguously - there will be a new palace of congresses. But where to build? On the territory of the Kremlin? Khrushchev insisted on this, because, as he said, the center of the state is located there, which means that party congresses should be held at this place. Architects, historians, people from the inner circle of the Secretary General 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 sites. There was a proposal to put the Kremlin Palace on the site of the blown up Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But Khrushchev made the decision almost single-handedly. Later, this was remembered to Nikita Sergeevich as one of the manifestations of that very “voluntaristic leadership style”.

Officially, the design and construction of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was supervised by Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, then Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR. 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 involved in the design of 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. Initially, it was planned to build something rather modest and small. However, then the project grew like a snowball, because in addition to the meeting hall itself, the palace had to have a large number of office premises, lounges, wardrobes, buffets and restaurants, toilets, etc. A lot of space was occupied by security systems - a separate electrical substation, an air conditioning system , lift facilities. In addition, the designers received another task - the palace will be used not only for meetings, but also as a building for theater and ballet performances. Therefore, it was necessary to provide a place for the stage and stage equipment, artistic dressing rooms, rooms for scenery. As a result, the modest building has turned into a huge multifunctional complex.

During the design phase, on the personal orders of Kosygin, several groups of architects and designers were sent to Europe, the United States and China. It is said that Khrushchev came up with the idea of ​​building a palace after traveling abroad and visiting buildings of this type. The building of the National People's Congress, built in 1959 for the 10th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, with a huge conference hall for 10,000 seats, was especially impressive for the Secretary General.

As the designers recalled, the disputes around the project of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses were quite stormy. 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 was approved by the order of the Moscow City Council - Mikhail Posokhin, Ashot Mndoyants, Evgeny Stamo and Pavel Shteller. It must be said that Mikhail Vasilievich Posokhin was appointed chief architect of the Kremlin Palace by no means by chance - it was Khrushchev's personal choice. Khrushchev and Posokhin were well acquainted, Mikhail Vasilyevich built government dachas, including for the Secretary General. At the height of the construction of the palace, Mikhail Posokhin was appointed chief architect of the capital.

The site for construction was chosen next to the Trinity Gates of the Kremlin, opposite these gates was located main entrance to the palace. Archaeologists were the first to arrive at the construction site. It must be said that the designers tried to interfere as carefully as possible in 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 archaeologists was unequivocal - there are no objects of particular historical value at the construction site of the Kremlin Palace. True, as some experts now say, 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 middle of the 18th century. When digging the foundation pit of the Palace of Congresses, the cellars of the chambers were excavated and destroyed. Yes, and on the surface they could not do without losses: during the construction of the Kremlin Palace, the builders demolished the old building of the Armory and several office premises of the 18th-19th centuries, including the Cavalry (retinue) buildings of the imperial palace.

16 months from the start of design to the commissioning of the facility - such a short time was given to designers and builders for the construction of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. In the spring of 1961, the 21st Party Congress was to be held, which was planned to be held in the new palace. The gigantic scope of work and the record-breaking short construction time required uninterrupted financing and the provision of the necessary materials and equipment. From the very beginning of the construction of the Kremlin Palace, Khrushchev regularly appeared on the construction site. Naturally, with such a patron and such control, performers never had problems with financial and material support.

The builders tried their best to complete the construction of the Kremlin Palace by the spring of 1961, by the opening of the 21st Party Congress. The work went on almost around the clock, of course, that the emergency pace could not but affect the quality of construction - there were a lot of shortcomings. In the event that the object had not been handed over on time or the State Commission would not have accepted it due to numerous shortcomings, very many would have lost their posts. But the builders were lucky - there was very little time left before the commissioning, when the opening of the XXI Congress was postponed to autumn. It was just a gift - the builders had a respite, an unexpected opportunity to bring the object to mind. By August 1961, the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was ready to be handed over to the State Commission. There were no serious complaints from the members of the commission. Particularly impressive were the tests of the roof of the building for snow load, as well as ceilings in case of a large crowd of people. At the end of summer, snow cannot 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 checked in the same way). According to the calculations of the designers, in order to carry out full tests, it was necessary to attract 30 thousand people! It was too much even for the most important party palace. It would take a long time to let such a huge mass of people pass through the gates of the Kremlin, and besides, it was necessary to block traffic in the center of Moscow for a long time. In the end, the number of "testers" of the Kremlin Palace was decided to be halved. On the roof, two thousand soldiers played the role of fallen snow, eight thousand were placed in the banquet hall, the remaining five - inside the hall and on numerous balconies. The commanders commanded “To the right! March with a step! ”, And in a single impulse, thousands of feet, dressed in heavy tarpaulin boots, stamped. Builders with bated breath watched what was happening. But everything turned out well, and the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was put into operation by an act of the state commission.

Since then, the Kremlin Palace has become the main ideological tribune of the Soviet Union. Within its walls, all party congresses, meetings and events dedicated to various solemn dates, international conferences were held (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 ticket to Artek, was considered the most coveted reward for every Soviet schoolchild.

On December 30, 1922, the creation of the USSR was proclaimed at the first Congress of Soviets. Then S.M. Kirov put forward an ambitious idea - to build the Palace of Soviets, which would become a symbol of the country. However, the implementation of the idea began only in 1931. At every stage - from the project to preparation for implementation and the start of a grandiose construction - the Palace of Soviets was a building the like of which did not exist in the world.

Struggles of architectural styles

In June 1931, a design competition was announced. A few months later, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was destroyed. "Obsolete", according to the plans of the authorities, had to give way to a new one. Both professional architects and ordinary citizens of the Union applied for the competition. Among the participants in the competition was also the great French architect Le Corbusier. The works of B. Iofan, I. Zholtovsky and G. Hamilton entered the second round. All three projects were designed in a monumental style. Later, this style will be called "Stalin's Empire". The choice of these projects marked the end of the era of Soviet constructivism - lightness and delicacy gave way to pomp and massiveness. Offended by the neglect of his thoughtful project, Le Corbusier wrote: "The people love royal palaces." In 1933, the winner was determined - the construction was to be carried out according to the project of B. Iofan. But the winning sketch was very different from the final version.

Idea transformation

The famous tower with the figure of Lenin was not in the first sketch: the Palace of Soviets looked like a complex of buildings, and the figure of the Liberated Proletarian was located on the tower. Gradually, the tower acquired a level structure, the accompanying buildings were removed. The height of the building was to be 420 meters, of which 100 is the height of the statue. The grandiose statue of Lenin (one finger of the leader was the size of a two-story house) appeared on the top only in 1939. The idea to make the building a pedestal did not belong to Iofan, but to the Italian Brasini. Iofan himself wanted to place a monument in front of the Palace, but the authorities liked Brasini's proposal. In the central part of the Palace, a Great Hall for 22,000 people was envisaged. The stage was in the middle, the audience rows were an amphitheatre. Next to it were the foyer, utility rooms, the Small Hall. In the high-rise part were the chambers of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Presidium, offices.

grand construction

According to the project, for the construction of the Palace and the entire infrastructure, it would be necessary to demolish almost all the historical buildings of Volkhonka. It was supposed to make a grandiose parking lot, a square filled with concrete, to push the Pushkin Museum to them. A. S. Pushkin. At the construction site, for the first time in the USSR, a preliminary analysis of the soil was performed using core drilling - a number of wells were drilled up to 60 meters deep and the composition of the soil was analyzed. The place turned out to be successful - dense limestones and a rocky "island" were located on this territory. To prevent groundwater from undermining the foundation, bituminization was used for the first time: almost 2,000 wells were drilled around the foundation pit, and bitumen was poured into them. Additionally, water pumps were installed and an insulating coating was added. For the final cladding of the grandiose structure, a stone-working plant was built, which later “helped” make Moscow granite: it processed stone panels for the metro, bridges and houses. For the production of concrete for the Palace, a factory was founded near it. The construction of the foundation (also designed in a special way - in the form of rings) required 550 thousand cubic meters of concrete. The diameter of each ring was about one and a half hundred meters. 34 columns were installed on them. The area of ​​one column in cross section was 6 square meters. m. A car could fit on such a column. The frame of the building was created from a special steel grade, created specifically for construction - "DS". Auxiliary frame, directing the load on the main one - made of corrosion-resistant steel, simpler. A plant was founded near the Lenin Hills, where the elements were prepared for installation. It was decided to mount the main frame on concrete rings. To lift the beams, cranes were supposed to be assembled on these rings. The higher, the fewer cranes: the installation of the statue had to be carried out by only one crane.

Construction final

The project was supposed to be completed by 1942. In 1940, the frame reached seven floors, but the war began. High-quality steel was required for the production of anti-tank hedgehogs, and the frame had to be dismantled. After the war, the country did not have the resources to similar structures. The project was transferred to Sparrow Hills, where the building of Moscow State University gradually grew instead of the Palace. The skyscrapers were based on the project of Iofan, and common features well visible. Another trace of the project is the Kropotkinskaya metro station - it was conceived as an underground lobby of the Palace and was built on a grand scale.

With the phrase " Great construction sites of communism Almost everyone is familiar, but what was meant initially? And what does " ».

Lots of illustrations.

We should start with Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature.

Autumn 1948, 3 years later after the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a resolution " On the plan for field-protective afforestation, the introduction of grass-field crop rotations, the construction of ponds and reservoirs to ensure high sustainable yields in the steppe and forest-steppe regions of the European part of the USSR". In the press, this document was called "".

Calculated plan for the period 1949-1965 years. What is its essence?

In the steppe and forest-steppe regions of the European part of the USSR ( Volga region, Western Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, Ukraine ) droughts and dry winds were often repeated.

However, you can also get excellent harvests there - there is a lot of sun and heat.

Just not enough water.

What to do?

Use a grass-field farming system ( V.V. Dokuchaeva, P.A. Kostychev and V.R. Williams).

The essence of which is:

• a) planting protective forest belts on watersheds, along the boundaries of crop rotation fields, along the slopes of gullies and ravines, along the banks of rivers and lakes, around ponds and reservoirs, as well as afforestation and fixation of sands;
• b) the correct organization of the territory with the introduction of herbal field and fodder crop rotations and rational use of land;
• c) correct tillage system , care of crops and, above all, the widespread use of black fallows, plowing and stubble cultivation;
• d) correct organic application system and mineral fertilizers ;
• e) sowing selected seeds adapted to local conditions high-yielding varieties;
• e) irrigation development based on the use of water local runoff through the construction of ponds and reservoirs.

This is at the local level. But what about the state?

In accordance with this plan, plant forest belts, to block the way to dry winds and change the climate on an area of ​​​​120,000,000 hectares, equal to the territories of England, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Protective afforestation and irrigation occupied a central place in the plan.

In total, it was planned to plant more than 4,000,000 hectares of forest and create state shelterbelts over 5300 km long. These strips were supposed to protect the fields from hot southeast winds - dry winds.

In addition to state forest protection belts, forest belts of local importance were planted along the perimeter of individual fields, along the slopes of ravines, along existing and newly created reservoirs, on the sands (in order to secure them).

The plan also provided for the introduction of a grass-field system of farming. According to this system, part of the arable land in crop rotations was sown with perennial legumes and bluegrass grasses.

Grasses served as a fodder base for animal husbandry and a natural means of restoring soil fertility (legumes, on the other hand).

The created forest belts and reservoirs were supposed to significantly diversify the flora and fauna of the USSR. Thus, the plan combined the tasks of protecting the environment and obtaining high sustainable yields.

To develop and implement the plan, the Agrolesproekt Institute (now Rosgiproles) was created. According to his projects, four large watersheds of the basins of the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Urals, and the European south of Russia were covered with forests.

The total length of large state shelterbelts exceeded 5,300 km. 2.3 million hectares of forest were planted in these strips.

Simultaneously with the establishment of a system of field-protective afforestation, a large program was launched to create irrigation systems. About 4 thousand reservoirs were created in the USSR, containing 1200 km 3 of water

The next step was Great construction sites of communism ».

Brown arrows are dry winds, green stripes are forest belts, red dashed lines are canals, red stars are future hydroelectric power plants ...

The question was where to get water. Warmth and sun already available!

There is also water, but in the form of rivers flowing aimlessly into the seas (Volga, Dnieper, Don, Amudarya).

The idea is that the waters of these rivers detain dams, thereby watering the territory, let on channels giving water for irrigation, make the turbines turn and give electricity!

Those same " Great construction sites of communism».

We list on the fingers that belonged to the Great construction sites of communism:

hydroelectric power plants :

Dnieper:

- Kakhovskaya HPP. She created a reservoir to feed the South Ukrainian and North Crimean canals.

- Tsimlyanskaya HPP. It created a reservoir that raises the water level for the use of the Volga-Don Canal and its energy supply, ensuring the navigability of the Don, feeding irrigation canals.

Volga:

- Kuibyshev hydroelectric power station. For power supply. 2nd in terms of power in the world at that time.

- Stalingrad hydroelectric power station. For power supply (1st in terms of power in the world at that time.), As well as irrigation, creating conditions for the Stalingrad main gravity canal.

Amu Darya:

- Takhiatash HPP. Redirected the waters of the Amu Darya along the Main Turkmen Canal, electricity supply.

Channels :

- South Ukrainian channel. Irrigation

- North Crimean Canal. Irrigation, water supply of the peninsula with fresh water.

- Volga-Don Canal(Volgo-Don). Transport (connection of the Caspian Sea with the rest of the seas).

- Main Turkmen Canal. Irrigation, transport (connection of the Aral Sea with the Caspian Sea). 2 HPPs were planned on the canal.

If anyone is interested in some statistics:

The total capacity of hydroelectric power plants built as part of the general plan amounted to more than 4 million kW. The Kuibyshevskaya and Stalingradskaya HPPs at the time of construction were the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world and surpassed the largest US hydroelectric power plants at that time (Grand Coulee and Hoover Dam).

The HPP provided energy, irrigation and watering, water transport, water supply, etc. A significant part of the HPP's electricity was directed to irrigation and electrification of agriculture.

Irrigation and watering base	Length of main canals, km	Area of ​​irrigated land, million ha	Area of ​​irrigated land, mln. ha
Kuibyshev hydroelectric power station
Stalingrad hydroelectric power station
Main Turkmen Canal from the Amu-Darya to Krasnovodsk and irrigation systems in the lower reaches of the Amu-Darya, Western Turkmenistan and the Kara-Kum desert
Kakhovskaya HPP, South Ukrainian and North Crimean channels and irrigation systems in the regions of southern Ukraine and Northern Crimea
Volga-Don Shipping Canal and irrigation systems in the surrounding areas
Total

Let's take a quick look at these buildings.

Tsimlyanskaya HPP.

Tsimlyanskaya HPP is a hydroelectric power plant on the Don River in the Rostov Region, near the cities of Volgodonsk and Tsimlyansk. It was built in 1949-1954 as part of the construction program for the Volga-Don shipping route.

It is of great economic importance, providing large-tonnage shipping on the lower Don, the operation of the Volga-Don shipping canal, irrigation of large areas of arid lands, water supply, flood protection and electricity generation.

Volga-Don Canal.

The Volga-Don Shipping Canal named after V. I. Lenin (Volga-Don Canal) is a 101 km long canal connecting the Volga and Don rivers at the place of their closest approach on the Volgodonsk Isthmus. A link in the unified deep-water transport system of the European part of Russia.

Deep-sea transport system of the European part of Russia is the red dotted line.

Historians attribute the first attempt to connect the Volga and Don at the place of their closest approach to the middle of the 16th century. In 1569, the Turkish Sultan Selim II sent 22,000 soldiers up the Don to dig a canal between the two rivers. Unsuccessfully.

The second well-known attempt was made during the reign of Peter I. Unsuccessfully.

Before the Revolution of 1917, more than 30 projects were created to connect the Volga with the Don. However, none of them was destined to be realized: resistance was provided by private owners of railways. In addition, even if the canal were built, the movement of ships through it could only be in the spring, when the rivers were full.

On May 31, 1952, the waters of the Volga and the Don merged between the 1st and 2nd locks. Since June 1, the movement of ships has already begun along the canal. On July 27, 1952, the channel was named after Vladimir Lenin. At the same time, at the first gateway (from the Volga side), a monument to Joseph Stalin was opened (later demolished, a monument to Lenin was erected on the pedestal).

Kuibyshevskaya (now Zhigulevskaya) HPP.

Zhigulevskaya HPP (formerly the Kuibyshevskaya HPP, and since 1958 - the Volga HPP named after Lenin) is a hydroelectric power station on the Volga River in Samara region, in the city of Zhigulevsk.

Included in the Volga-Kama cascade of hydroelectric power stations. Second

The construction of the hydroelectric power station began in 1950 and ended in 1957. feature geological structure hydroelectric complex is a sharp difference between the banks of the Volga. The high steep right bank is composed of fractured Upper Carboniferous limestone-dolomite rocks. The left bedrock bank of the valley is composed of sands with interlayers and lenses of loams.

In addition to generating electricity, it provides large-capacity shipping, water supply, and flood protection. The reservoir of the Zhigulevskaya HPP is the main regulating reservoir of the Volga-Kama cascade.

Stalingradskaya (now Volga) HPP.

Volzhskaya HPP (formerly Stalingradskaya / Volgogradskaya HPP, Volzhskaya HPP named after the XXII Congress of the CPSU) is a hydroelectric power station on the Volga River in the Volgograd Region.

First hydroelectric power plant in Europe.

Included in the Volga-Kama HPP cascade, being its lowest step. In 1961, the world's largest hydroelectric power plant. It was erected in record time. The first soil in the foundation pit for the future hydroelectric power station was excavated in 1952. And in December 1958, the first hydroelectric unit was already put into operation. The world practice of building power plants did not know such volumes and rates of work.

For the first time in world practice, Soviet specialists substantiated the possibility of building large hydroelectric facilities on non-rocky foundations.

Kakhovskaya HPP.

Kakhovskaya HPP is the sixth (lower and last) stage of the cascade of Dnieper hydroelectric power plants in Ukraine (the city of Novaya Kakhovka, Kherson region), built on the Dnieper River.

Construction began in September 1950, in October 1956 the last hydroelectric unit was commissioned.

Kakhovka Canal.

Kakhovka Canal- the central irrigation and main main canal of the south of Ukraine.

It was opened on October 26, 1979. The length of the channel is 130 kilometers, it originates from the Kakhovka reservoir. Water from the Kakhovka reservoir rises by pumps (powered by the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station) by 25 meters and then flows by gravity through the territory of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.

Canal water is supplied to four irrigation systems:

• Kakhovskaya
• Priazovskaya
• Serogozskaya
• Chaplynskaya.

The canal is used to irrigate 326,000 hectares in two regions of Ukraine.

North Crimean Canal

Irrigation and watering canal 402 km long, built (more than 10 years of research and design and survey work) in 1961-1971 to provide water to dry and dry territories of the Kherson and Crimean regions of the Ukrainian SSR with water intake from the Kakhovka reservoir, filled in 1955- 1958. Known when opened as North Crimean Canal named after Lenin Komsomol of Ukraine.

Up to 80% of the Dnieper water of the SKK, supplied to the Crimea, was used for the needs of agriculture (of which 60% - to ensure the cultivation of rice) and industrial pond fish farming; about 20% of the Dnieper water of the SCC was supplied to reservoirs - sources of centralized domestic and drinking water supply for cities and rural settlements of Crimea.

Since 2014, the supply of Dnieper water to Crimea has been stopped.

Main Turkmen Canal

In the foreground is a walking excavator.

The canal was supposed to be laid from the Amu Darya River to Krasnovodsk along the ancient dried-up channel of the Uzboy for the development of cotton growing, the development of new lands in Karakalpakstan and the Karakum Desert, as well as for shipping from the Volga to the Amu Darya. It was built in 1950-1953, then the construction was stopped.

The canal was to be the second longest canal in the world. Its length was supposed to be more than 1200 kilometers, starting from Cape Takhiatash, 10 km from Nukus to Krasnovodsk.

A system of dams, locks, reservoirs, three hydroelectric power plants with a total capacity of 100,000 kW, diversion channels and pipelines over 1,000 kilometers long were planned along the canal route. At the beginning of the canal, a huge dam was being built at Takhiatash, which was to be combined with a hydroelectric power plant. 25% stock The Amu Darya was to be diverted to a new canal, the Aral Sea was supposed to lower its level, and the lands that arose during the retreat of the sea were supposed to be used in agriculture, the salinity of the lower reaches of the Amu Darya, according to calculations, should have decreased. It was planned to build 10,000 kilometers of main and distribution canals around the canal, 2,000 reservoirs, 3 hydroelectric power stations of 100,000 kilowatts each. The width of the channel was supposed to be more than a hundred meters, the depth - 6-7 meters. It was planned to use ten thousand dump trucks, bulldozers, excavators. Construction was supposed to be completed by 1957.

In December 1950, a new city of Takhiatash was founded near Cape Takhiatash, on which there had previously been two shelters from bad weather for barge haulers. On June 15, 1952, the Chardzhou-Khojeyli railway was opened and a branch line was built to Takhiatash. Infrastructure was created for the development of construction, exploratory expeditions were organized, aviation was connected.

After Stalin's death, at the suggestion of Lavrenty Beria, the construction of the canal was suspended on March 25, 1953, and then stopped.

Since 1954, the construction of the Karakum Canal began.

Blue - not built Main Turkmen Canal, red - built Karakum Canal.

Karakum Canal- a canal built in the USSR for water supply to the southern and southwestern regions of Turkmenistan with a length of 1445 km. In modern Turkmenistan, the name Karakum River is also used. The water in the canal flows by gravity. It is navigable for 450 km.

The first stage of the canal (Amu Darya - Murgab), 400 km long, was built in 1959. Its introduction into operation made it possible to increase the area of ​​irrigated land to 100,000 hectares.

The second stage of the canal (Mary - Tejen) 138 km long was completed in 1960. This made it possible to irrigate over 70 thousand hectares in the Tejen oasis.

The third stage of the canal (Tejen - Ashgabat) 260 km long completed in 1962. In 1967, the canal was brought to Geok-tepe. The commissioning of the third stage made it possible to additionally irrigate about 100,000 hectares.

Since 1971, the construction of the fourth stage of the canal began. Further, the canal will be extended to the town of Bereket. The next section of the canal goes to the subtropical regions of southwestern Turkmenistan up to Etrek, 270 km long, the other branch of the canal goes to Nebit-Dag. The canal was officially completed in 1988.

Channel takes about 45% of water Amu Darya, which is an important factor in the problem Aral Sea. About a quarter of the water entering the canal is lost in the channel itself, as a result of filtration through the earthen bottom.

Why, the Karakum Canal was built, and not the Main Turkmen Canal, I do not know.

But I have guesses. Takhiatash HPP was supposed to be located in Uzbekistan! And what Turkmenbashi would agree to give such an important facility to a neighbor? If I don’t eat it myself, I won’t give it to you either.

Secondly, what Turkmenbashi will refuse to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the largest fountain complex in his capital?

And the fact that the Aral has dried up is the problem of the neighbors of the Uzbeks, and the Kazakhs.

And the fact that the connectivity of the territory of the USSR from the presence of this channel does not increase, then these are Moscow's problems.

And Moscow has no use for extra memories of Comrade Stalin...

OK…

How much does a channel cost? Did you think hordes of imprisoned canal soldiers are dragging the earth in wheelbarrows? Sorry - it's ineffective. Faster and better like this:

Scrapers create embankment of the future channel.

The excavator is digging. Walking - digs a lot.

Dredger - deepens and widens the channel.

Why all these pictures? Well, first of all, it's interesting. And secondly, you will entrust all these cars to prisoners???

A lyrical digression about the camps...

It is worth saying a few words about the camps.

This topic is extremely fertile for fruitless discussions. However, some omissions should be pointed out.

First. In a country building a bright future, where all the people were brothers prisoners?! Yes. And although this is a “template break”, but what is, is. By the way, there were not much more of them than in modern Russia. As much as in modern Turkmenistan.

Second. Modern society treats prisoners on the principle of "out of sight, out of mind." If no one sees them, then they don't exist. And under Comrade Stalin, it was believed that a person should serve society. So let him work for the good of society ...

Third. They try to compare Soviet camps with English or German ones. But this is a typical attempt to compare "warm with soft". The Soviet camps are construction camps, they are from the communist idea of ​​"labour armies". English and German - concentration. Their main idea is to quickly get rid of the excess livestock of the third-rate population. Only the British did not bother with infrastructure, and the Germans tried to adapt some to work for the benefit of the Reich.

If it’s quite simple, then one could manage to leave the Soviet camp ahead of schedule with a medal for labor merits, then from the German one - only feet first in the form of fertilizer and a bar of soap. So that!

And the last. Prisoners are people too and their work for the benefit is worthy of respect. Such things as Salekhard-Igarka, etc. - just an example of mismanagement, and the prisoners are not to blame.

The question remains, why use electricity?

Light bulbs, machine tools, electric furnaces are understandable, but what is an electric tractor? Imagine a tractor chassis with an electric motor and a long wire pulling plows. Represented? So this is it!

And now the results.

« Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature ».

After the death of Stalin (03/05/1953), many forest belts were cut down, several thousand ponds and reservoirs for fish breeding were abandoned, 570 forest protection stations created in 1949-1955 were liquidated. ().

Why did this happen? Don't know. I can only guess.

The plan has been implemented for 5 years already, it did not give quick results, but pulled the funds. After Stalin's death, the leaders needed populism for the masses, and not connected with the name of Stalin...

« Great construction sites of communism »:

South Ukrainian channel. Built for a long time. Functioning.

North Crimean Canal. Closed in 2014. No comment.

Volga-Don - underloaded, sort of because of shallowing ...

The main Turkmen canal has not been built. And the Aral has dried up...

It is easier with power plants - they were more understandable for comrades from the government.

The Kuibyshev hydroelectric power station and the Stalingrad hydroelectric power station are operating. Belong to RusHydro.

The Tsimlyanskaya HPP is in operation and is owned by Lukoil-Ekoenergo.

As many as 32 pieces of electric tractors were riveted ... And they forgot about them.

After 10 years, despite the plowing of virgin lands, in 1963 the USSR for the first time since the war, selling 600 tons of gold from the reserves, bought about 13 million tons of bread abroad.

The illustrations used were "Technology for Youth", stamps of 1948-1953.

One of the most hidden and vile myths in the USSR now being praised by admirers was the glorification of the supposed participation of free and ideological communist Komsomol members in industrialization or another, most often unnecessary "great building of communism", in fact, millions of armies of slaves were used on them - ZeKa: on the construction of any object - civil, military, cultural, on which, without sparing the free labor and lives of prisoners, the tasks of the Communist Party were carried out.

At the construction site of Moscow State University. A photo:pastvu.com

The "cheap labor" of prisoners was widely used in the first half of the last century - during the Gulag.

O skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya embankment there are many stories and legends. One of the stories says that in the apartment of the writer Vasily Aksyonov there is a scrawled inscription "convicts built". It is also said that the prisoners posed for the sculptors who sculpted the bas-reliefs. The convicts did build a skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya embankment, as well as Moscow State University building. The scale of attracting labor from correctional institutions was such that it allowed the use of convicts for the construction of not only industrial and military, but also civilian facilities.

Since 1934, all corrective labor camps and colonies were transferred to the jurisdiction of the main department of camps for labor settlements and places of detention of the NKVD of the USSR. In the GULAG system, central offices were created with specific economic tasks: the main directorate of the camp forestry industry (GULLP), the main directorate of camps for mining and smelting enterprises (GULGMP), the main directorate of railway construction camps (GULZhDS), the main directorate of airfield construction (GUAS), the main directorate of camps industrial construction (Glavpromstroy), the main department of hydrotechnical construction camps (Glavgidrostroy) and so on.

One of the activities of Glavpromstroy was housing and cultural construction. It was the forces of the prisoners of the camps of Glavpromstroy who erected skyscrapers on the Kotelnicheskaya embankment and Sparrow Hills. Finishing work on the main building of the Moscow State University was carried out by the prisoners of the camp "Vysotny" - these are 368 people, of which 208 are women.

Workers at the construction site of the White Sea Canal, 1930-1933. Photo: Laski Diffusion/ East News

* * * * *
One of the many carefully concealed by the communists for all 70 years of its brief history Union of Terrible Pages:

Nizhny Tagil Drama Theater them. Mamin-Sibiryak on the avenue, of course, Lenin. By whom was it built? Conscious Komsomol members? Of course, the architect and part of the builders were builders, but how many Zeks died there on it and other construction sites?

“This inscription was walled up on March 15, 1954, not to the thunder of orchestras and the noise of the crowd, but it will tell posterity that this theater was not built by the forces of the Komsomol brigades, as chronicles will claim, but was created on the blood and bones of prisoners - slaves of the twentieth century. Hello! to the coming generation, and may your life and your era not know the slavery and humiliation of man by man.

hello prisoners
I. L. Kozhin
R. G. Sharipov,
Yu. N. Nigmatulin.
March 15, 1954

According to Lev Samuilovich Liebenshtein, who in the 1950s worked at a house-building plant and supervised the construction of buildings on Theater Square, prisoners deprived of the right to correspond were immured bottles with their letters under one of the columns. What is written in them, no one knows ...

P.S. This link with the photo "suddenly disappeared", we took care of it: source:http://tagildrama.ru/hidden-partition/127-poslanie-potomkam
Nothing, this letter and the description of the use of ZEK slaves are widely known, the communists will not be able to hush up their crimes:

"When Vera Avgustovna Lotar-Shevchenko worked in the drama theater, its building was still under construction. It was built by Tagillaga prisoners, who were brought to work every morning and taken back in the evening. The construction site, as it was supposed to, was fenced with barbed wire, and there were towers, on which sentries with rifles carefully observed the movements of prisoners.

However, in March 1954, builders-prisoners managed to wall up a sheet of iron with a message to the “coming generation”.

Two years later, it was found during the repair of the floors, but times were already different - the 20th Congress of the CPSU was held, so the text of the message has been preserved. Here is what the prisoners wrote:

“This inscription was walled up on March 15, 1954, not under the thunder of orchestras and the noise of the crowd. But she will tell posterity that this theater was not built by the forces of the Komsomol brigades, ...

Did Vera Avgustovna see this construction site? Of course I saw it. And this and other construction projects in Nizhny Tagil. The labor of prisoners, "slaves of the twentieth century" was widely used in Nizhny Tagil, and in Sverdlovsk, and in hundreds of other cities of the USSR.

It was also used in Akademgorodok in the early years, starting from 1959 and up to the mid-60s, when foreigners began to visit us, incl. and dignitaries. Therefore, Academician Lavrentiev began to ask Colonel Ivanov, head of the Sibacademstroy Construction Department, to refuse to use prisoners in construction, or at least use them at such construction sites where foreigners could not see them.

Nikolai Markelovich Ivanov, in response, always said that he had a huge shortage of workers, he could not do without prisoners, and if Academician Lavrentiev put a spoke in his wheels, he would not be able to guarantee the implementation of the plan.

It came to trial in the district committee of the CPSU, where, of course, Academician Lavrentiev did not come, but his deputy B.V. Belyanin and head of UKS Kargaltsev. The conversation was usually on a high tone. I myself was present a couple of times at this, since it was the implementation of construction plans that was discussed.

At the same time, the position of the secretary of the district committee was very unenviable. He could not ignore the opinion of Academician Lavrentiev, but he could not force Colonel Ivanov to refuse free labor - prisoners. Let me remind you that the objects of the Minsredmash in those years were built with the massive use of the labor of prisoners, and the Sibakademstroy Construction Department was subordinate to this particular ministry ... "http://www.proza.ru/2014/01/23/152

Photo from the construction of the Drama Theater in Nizhny Tagil

Construction of the Drama Theatre. Photo taken in 1953. The first work on the construction of the drama theater began in 1951. On December 3, 1951, the laying of the walls of the Drama Theater began. By the spring of 1952 ground floor was ready.

Behind the Drama Theatre. View from the current DPP on Lenin Ave. To the right is part of the fire tower building behind the dramatic
theater. Photo taken in 1953. http://historyntagil.ru/cards/9_old_tagil_50_open.htm

Such a memory is only in one theater built by the prisoners of Tagillag. It was a real death camp.

One of the largest camp formations on the territory of the Urals of war and post-war times, Tagillag NKVD is dozens of camp sites with terrible working and living conditions for prisoners, terrible penal camps at Vinnovka and Serebryanka, numerous mass graves, thousands of unknown victims of hunger, disease, physical violence; these are the fates of Russians, Poles, Latvians, Soviet Germans, residents of the Central Asian republics, prisoners of war from special camps No. 153 and 245. Typhus raged in the camps, people died of vitamin deficiency, scurvy, dysentery, and froze from the terrible cold in dugouts and barracks. Prisoners of Tagillag, despite hunger, cold, illness, moral and physical humiliation, built the city and its industrial facilities, restoring the country. That's just short list construction sites where the work of prisoners ranged from 50 to 100%: NTMZ open-hearth furnaces No. 4 and 5, blast furnace No. 3, shaped-casting and rolling shops, blooming; sinter plant, Verkhne-Vyiskaya dam, Severo-Lebyazhinsky quarry, VZhR club, mine management building; coke batteries No. 3 and 4, distillation shop and other objects of coke production; cement, slate and brick factories; Hoffmann furnaces No. 3 and 4 at a refractory plant; streets of residential buildings in the city; tankodrome and access roads to Uralvagonstroy; Chernoistochinsky dam; the second stage of the Goroblagodatsky mine and much more.

And now Stalin was gone, but the prisoners remained, and slave labor was in demand during the construction of the drama theater, they tried to erase their memory from our history altogether, and the labor exploits of the slave prisoners were recorded at the expense of Komsomol members and communists, glorifying and strengthening the ideological dogmas of the totalitarian regime .

Tagillag ceased to exist in 1953, but did not leave the city, leaving behind a "rich legacy" - more than a dozen labor camps and many special commandant's offices. Nizhny Tagil has become a gloomy symbol of the entire totalitarian regime - a city of prisons and camps, populated by people with a crushed past, deprived of a future. http://kp74.ru/nizhnetagilskij-teatr-dramy.html

Do you remember very well the huge map of Soviet concentration camps that covered the Land of the Soviets? Not? Already "forgotten" or did not know at all and did not suspect?

But such "thoughtful necessary" construction projects for the Soviet government, on which countless thousands of lives were spread rot, did not begin under Dzhugashvili, he was just a faithful successor to the work of the main ghoul of the USSR - Lenin:
One of the first construction projects took place under the direct supervision of Lenin. And it is not surprising that it is unknown: all the materials related to Algemba - the first attempt of the young Soviet government to acquire its own oil pipeline - were classified for a long time.
In December 1919, the Frunze army captured the Emba oil fields in northern Kazakhstan. By that time, more than 14 million poods of oil had accumulated there. This oil could be a salvation for the Soviet republic. On December 24, 1919, the Council of the Workers' and Peasants' Defense decided to start construction of a railway through which oil could be transported 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 versts. Most of the way ran through waterless saline steppes. It was decided to build the highway from both ends at the same time and meet on the Ural River near the village of Grebenshchikovo.

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

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

Lenin began to look for an alternative solution. At first it was proposed to produce wooden pipes. Specialists just shrugged their shoulders: 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 embarrassing: the collected "spare parts" were still not enough even for half of the pipeline! However, work continued.

By the end of 1920, construction began to suffocate. Typhus claimed several hundred people a day. Guards were posted along the highway, because local residents began to pull apart the sleepers. Workers generally refused to go to work. Food rations were extremely low (especially in the Kazakh sector).

Lenin demanded to understand the causes of sabotage. But there was no sabotage in sight. Hunger, cold and disease collected a terrible tribute 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 the construction of Algemba, already in April 1920, Baku and Grozny were liberated. The Emba oil was no longer needed. Thousands of lives sacrificed to the construction site turned out to be in vain.

It was possible even then to stop the senseless activity of laying the Algemba. But Lenin stubbornly insisted on the continuation of construction, which cost the state fabulously expensive. 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 settled in foreign accounts. Neither the railway nor the pipeline was built: on October 6, 1921, the construction was stopped by Lenin's directive. A year and a half of Algemba cost thirty-five thousand human lives.

The use of free labor was welcomed and encouraged by caring communist rulers, remember, a valiant page from the aircraft industry, sharashki for scientists appeared much earlier in 1928-29. - the legendary Soviet fighter "Ishachok", created, of course, by ZeKa.
The leaders of the OGPU came up with a brilliant idea: why, instead of sending the arrested to Solovki, not force them to build airplanes and engines in prison conditions, under the watchful eye of state security guards? "... Only working conditions in a militarized environment are able to ensure the effective activity of specialists as opposed to the corrupting environment of civilian institutions", - Yagoda, deputy chairman of the OGPU, later wrote in a letter to Molotov.
The first prison design bureau in the history of aviation was organized in December 1929. It was located "at the place of residence" of the prisoners - in the Butyrka prison. Two work rooms were equipped with drawing boards and other necessary drawing utensils. new organization was given a high-profile title - the Special Design Bureau.

In November 1929, the Special Design Bureau (OKB) was created in the Butyrskaya prison. In January of the following year, the Design Bureau was transferred to aircraft factory No. 39, where they began to create the Central Design Bureau (TsKB). On the territory of the plant there was a wooden one-story hangar No. 7, adapted for housing for prisoners. 20 prisoners lived and worked in it under guard. The team was small, but very highly qualified. The backbone of the designers was made up of employees of the Marine Experimental Aircraft Building Department (OMOS, previously headed by D.P. Grigorovich), who shared the fate of their boss: A.N. Sedelnikov (former deputy head of the department), V.L. Korvin (head of production) and N .G.Mikhelson (head of the drawing bureau). Together with Polikarpov, his colleagues E.I. Mayoranov and V.A. Tisov got to the Central Clinical Hospital. In addition to them, a major specialist in small arms A.V. Nadashkevich (creator of the PV-1 aircraft machine gun), former director of Pilot Plant No. 25 B.F. Goncharov, statistical testing engineer P.M. Kreyson, assistant director of plant no. 1 I.M. Kostkin and others. Grigorovich was appointed chief designer of the design bureau, but in fact all the main design issues were decided collectively. The connection of the prisoners with the production units of the plant was provided by a free engineer S.M. Dansker. The "pests" were given a difficult task - to urgently design a single-seat fighter of a mixed design with an air-cooled engine. - "If you don't do it in a month, we'll shoot you"

In less than two months, a small OKB team designed a new fighter. The prison administration forbade purging models and other types of tests in the laboratories of TsAGI (which was managed by A. Tupolev, who later became a "prisoned specialist" of TsKB-29), Moscow Higher Technical School, and the Air Force Academy. The designers could only rely on their experience and the materials that they were allowed to receive from some organizations ...

<...>To amnesty the following designers - former pests sentenced by the OGPU board to various measures of social protection [what is the term! — D.S.], with their simultaneous awarding: a) the chief designer for experimental aircraft construction Grigorovich Dmitry Pavlovich, who repented of his previous actions and proved his repentance in practice with a year of work - a letter from the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and a cash award of 10,000 rubles; b) chief designer Nadashkevich Alexander Vasilievich - a diploma of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and a cash prize of 10,000 rubles; c) the former technical director of plant No. 1 Ivan Mikhailovich Kostkin - a cash award of 1000 rubles; d) Pavel Martynovich Crayson - a monetary award of 1000 rubles; e) Viktor Lvovich Korvin-Kerber - a cash award of 1000 rubles; f) amnesty for all engineers and technicians sentenced by the OGPU to various measures of social protection for sabotage and now conscientiously working in the Central Design Bureau.

Among the arrested aviation specialists were not only aircraft builders, but also engine designers: A.A. Bessonov, N.R. Brilling, B.S. Stechkin ... October 25, 1929 was arrested N. N. Polikarpov - an outstanding aircraft designer r, became famous in the 30s. as the creator of first-class fighters. He was charged with participation in a counter-revolutionary sabotage organization and, like other comrades in misfortune, was sent to Butyrka prison.
Biographer Polikarpov V.P. Ivanov cites in his book a letter from the designer to his wife and daughter, written by him shortly after his arrest: " ... I am always worried about how you live, how your health is, how you are experiencing our common misfortune. It's not worth even remembering, I'm completely killed by this grief. Occasionally, at night or early in the morning, I hear the sounds of life: a tram, a bus, a car, a ringing for morning, but otherwise my life flows monotonously, depressingly. Outwardly, I live nothing, the cell is dry, warm, now I eat lean, I buy canned food, I eat porridge, I drink tea, or rather water. I read books, I walk for 10 minutes a day... Pray for me St. Nicholas, light a candle and don't forget about me..."
Fully - HISTORY OF AVIATION AND SPACE TECHNOLOGY IN RUSSIA
http://voenoboz.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=109%3A2011-03-09-17-32-27&catid=34%3A2011-02-14-00-01-20&Itemid=28&showall=1
http://topos-lite.memo.ru/vnutrennyaya-lubyanskaya-tyurma
"Repressions in the Soviet aircraft industry" http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/papers/sob00v.htm
* * * * *
Canal of Death - White Sea-Baltic , sung best writers and the poets of the USSR, all those bitter, demons, the poor and other lickers of communist criminals.

The initiator of the construction of the White Sea Canal was Joseph Stalin. The country needed labor victories, global achievements. And preferably without extra costs, since the Soviet Union was going through 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 as early as 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 method of implementing the project (and Naftaly Frenkel was appointed head of the canal construction) turned out to be so cruel that it forced historians and publicists to look for parallels in the slave-owning 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 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 beginning to end by the forces of prisoners. Convicted designers created drawings, found extraordinary technical solutions (dictated by the lack of machines and materials). Those who did not have an education suitable for designing spent day and night digging a canal, waist-deep in liquid mud, driven not only by overseers, but also by members of their brigade: those who did not fulfill the norm were reduced to an already meager diet. This was one road: into concrete (the dead were not buried on the White Sea Canal, but simply fell asleep at random in pits, which were then filled with concrete and served as the bottom of the canal).

The main tools of labor in the construction were a wheelbarrow, a sledgehammer, a shovel, an ax and a wooden crane for moving boulders. The prisoners, unable to withstand the unbearable conditions of detention and overwork, died by the hundreds. At times, the death rate reached 700 people a day. Meanwhile, the newspapers printed editorials devoted to the "reforging by labor" of hardened recidivists and political criminals. Of course, it was not without postscripts and eyewash. The canal bed was made shallower than it was calculated in the project, and the start of construction was retroactively postponed to 1932 (in fact, work began a year earlier).

About 280 thousand prisoners took part in the construction of the canal, of which about 100 thousand died. The remaining survivors (every sixth) had their sentences reduced, and some were even awarded the Order of the Baltic-White Sea Canal. The heads of the OGPU in full force were 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 snag: the most physically strong and hard-working prisoners earned a reduction in terms.

In 1938, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Stalin raised the question: “Did you correctly propose a list for the release of these prisoners? They leave their jobs… We are doing a bad job of 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, this is bad ... The best people will be released, and the worst will remain. Is it possible to turn things around in a different way 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 a robe would look too strange …
"Slaughter buildings of the XX century" http://arman71.livejournal.com/65154.html, photo from "Death Channel" https://mexanic2.livejournal.com/445955.html
* * * * *

Immediately after the death of the mass murderer Stalin, all the "great construction projects of communism" had to be curtailed,

A bit from allin777 in Unfinished construction of Stalinism.
Draft Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On changing the construction program of 1953"
21.03.1953
Top secret
Project On changing the construction program of 1953

Considering that the construction of a number hydraulic structures, railways, highways and enterprises, provided for by earlier adopted resolutions of the Government, is not caused by urgent needs of the national economy, the Council of Ministers of the USSR decides:

1. Stop the construction of the following facilities:

B) railways and roads -

Railway Chum—Salekhard—Igarka , ship repair shops, a port and a settlement in the Igarka region ;

From a letter to L.P. Beria to the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the change in the construction program of 1953

Work completed on 1 January 1953 in millions of rubles:

Railway Chum—Salekhard—Igarka, ship repair workshops, a port and a settlement in the Igarka region - 3724.0

GARF. F. 9401. Op. 2. D. 416. Ll. 14-16. Certified copy.

TOTAL: Liquidated construction, which was invested6 billion 293 million rubles and thousands of livesSoviet prisoners.
* * * * *
In one material it is impossible to list all the countless construction projects and the sacrifices of Soviet prisoners incurred on them in the name of achieving the mythical and never built communism.

At the very top of the Central Committee of the CPSU, they knew how and loved to build grandiose plans for the future. Large-scale and easily implemented on paper ideas were supposed to provide the country with superiority in all areas over everything and everyone in the world. Let's take a look at some of the ambitious Soviet projects that never came to fruition.

The idea of ​​this project, which was to literally raise the USSR above the whole world, was born in the early 1930s. Its essence was to build a skyscraper 420 meters high with giant statue Vladimir Lenin on the roof.
The building, even before the start of construction, was called the Palace of the Soviets, was to become the tallest in the world, overtaking even the famous skyscrapers of New York. This is how the future giant was imagined in the party leadership. It was planned that in good weather the Palace of Soviets would be visible from a distance of several tens of kilometers.

A wonderful place was chosen for the construction of the future symbol of communism - a hill on Volkhonka. The fact that the location had long been occupied by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior did not bother anyone. Cathedral decided to demolish.

They say that Stalin's associate Lazar Kaganovich, watching the explosion of the temple from a hill with binoculars, said: "Let's pull up the hem of Mother Rus'!"

The construction of the main building of the USSR began in 1932 and continued until the start of the war.

The erection of the basement During this time, they managed to completely get even with the foundation and start working on the entrance. Alas, things did not progress further than this: the war made its own adjustments, and the country's leadership was forced to abandon the image idea of ​​providing the people with high-rise buildings. Moreover, they began to dismantle what had already been built and put it into military use, for example, to create anti-tank hedgehogs.

In the 50s, they returned to the “palace” theme again and even almost started work, but at the last moment they refused and decided to build a huge pool on the site of the failed skyscraper.

However, this object was subsequently abandoned - in the mid-90s, the pool was liquidated, and a new Cathedral of Christ the Savior was erected in its place.

Perhaps the only thing that today reminds of the once grandiose plans of the authorities to create the Palace of Soviets is a gas station on Volkhonka, often referred to as the "Kremlin". It was supposed to become part of the infrastructure of the complex.

And now look how the capital could look if the leadership of the Union were able to carry out plans to build a "symbol of communism."

"Construction No. 506" - Sakhalin Tunnel

Not all construction projects of the Stalin era were of an image nature. Some were launched for the sake of the practical component, which, however, did not make them less grandiose and impressive. A vivid example is the colossal construction on Sakhalin, which started in 1950. The idea of ​​the project was to connect the island with the mainland by an underground 10-kilometer tunnel. The party took 5 years to complete the work.

As usual, the work of building the tunnel fell on the shoulders of the Gulag.

Construction came to a halt in 1953 almost immediately after Stalin's death.
For three years of work, they managed to build railway lines to the tunnel (about 120 km of the railway track in the Khabarovsk Territory), which later began to be used for the export of timber, dug a mine shaft, and also created an artificial island on Cape Lazarev. Here he is.

Today, only infrastructure details scattered along the shore and a technical mine, half littered with debris and soil, remind of the once large-scale construction.

The place is popular with tourists - lovers of abandoned places with history.

"Battle mole" - classified underground boats

The construction of skyscrapers and other structures that amaze the imagination of the layman is not the only thing that the Soviet budget was spent on in an effort to "overtake competitors." In the early 30s, in high offices, the idea was set on to develop vehicle, often found in the books of science fiction writers - an underground boat.

The first attempt was made by the inventor A. Treblev, who created a boat resembling a rocket in shape.

The brainchild of Treblev moved at a speed of 10m / h. It was assumed that the mechanism would be controlled by the driver, or (second option) - using a cable from the surface. In the mid-40s, the device even passed tests in the Urals near Mount Blagodat.

Alas, during the tests, the boat proved to be not very reliable, so they decided to temporarily curtail the project.

The iron mole was remembered again in the 60s: Nikita Khrushchev terribly liked the idea of ​​"getting the imperialists not only in space, but also underground." Advanced minds were involved in the work on the new boat: the Leningrad professor Babaev and even academician Sakharov. The result of painstaking work was a car with a nuclear reactor, capable of accommodating 5 crew members and transporting a ton of explosives.

The first tests of the boat all in the same Urals were successful: the mole overcame the allotted path at the speed of a pedestrian. However, it was too early to rejoice: during the second test, the car exploded, the entire crew died. The mole itself remained walled up in grief, which he could not overcome.

After Leonid Brezhnev came to power, the project of the underground boat was curtailed.

"Car 2000"

No less sad was the fate of a completely peaceful transport development - the Istra car, also known as the "two thousandth".

The creation of the "most advanced machine of the Union" began in 1985 in the Office of Design and Experimental Works. The program was called "Car 2000".

Through the efforts of designers and designers, a truly promising car with a progressive design has turned out ahead of its time.

The car was equipped with a light duralumin body with two doors opening upwards, a 3-cylinder turbodiesel ELKO 3.82.92 T with a capacity of 68 horsepower. Max Speed the car was supposed to be 185 km / h with acceleration to 100 km in 12 s.

On the most progressive car of the USSR, a computer-controlled air suspension, ABS, airbags, a projection system that allows you to display instrument readings on the windshield, a forward-looking scanner for driving at night, as well as an on-board self-diagnosis system showing malfunctions and possible ways to eliminate them.

Alas, the futuristic Soviet sedan failed to enter the market. In preparation for the launch, as it happens, minor problems surfaced related to the refinement and serial production of engines. At the same time, if the technical issues were completely solvable, then the financial troubles that fell on the heads of the authors of the project already in 1991 turned out to be critical. After the collapse of the Union, there was no money for implementation, as a result, the project had to be closed. The only sample of the "two-thousander" is stored today in Moscow in the Museum of Retro Cars.