To say that the Park Pobedy (Victory Park) station is deep is to say that the Moscow Metropolitan is just a good way to get around.  Mounting the escalator, one immediately recalls the posters in the metro showing a station attendant, young, blond, and cute, in her blue uniform.  She smiles beguilingly and the text reads “Yest’ Vykhod.”  There is an exit. 

This is reassuring.  The escalators, among the fastest in the world, whisk passengers along at almost a meter per second.  So quick are they that in 2003 six German tourists were hospitalized when the speed of the steps tripped one who knocked over the other five.  Speed notwithstanding, it still takes exactly three minutes to ride from top to bottom. If you begin listening to an average pop song as you mount this monster, the tune will end right as its teeth spit you out at the other end.

The station serves its namesake, once the grounds where Napoleon and his army staged before entering the city of Moscow and is now home to a complex of museums, memorials, and parks.  As a trainload of passengers arrives, there is a collective gasp, a buzz that runs throughout the car.  Park Pobedy gleams.  The walls and floors are orange, gray, and white, representing the colors of Russia’s first military order.  The marble has been smoothed and polished to a metallic luster.

 On the occasion of Victory Day most of Moscow seems to be heading to Victory Park to watch the fireworks.  As the train empties its contents into the hall there is the rarest of sites: thousands of Muscovites, mouths agape, staring in wonderment at a metro station.  A foreigner turns to his Russian companion to ask why Russians were reacting this way.  “Because we have never seen it before,” he replied, himself looking stunned.

The Moscow Metropolitan has been operating for seventy years.  That is seventy years of people leaning against its walls while waiting for friends and lovers; seventy years of vapor exhaled by millions of daily passengers; seventy years of slyakat’ brought in on Muscovites’ muddy winter boots; seventy years of cleaning and scrubbing that still makes Moscow’s one of the cleanest undergrounds in the world. 

The stations that opened in 1935 are still remarkable today.  As a repository for acres of granite and mahogany, orlets, porphyry and semi-precious stones like onyx, and 23 varieties of marble, its designers intended to overawe both citizens and visitors to the capital of the world’s only socialist state in the way that 17th century architects did in the mirrored halls of Versailles and their 19th century counterparts did with the neo-classical muscularity of Washington D.C.  But as impressive as these stations are, time has dulled the oldest of them and Moscow has reared generations of citizens on their storied platforms.  For tourists, the metro is an object of fascination.  For Muscovites, it is an unapologetic part of the everyday.

It was fitting that Victory Park station was completed just in time to usher Moscow up to Victory Park to celebrate Victory Day.  The first line was completed just in time for another holiday eight days earlier in the month.  Standing among a throng of Muscovites gushing at the wonder their country had produced,  it seemed possible to understand for just a moment what it must have been like when the red lined opened for official viewing on May Day 1935.

Methods of the Madness

It is an interesting what-might-have-been to consider how the Moscow Metropolitan would have looked had the imperial government of Nicholas II been responsible for its first stations.  The Moscow city council had discussed the possibility of building a metro as early as 1900 but the unlikely alliance of the Imperial Archaeological Society and the Archbishop of Moscow, fearful that construction would damage the city’s ancient churches and other structures, weighed in against it.

With the existing transportation system being overwhelmed in the rapidly growing capital, the council revisited the idea again in 1930 and immediately received the endorsement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.  However a tsarist metro would have looked, it is certain that a cash-strapped autocracy would not have spent lavishly on a system that would largely serve the working class.  That, of course, is exactly what Stalin, who had a supposed fondness for the workers of Moscow, wanted.

The metro was the most visible salient in Stalin’s war of industrialism. Gigantomania is the term-of-art applied to the first and second Five-Year Plans by the economist Nicholai Basili who chronicled 20 years of Soviet power in his book Russia Under Soviet Rule.  Every plant had to be “bigger than the greatest in the world,” regardless of whether or not such massive projects made any economic sense.  Magnitogorsk was a massive steel works built to be larger than those of Gary, Indiana, at the time the world’s largest steel producing center.  The assembly building of the Cheliabinsk tractor factory had the greatest area of any building in the world, large enough to contain 21 soccer fields with enough room left over to build dressing rooms for the players.  Azbest had the world’s largest open cut asbestos mine.

It only made sense that Moscow, the head from which sprung this pathology of vastness, would have its own super-project.  Experts from London, Paris, and New York advised Soviet authorities against building an underground.  Such construction is always difficult but never more so than in a place like Moscow where geologists had no idea what would be found under the city’s ancient streets.  The money could be far better spent, the experts said, on ground level transit in a city that had only a few thousand automobiles.

The metro, however, was intended to serve purposes far greater than just transportation.  The unprecedented depth of the stations would make them ideal as bomb shelters in the event of war.  But more importantly, in a country that was trying to industrialize almost overnight, the metro would be a showpiece of what homosovieticus could accomplish.  The country was already littered with buildings adorned with Stalin’s portraits and banners shouting his obsessive belief: “There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm.”  The Soviet Union had tremendous expertise in mining and anyway labor was very, very cheap.

Boris Iofan's 1937 illustration of the super project Palace of Soviets. It was never built but the station that was to serve it was: Kropotkinskaya.

In many regards the foreign experts were correct.  The shallower stations were built in the cut-and-cover method whereby an open trench was dug from the street level and then covered afterward.  But Moscow’s famously long winters made this less practical than deep tunnel mining.  Or so the conventional wisdom went.

Moscow’s foundations proved to be significantly different from what coal and asbestos miners were accustomed.  When miners hit a quicksand deposit, its contents drained from its natural cavity into the mineshaft, removing the support from buildings above ground that engineers then needed to reinforce.  Similarly, water deposits flooded the mines. To counter these problems, engineers devised a method of chemically freezing the material around the shafts so that miners could then excavate it like any rock.

The freezing process created its own problem.  The walls were frozen to between 10 and 14 degrees Fahrenheit.  The concrete in use at the time set best in summer temperatures of 60º or above and not at all below freezing.  The concrete had to be heated in order to dry, but clearly it would be disastrous when the warm concrete touched the ice.  The engineers addressed this problem by adding a layer of insulating material between the ice and the warmed concrete.  All these additional steps made the battle of the metro one fought in inches but ultimately measured in miles.  Expense piled on top of expense.

Success

Workers began excavating the first shaft in 1932 but progress had been slow.  In early 1933, with an opening date set for the 1934 anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin assigned his energetic lieutenant Nikita Khrushchev to oversee construction.  This must have been a daunting assignment.  There was so much uncertainty and difficulty surrounding the project.  Khrushchev later remarked, “when we started building, we had only the vaguest idea of what the job would entail.  We were very unsophisticated.  We thought of a subway as something almost supernatural.  I think it’s probably easier to contemplate space flights today than it was for us to contemplate the construction of the Moscow Metro in the early 1930s.”  He had a rapidly approaching deadline and, of course, he answered to Stalin.

At the same time, Khrushchev had considerable mining experience and was a tough taskmaster.  He may have missed his original November 1934 opening date, but he made remarkable progress.  A German writer visiting Moscow in the summer of 1934 recalled that in “every quarter of the city the earth shook with the ringing of hammers, the banging, bumping and screeching of single-bucket excavators, concrete mixers and machines that turned out mortar.”  Once the arduous task of excavating and construction was complete the architects and designers were called in. 

There was no template for how the stations would look, but by the early 1930s the modernists were firmly out of favor and socialist realism was the accepted standard for the arts.  In architecture, that meant a return to classicism. Doric and Corinthian capitals, coffered ceilings, apses, and colonnades created a visual link with the great civilizations of the ancient world.  For the Palace of Soviets station, its architects Dushkin and Lichtenberg reached back even further in time.  The ceiling of this shallow station is held up by Egyptian columns, capped by lotus leaves that form the shape of stars on the ceiling.  One wag called it the “150-meter alley of palms.”

The importance of this station, now called Kropotkinskaya, cannot be understated.  It was to serve as a foyer for the actual Palace of Soviets, the greatest building in the world, complete with a 100-meter tall statue of Lenin, more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.  A competition to design it went through several rounds before settling on a final design.  The drawings are impressive but construction never progressed beyond pouring the foundation.  As the intended seat of power for the nation, this would-be building lends great significance to the station underneath it.  VIPs came to see it before it was opened.  The ever-astute Lazar Kaganovich praised it saying, “Just like a railway station,” while the portly Klimint Voroshilov observed “It looks just like a restaurant.”  Both of them missed a more appropriate connection.  This Egyptian theme was a distinct, if subtle, variation from the style typical of stations of this time and it does leave one to wonder if its architects were connecting it with the pharaoh-tsar Stalin.

A month before the metro opened, some English journalists were invited to come and have a look at the Palace of Soviets and Komsomolskaya Square stations.  A Mr. Eden noted “[the Soviet Union] has used the rich experiences of Europe and America, but taking all the positive and discarding all the negative.  The metro was built with purely artistic taste.”  He was especially taken with the Palace of Soviets station, comparing it favorable with the best stations in London, Charring Cross and Picadily Circus.  “The metros of the capitals of the world will all be compared against the Moscow Metropolitan.”

In Moscow there were two days of holidays to commemorate the opening of the metro for public use.  On the 14^th of May, citizens carried banners through the streets barring a message that would echo in an ad campaign much later: Yest’ Metro (There is a Metro).  The next day, according to Pravda, when the metro officially opened “the holiday continued when hundreds of thousands of Muscovites filled the metro from dawn, taking a fantastic journey in the radiant, underground palaces, and, full of the unforgettable impression, exited onto the street.”  All told, 372,337 people passed through the metro on its first full day of operation.

Among the signs present, one read, “The best metro in the world is built.”  Of all the things its architects and designers got right, the most important is that riders never feel like they are in a tunnel.  That is something that no other metro can boast, least of all London’s which feels every inch a tube.

Dirty Corners

The childrens's version of Soviet history. The happy farm girl smiles her way through the great famine. Photo Scheib.

The mosaics, paintings, relief sculpture, and statuary of the Moscow Metropolitan offer a short course in Soviet history.  But it is the children’s version of it.  The workers reading Iskra, the competition between the Ural and Donbas miners, the happy farm girls collecting wheat or riding tractors, none of the iconography smiling from the walls and ceilings of this lovely web of concrete and steel betrays the fact that the metro was incorporated in the trio of horrors of Stalin’s reign: collectivization, industrialization, and the Great Terror.

The metro was built in a very Russian way: under coercion.  Passing the Russian Baroque architecture along the rivers and canals of St. Petersburg, there is nothing there to intimate the pain of the serfs who built it under Peter the Great’s sword, or to memorialize the many who died in the process.  So it is with the metro in the other captial Moscow.

There are distinct differences, however, between typical projects of the Stalin-era and the metro.  Approximately 100,000 laborers died building the White Sea Canal.  John Scott, an American working in Magnitogorsk reported untrained, underfed, and exhausted men falling from scaffolding to their deaths.  But these locations were remote while Moscow was anything but.  And the workers on the metro were workers; those in the camps were political prisoners.

The metro was a product of Soviet industrialization, a period as famous for the grandness of its projects as it is infamous for its leaders’ cavalier attitudes toward both resources and human lives.  One of Scott’s more potent observations was that “Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.”

As the superintendent of metro construction, Khrushchev took enormous risks in executing a project that had stagnated before he took over.  He pushed his crew of 70,000 relentlessly.  Shifts ran to 48 hours without rest and Khrushchev ignored engineers’ warnings that tunnels would collapse.  Flooding and fires, and casualties, were common, but unlike the situation with prison laborers whose plight would not be told for decades, these stories were hailed in the pages of Pravda as heroism in service to a great cause.  As with so many things associated with the Soviet Union, the metro is riddled with irony and paradox.  Stalin had great affection for the workers of Moscow, but many of them died constructing the Metro, a treasure ultimately destined to be their own.

Moscow in the early 1930s had little automobile traffic and was still struggling with shortages of food and housing.  Arguably the city’s residents had greater need for basic necessities than for a shiny new underground train, so surface transportation would have been a more prudent use of funds.  The frequent accidents added to the already exorbitant construction costs.  In 1934 alone, 350 million rubles were spent on the metro.  For perspective, only 300 million rubles were spent on consumer goods for the entire Soviet Union during the first Five Year Plan.

The source of the funding for these massive projects came largely from grain exports.  Activists were sent into the countryside to “invite” the peasants to join collective farms.  One activist recalls a gathering: “I called a village meeting, and I told the people that they had to join the collective, that these were Moscow’s orders, and if they didn’t they would be exiled. . .  They all signed the paper that same night, every one of them.  Don’t ask me how I felt and how they felt.  And the same night they started to do what the other villages of the USSR were doing when forced into collectives—to kill their livestock.”  Another activist remembered that every peasant “had a greasy mouth” from the feast that ensued.  It turned out to be a last supper.

The images of healthy farmwomen that adorn the metro bare little resemblance to the skeletal figures then occupying the countryside.  Pasternak visited some villages in the early 1930s and later described what he saw as “inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract.”  The collectivization of the peasantry is one of the saddest episodes of the Soviet century.  While grain was sold abroad to buy material and machines, millions starved to death at home.  Some of that blood money certainly fell into the coffers of Metrostroi, the organization responsible for building the system.  It is interesting to note that before coming to Moscow, Khrushchev was a key operator in collectivizing the Ukraine, the corner of the Soviet Union that suffered most from starvation.  Despite being named for Kaganovich, and later Lenin, Khrushchev’s presence is never far from the metro.

Industrialization marks the first half of the thirties, the Great Terror the second and the opening of the metro neatly straddles the two.  The Terror is the third dark corner in the metro’s storied past.  No one was imprisoned in the metro, nor tortured there either.  But given the security organ’s preference for surprise arrests, many were taken in the metro.  One author writes of being escorted “through the circular upper concourse of the Byelorussian-Radial subway station on the Moscow circle line, with its white-ceilinged dome and brilliant electric lights, and opposite us two parallel escalators, thickly packed with Muscovites, rising from below.”  Solzhenitsyn made his way to the gulag through the metro.

The Second Generation

The next round of stations opened in 1937-38 and expanded the vocabulary of the earlier stations with some standout results. The lighting in Sokol is brilliant.  It has a single line of stanchions that emerge from the benches around their bases, only about four feet on a side, and spread out to the width of the ceiling.  Between each of the flowering pillars is a white dome lit by fixtures mounted on the elaborate crown molding just inside the cavity.

Dushkin's thin stanchions with corrugated steel in Mayakovskaya.

This crop produced two stations that are still among the most famous.  Mayakovskaya was one of the deepest stations at the time.  This is another of Dushkin’s stations.  Instead of the thick pylons that held up most other stations, he used thin columns faced with corrugated stainless steel and embellished at the bottom with red orlets, a decorative stone from the Urals.  Between the steel ribs of the station are false cupolas with mosaics made from smalt, a type of colored glass.  The depictions of the cast—the workers soldiers, and farmers that are the stuff of proletarian art from Berlin to Magadan—flying airplanes, parachuting, and so forth were based on a series of drawings by the artist Deineka. 

Mayakovskaya was so beloved that it was reproduced for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where it won the grand prize in architecture.  It would later show up in a painting of Stalin’s 1941 meeting held in that station to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution while the Nazis were poised at the edge of Moscow.

When tourists have time to see only one station, they see Revolution Square.  This station, yet another by Dushkin, has 80 larger-than-life statues of the cast crammed under red marble arches.  A study of one of the statues, the head of the “student,” is on display at the New Tretyakov Gallery.  The figures all look terribly uncomfortable.  One worker is holding himself up by his jackhammer, a soldier by his rifle.  The student could not have studied very long in the position he occupies.  Just two stations away is another station, this one designed by Boris Iofan a few years later, that also has a series of bronzes.  These are smaller-than-life but the chests on some of the men are so puffed up that the figures seem to burst from their confines.  This is conjecture, but with the large men greatly restricted and the small ones strutting about, it leaves one to wonder if Dushkin and Iofan had something to say about their times.

The Sailor in Revolution Square looking a bit uncomfortable. Photo Scheib.

Revolution Square station would be the standard against which all future stations would be measured. Several would stack up largely because the Soviet Union would soon win a very big war and be elevated to empire.

With Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet Union shifted its entire economy to a war economy.  As yet another signal of the importance of the Moscow Metro, it was the only major project that was undisturbed by the war.  Several new stations were completed in 1943 and 1944 and these carried on the incremental changes made during the 1937-38 group.  Stalinskaya (1944) is difficult to describe but is defined largely by geometric patterns and a great variety of colored stone.  Paveletskaya is probably the most elegant station in the metro.  Its long colonnade of white marble holds a white vaulted ceiling.  Where the arches meet there is a golden shield with a hammer and sickle.  It is uncluttered and calm.

Paveletskaya is a simple and elegant station finished during the war.

Novokuznetskaya Station. Photo Scheib

Naturally, war themes were incorporated.  At Izmailovsky Park a sculpture of the beautiful partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya stands guard posthumously while behind her small friezes of machine guns hanging from trees top the columns.  Then there is Novokuznetskaya, a dizzying display of workmanship.  A bas-relief cornice runs the length of the station showing what must be the entire Red Army in action.  A series of brightly colored mosaics dot the elaborately decorated ceiling.  Between the narrow passageways to the trains are six-foot tall marble benches with carved scrolls for arms.  This station is almost overwhelming and typical of what was to come after the war.

The Post-war Boom

Blue ceramic panels in Taganskaya

The ring line was part of the original 1931 plan, but no one then could have imagined the power that the USSR and Joseph Stalin would hold when it was built.  This line was the apotheosis of both of them.  There seems to be no standard for what these stations should contain, as long as it was expensive.  Taganskaya has gorgeous light blue ceramic murals.  Novoslobodskaya is breathtaking when riders stream past its dozens of internally illuminated stained-glass windows. The red ceramic molding of Kievskaya alone is worth stopping to see, but it also has its own didactic renderings of the cast, and even one of Peter I, whom Stalin admired, the only image of a tsar in the metro known to this author.

The post-war round of station construction reached its apogee with Komsomolskaya.  By adding steel supports, its architects expanded the height and width of its arches; this expansive station could contain any two previously built stations.  The baroque arcade of white marble columns holds a barrel-vaulted ceiling covered with portraits of Russia’s greatest heroes based on illustrations by Korin: Aleksander Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoi, Kutuzov, Suvorov, Lenin, and two frames of Stalin.  These characters are illuminated by chandeliers the size of Yugos.  Louis XIV would have felt right at home awaiting the next train.

The Lovely: Novoslobodskaya. Photo Scheib

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev assumed power and once again left his mark on the metro.  The new premier was essentially handed the bill for his predecessor’s spending spree.  The Soviet Union had not recovered from the war and frugality would mark many of Khrushchev’s projects.  In reply to the housing shortage, he ordered the construction of thousands of five-story concrete apartments.  These poorly built, “temporary” structures, many of which are still in use today, came to be called Khrushhcoby, a portmanteau of Khrushchev’s name and trushchoby, the Russian word for slums.

Underground, Khrushchev established during his reign (1953-1964) a bland template for station construction that was used for decades, usually at distant suburban stations: a long, square hall lined with square columns, covered in tile with the occasional ornament.  That’s it.  These stations were made in the cut and cover method and passengers who live near them should feel lucky as they enter their stations on frozen Moscow mornings.  There were a few stations made even more cheaply.  Pioneerskaya, Fili, Studencheskaya and others were built outdoors at ground level.

By the time Khrushchev was removed from office, the metro was serving 3.2 million riders per day, a considerable increase from its first years of operation.  He added more than 17 miles of track and dozens of stations during his tenure, so he can be forgiven if some look stingy.  But he should be credited for one other contribution to the metro.  The last two entries on the long row of heroes on the ceiling of Komsomolskaya are now a coat of arms and a hammer and sickle.  After Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech, Stalin’s two mosaics were removed, as was his statue from the central hall of Kurskaya. Stalinskaya became Semyonovskaya, and Zavod imeni Stalina (Factory named for Stalin) became Avtozavodskaya.  No one worried about being “taken” on the way to work.  “The fear is gone.”  Khrushchev said.  “That is my contribution.”

The central hall of Kurskaya, circa 1949, contained a statue of Stalin. Krushchev would have it removed.

Onward

Shosse Entusiastov is one of the strager stations from the 1970s. Photo Scheib.

Flush with oil money in the 1970s and 1980s, the sturdy, expensive style of the 40s and 50s came back in vogue again.  It is said that Khrushchev’s insistence on building more, if cheaper, stations, came from his 1959 visit to the United States and his horror at seeing the glutted L.A. freeways.  The neo-Stalinist stations of this period call to mind another aspect of the American car culture.  The barrel vaulted ceilings, heavy chunks of marble and granite, and kitsch were back often with peculiar results. Aviamotornaya (1979) has a gold foil ceiling and a statue of what appears to be angels, odd in an atheist state. Shosse Entusiastov (1979) has a fist breaking its chains, an immediate reminder to American viewers of the black power movement.  So like the cars rolling out of Detroit at the same time, these stations are bulky and covered with stuff, but lacking the elegance of earlier models.

There are some exceptions.  In Ploshchad’ Ilych (Ilych (Lenin) Square, 1979) for example, the massive square red marble stanchions support the ceiling over a floor of gray, black and red granite.  At the end of this somber station is a portrait of Lenin.  This station has much calm and dignity and is a tribute far more dignified than the crushing ceremony surrounding the waxen corpse on Red Square.

Khrushchev once remarked that when the Soviets started building the metro, it might as well have been rocket science, so foreign was the endeavor to their understanding and technology.  Through decades of turbulence including the wild years of industrialization, the greatest war the country has ever seen, and through the space age, construction continued on the finest metro in the world.  As a testament to the metro’s significance, Russia continued building even as the Soviet Union that spawned it collapsed and the country once again faced difficult economic circumstances. 

Many of the stations built in the 1990s and into the 21^st century are innovative and grand, set pieces with what came before.  Chkalovskaya resembles a space station with its green plastic lights bridging gray marble on either side of the arched roof. Vorobyovyi Gori always provided a nice view sitting as is does on a bridge over the Moscow River.  Its large windows are now contained in a renovated, modern station brimming with sleek silver and grey paneling.  And the station that began this narrative, Park Pobedy is emblematic, a beautiful addition to a system that is rich and deep.  With history, that is, among other things.