Pestovo School, 1936. The thirteen-year-old Antonina (the only child without the uniform of the Pioneers) is standing on the left.
As she grew in confidence and ambition, Antonina decided to stop trying to get accepted for who she was and simply make up a new identity. She began to lie about her origins whenever she was asked to fill out questionnaires. ‘I knew what I was doing,’ she recalls. ‘I had decided to write a new biography for myself.’ From the end of her teenage years, Antonina lived a secret life. She did not speak about her family to any of her friends. She did not tell her first serious boyfriend, whom she met in 1940, because she was afraid that he might leave her if he found out about her past. For the next fifty years, she hid her identity from her family, because she was afraid, for them and for herself. Looking back, she remembers:
I had to be alert all the time, not to slip up and give myself away. When I spoke I had to think: did I forget something? Did I say anything that might make people suspicious? It was like that all the time… I was afraid, and I would remain silent. This fear lasted all my life. It never went away… Mama always said, ‘When you live with wolves, you must learn to live like wolves!’106
3
The Pursuit of Happiness
(1932–6)
1
In 1932, Fania Laskina married Mikhail Voshchinsky, a Party worker and chief administrator of building works at the Vesnin Brothers’ architectural workshops, one of Moscow’s leading construction companies. Fania left the Laskin home on Zubov Square and, after a few months in rented rooms, moved with her husband to a three- room apartment in the fashionable Arbat area. It was a tiny apartment, just 58 square metres in total area, but in comparison with the living conditions of the vast majority of Muscovites it was modern and luxurious, with its own kitchen, its own bathroom and toilet, and even its own private telephone.1
Fania Laskina and Mikhail Voshchinsky (wedding photograph) Moscow, 1932
Moscow grew at a furious pace in the early 1930s. From 1928 to 1933 the population of the capital increased from 2 million to 3.4 million, mainly on account of the mass influx of peasants into industry. Their arrival put enormous pressure on the housing stock. After 1933, the growth of the city was controlled by the passport system and by mass expulsions of ‘alien elements’.2 To live in Moscow was the dream of millions. The city was the centre of power, wealth and progress in the Soviet Union. Propaganda portrayed it as living proof of the better life to come under socialism.
The Laskin household in the Arbat: Sivtsev Vrazhek 14, apt. 59
Stalin took a personal interest in the ‘socialist construction’ of his capital. In 1935, he signed an ambitious Master Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow. The Vesnin Brothers, Leonid, Viktor and Aleksandr, were among the architects responsible for drawing up the plan under the direction of the Moscow Soviet. The plan envisaged a city of 5 million inhabitants, with vast new residential suburbs connected by highways, ring roads, parklands, sewage systems, communication networks and a Metro system that would be the most advanced in the industrial world. Everything was planned on a monumental scale. The medieval city centre, with its narrow streets and churches, was largely cleared to make room for wider streets and squares. A vast new parade route was constructed through the centre of the capital. Tverskaia (renamed Gorky) Street was broadened to a width of 40 metres by knocking down the old buildings (many architectural monuments, including the eighteenth-century chambers of the Moscow Soviet, were reassembled further back from the main road). Red Square was cleared of its market stalls to allow for the march of the massed ranks past the Lenin Mausoleum, the sacred altar of the Revolution, on 1 May and Revolution Day. There were even plans to blow up St Basil’s Cathedral, so that the marchers could file past the Mausoleum in one unbroken line. Stalin’s Moscow was recast as an imperial capital, a Soviet St Petersburg. Bigger, taller, more advanced than any other city in the Soviet Union, it became a symbol of the future socialist society (Bukharin said that the Master Plan was ‘almost magical’ because it would turn Moscow into ‘a new Mecca, to which the fighters for mankind’s happiness would flock from all the ends of the earth’).3
The Vesnin Brothers played a leading part in this transfiguration of the capital. Their work on it involved a dramatic change in their architectural philosophy. During the 1920s, the Vesnins had been in the vanguard of the Constructivist movement, which sought to incorporate the Modernist ideals of Le Corbusier in Soviet architecture. Their adoption of the neoclassical and monumental style, in which Stalin’s Moscow was to be rebuilt, represented an artistic and a moral compromise. But as architects they depended on patrons, and the only patron was the state. The brothers had been on the planning committee for the grandiose Palace of the Soviets, intended for the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, demolished in 1932. The Palace was supposed to be the tallest building in the world (at 416 metres it was to be 8 metres taller than the Empire State Building, which opened in New York in 1931) with a colossal statue of Lenin (three times the size of the Statue of Liberty) at its summit.4 The Palace was never built,* but for years the site was a monument to the promise of Moscow.
The Vesnins also helped to oversee the construction of the Moscow Metro, another icon of Communist progress. The tunnelling began in 1932. By the spring of 1934, the enterprise employed 75,000 workers and engineers, many of them peasant immigrants and Gulag prisoners. The digging was extremely dangerous work. There were frequent fires and cave-ins, because of the softness of the soil, and more than a hundred people died during the construction of the first line, 12 kilometres of track between Sokolniki and Gorky Park. Gulag labour was employed in all the city’s major building projects during the 1930s (there were several labour camps in the vicinity of the capital). A quarter of a million prisoners took part in the construction of the Moscow–Volga Canal, which provided water for the growing population of the capital. Many of them died from exhaustion, their bodies buried in the foundations of the canal. Like Peter’s capital, St Petersburg, which was in many ways its inspiration, Stalin’s Moscow was a utopian civilization constructed on the bones of slaves.
When the first Metro line was opened, in 1935, Lazar Kaganovich, the Moscow Party boss, hailed it as a palace of the proletariat: ‘When our worker takes the Metro, he should be cheerful and joyous. He should think of himself in a palace shining with the light of the advancing, all-victorious Socialism.’5 The Metro stations were built as palaces, with chandeliers, stained-glass panels, brass and chrome fittings, walls of marble (there were twenty different kinds), porphyry, onyx and malachite. Maiakovsky Station (1938) matched the beauty of a church, with its oval ceiling cupolas, mosaic designs, marble patterned floors and stainless-steel arches, which created a bright and lofty atmosphere in the central hall. Drawing up their plans for the Stalin Factory (Avtozavod) Metro Station during the late 1930s, the Vesnins likened the effect they aimed to achieve to the atmosphere inside a cathedral. The finished station (1943), with its high, almost gothic marble columns, its simple use of space and light, and its white marble bas reliefs depicting the ‘achievements’ of the Five Year Plans (Magnitogorsk, the Stalin Factory, the Palace of the Soviets, the Moscow– Volga Canal), perfectly accomplished their ideal.6 The splendour of these proletarian palaces, which stood in such stark contrast to the cramped and squalid private spaces in which the majority of people lived, played an important moral role (not unlike the role played by the Church in earlier states). By inspiring civic pride and reverence, the beauty of the Metro helped to foster popular belief in the public goals and values of the Soviet order.
Avtozavod Station, 1940s
The Vesnin brothers were also involved in building private homes. They were commissioned to design two- and three-room apartments, like the one Mikhail Voshchinsky and Fania Laskina occupied after their marriage.
