Personality

Leisure

The Moscow Central Park of Culture and Leisure opened in August 1928 on the site of the 1923 All-Russian Agricultural and Artisanal–Industrial Exposition, whose layout it incorporated. As its name betrays, the immediate goal of the park was to make the leisure of the working class cultured—to teach the newly urbanized population that arrived to work on the construction sites of the First Five-Year Plan the habits of urban life, simultaneously preparing unskilled workers for acquiring qualifications demanded by industry. The idea was first introduced by the chairman of the Moscow Council, Konstantin Ukhanov. Anatoly Lunacharsky, who became the deputy head of the commission for the foundation of the park, elaborated on it, as later did his protégé Glan.7 According to Ukhanov, who in March 1928 announced the park’s creation in the party newspaper Pravda, “the battle for culture” in the park was a part of the “cultural revolution,” intended to “reconstruct the everyday life of a worker and a peasant, fill it with new content, adequate for the socialist essence of our construction.”8 The park had to replace the old, “unorganized” outdoor sites of the individual leisure of the workers, where on weekends they “walked or sat on the grass in a narrow circle of friends,” where vodka and beer “abounded, an accordion creaked, tipsy couples danced, and fortune-tellers moved to and fro.”9 Instead, Ukhanov stipulated, the new park was to become a collective cultural entertainment complex, in which a worker could find everything for a day off: cinema, theater, circus, radio, music, fields for sports, playgrounds, attractions, exhibitions, newspaper kiosks, dining rooms, cafés, and milk and grocery stands.10 Along the same lines, professor of “resort medicine” Georgy Danishevsky, who developed the park’s hygienic program, distinguished between two forms of leisure: one was “idle and dumb,” the other “correctly organized” and able to “fully activate the worker and the peasant and strengthen their will to socialist labor.”11

This program was elaborated in response to the two existing types of modern working-class outdoor recreation spaces: the urban public park and the entertainment park.12 While the former served a moral and hygienic purpose, helping urbanites to reunite with nature, the latter, downplaying these goals, indulged the city sensibility of the workers by providing them with nervous stimulation and easy gratification. Rather than simulating nature in the manner of nineteenth-century metropolitan parks, the Central Park of Culture and Leisure was to become an industrial-like space for the utilization of natural hygienic resources; rather than catering to the emerging mass culture, it was to make high culture accessible to the masses (Plate 20).

In other words, the Park of Culture and Leisure, which was to be visited in the immediate aftermath of factory work, aimed to restore all that divided labor, as Karl Marx vividly demonstrated, alienated from the workers: their health, their sense of collectivity, and their moral, cultural, and intellectual integrity. Indeed, Marx’s view of industrial labor, unlike that of some of his followers, was far from romanticizing: for him, labor was a hard, monotonous, and debilitating physical activity.13 Whereas the craftsman had control over the entire process of production, the capitalist manufacturing process and, even more so, the Fordist assembly line made the worker responsible for only a fragmented operation repeated over and over again.14 This work, as Wells illustrated in his gruesome neo-Lamarckian image of Martians in War of the Worlds (1898), threatened the genetic evolution of humanity, leading to biological simplification—a monstrous reversal of the evolutionary strive to complexity: “To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body.”15 The result of this development was repulsive:

They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-colored eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. . . . The internal anatomy . . . was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. . . . And this was the sum of the Martian organs. . . . Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins.16

Marx’s solution to the problem of alienation was to redistribute all types of work among everyone. In The German Ideology he foresaw a society in which one would “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”17 But as such an egalitarian redistribution of tasks proved to be unachievable (in postrevolutionary Russia, no less than elsewhere, social stratification based on training and occupation persisted), leisure emerged as a way of restoring the soul just as rest ensured the recuperation of the body.

Famously distinguishing between labor, which belonged to the domain of necessity, and work, which, as creative and socially meaningful action, belonged to freedom, Hannah Arendt noted that in ancient Greece, labor was delegated to slaves, whose dehumanization was the sole attainable means of ensuring the humanity of citizens. Humanness, which was inseparable from freedom, originated not in labor, but in its absence.

Contempt for laboring, originally arising out of a passionate striving for freedom from necessity and a no less passionate impatience with every effort that left no trace, no monument, no great work worthy of remembrance, spread with the increasing demands of polis life upon the time of the citizens and its insistence on their abstention (skhole) from all but political activities, until it covered everything that demanded an effort.18

As Arendt did later, Lunacharsky, in The Foundations of Positive Aesthetics (1903), praised this idea of skhole as the source of human dignity:

Σχολή [skhole]—idleness—is the mother of all sciences. With a class that did not have to struggle constantly for survival, there emerged a new mighty stimulus of human progress. Idle people could better develop their organs, from muscles to brain, because they could play: this was their freedom; the [Russian] word “slavery” [rabstvo] stems from the word “work” [rabota]: art and science were inaccessible for a slave [rab] [or] a worker [rabochii]. Play gave a tremendous strength to the aristocracy, because it not only exercised the body and brain of the representatives of the upper classes, but gave them an opportunity to transfer a concrete struggle into the sphere of abstraction: they could combine, daringly generalize generations’ experience, they could pose questions in the most general, abstract terms.19

Today, the root of the Greek word skhole survives in the word “school.” In its original meaning of “leisure, free time,” skhole was identified with “time used for intellectual discussion,” and then came to mean the place where such discussions were conducted. Like the Greek skhole, the Roman otium was a concept associated with intellectual, contemplative leisure, which allowed the patricians—attended by slaves and temporarily relieved from daily political obligations—to engage in scholarly activity and to reunite with nature.20 The concept of otium led to the emergence of an architectural type, the suburban villa. Both otium as a concept and the villa as its architecturalization were embraced by Renaissance humanists; as a bourgeois architectural type, the villa persisted, almost unchanged, until this day.21 For one, in his News from Nowhere (1890), illustrated with an image of his suburban villa at Kelmscott, British romantic socialist William Morris endowed leisure with a prominent role in the society of the future: guaranteeing the dignity and humanity of the citizens of the ideal London and thus enabling happiness, pleasure, self-fulfillment, creativity, and beauty.

Resembling Arendt’s later distinction between labor and work, another distinction can thus be detected in the thought of the Soviet park theorists: the one between rest and leisure. If the English word “leisure,” stemming from Latin licere (“to be allowed”), originally meant an opportunity afforded by freedom from necessity (thus related in its meaning to skhole and otium), “rest” is related to Old Norse rost (“distance after which one rests”) and Old Saxon resta (burial place) and is thus associated with immobility. In a similar manner, contemporary German distinguishes between Muße and Ruhe; French between loisir and repos; and Russian between dosug and pokoi. In other words, whereas the body requires rest to return to labor, the mind needs leisure to be able to work. In Russian, furthermore, both meanings are subsumed under the umbrella of otdykh (originating from dyshat’, to breath—a moment when one takes a breath from work), which is accordingly subdivided as passive or active.22 This word was used in the park’s title. Its ambiguity elucidates the program of the “Park of Culture and Otdykh” as the site for both rest and leisure, but with a priority, strengthened by the addition of “culture,” assigned to the latter. In the words of the hygienist Danishevsky, “the primacy of the social in the unity of the biological and the social” comprised the principle of the park’s work: only departing from the social, “can the organization of mass leisure, activating and strengthening homo corporalis and supporting, in every possible way, the harmonic development of his physical and intellectual forces in its form and content, be subordinated to the decisive task—the improvement of the productivity of labor for the struggle for socialist construction and the defense of its heroic participant—homo socialis.”23

Like Morris, Lunacharsky believed that creativity (which, for him, constituted the essence of humanity) was a fruit of leisure, an active and meaningful use of free time. Such active and productive leisure emerged not as the opposite of work but as a precondition for it. Applying his teacher Richard Avenarius’s philosophy to aesthetic thought, Lunacharsky argued that everything that increased the amount of energy (affektsional) in an organism was “aesthetic,” while everything that decreased it was “antiaesthetic.”24 However, a simple accumulation of energy was no less harmful than its excessive loss because it led to energetic “obesity”: passivity, laziness, and weakness. What was needed instead was a balance of two processes: assimilation, or the acquisition of energy from the external environment, and deassimilation, the loss of energy of the organism to that external environment.25 From a more vitalist perspective, Alexander Bogdanov, developing what he called “psychoenergetics,” postulated that the principle of organic development presupposed neither an accumulation of energy nor its prudent expenditure but rather the use of energy for brave, audacious deeds.26 In a socialist society (which, for him, was the natural direction of social evolution, artificially impeded by capitalism), selection would lead to the survival of those “who possess maximum vitality, that is, the greatest sum of energy along with the maximum flexibility and diversity of organic adaptation.”27 Following Lunacharsky’s and Bogdanov’s long-time associate and Wells’s old friend, the writer Maxim Gorky had earlier condemned the capitalist entertainment park as “the kingdom of boredom,” where “the person is immediately stupefied, his consciousness squashed by its gleam, thought expelled from it, and personality turned into a fragment of the crowd”; Glan called for the Soviet park to become “the city of cheerfulness.”28 In 1931, Gorky’s name was given to the Park of Culture and Leisure, which has been known as Gorky Park ever since. The addition emphasized the park’s vitalist and collectivist agenda, exemplified in its mission to become the proletarian villa.

In accordance with this program, Glan based her project of transforming workers’ personality on “the principle of the activation of visitors” (printsip aktivizatsii posetitelei).29 The visitors were, for instance, invited to take part in the experiments of the Timiriazev Biological Museum within the park and in the demonstrations of machinery in the park’s Village of Science and Technology.30 Moreover, mass singing, dancing, and the reciting of rhythmic poetry engaged thousands of people every day, leading to the emergence of a new position, which became crucial for the functioning of the park: “mass organizer.” Several hundred volunteers specialized in activating the masses. Like Glan, they were “young cheerful [people]” who “possess a wonderful quality . . . the special capacity to organize and lead the masses, to draw them into singing, dance, play, to give it a free and easy merry disposition.”31 The significance of such collective activities within the park’s program overshadowed the role of aesthetic spatial experience: in essence, the park was not a site but a mobile activity infrastructure, which could be brought to factories and workers’ clubs by “touring brigades.”32 The lengthy and excited testimony left by Julian Huxley, the coauthor of The Science of Life, who visited the park with a group of British scientists in 1931, provides a personal glimpse of how this program of energizing the workers was realized in the park:

The biggest park in Moscow is called “the Park of Culture and Rest.” At the far end is the Rest section, with abundance of deck-chairs, and little open-air libraries at which you may borrow books. Towards the city, there are side-shows, restaurants, theatres, cinemas. There is a band-stand, surrounded with huge hoardings on which are painted propaganda cartoons. There is an exhibition of machinery. There are courts for volley-ball, open-air gymnastic apparatus, places where the novice can be instructed in fencing, bayonet practice, athletics (the coaches all giving their time voluntarily).

Community singing is always going in two or three places, very efficiently run by young women. And community dancing is also much in vogue. Every day there are small dancing circles, but sometimes the big central square is given over to this. The band plays the tune; the conductor, through a microphone, explains the dance and tells those who want to take part to form a circle; then the instructors—a dozen pairs of young girls—demonstrate the dance; the public try the steps, first slowly, then faster; and finally they dance for some ten minutes, then beginning on another set of steps. Our party happened to be there on an evening of this sort, and insisted on joining the fun. And all of us, from medical students to Harley Street specialists and scientific professors, experienced a real exhilaration from our brief immersion in this organized mass activity shared with four or five hundred other human beings. . . .

Almost every day the central square is the seat of different activity. Once I saw a big demonstration of physical exercises by boys and girls; once a parade of trained Alsatian dogs; and once there was an enormous anti-gas demonstration, staged as a mimic gas-attack from the air. Five airplanes came across from the aerodrome; mimic bombs were exploded all over the park, scaring up a protesting flock of rooks. Men and women lay down, pretending to be casualties. Fire-engines and ambulances with all the personnel in gas-masks drove up and rescued the “casualties.” Hand-carts which sprayed anti-gas chemicals were wheeled up and down. To add as much verisimilitude as possible, the men with the “bombs” would often throw them right up against the crowd, which hastily scattered before the explosion could take place; and the fire-engines were deliberately driven through the masses of people, ringing their bells and hooting. I do not know whether this was Culture or Rest, but it certainly proved a very popular spectacle.33

Huxley’s and his colleagues’ “exhilaration” from their brief immersion into an “organized mass activity” shared with hundreds of other bodies summarizes the collectivist dialectic of the park: to flourish, individuality required collectivity. The rest of this chapter will examine how this dialectic was architecturalized by the park’s designers.

The Individual and the Collective

Both a laboratory and a showcase of the socialist park, Gorky Park included its own Scientific-Methodological Center (Nauchno-metodicheskii tsentr), which employed theater directors and education specialists who developed its program, and the Office of Design and Planning (Proektno-planirovochnyi otdel), responsible for elaborating design principles for Soviet public parks. This office was directed by Konstantin Melnikov in 1928–29, El Lissitzky in 1929–32, and later by Alexander Vlasov.34 At the same time, the park served as the largest recreational facility in the country: in 1932, it was visited by eight million people.35 The two aspects of the park’s program—its giant scale and its use as a base for research and theorization—overlapped, as the mass character was precisely what, according to its theorists, defined the socialist park of the future.

The park’s collectivist program relied on the philosophy of “god-building” (bogostroitel’stvo), which Gorky and Lunacharsky had developed in the 1900s. Blending turn-of-the-century Orthodox “god-seeking” with socialism, the god-builders deified the people: God cannot be found, they claimed, but can be built by a collective effort of people—and moreover, the people itself, when consolidated into the collective, became the god. In the aftermath of the revolution, Lunacharsky evoked this agenda when elaborating a program for mass celebration as the new, proletarian, type of art, which transubstantiated individuals into the people:36

In order for the masses to make themselves felt, they must outwardly manifest themselves, and this is possible only when, to use Robespierre’s phrase, they are their own spectacle. If organized masses march to music, sing in unison or perform some extensive gymnastic maneuvers or dances, in other words, organize a kind of parade, then those other, unorganized masses clustering round on all sides of the streets and squares where the festival takes place, will merge with the organized masses, and thus, one can say: the whole people manifests its soul to itself.37

In 1929, the artist L. Roshchin based a scenario for mass celebrations upon this principle, suggesting enhancing the dramatic potential of the rally by choreographing the flow of its movement. “Let [demonstrating] columns face [demonstrating] columns along the entire length of streets. . . . Let enthusiasm multiply enthusiasm, joy [multiply] joy, sounds [multiply] sounds, colors [multiply] colors, political slogans [multiply] political slogans!” he called, adding that this spectacle would finally eliminate the boundary between the participants and the viewers, achieving, as it were, the ambition of the avant-garde theater.38

This call inspired the proposal for Gorky Park that was defended as a diploma project by Ladovsky’s student Mikael Mazmonyan in 1929. The project made the demonstrating procession the backbone of its design. Arriving via the “report alley,” flanked by tribunes from which the representatives of public organizations reported to the passing citizens, the procession moved into the park through the ceremonial entrance. This was a broad, meandering ramp, on which the procession would ascend to enjoy the panorama of the park while simultaneously providing spectacle for the others.39 As Mazmonyan explained, whereas the “triumphal arch of the past,” a product of absolutism, dominated over the spectator, the (socialist) ramp-arch of Gorky Park remained architecturally incomplete without the participation of the masses. Evoking modern highway intersections developed around the same time, more immediately, his theatrical project relied on Lissitzky’s 1926 unrealized stage-set for Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Theater and on Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theater (1924), both of which employed a set of intersecting ramps.40 Praising Mazmonyan’s project, Lissitzky noted that it blended the bodies of workers into the great transindividual subject, giving each of them a jolt of energy (“high charge,” vysokaia zariadka, as Lissitzky called it). The park, for him, was defined through its mass character: “The entire class, the mass, the collective is the master of the park.” The park thus had to become a “system of paths and levels, moving along which the mass would self-organize and turn into an animated form.”41 Several arteries would lead from the city to the park, where they merged into a large thoroughfare. Within the park, this thoroughfare would symbolically narrate the story of humanity’s evolution—in society, labor, and culture—from the primitive to advanced stages. Ironically, when the formal idea of intersecting ramps would finally be realized, under the patronage of Huxley, by a former VKhUTEMAS student Berthold Lubetkin as the penguin pavilion in the London Zoo (1933), it proved to be not an animal habitat but a theatrical setting, which, as Hadas Steiner remarks, “dictated that penguins, birds that move gracefully through water, awkwardly plod up and down ramps,” as if showcasing their evolutionary primitivism that precluded them from forming a collective.42

Even when acting individually, the imagined visitors to the Soviet park were far from the presumed weak and debilitated benefactors of European and Latin American progressivist programs—rather, they were seen as the best specimens of the modern type. The park’s utopian goal was not to prevent genetic degeneration but to take humanity to the next level of its evolutionary development: it heroicized the individual body and challenged its physical abilities, accelerating, as it were, the biological evolution of the human species. Its most popular attractions were athletic, such as the popular Spiral Slide, the ski-jumping hill, and the sled track. A simplified version of László Moholy-Nagy’s Kinetic Construction System (1922), the Spiral Slide (whose idea, and likely design, can be attributed to Lissitzky) presented a tower from whose top one could slide down a spiraling furrow, which was filled with water in the winter, turning into an ice slide. Because the athletic visitors found the sliding angle not steep enough, after 1933 the tower was used for jumping down with a parachute.43 Similarly, the forty-meter-high ski-jumping tower, for which Lissitzky designed a poster, made the skier fly in the air. This thrilling experience was echoed by the kilometer-long sled track, whose design was suggested by the celebrated athlete brothers Kharlampiev, that started at the tip of the high Vorobyovy Hills on the opposite bank of the river and continued into the park.44 Breathtaking perspectives were also promised by Lissitzky’s (unrealized) cable car that was to connect the entrance and the rally field on the low bank of the Moscow River to the Vorobyovy Hills.45

Developing its program for individual rest, the park collaborated with the Institute of Resort Studies (kurortologiia), which employed both architects and medical doctors, including its director Danishevsky and Alexander Orlyuk, the author of How to Use Sun, Air, and Water (1930) and other brochures on preventive medicine.46 In 1930, Lissitzky and Orlyuk developed a program for a “complex [kombinat] for regaining energy [vosstanovleniia sil] and mass health”—an “experimental base of rest,” which would provide up to seven hundred workers with several hours of rest every day.47 The unrealized “factory of health” (to use Orlyuk’s expression), designed by Lissitzky, was an industrial-like, one- to two-story structure whose central area housed an athletic hall as well as areas for leisure and interest clubs (kruzhki), while the functions of hygiene and dining were placed in protruding side wings.48 Visitors would enter through the central foyer, leaving their coats and their children (to be taken care of in a separate wing), and proceed to the showers to clean themselves after a day of work. The open space of the south-facing athletic hall could be easily separated by movable glass screens that reduced the noise while preserving collectivity and the unity of space, and could thus be used for afternoon naps. Passing through the athletic hall and the dressing rooms, the visitor would exit to one-story verandas for sunbathing—two long narrow structures, one for men and another for women, surrounded by lawns and sports grounds and topped with roof gardens. A similar wing for children was located on the side opposite the entrance.

Even while taking care of individual bodies, the Soviet park did not lose sight of the collective as its ultimate subject. The curved plan of the verandas in Lissitzky’s project would ensure collectivity during sunbathing, enabling each person to see their neighbor without turning their head. During the summer, the glass walls of the verandas could be opened, merging the interior with nature, and visitors could pass through the lawns and to the glass hall filled with plants—the winter garden—where people would lie naked beneath bedsheets. On gloomy days, instead of the winter gardens, the visitors of both genders would meet in the domed planetarium-like hall, which connected the male and female wings, to enjoy the rays of an artificial sun.49

The Principle of Switching

The competition for Gorky Park’s general layout, announced in 1931, specified that the park had to become “a powerful cultural [production] complex [kul’turnyi kombinat] combining mass political, scientific–popular, art spectacle, and physical culture and health work, intended to attract tens and hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the year.”50 The exhaustive list of required functions and facilities encompassed physical, intellectual, and political needs of the Soviet worker: kindergartens with kitchen gardens and flowerbeds, athletic halls, libraries, and theaters for adults and children; food facilities and spaces for quiet rest; grounds for sports and military training. The park’s evolutionist program was to be reinforced by ethnographic, botanical, and zoological exhibits.51 Among the ten projects submitted for the competition, two, by Melnikov and Moisei Ginzburg, relied on zoning as the primary design strategy, imagining the park as a modern city within the city.52 By the time of the competition, zoning had emerged as the principle of modernist urbanism, which subordinated the city to the logic of the division of labor. It would be codified during the fourth conference of CIAM (1933), devoted to the “Functional City,” which was originally scheduled to take place in Moscow. One among the four main functional zones of the city, the green space was a type of social infrastructure that contained kindergartens, schools, and other community programs.53 Reinforcing the zonal approach, Melnikov and Ginzburg postulated it as the principle of the design of these green spaces themselves.

In Melnikov’s project, zoning was solidified by canals, which, radiating from the central stadium, divided the low bank of the river into functionally defined sectors. Unlike Melnikov, Ginzburg, a Soviet delegate to CIAM, was concerned not with isolating zones but with connecting them. He envisioned a developed circulation system, which included the railroad, pedestrian and bicycle paths, streetcar and bus routes, water transportation, and a “tank way.” Ginzburg divided the park into a series of long narrow stripes that, following the curve of the river, housed the multiplicity of its sections. Those were sliced by perpendicular pedestrian alleys, which would allow visitors, depending on their goals and expectations, to either explore one zone in detail or to receive an experience across all of the zones.54 Ginzburg’s design evokes the “linear city,” concurrently developed by Stroykom’s patron, the minister of finance Nikolay Milyutin, who proposed a “flowing functional assembly-line system” to rationalize production processes in the factory and the city alike. In Milyutin’s vision, functionally similar zones would be placed next to each other, ensuring minimal distances and the easy flow of the workforce.55 Just as the development of the modern factory followed the conveyor belt, Milyutin explained, urbanism followed the factory, and the park followed the city. In Ginzburg’s project, the zones were situated in a sequence whose logic was defined by function, one following another in a series of narrow, gently curving stripes: exhibition zone, science zone, “advanced work zone,” mass-sportive zone, military zone, botanical and zoological zones, zone of water sports, spectacle zone, preventive medicine zone, zone of quiet rest, and children’s zone.

Glan welcomed zoning as the method that helped visitors develop their individuality by structuring the park according to their possible interests. Like Ginzburg, she sought to mitigate zonal divisions by asking architects to devote special attention to boundaries and the spaces between the zones so that “a correct transition of the worker from one activity to another” would be guaranteed.56 Thus, in the work of Gorky Park’s Office of Design and Planning, the principle of zoning was supplemented with “the principle of switching.” According to Glan, “It is unquestionable that the park must not continue working processes, that it has to accommodate a pause in labor; however, the energy of the visitor to the park must be not be switched off but rather redirected to other activities, which due to the very fact of this voluntary switching offers rest after previous work.”57 The idea of switching energy from one activity to another was inspired by the first law of thermodynamics, which stated that energy in a system was constant: it could be transformed from one form to another, but not be created or destroyed. This law was psychologized by Ernst von Brücke, whose science of psychodynamics presented organisms as energetic systems, and by Brücke’s student Sigmund Freud in his concept of sublimation. Similarly, for Danishevsky, “The positive, refreshing, invigorating impact of switching from one type of activity to another is well known and, in many instances, has been experimentally confirmed.” Alternating between intellectual and physical activity, he argued, had a positive effect upon general work productivity, reducing the urotoxic coefficient (the toxicity of urine, whose increase pointed to liver dysfunction) by 33 percent.58

Lissitzky, who had by then long pursued an interest in the unconscious mechanisms of orientation (as was examined in chapter 2), became the architect who theorized the notion of switching as a way of linking urbanism and landscape architecture that was complementary to zoning. Like Ginzburg, he supported an easy and smooth flow of visitors between zones, stimulated not by conscious decision but by the surrounding environment. Tacitly prompting visitors to explore all zones rather than remain limited to just one, architecture was to ensure the completeness of the park’s “ideological effect”: beginning their movement at the zone of their particular interest, visitors would then find themselves in a neighboring area, from which they would move to the next one, thus becoming subjected to the “combined effect of all forms of the park’s work.” In 1931, in a project for the park of culture and leisure in Sverdlovsk (today, Ekaterinburg) in the Ural Mountains, Lissitzky and Andrey Korobov developed a program of “a gradual switching of the visitor from one activity to another, which enables the complex impact of all forms of the park’s work.”59 Here, similar zones were adjacent to each other, and the borders between them, which could have otherwise hindered the movement of visitors, were made transparent: following each other thematically, zones merged into a unified contourless landscape, across which the visitors seamlessly flowed.

From the park’s opening, sociologists in its team studied how it was navigated by the visitors. In their interview-based analysis of the visitors’ budget of time and means (1928), Iosif Blinkov and Vladimir Altman noted that the workers spent more time looking for entertainment than getting it, and argued that it was necessary to install information stands at the park’s entrances.60 This recommendation was later elaborated by architects as the concept of the “switching zone,” which developed the principle of switching. In 1934, this concept was proposed by a Gorky Park architect (and Ladovsky’s and Melnikov’s former student) Militsa Prokhorova in her project for the park of culture and leisure in Tula, an old industrial city to the south of Moscow. The scheme, Prokhorova’s largest independent project of that time, significantly enlarged the preexisting park, which was now to occupy one and a half square kilometers and, to use her expression, could “suck in” 10 percent of the city’s population (twenty to thirty thousand people) on weekends and holidays. Whereas zoning allowed the even distribution of the masses throughout the park, the circulation of visitors was made possible by the carefully arranged and porous sequence of zones. Thus, the Children’s Village bordered the sector for school-age children, while the theater was to be located on the border with the “adult” zone in order to be accessible to those children who visited the park with their parents. This system was supplemented by a new way of facilitating the navigation between the zones—the switching zone (zona perekliucheniia), located at the main entrance to the park. Like a factory planning department, it guaranteed the organization and coordination of the park’s work. Here, visitors received initial information about the park’s zonal division and could independently develop their personal programs of leisure and routes through the park. A project for such an information stand was prepared by V. Tarasov, an architect employed at the Institute of Resort Studies. Meanwhile, the other zones, each allocated to a specific activity or targeting a particular group of visitors, were separated by paths and hedges, forming segments of a circle centered on the park’s main square, not unlike Melnikov’s solution for Gorky Park.

In contrast to the earlier projects of Ginzburg and Lissitzky, Prokhorova’s partial reinstatement of boundaries and the introduction of the switching zone as the space where the visitor would consciously analyze the park’s layout and develop an individual program of movement construed the subject as the manager of their own time. The project signaled a forthcoming shift in Soviet landscape architecture, and culture in general, from form, and thus unconscious perception, to content—a shift that would eventually be exemplified by the arrival of socialist realism. Before this shift would happen, however, another attempt was made to organize the navigation of visitors through the park with the help of experimental psychology.

Vertical Development

In 1930, Lunacharsky proposed a novel science, anthropagogy (antropagogiia), which was devoted to the education of adults just as pedagogy studied the education of children. Lunacharsky saw the goal of anthropagogy in “unfolding all possibilities hidden in a human,” or the creation of what he called a polytechnic personality—a person of broad interests and erudition, physically, intellectually, ethically, and aesthetically developed.61 Only such multifaceted personalities, which used all of their talents to their maximum potential, could, according to Lunacharsky, consciously and energetically participate in the construction of the new society. Glan developed this idea when she defined the park as “a giant factory of the transformation of human consciousness, the rebuilding of everyday life, a giant agitator, under the most immediate guidance of the party conducting a huge work of the political and cultural reeducation of millions.”62

The challenge of the anthropagogical program, as the park’s theorists soon realized, was that most visitors resisted this transformation, preferring entertainment to culture. As a social condenser, the park had to respond tacitly and incrementally, without forcing anyone into the new selfhood. In Danishevsky’s words, the visitor had to possess “full freedom in choosing occupation, entertainment, labor processes (no elements of compulsion!) under the guiding educational impact of the organizers of leisure and the organization of the entire environment.”63 To this end, Glan proposed a program of personal transformation as a movement “from accordion and guitar—to sophisticated symphony music; from primitive physical exercises—to ski-jumping from a forty-meter-high springboard and skiing roped to a motorcycle,” “from a simple choral song—to concerts of the best masters of singing and stage,” “from amateur propaganda brigade—to a giant performance at the mass theater on the Smychka Square [Unification Square, the central square of the park used for rallies and mass spectacles].”64 The mission of the park was to trigger this upward development: to make the visitors recognize the seeds of talent and interest within them to nourish them into a beautiful tree. To do so, the park had to offer everyone, independent of their level of culture, something that responded to their taste and interests: these interests could then be developed, skills improved, and knowledge expanded.

In 1935, Glan invited the Psychological Brigade of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, headed by Alexey Leontyev (whose activity theory was examined in chapter 5), to conduct two and a half months of research in the park.65 Glan’s program of shaping human personality by external, often unconscious stimuli corresponded with Leontyev’s interest in Kurt Lewin’s field theory, which postulated the foundational role of a social and material environment (the field) in the formation of the human psyche.66 Leontyev reformulated Glan’s program for the development of the visitors’ personality as “the formula ‘from—to’: from the elementary, the superficial, and the accidental to deeper, more developed and stable.”67 He called this type of personal development “vertical movement,” comparing it with the visitor’s physical movement in the park. Progressing from a curiosity about an amusing physical phenomenon to learning the science of physics, or from a jump from the parachute tower to parachuting as a serious sport, the visitor was transformed into “a free and multisided, harmonically developed personality.” For the psychologist, the park was first and foremost “an institute that unfolds personality during the time of leisure.”68 It was this unfolding environment—understood as a system of objects—that Leontyev studied in the park in lieu of (human) laboratory subjects, because the visitors were too many to be examined empirically: “As the subject of our research, we had to take objects that reveal themselves in a moving flow; that is, we had in fact to experiment with an object that we plunged into the human flow.”69 Based on his research at the park, Leontyev concluded that the park had to offer what he called a system of verticals, which provided the visitor with a choice of opportunities. Such a vertical system, however, began with a number of horizontal moves, from the attraction of one thematic cycle to that of another, in which the vertical movement could begin from any point of the horizontal row.70

Leontyev entered into polemics with Dmitry Uznadze, the author of one of the original Soviet theories of ustanovka (“setup”).71 Whereas Uznadze maintained that the setup was primary to activity, Leontyev and his school believed in the primacy of activity, arguing that setups were formed within it. Accordingly, the park’s targets were not those visitors who had a preexisting interest (the setup), but rather those who came to the park without any particular reason, in order to simply stroll or rest. As a system of objects, the park captured those people, attracted them to its educational centers, and prompted to explore their content; they would ultimately leave with a new interest and a determination to explore it deeper. According to Leontyev:

A person does not come to the Park to become this or that or to receive such and such knowledge; he comes not to become a fully developed member of society, but to have rest; thus, [our] task is to make him, having come to the Park and having freely surrendered himself to the Park—that is, being moved by the system of objects, or, to be more precise, by the system of situations that these objects create—to perform the program of development that forms the social-pedagogical task of the Park.72

The psychologists observed that coming to the park without any plan or “cultural” purpose, the visitors tended to avoid walking to reach particular points of interest, preferring, instead, to concentrate in the zones adjacent to the entrance and to float from one zone to the next. To change these patterns, attracting visitors to educational centers, Leontyev developed a program that he, like Glan, called their activation. Thus, in the course of an experiment at the Aviation Laboratory in the Children’s Village, Leontyev’s team succeeded in reducing the percentage of “specialists” (children who came to the park with the purpose of improving their preexisting knowledge of model-making) from 65 to 9 percent, whereas the percentage of those who came to explore this unfamiliar topic and those who came without any particular purpose increased from 15 to 44 percent and from 17 to 43 percent respectively. In the vertical of personal development, the child began at the most amusing, entertaining exhibit (the object that, in Lewin’s terminology, created the strongest Druck [tension], such as an airplane model), subsequently moving to the exhibits that did not possess an immediate attractive force (such as the demonstration of the principles of aerodynamics). One of the most successful innovations of the psychologists in the work of the Aviation Laboratory was allowing children to engage with exhibition objects directly, which, they discovered, helped children overcome their inclination to steal; objects were thus transformed, to use Leontyev’s language, from “objects-‘disorganizers’” to the organizers of personality.73

Leontyev’s theory developed the neo-Lamarckian cultural-historical theory of his mentor, social psychologist Lev Vygotsky. As Vygotsky postulated, the process of evolution unfolded in two stages: the first, biological, stage was described by Darwinism, the second, human, by Marxism. The man, according to the psychologist, developed biologically from animal to “the primitive” and the child, and then to the (Western) adult, and would continue developing. As he argued in “The Socialist Alteration of Man” (1930), the social transformation of humans was a key to their biological evolution:

A human being evolves and develops as a historical, social being. Only a raising of all humanity to a higher level in social life, the liberation of all humanity, can lead to the formation of a new type of man.

However . . . this change of the human personality, must inevitably lead to further evolution of man and to the alteration of the biological type of man. Having mastered the processes which determine his own nature, man, who is struggling with old age and diseases, undoubtedly will rise to a higher level and transform the very biological organization of human beings. But this is the source of the greatest historical paradox of human development, that this biological transformation of the human type which is mainly achieved through science, social education, and the rationalization of the entire way of life, does not represent a prerequisite, but instead is a result of the social liberation of man.74

The same idea had earlier been supported by Leon Trotsky, according to whom, “Life, even if purely physiological, will become collective-experimental. The humankind, the frozen Homo sapiens, will again go into active reworking and will become—under its own fingers—an object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.”75

Like the French and Latin American hygienists and architects discussed by López-Durán, the creators of Gorky Park treated the urban public park, due to its association with nature, as the architectural type designated for evolutionary progress. While elsewhere, however, the goal of conservative eugenic programs of such parks was to restore the nation’s gene pool, Soviet psychologists and designers believed in the necessity of stimulating the evolutionary progress of Homo sapiens. This program was simultaneously totalitarian and humanist, racist and universalist, elitist and democratic. As Rene Van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner observed, Vygotsky formulated an image of man as “a rational being taking control of his own destiny and emancipating himself from nature’s restrictive bounds”—even though rooted in the philosophy of Francis Bacon, Spinoza, and Marx, “above all, of course, this was an image of man Vygotsky believed in, a belief that was very common along the people of his time and in the country he lived.”76

The story of Gorky Park challenges the myth of Soviet modernization (and the First Five-Year Plan as its epitome) as based solely on the state-capitalist ethos of productivist self-sacrifice. Unlike the other stories examined in this book, the concept of the park of culture and leisure served not to intensify but to counterbalance exploitation in the same manner as this was done by philanthropic (and often eugenic) public parks elsewhere. Yet, due to Lunacharsky’s collectivist agenda at its core, the Soviet park differed from its international neo-Lamarckian analogs in that it focused not on individual health but on social evolution, which it aspired to guide. The influence of Lunacharsky’s ideas, which in many ways prefigured later humanist Marxism, reveals the complexity of the Soviet monistic modernist discourse, in which humanism and productivism became intrinsically intertwined.77 Collective leisure promised to overcome the predicament of industrialization, healing the debilitating effects of divided factory labor at a time when the development of technology did not yet allow the move to the next step of social relationships of production. To use Arendt’s terms, leisure was to transform labor into work. These utopian hopes were crashed in the purges of 1937. That year, Milyutin lost his political influence (although he was never arrested), while Mazmonyan was arrested and exiled to the Arctic city of Norilsk. Most tragically, Glan was subjected to repression following the execution of her husband, the head of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia Milan Gorkić.78 However, she was to reemerge in 1954 and to resume playing a leading role in Soviet culture, from which the influence of Lunacharsky’s romantic socialism never fully disappeared. The hope of humanist productivism would wither away under very different political circumstances.

In contrast to the eugenic programs of Western parks, it was labor—understood as the humanist work on oneself—that was seen as the key to evolutionary progress in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in the end, the development of personality was none other than cultivating superb laboring abilities. Lunacharsky’s and Glan’s ambitions notwithstanding, in reality, humanist concerns about individuality and creativity became managerial instruments that intensified exploitation. The opposition of productivism and humanism was eventually resolved in favor of the former. In this sense, the Soviet concept of productive leisure presaged the ethics of post-Fordism, a still-prevalent managerial approach that aspired to rehumanize work without sacrificing—and, in fact, while intensifying—productivity. Although some specific concerns of Soviet architecture, such as forging the collective subject and, most importantly, accelerating and directing social evolution, have been rejected, almost a century after the opening of Gorky Park, architecture is still trying to rationalize, optimize, mitigate, humanize, and otherwise improve productivity rather than abolish it. In the words of Kathy Weeks, “metaphysics and moralism of work require a more direct challenge than the critique of alienation and humanist work ethics are capable of posing. The struggle to improve the quality of work must be accompanied by efforts to reduce its quantity.”79