Why Soviet Subways Were Built to Lie

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Intro

These are Soviet Metro stations.

They look like palaces. Marble, gold, beautiful columns and arches. They look nothing like American transit stations.

This is no accident. The original designer of the Moscow Metro said his mission was to build “palaces for the people.” (A, 10) These stations were supposed to be proof of Communism's success in building a new, equal society that put workers first.

But there’s a problem. You see, when I went all the way to Tbilisi, Georgia—home to the fourth metro system built in the USSR—to see its stations, what I found shocked me.

They were nice. They were interesting, but they weren’t lavish. They weren’t stunning.

And then I learned that Joseph Stalin—among the bloodiest dictators in history—built some of the most beautiful Soviet metro stations, and that Nikita Khrushchev—who succeeded Stalin and abandoned many of his most brutal habits—built Tbilisi’s comparatively plain stations.

This all got me thinking, what’s really going on here?

Why would Stalin, of all people, build palaces for workers he killed so casually? And why did Khrushchev, the reformer, abandon beauty?

And what does it mean for free societies if dictators are so much better at building beautiful things than we are? In digging into these questions, I found answers I never expected: a dark history beneath the grandeur that’s made me seriously reconsider whether I, whether we, are totally wrong about what beauty is, what it means, what it does to us. This is why Soviet Metro stations are so lavish.

Moscow

I. Vision

We begin in Moscow, where twenty years after Russia’s Communist Revolution, the Soviet Metro system was born, when stations like Sokol, with its grand curves and ornately molded illuminated portals; Maeyakovskaya, starring ethereal pools of light and tremendous mosaics; and Kievskaya, floored with red granite and lined with marble columns, each opened between 1937 and 1938.

According to one historian, “More marble went into the stations of the First Line than went into all the palaces of the Tsar in the fifty years before the revolution.” (A, 7)

But this extravagance was a problem. Lazar Kaganovich—a close deputy of Stalin—charged that some stations had simply “paraphrased the house of the Pharaohs.” Alexey Dushkin, one of the Metro’s lead designers, countered that “Their palaces are for pharaohs. Ours are for the people.” (A, 10)

Yet Kaganovich had a point. Without the appropriate decoration and details, such lavishness risked glorifying the old regime—wealth, power, and status—rather than advancing the egalitarian objectives of the Communist revolution. The solution to this problem lay in doubling down on Dushkin's sentiment.

Take a look at Elektrozavodskaya station, opened in 1944. Beyond the mere beauty of those earlier stations, Elektro’s grand marble walls are populated with relief sculptures of Soviet workers looking almost like Greek heroes: classical forms of grandeur glorifying radically egalitarian sentiments.

This aesthetic formula—the retooling of old styles to communicate Communist ideology—was the essence of Stalinist Neoclassicism. But once you begin to understand how this aesthetic was literally built, it suddenly feels much less revolutionary.

II. Beauty

Take a closer look at Mayakovskaya station. Notice anything missing? From a picture, it can be easy to gloss over, but to many of the Metro’s weary travelers it was a daily frustration. There are no benches.

Mayakovskaya was hardly alone in this. All of the early stations neglected this obvious necessity, leaving those workers whom the metro was supposedly meant to glorify without a place to rest while waiting for a train.

Victor Serge—who remarked on the lack of seating after many years exiled to a yurt in Central Asia for not being the right kind of Communist—also complained that the Metro was prohibitively expensive for many workers. (A, 7)

These are cracks in Stalin’s neoclasical facade, signals that aesthetics, not workers, truly came first in his grand metro. But they’re nothing compared to the darker betrayals buried beneath the marble.

III. Labor

This is Ploshchad Revolyutsii—Revolution Square—a station near the Kremlin. Beneath the platforms’ grand arches crouch large bronze sculptures of Soviet men and women: workers, athletes, and revolutionaries. They appear almost like Atlases, bearing the weight of the Kre mlin above—indeed, the weight of the revolutionary project—on their shoulders.

Yet on opening night, it’s hard to imagine their sculptor, Matvei Manizer, wasn’t holding his breath, fearful that Stalin might see something different: take offense that the revolutionaries weren’t standing tall, or see comrades being pressed to their knees under the weight of a brutal regime. (A, 10)

Because Moscow’s first metro stations like this one all opened just as Stalin’s great terror began in 1937. Following the mysterious death of his close friend, Sergei Kirov, Stalin began a massive campaign of purges, arrests, deportations, and executions of anyone he considered politically unreliable. Hundreds of thousands were caught up in this terror.

By the way, we have a whole 40-minute deep dive on Kirov’s mysterious murder. It’s one of our favorite videos, and it explains Stalin’s purges in way more detail. So go check it out after this one.

But of those hundreds of thousands who weren’t killed or exiled, many were sentenced to hard labor…building the Moscow Metro. That’s right, from 1938 until Stalin’s death in 1953, a large part of the Moscow and Saint Petersburg Metros were built by slave laborers like these. (A, 10) It was a useful tactic, because this was a dangerous job.

In the early days, Khrushchev said figuring out how to build a metro was harder than putting a man in space, and the mistakes along the way were deadly. “There were dozens of collapses, floods, and fatal accidents.” (A, 6, 10)

As the authors of Soviet Metro Stations cleverly observe, the Moscow Metro “didn’t just look like the architecture of the pharaohs, it was built using their methods.” (A, 10)

Suddenly this grandeur doesn’t feel like it’s for the workers at all. Though Stalin and his comrades proclaimed a radical departure from the archaic brutality and oppression of history, they faced the same obstacles any budding regime has ever faced. Like the pharaohs, they had to demonstrate their power, they had to build, and like the pharaohs, they settled on the most popular solution in history: violence and slavery.

That is what these stations were about: power, not of workers, but of the party. That party made big promises, but in the end, it was more like the old regime than anything new.

IV. Empire

This is Novoslobodskaya station. Here, Alexey Dushkin designed a series of stained glass panels depicting the sciences and professions, using glass taken from churches: a perfectly poetic expression of Communist ideology which condemns religion as an opiate of the masses and prizes science and labor as the path to a liberated future.

But it’s almost too on the nose. Because rather than demonstrating the superiority of scientism to religion, the panels instead suggest how the Communist project turns to the same aesthetic tricks used by religion, employing beauty and symbolism to package and sell adherence to a set of abstract values.

Moreover, that stained glass wasn’t taken from a Russian church. It was taken from a church in Latvia, just recently annexed by the Soviet Union. (A, 12) This stained glass was not alone.

All the stone which dressed Moscow’s lavish stations was taken from all over the Soviet Union: Uzbekistan, Armenia, Siberia, the Ural mountains, and Georgia among many others. (A, 7) With this in mind, these grand stations don’t just serve as misleading tributes to a revolutionary project—a means of indoctrinating the public into disbelieving the brutality and oppression unfolding before their own eyes under Stalin—

they’re also fittingly palatial celebrations of a new grand imperial capital to which the material wealth of peripheral so-called Republics now flowed. Which brings us to one of those peripheral republics: the Georgian SSR.

Tbilisi

V. Periphery

This is Rustaveli Station in Tbilisi, and it doesn't hold a candle to Moscow's grandeur. Decoration is minimal. No ornate molding or remarkable sculptures. The design is simple. The columns are faced with gorgeous red marble, but the columns themselves feel squat and almost unbalanced, as if they’re at risk of toppling over.

This is partly the product of the imperial structure of this regime. Though Tbilisi was one of the largest cities in the Soviet Union at the time, it simply wasn’t a center of political power in this top-down autocracy.

If anyone ever tells you the Soviet Republics were equal members of a union, just show them a picture of Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Station next to Moscow’s Komsomolskaya. You might think Georgia would be an exception, since this was Stalin’s home country. He went to school in Tbilisi, after all. But the Tbilisi Metro wasn’t built under Stalin, and in fact, that may have been for the best. I’ll show you why.

VI. Modernism

This is Marjanishvili station. Like Rustaveli, like pretty much every metro stop in Tblisi, it lacks the obvious beauty of the Moscow metro. But look closer. Sure, Marjanishvili is simple. But I’d argue that in its own way, it’s quite beautiful. Look at the symmetry, the clean lines that define its structure, the beautifully balanced arches that, black on white, almost look like they’re floating, despite the enormity of the marble.

Because the simplicity of Tbilisi’s metro isn’t simply ugliness. It was a conscious decision by Nikita Khrushchev who succeeded Stalin in 1955 and was eager to distance himself from Stalin's brutality. Khrushchev, let’s be clear, was no saint, but he was intent on a little less indoctrination and a little more actual results.

This meant no more forced labor, more money spent building housing, and less money to burn on lavish, dishonest symbols of worker power. People simply needed Metro systems that worked.

In the words of an official government resolution, “The [Stalin-era] design and construction of train stations...reflects a misguided architectural approach, resulting in the creation of palace-like train stations, [but] they fail to provide the necessary amenities for passengers.” (B)

So, Khrushchev pivoted Soviet design away from Stalin’s ornate classicism and toward modernism. Simple. Scalable. That’s exactly what you see here: those symmetric features, clean lines, and simple designs. Like Stalin, Khrushchev wanted to communicate his regime’s priorities: now, functionality and austerity.

So there’s more than meets the eye here in Tbilisi. What at first seems plain and unassuming, perhaps even ugly, conceals a real improvement on Stalin’s outwardly beautiful metro stops. Tbilisi, while the fourth Soviet metro overall, is both first to lack Stalin’s beloved ornamentation and the first to be built without forced labor. And knowing that does make this station that much more admirable, even beautiful.

But there’s something missing here. You see, right underneath this bronze bust of the avant-garde theatre director Konstantin Marjanishvili, for whom the station is named, there used to be a quote. Who knows what it said. But now it’s gone. Why? Another station has our answer.

VII. Renovation

This is Tsereteli. It is kind of cool, but it’s also…strange. The chrome-y molding, the black pillars, and the blue plastic panels make it feel a bit like a haunted diner, a hundred feet underground. I mean maybe that’s too harsh, but I can’t really find the “beauty” here, nor can I find very much that’s Soviet…because it isn’t Soviet.

In 1991, the USSR collapsed, and as it did, Georgia regained its independence…sort of. Because Russia continued meddling in Georgian politics, and Communist era leaders remained in power. It wasn’t until 2003 that Georgians threw them out in what came to be known the Rose Revolution, when protestors stormed the country’s parliament building with roses in their hands. Soon thereafter, the Metro’s many busts and statues of Lenin were removed. Communist-tinged quotes, like the one that once hung in Marjanishvili, were stripped too. (A, 18)

And three years later, Tsereteli station was redone to look like this. Aesthetically, I’ll take Khrushchev’s modernism any day. But knowing this story, there is a kind of beauty here—the beauty of a country shaking off its chains and charting its own path.

Even if the renovation is a bit tacky, there’s something comforting about knowing that the artistic direction wasn’t decided as a matter of state policy by a brutal autocrat or by his marginally less brutal—but still authoritarian—successors.

Georgia isn’t a perfect democracy, far from it, especially as an increasingly aggressive Moscow looms ever larger over this tiny neighbor.

But the changes to the metro station—whether we’re talking about the removal of quotes, aesthetically questionable renovations, or the utter plague of TVs and advertisements—there’s something honest about them makes me prefer it to the Moscow metro, drenched as it is in hypocrisy and blood. But even with all that knowledge, I do want to show you one last station that shattered my assumptions about what post-Soviet freedom looked like underground.

VIII. Freedom

This is Technical University. Beside it’s tremendous ceiling, its greatest features are these mosaics above each entrance. They are tremendous and whimsical. Amid beautiful kaleidoscopic waves of colorful beads, we see humanity at its best. On one side Men dance, women reach toward the heavens, a man paints a landscape, a woman plays a violin, and an astronaut takes flight on a kite. On the other, a man picks fruit, another demonstrates scientific discoveries, and men and women promulgate laws. They tell a story that fits neatly in Communist ideology: how human dreams, rationality, and technical excellence can show the way toward a brighter future.

And in that light, though these mosaics were in essence propagandistic by design, are they wrong? It seems they speak to a sentiment we still ought to prize. In turn, it’s reassuring that in the midst of decommunizing their metro system, Georgians saw fit to leave these mosaics, recognizing their beauty for what it was, regardless of ideological background. This is perhaps a perspective we ought to apply more broadly to these Soviet metros.

There is a beauty in the effort to build “underground palaces” meant to improve the aesthetic experiences of hundreds of thousands of workers every day and to honor their labor, however trivially and however dishonest those motives may have been.

As the authors of Soviet Metro Stations sharply point out, to fully decommunize any of the Soviet metros would require filling these tunnels and destroying the system altogether. (A, 19)

It’s a good thing this mosaic is here, despite the history of oppression that lies behind it. Because a healthy liberal democracy can appreciate beauty, even if it points to a dark history. At their best, liberal democracies facilitate honesty openness, and even a little bit of chaos. Sometimes, that means that the most extravagant public projects—like the Moscow metro—won’t be built.

At times, when faced with the grandest projects of tyrants, this can seem regrettable. The modern world is ugly, we often lament. We naturally yearn for beauty and grandeur. But this attraction is also what makes it so dangerous: a powerful tool for delusion, indoctrination, and abuse. That doesn’t mean ugliness is the objective, or that beauty is always evil, but looking at Tblisi’s Metro stations, I begin to see the beauty beneath the surface. There’s beauty in the austerity and functionality, beauty in this honesty and simplicity. Perhaps, that’s what freedom looks like.

Post-script

This video wouldn’t have been possible without this book: Soviet Metro Stations. It’s full of amazing photography and excellent essays. If you or someone you know might enjoy a copy, you can pick one up at the link in the description. To hear about my runs ins with the Tbilisi metro police making this video, you can join our Patreon for our behind-the-scenes podcast. Or, if you’d rather some merch from your favorite channel, everything is 10% off for the next seven days only. That includes tee shirts, coffee mugs, posters like this, and super-cozy sweatshirts we just launched for the winter season. So head over to shop.spectacles.news for that discount! And don’t forget to download AnyDesk, the number one remote desktop solution, completely free, at anydesk.com/spectacles. Thanks for watching.

Sources

A. Owen Hatherley, Soviet Metro Stations (Fuel Publishing, 2019).

B. “On Eliminating Excesses in Design and Construction,” Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR of November 4, 1955 No. 1871.