The Reconstruction of Moscow

tence of the authorities and the technical equipment of the engineering corps inade it possible to cope with this task in the course of ten years. In 1931 the streets of Moscow began to be deserted; the engineering corps, proceeded to plan the new Moscow; Moscow sky- scrapers were destroyed by the hundreds, often with the use of dynamite. The most daring of our leaders, wandering about a city of ruins, were prepared to confess themselves vandals, so dire was, the picture of devastation that Moscow presented. However the unremitting struggle continued." With the victorious march of the proletarian revolu- tion this farrago of Utopian banalities, the fantasy of the ideologist of kulak vandalism calling in his pamphlet for a farmstead system of economy, for the destruction of cities, for the founding of "cultured" monasteries, and similar obscurantism, has been completely shattered. Enemies of the Soviet Union did no little damage in the matter of reconstructing Moscow, not only in theory, but also in practice. ' For a whole decade (1920-1930) in the planning of Moscow practices prevailed which militated against the interests of the socialist reconstruction of Moscow. In the reactionary plans of those formerly in charge of the plan- ning of Moscow the city was to grow to 200,000 hectares, so as to preserve the old city intact. They strove for a ter- ritorial separation of the political centre from the work- ers' quarters, disposing it in a diametrically opposite direction. The architectural treatment was> to be based on the style of old aristocratic residences, squires' coun- tryhouses, churches and monasteries. The decision of the Council of People's Commissars has set the task of the radical reconstruction of Moscow,.

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