Background plan of 1925 Immediately after the
October Revolution, projects for cities of the future were created, and proposals were made for the reconstruction of
Petrograd and Moscow. The first reconstruction plan, "City of the Future", was drawn up in 1918 by Professor
Boris Sakulin. The plan covered the cities of the
Moscow Oblast and provided for group resettlement. However, the project was unfeasible, since it involved the reconstruction of life on too large an area, comparable to a small state. In 1918, city officials established two competing planning groups. The
Mossoviet workshop under the leadership of
Ivan Zholtovsky (later management of the project passed to
Alexey Shchusev) was primarily concerned with the development of the old city, and S.S. Shestakov's group was concerned with the problems of the working outskirts. The "New Moscow" plan proposed by Shchusev in 1923-1924 was based on the
radial-ring layout traditional for Moscow. The government center moved to the area of
Petrovsky Park and
Khodynka Field. The Moscow
Kremlin was freed from administrative and residential functions and in the future turned into a
museum. The medium-term population forecast was limited to two million people, so the city's development area was limited to the
Little Ring of the
Moscow Railway, and new development was predominantly low-rise. The outskirts of Moscow were to develop as a single
garden city. The
Greater Moscow project was developed in 1921–1925 by
Sergey Shestakov. According to the plan, the historical core of the city was surrounded by a system of three rings. However, the authorities abandoned the implementation plan in 1929, and Shestakov himself was repressed.
Competition entries The end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s was a time of heated discussions about the principles of socialist resettlement, types of housing, ways of developing the future Moscow, and the future of the
Soviet people. In 1930, two plans for the development of Moscow appeared in print - the
de-urbanistic project of the "Green City" by
Mikhail Barshch and
Moisei Ginzburg and the successively urbanistic project of
Nikolai Ladovsky. According to the Green City project, its axis was to be the
Yaroslavskoye Highway. Along it, on both sides, there were to be strips of isolating green spaces, behind which dwellings scattered in disarray were to be located (various types of autonomous living cells for one, two or more people were assumed). On every kilometer of the highway it was planned to locate two-story public buildings, which would have canteens, storerooms for servicing residential cells, information centers, sports storerooms, newsstands, hairdressers, etc. Ginzburg and Barshch proposed building a network of such suburbs around Moscow, and in Moscow itself, according to their project, construction should have been completely frozen. At the same time, as the buildings inside the city deteriorated, it was proposed to demolish them; only buildings belonging to the category of cultural and historical monuments were to be preserved. The rational architect
Nikolai Ladovsky believed that Moscow had been a radial-ring fortress city for hundreds of years and did not have the
public spaces and buildings necessary for a capital. The architect's plan suggested
breaking the radial-ring system of Moscow's planning, opening one of the rings, and giving the city the opportunity for dynamic development in a given direction, namely in the north-west along
Gorky Street,
Leningradskoye Highway and beyond ("Ladovsky’s parabola"). Over time, Moscow, developing in a northwestern direction, could merge with Leningrad. In 1932, the
Moscow City Council organized a closed competition for the idea of a
master plan for Moscow. The competition was attended by the largest functionalists from all over the world - Le Corbusier,
Hannes Mayer,
Ernst May and
Nikolai Ladovsky. In the project of engineer
German Krasin, the layout of Moscow was proposed in the form of a star-shaped structure with a densely
built-up center, settlement development along radial highways, between which lay green spaces running from the
Moscow Oblast to the center. German architects
Ernst May and
Hannes Mayer proposed leaving the radial-ring layout and the historical center of the city, in which cultural, administrative and political life was concentrated. It was planned to develop industry in the southeast. Satellite cities were connected to the center and industrial areas by electric railway. The French-Swiss architect
Le Corbusier, a classic of the
architectural avant-garde, believed that the medieval radial-ring structure of the plan was not capable of accommodating the new content of the growing city. Le Corbusier proposed a
rectangular grid plan instead of the traditional radial ring structure. The territory of the capital was to be divided into zones: in the north there would be a new political center of the city, to the south - four large residential areas, then - the historical center, to the south of which there would be an
industrial zone. There was also a draft general plan authored by
Lev Ilyin, proposed in 1936, after the implementation of the general plan. For the first time, an attempt was made to resolve the issue of reconstructing the city center not through the design of individual buildings - the
Palace of Soviets or the building of the
People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry - but through the design of interconnected ensembles-complexes.
Watering plan The watering plan also featured a variety of options, which were prepared by various architects. The final options were developed by specialists from Moskanalstroy, organized under the
Moscow City Council in 1930. By 1932, they proposed three plans for the Moscow-Volga canal: Staritsky, Shoshinsky and Dmitrovsky. All options had their pros and cons. The Dmitrovsky project was adopted as the general plan for watering. According to this option, the total length of the canal was 128 km, the route began at the confluence of the
Bolshaya Dubna river with the Volga and headed south through
Dmitrov and
Iksha station. Each stage of the canal was a single-chamber lock and pumping station. In the Pestovo area in
Mytishchinsky District, located at the
confluence of the
Chernaya River and the
Vyaz, the canal crossed the watershed between the Vyaz and
Ucha rivers and turned to the southwest. In this direction, he cut through the Klyazma-Khimki watershed through the valley of the
Khimki River and descended along a steep slope to the Moscow River near the village of
Shchukino. The geological conditions of the Dmitrov Canal Project were complex and varied, but generally more favorable than those of the other two options. ==The 1935 General Plan==