Yekaterina Maximova, forgotten architect of the Soviet avant-garde

Last week I was contacted by my friend, architect Vitaly Stadnikov about the Hammer and Sickle Factory Canteen in Samara once more - the story of which was the first entry in this blog. It is at risk again as the local government is threatening to replace it with a replica, rather than restore it, as was agreed with the Ministry of Culture three years ago. 

This is a good moment to look back at the past few years and the research that has come to light about its architect, Yekaterina Maksimova, one of the Soviet Union’s first female architects, who died tragically in the same year that the factory canteen opened in Samara. 

The research below came to light half way through the campaign for the building. Information for this blog post is taken from Stadnikov’s findings, and that of  architectural historian Alexander Isakov. 

The Hammer and Sickle Factory Canteen, Samara, from the air.

In addition, the campaign led Stadnikov to be appointed Chief Architect of Samara in 2012. I met him in Moscow in 2004, shortly after we launched the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society. Soon afterwards I visited Samara with him and we published a report with SAVE Europe’s Heritage. His zeal, fired originally by his interest in the city’s forgotten Constructivist heritage, led him to become deeply involved in the architectural development of Samara. For example, he devised a model for regenerating and restoring the historic centre of Samara, built on a grid system under Catherine the Great in the 18th century. During his time as Chief Architect of the city 2012-2014, Stadnikov successfully secured the future of the Factory Canteen: he managed to get the listing increased to regional level, and, working with local politicians, attract central government funding for its restoration and conversion into an arts centre.

This was possible thanks in part to Alexander Isakov’s research, undertaken during his Masters degree, which has provided new depths for the historical and sociological understanding of the building. Now we know more about its architect Maximova, in addition to research made by Stadnikov into NARPIT - a merger of the first three letters of the two words: National and Nutrition - i.e. the National Nutrition Board. Maximova was one of the main architects for NARPIT, which grew out of the Commission for the Fight Against Hunger in 1923. It later turned into the All Union Society for National Nutrition and led to the construction of Factory Canteens all over the Soviet Union. NARPIT was born during the first five-year plan, at a time of intensive industrialisation. By 1930, 175 Factory Canteens were functioning all over the country, fuelling shock workers to industrialise and modernise the Soviet state in double quick time.

NARPIT’s lead ideologue was Artemiy Bagratovich Khalatov, who developed the ‘rationalising of catering,’ in order to make food cheap and available to all, and to free up the work force for the creation of socialism. He was the prototype of the odious Andrey Babichev in Yuri Olesha’s novel, "Envy".

Artemiy Khalatov 1894-1938. Taken from Прожектор website 

During his research, Isakov came across a reference to the fact that the architect of the building, Ekaterina Makismova, was buried in Moscow’s prestigious Vagankovskoe cemetery, clear evidence that she had been an important figure in her time. He decided to look into her history and visited her grave. After searching for a couple of hours, Isakov found the grave and left a note on it, hoping that Maximova’s family would find it when they visited (in Russia grave visiting is a strong part of the culture). They did, and they allowed Isakov access to Maximova’s archive and hear the fascinating and tragic story of her life and that of her brother. Because of the regular dramatic political shifts in the Soviet Union during the 20th Century, and the persecutions, most archives are private and kept at home, except for those of major figures.

Yekaterina Maximova

Maximova was a graduate of the St Petersburg Higher Polytechnic College for Women, that had opened in 1906. She commenced studies in 1909, and became one of Russia’s first trained female architects, and one of the first active ones in the Soviet Union. Her brother Vladimir was also an architect. After the revolution she assisted the great Russian architect Alexei Shchusev on the flamboyant Kazan Railway Station in Moscow, following in her brother Vladimir’s footsteps, who had also assisted Shchusev on some projects before the revolution. After the revolution, Vladimir Maximov, a deeply religious man who had been close to the Tsar, indeed the Tsar was godfather to his son, stopped practising - he refused to work for the Soviet authorities due to their atheism. From then on, Yekaterina supported the family: Vladimir helped her with her projects but never put his name to them. A monograph about his life was published in 2006, detailing his pre-revolutionary work including his work at Tsarskoe Selo for Nicholas II.

Maximova worked on several other Factory Canteens of radical design, in architecture parlante, like the Hammer and Sickle factory (see my first blog post below, for details about this building). She was technical supervisor for the very first Factory Canteen, at 7 Leningradsky Prospekt in Moscow, by architect A. Meshkov. The forerunner for the Samaran Factory Canteen is that on Botkinsky Proyezd in Moscow, in the former of a MIG fighter. The wings were the dining halls, the fuselage the kitchen, and the engines contain the glazed stairwells. As Stadnikov writes of this building: “For the first time here Maximova and her colleagues tried to join the symbolic form with rational catering technology.”

This was later developed at the Factory Canteen in which the food is prepared in the Hammer and carried by conveyor belt to the dining area in the Sickle. 

Over seven years, 1925-1932 Maximova went on to build further Factory Canteens all over the Soviet Union, including in Dneprostroy, Ekaterinburg, Magnitogorsk and elsewhere. The Hammer and Sickle Factory Canteen was the last one she was destined to be involved with. Later in 1932, Maximova was crushed by a train and killed. 

In 1932 a Five Year Plan of Godlessness commenced as part of the ‘War on Religion’, and in April of the same year, Vladimir Maximov was arrested on trumped up grounds. He was a member of a secret orthodox organisation called ‘the true Orthodox Church’ (Istinno-Pravoslavnaya Tserkov) which is likely to be the real reason for the arrest of him and his son. Vladimir Maximov died in the camps in 1942. 

Restoration Project for the Hammer and Sickle Factory Canteen

Today, Vitaly Stadnikov is continuing in his crusade to save the building, with the full support of Russia’s Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, who initiated the project to restore the Factory Canteen and convert it into an Arts Centre. The Russian Federal Government committed the majority of the money on the condition that there was some local money also forthcoming. This original intention appears to have got lost in translation: the Samaran local government put the restoration project out to tender, and the cheapest proposal came from a contractors who proposed full demolition and reconstruction as a replica. This would involve de-listing the building, which makes a mockery of the entire process, and puts the building into double jeopardy (once de-listed, why bother reconstructing at all?) SAVE Europe’s Heritage has written to Minster Medinsky asking him to intervene and to get the project back on track.

Liza, Summer 1990. Gateway to Moscow.

I met Liza on her return from a ten month stint studying in Moscow in 1990, as part of her university degree. She came to recover at my cousin’s house on the North Norfolk coast. Our family were renting a cottage on the farm and I was kicking around looking for people to hang out with. I’d been studying Russian for a year.

On the lawn of the Hall lay an open book - its pages gently fluttering in the sea breeze. It was a yellow bound book with faded gilded writing on the spine. There were no pictures and the lines of text were neat and impenetrable. I’ve since heard someone say that Russian is particularly hard to read because in printed cyrillic few letters have tales, riding up or below the line, and the eye has nothing to latch on to. I had been learning Russian for a year by the time I saw that book, and the reality of reading it was as far off as the country itself. It was The Brothers Karamazov - I was impressed. 

I found Liza in the kitchen. She was slowly broadening her post-Russian diet of porridge and bread  to include tomatoes and raspberries from the kitchen garden, but after a year in Russia she found even tomato soup overwhelmingly rich. 

There was a tangible sense around Liza that summer of a ‘otherness’ - she brought a breath of the road in with her, and a feeling of other ways of doing things. In Moscow, she had started to draw, and continued in Norfolk. She drew me sitting in the barn where the barn owl roosted and that was full of junk, with a marsh developing at the bottom of the former grain tower flung up after the war from breeze blocks. While she drew she told me stories, and it was these stories that made me want to stick with Russian. 

Liza and I used to go swimming on Cley beach - a shingle beach. Liza would stay in the water for a long time - I would sit on the shore and watch her and think about the Russian stories. Once when it rained we stayed in for almost an hour, Liza mostly lying on her back letting the rain fall on her face. Then back at the Hall we made a Russian feast - русский пир. She made those salads that I’d had in the Intourist hotel, which I’d visited as a schoolgirl, except from fresher more delicious ingredients - but the same idea - vegetables and some meat, diced up and thrown together with some fresh herbs, and mayonnaise added and placed in crystal dishes. We made pirogi with meat and with mushrooms; we somehow located black bread so we could have the obligatory black bread and white bread on offer in a basket. Instead of salmon eggs, red caviar, we had cod’s roe from the local smokehouse where I was working as a summer job, hanging herring roes on wooden rods and placing them in the smoker like so many old grey socks. 

We chilled vodka, and even made a syrup from raspberries to add to it. We cooked lots of beetroot and grated it with fresh raw garlic, and added walnuts, a drop of sunflower oil and a scattering of parsley. We sliced cheese and laid out fresh herbs - parsley and fennel (in Russia there would have been coriander, dilll and tarragon too). Liza found tins of sardines, the equivalent of Russian sprats, and cut the tomatoes, that would have been so precious in Russia, into eighths. 

A few months later, Liza’s best friend from Moscow, Ira, came to stay with her in Chiswick. Liza lived in a flat above a school uniform shop. Her front door was dark green and dusty with a steep flight of stairs up to her flat. The kitchen was higgledy piggledy, and, I was later to discover, quite Russian. There was a row of shelves around the top of the walls in the bedroom, that held rolls and rolls of drawing kept in place with slender copper piping. In the main room was another bed, surrounded by bookshelves holding Russian books. The bed was for reclining and reading, Oblomov style. 

I was invited around so that Ira could have a look at me and decide if she liked me. If she did, I could go and stay with a friend of hers in Moscow. Round I rushed in my paisley shirt, listening to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan on my walkman. Ira was sitting in an armchair in the sitting room, I went over to ‘show her my face’ - we had no common language at that time. She took my face in both hands and decided that yes, I could stay with Lex, a classical guitarist, who lived on the outskirts of Moscow.

That evening Liza laid her table with newspaper, Russian style, and cooked kidney and liver with huge sprigs of rosemary, thyme and coarsely chopped onions, that she seemed simply to throw into the oven after the meat. We drank vodka in little sips and sang sweetly mournful Russian songs.

Drawing Your Way into Space

To the science museum for the Cosmonaut: Birth of the Space Age exhibition which was unexpectedly moving, and transporting. I went with old friend, photographer of Russian churches Richard Davies.

The exhibition, rightly, gives full credit to Russia for the development of Space travel - something that was later lost in the politics of the Cold War. 

It opened with some 1920s drawings by Georgy Krutikov a Soviet avant garde architect that I’m interested in because he became a fierce defender of historic buildings in his later years, after meeting Pyotr Baranovsky, the giant of Soviet conservation, in Kiev in the 1930s. However, he is known for his Flying Cities, sketches which envisage humanity living in great floating structures that Richard and I agreed looked like elegant 1960s Soviet light fittings. There was also a wonderful pencil drawing by Krutikov, of a tear-shaped pod containing what looked like a deckchair and an ashtray, but perhaps it was a gear stick, hurtling through space.

Even more extraordinary, because much earlier were the sketches by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) the father of Soviet space travel. He was concerned with space travel as early as 1890s, though the sketches on show here date to the 1930s. They are drawn with a thick blunt pencil and show rockets and people in space suits, connected to the rocket via curly wurly attachments, cosmonauts hovering over a window in the space craft, looking out into space. Another drawing shows a spaceman floating off, when his curly wurly string breaks off, and another scenario in which he is saved. And, extraordinarily, diagrams of how an air lock works. 

Photographs of Tsiolkovsky, the subject of an excellent historic novel by Tom Bullough, shows him with a giant ear trumpet - through which he could doubtless hear the sounds of the cosmos. Tsiolkovsky was immensely influenced by philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that humanity must prepare for the Day of Judgement when all the dead shall rise again. There will not be room on earth and so we need to explore and colonise space. By many he is considered the true father of the exploration of space, and he remains a huge influence on Russian thought. 

Tsiolkovsky's drawings of how man could reach space, as well as his research into rocket fuel and the creation of spacecraft, became reality thanks to Sergei Korolyov (1907-1966) a spacecraft designer and rocket engineer, who was at the centre of developing space travel technology right up to his death. This was despite being sent to a Kolyma Gulag at the height of the Terror, in 1938. His tin mug from the camps is on display. 

Many other rocket engineers did not even survive this period and he was fortunate to. The Terror set back Soviet space research by many years. Nevertheless, as the exhibition demonstrates, the Soviet Union sent the first man into space. 

Seeing the actual capsules that were sent up into space, with their strange, burnt exteriors, was mesmerising. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space, at the age of 26, in 1963. Later that year, she married a fellow cosmonaut: above her capsule in the exhibition is film footage of her getting married - a toothy grin, raising a glass of soviet champanskaya in her white dress and veil - a bizarre contrast to the grimy pod, which carried her around the earth for 3 days in total isolation. The wedding was only a few months later: their child was the first child to be born whose parents had both flown in space.

And then more drawing - cosmonaut and amateur artist Alexey Leonov took his pencils into space in 1965. These Soviet crayons are displayed in a cabinet - each with a piece of string attached to them which he in turned tied to an elastic band around his wrist. As he circled the earth, he drew the sunrise and sunset, that would have happened every 45 minutes. Exhibited for the first time in the UK is one of these sketches - the first drawing from space of the earth  - executed in what must have been the most awkward conditions possible for an artist: cramped, unable to move, and with zero gravity, probably suffering from nausea. It is a tender, awe-inspiring little sketch, created some 30 years after Tsiolkovsky's imaginings of man in space.  

Golden Lane

I moved to Golden Lane near Old Street in East London five years ago thanks to a Russian friend who came to stay. An architect from Samara, a city on the Volga, Vitaly dragged me around London’s modernist masterpieces for a week, in shock that I had never seen them. We had a wonderful time playing in Golden Lane - peering into peoples’ windows and photographing their cultivated corners of the communal garden. It was the first social housing scheme to be built after the Second World War - the apogee of socialist idealism - free housing and education for all who needed them. A large area was cleared to make way for it - an area that showed up as blue/black on Charles Booth's survey of London i.e. criminal. 

The estate was for blue collar workers serving the City to allow the City back up off its knees after the war. What was left of the bombed out pre war housing was cleared and in its place a carefully landscaped estate was constructed. The competition had been extremely popular but three of the entering architects had agreed that if any of them one, they would form a single practice and design the estate together. That is exactly what happened and thus Chamberlin, Bonn and Powell was born. They studied european housing estates and considered local needs ,and came up with an estate of 6-storey houses with a 20 storey tower in its centre - the country’s first high rise residential building. 

There were apartments for single mothers, single people living alone, just married couples, and two and three bed apartments for families. The apartments in the 6 storey blocks were duplex and double aspect with beautiful design features that created a feeling of much more space than there is. These include a cantilevered staircase and a double height window overlooking it. The buildings are surrounded by carefully landscaped grounds: gardens, fountains, trees, a community centre, a meeting room, two tennis courts, a swimming pool, and a row of shops. It was paradise on earth. 

I thought it was when I looked around: the colours of the buildings - yellow, red, blue, were all faded from 50 years in bright sunlight. The detailing seduced me - beautifully glazed and fired square tiles on the balcony with black grouting, and the same on the steps. 

Two years later when I decided to move back to London, I found a flat in Golden Lane and soon moved in, with my Russian cat, on the ground floor, so she could run around in the garden. It said in the estate rules that no pets were allowed but I was reassured by the agent that lots of people had cats and that the estate management tolerated them, referring to them as ‘parrots’. Malinka and I decided that was ok. 

I moved in my library of Russian books and called Vitaly to tell him about this turn of events. He was very pleased and promised to come and stay soon once he had saved the modernist building in Samara that he was campaigning for (see previous post). 

Opposite me live Fred and Buffy - who I consider to be the king and queen of the estate. Both in their seventies, they are a handsome couple (Buffy does some modelling). Both their children, from previous marriages, live on the estate. Buffy is an artist and Fred is a writer and retired teacher of architectural theory. Fred is passionate about Russia and has a fascination for Stalin. Buffy and Fred both make beautiful collages - Buffy on the theme of the estate and nature, Fred often on Russian themes, and sometimes the Barbican and other buildings nearby. At the moment Fred is working on a series of collages about Stalin’s wife who committed suicide, Nadia Allilueva, that he recently showed me “it’s so great, Clem, the printer ran off 20 for me.” Fred insists that Stalin was cast down by the suicide, demonstrating that he was not just a monster he was a man too.

Their flat opens on Open House weekend every year with a long line of people queueing to get in. It is worth the wait. They have it down to a T. They spent 6 weeks with wire brushes and chemicals scrubbing the paint off their staircase when they first moved in, to get it down to the bare concrete “we nearly divorced,” said Buffy. They have a lot of the original fittings, and beautiful chairs - that together with some african hangings and masks, and some of Buffy’s paintings and her choice of bright but muted colours on the walls create just the right tensions and contrasts for the full modernist 1950s experience. 

My flat is entirely different - the internal wall on the ground floor that once divided the kitchen from the living room was taken out several years ago creating one large unified space, which is excellent for parties, as the result of which I am the designated party flat: this suits Malinka and I fine. She lies in the middle of the room with her white belly in the air when guests come round. Fred and Buffy are always the stars of any party on Golden Lane and dance longer than anyone.

My first trip to Russia in 1990

This is the first blog of a series that will recount my experiences in Russia over the last 25 years.

In December 2014 on a trip to Russia, when my friends were distressed and arguing with each other about the recent annexation of the Crimea by Russia, my friend Alyona gripped me by the shoulders when we were sitting in a bar one evening and said, "Klyem, you have been coming to Russia for nearly 25 years - this is incredibly valuable experience. You haven't written it anywhere - you must write it for me. You must promise!" I did promise, but I started, and then stopped. Now I will post the episodes I wrote for her here, and continue amongst my other blogs about more current things.

1990 Late Spring

My first trip to Russia was with school. It was 1990 and Russia was still part of the Soviet Union. We had been told to take chewing gum and jeans to swap with young Soviet people for badges, or just to give them, as they couldn’t get these lovely things themselves.

In Moscow we stayed in the 1960s Intourist Hotel on Tverskaya which has since been demolished. Its reception was decorated with great glazed ceramic tiles and shapes. I was only 15 and frankly I was far more interested in the other girls in my group than in what was around me. One of the girls in the year above wore smoky black eyeliner all around her eyes and she told me she never took it off, even at night, and that seemed rather shocking to me. Outside the windows was a cold Moscow, with a pale grey low sky, and people in colourless coats bustling up and down the street. I was too cut off from them to be at all interested in them. The meals were torture and we girls worked each other up about them. We were well behaved enough to try and eat things even if we thought they were disgusting. There were towering salads of pastel shades as the vegetables merged with the mayonnaise. This concept of making salad from diced up vegetables and cold meat and mayonnaise was new and repellant. As for herring with egg and beetroot - that was beyond the pale. I was curious about the tinned peas. Fast forward 20 years and I purposefully seek out places in Moscow that serve this kind of food. I was impressed by the way all meals were served as a banquet with lots of cut glass and rows of knives and forks - it seemed quaint and strange, as if from a fairytale in which everyone was very poor.

Our teachers got rather excited one day and took us to meet some ‘Soviet children of our own age.’ They were boys and as we were from an all-girls boarding school this made it even more awkward. I wanted to ‘make friends’, to know the right thing to say but, frankly, these boys were not like boys I had encountered before and I had no idea how to put them at their ease. Maybe some of the other girls did, I don’t remember, but I also remember being one of only a few from the group willing to meet these boys. They were agonisingly shy and, well, they were smelly. They smelt surprisingly strongly of sweat for boys of 15 or 16, they looked extremely unhealthy with alarmingly pale faces and little pimples, and their clothes were awful - ill fitting jeans and embarrassing jumpers that looked synthetic. I have a photograph of 3 of them standing shyly by the lifts, all turning away from me awkwardly. I can’t remember much about the exchange except that we gave them lots of chewing gum and they gave us badges and a couple of t-shirts that said Perestroika, Glasnost and Pravda on them (I still have mine). They put their swag into bags that they’d hung across their bodies - I hadn’t come across boys having bags before but on later trips I came to see that you had to carry a bag when moving around Moscow as you never knew what you might pick up. The string bags that some people carry in their handbag are called ‘avoska’, from the word ‘avos’, ‘just in case.’

We did the usual naughty schoolgirl things - we went to the bar on the top floor of the hotel and drank Soviet shampanskaya - someone must have told us about this phenomena - fizzy wine production of which started under Stalin, at a time when the elite was growing and enjoying more luxuries. This was a way of the entire population drinking champagne, even tho it was merely fizzy wine of the lowest quality. Our teacher who I think was a feminist, told us that Fins came to Moscow to drink cheap booze and pick up hookers. I remember staring  at the hookers in reception and staring at the men, and condemning them in my mind. The Fins were a hard drinking, rough lot. 

It was, of course, the matters of every day living that were of interest on that trip, and not what we were shown. The other running theme of the trip was the exchange rate - this was clearly uppermost in the minds of the russians we met, and it rubbed off on us via our teacher. We went to one of the currency shops and looked at the goods. I resented being shown the sights - they were shown with far too much self-consciousness ‘and this building has 3 million bricks and has used half a tonne of gold’ - I hated the self-satisfied statistics. SO WHAT!?!?!?! 

GUM was wonderfully depressing - it was, basically, empty, like a huge forgotten vessel, inhabited only by a few slow-moving babushka in enormous fur coats. I am also delighted that I saw the swimming pool in the foundations of the Cathedral of Christ our Saviour - we drove by in our tour bus and through the frosty windows saw the steam floating up from the circular swimming pool that had been sunk into the foundations. I am fairly sure I saw people playing chess, semi-submerged, and brightly coloured swimming caps. And always droning on, the commentary ‘this was the site of the biggest cathedral in… it was to be the site of the biggest statue of Lenin…’ etc etc. 

Another memory stands out from that trip - walking along the Arbat and suddenly smelling an orange! I gasped and looked round and saw a lady in a fur hat, elegantly peeling an orange as she walked along. The smell cut through the frosty air and lifted everything for a moment. Then I turned back to the dreary souvenirs.

We went to Leningrad by train and that city interested me even less. It seemed so sad, lying low on the wide Neva under a heavy, endless grey sky, and the sights imposingly showy and grand and dreary at the same time. The people seemed even more out of reach than they had been in Moscow.

We flew back to London with tales of salads and smelly boys, and, for my part, not a huge amount of interest in what I had seen. For that reason I don’t count it as my first trip to Russia, but rather as a preface to my first trip alone, 18 months later. 

Samara's Constructivist Hammer and Sickle Canteen

Published in Blueprint Magazine, January 2010

          The canteen in Samara, shot from the air in 2007

In spring 2007 I went to Samara, a city some 500 miles south east of Moscow on the Volga River, to look at the Maslennikov factory canteen (1930-1932) by one of the few female architects of the Soviet avant-garde, Yekaterina Maximova. It has a ground plan in the form of a hammer and sickle and, despite years of neglect, is a monument to the innovative period in which it was built. A press conference was held by the Hammer and Sickle Movement, defending the factory canteen from demolition. I was struck by their determination to defend a period that had been so unfashionable for most of the Soviet era.

In 1918 Lenin called on artists to create ‘monuments to the Russian socialist revolution.’ The factory canteen, with its architecture parlante, fulfilled this beautifully by providing a necessary function and celebrating the revolution. Factory canteens were intended to free women from the shackles of domestic duties, allowing them to devote their energies to the building of the Soviet Union. Samara (then Kuibyshev) was the capital of a large agrarian area, busy building enormous factories and becoming an industrial centre. Food was cooked in the ‘hammer’ and transported on conveyor belts to the ‘sickle’ part of the building. Cheap, hot meals were served all day and there were also rooms where the builders of the Soviet Union could relax: a reading room and a gym. Maximova’s factory canteen has a reinforced concrete building frame, due to a lack of metal. This was one of the first in the city, an example of how shortages forced architects to test the boundaries of their materials. The Soviet avant-garde was a time of explosive creativity. In art as in society, everything was turned on its head: old ways of seeing and creating were rejected and replaced with new forms that harnessed new technology and the revolutionary spirit of the time.

Shot of the Factory Canteen in 1938 

The avant-garde period was high on energy but it was also one of extreme poverty and hardship. Constructivism was rejected under Stalin, and existing buildings sometimes adapted. In 1944 the factory canteen was given a classical re-working: its predominantly glass facades were filled in and windows given classical forms. These distortions of architectural form and the negative associations with the era, mean that developers now wishing to sweep away architecture of the avant-garde, are baffled by any movement to stop them on the part of the public. The developer wishing to knock down the factory canteen invited the head of the Hammer and Sickle Movement, architect Vitaly Stadnikov, and myself to dinner in an elegant post-war modernist building (which he announced over pudding that he also intended to demolish) and probed us to try and understand why we were interested in the building. In the spirit of the avantgarde, Stadnikov said, ‘we are enthusiasts.’ The developer found it hard to believe that we were not on somebody’s payroll, and the conversation ended.

Samara is the sixth Russian city in terms of population and was chosen as the emergency capital during the Second World War, when many ministries were evacuated there and Stalin had a deep bunker constructed. Samara was a ‘closed city’ during Soviet times due to its arms production sites. Since the fall of Communism, it has lost approximately one third of its historic buildings, and corruption is rife. Architecture and planning is a dangerous business: the head architect of the neighbouring town Togliatti was assassinated five years ago. In the first years of post-Soviet capitalism, there was a rush for the best plots of land in the city; the embankment became built up with high-rise buildings for a new middle class, architectural monuments in the historic centre were regularly razed to the ground in mysterious fires.

Ground plan of Yakaterina Maximova’s factory canteen (1930-32)

Despite this rush for profit and desire to establish a new set of symbols for the city, there are still many people who feel that witnesses of 20th-century history like the factory canteen must be saved. The campaign has support from UNESCO, DoCoMoMo, SAVE Europe’s Heritage and Russian charity MAPS (Moscow Architecture Preservation Society) and has led to a book on Moscow by MAPS and SAVE, published in December 2009. The editor, Stadnikov, has rallied Samara to think of new ways to reuse buildings like the factory canteen: victims of Russia’s turbulent history. This determined campaigning continues the spirit of the avantgarde. If the era’s buildings are embraced in Samara, they will be a rich source of inspiration for future generations.