General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow

It was approved on July 10, 1935, by resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union No.

Immediately after the October Revolution, projects for cities of the future were created, and proposals were made for the reconstruction of Petrograd and Moscow.

[5][4] The New Moscow project had a completely different focus than the Stalinist master plan for the reconstruction of the capital of 1935, which is often incorrectly described as a development of Shchusev's ideas.

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).

[12] 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 competition was attended by the largest functionalists from all over the world - Le Corbusier, Hannes Mayer, Ernst May and Nikolai Ladovsky.

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.

[13] 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.

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.

[19] None of the competition projects announced earlier was considered convincing enough to become the basis for a future real plan for the transformation of Moscow.

2 of the Moscow City Council, one of the leaders of which was the Leningrad architect Vladimir Shchuko, began to deal with issues of reconstruction of the center of the capital in 1933–1935.

[22] The proletariat inherited a very intricate system of labyrinths, nooks, dead ends, alleys of the old merchant and landowner Moscow.

With the increase in population, our city will grow to 5 million, with the rapid growth in the number of cars and other types of Public transport in the city, it will be impossible to live unless the city is replanned, the streets are not widened and straightened, and new squares are not created.The architects of the 2nd planning workshop faced the difficult task of creating a unified ensemble, taking into account, on the one hand, the Palace of Soviets that had not yet begun construction, and on the other, new buildings already being erected along the route of the future main highway, such as the Building of Council of Labor and Defense, the first stage of the Mossoviet hotel, the "house on Mokhovaya" and the Lenin Library.

[26] The Plan, among other things, included Stalin's urban development ideas: These rules effectively banned low-cost mass construction in the old city and "first-rate" streets, as well as single-family homebuilding.

Low-cost development proceeded in remote areas, but most funds were diverted to new, expensive "ensemble" projects which valued façades and grandeur more than the needs of overcrowded cities.

It was assumed that the new master plan, developed by Vladimir Semyonov and Sergei Chernyshev, would be implemented within a decade.

Until the Great Patriotic War, work on the implementation of the general plan proceeded continuously, with an increase in the volume of all types of construction.

The composition of the park included open spaces for cultural events, and recreation areas were characterized by a picturesque layout.

For the opening of the new All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in 1939, the largest array of greenery was formed in the north-west of the capital, including the Park of Culture and Leisure named after Dzerzhinsky, Ostankino Park and the Main Botanical Garden[30][31] In the fall of 1932, construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal (the current Moscow Canal) began at a rapid pace; it took four years and eight months to dig an artificial river from the Bolshaya Volga station on the outskirts of Dubna to Moscow.

And two years before that, river transport began to develop, when a government decree of September 8, 1935 approved the decision to create a series of special "canal" vessels.

By the beginning of navigation on the canal, it was necessary to develop and build vessels for the new waterway - motor ships, boats, gliders, water taxis, to create a comfortable and convenient fleet.

The greatest attention was paid to the construction of canals that were supposed to connect Moscow with all the major rivers of the European part of the country.