Little-known facts about the Stalinist skyscraper at Krasnye Vorota - the most laconic and mysterious of the "sisters"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The building on Sadovaya-Spasskaya, which is one of the seven famous Moscow Stalinist skyscrapers, is unique and inimitable. Its common living quarters are not abundant in decoration, the front ones are not so spacious. However, even with its relative brevity, it evokes admiration and curiosity. And it is no coincidence, because a lot of interesting facts are connected with this building. Here are just a few of them.

Conciseness and grandeur

The house was built in 1951 on an empty site that belonged to the Ministry of Railways (once there was an old quarter). The authors of the project are architects Alexey Dushkin and Boris Mezentsev, as well as designer Viktor Abramov. The architects received the Stalin Prizes for this project.

The central part of the building (about 140 meters high), designed according to the tiering principle, includes 24 floors, and the side ones - 11 each.

Initially, the high-rise was planned to be developed in the style of the Russian and Cossack (Ukrainian) Baroque, but then it was decided to design it in a more restrained style with a calmer external design. Nevertheless, the skyscraper still turned out to be very elegant and original - in particular, due to the fact that the facades of the central part of the building are finished with limestone, and the lower floors and steles of the main entrance - with red granite. The roof of the main building is crowned with a tiered tent.

By the way, the granddaughter of Alexei Dushkin, Natalya Olegovna, still lives in this house. She also received an architectural education, is a historian of architecture and urban planning, has a number of scientific works and is actively involved in the protection of cultural heritage, for which she received a number of prestigious awards.

Experimental Methods

It took four years to build the building on Sadovaya-Spasskaya, and work began simultaneously with the start of construction of the remaining high-rises - on the day of the 800th anniversary of Moscow. They say that when choosing a date for the construction of "skyscrapers", Stalin consulted with astrologers. And Beria supervised the construction of skyscrapers, who, by the way, studied to be an architect in his youth.

The project of a house on Sadovaya-Spasskaya, like the projects of other Stalinist skyscrapers, was very daring, given that Moscow city planners did not yet have the necessary experience, equipment and materials for such work in those years.

Plants were built in Lyubertsy and Kuchin, near Moscow, specifically for the construction of high-rise buildings, which were decided to be erected from monolithic reinforced concrete; the designers developed a special type of tower crane capable of lifting up to 15 tons. In addition, such cranes could independently step-by-step rise from floor to floor as the building was erected. Also, special bricks and hollow ceramic stones were developed, for which a plant was also specially built in the Moscow region.

And during the construction of this skyscraper, Soviet engineers for the first time used the technique of freezing quicksand soils (and the land in these places is not easy - sandy loam, loam, sand). As you know, in the basement of the building there is one of the subway entrances, and work on the construction of the subway and the skyscraper at Krasnye Vorota went on at the same time.

The freezing method was used to make the widest possible pit for the subway station. The workers dug more than two hundred wells 27 meters deep and 110 more - for the construction of an escalator tunnel. They placed pipes in which the compressors drove a cooled solution of calcium chloride. And so that the building does not sag after the construction is completed and the soil thaws and subsides, they began to erect the high-rise with a slight (16 cm), but noticeable slope. The idea seemed risky, but the calculations of engineers Yakov Dorman and Viktor Abramov turned out to be correct: as soon as the ground thawed, the building stood upright. Moreover, the house was finally straightened only in the early 1960s.

Difficult tenants

The building at Krasnye Vorota was supposed to become the center of a new architectural ensemble and, together with the skyscraper on Komsomolskaya Square (the Leningradskaya Hotel), would form a kind of “ceremonial lobby of the capital”.

The central part of the building was originally designed for government agencies (in particular, the Ministry of Transport Construction was located there) and only the side wings were provided for residential apartments (in each - from two rooms or more).

Moreover, these apartments were clearly not intended for mere mortals. According to the decree of the USSR Council of Ministers, when designing high-rise buildings, architects and engineers had to initially provide for equipping them with the most modern technical means, including elevators, plumbing, daylighting, telephony, heating, air conditioning and dust removal. Each entrance to the building at the Red Gate was equipped with its own bomb shelter.

In five-room apartments, as if in pre-revolutionary rich tenement houses, next to each kitchen there was a room for a housekeeper. In addition, the kitchens already had refrigerators and built-in furniture.

Under the house there was a garage for three dozen cars. A kindergarten worked in one of the residential buildings of the high-rise building.

The bulk of the residents were employees of the Ministry of Railways and other departments, as well as honored workers in education and medicine. The five-room apartments were mainly occupied by ministers and their deputies. Among the most famous residents of the house on Sadovaya-Spasskaya were the President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Mstislav Keldysh, actors Natalya Gundareva and Boris Chirkov.

Legends and myths

Like any old house, the skyscraper on Krasnye Vorota has its own legends. One of them is associated with the personality of Academician Keldysh. Old-timers said that once fleas and bedbugs bred in the building, the residents of which could not manage to get rid of. Mstislav Vsevolodovich helped: allegedly in his scientific laboratories, he developed a miracle cure for the destruction of bloodsucking, and after he treated the apartments, bugs and fleas disappeared.

The second legend is about a laughing ghost. According to this legend, the wife of a major boss lived in the house, and a neighbor, a simple official, was in love with her. To impress the beauty, the man once told her a political joke. The wife, out of naivety, told his wife, and he reported where it should be. The unlucky admirer was arrested and placed in a mental hospital, where he disappeared. Well, his ghost allegedly still wanders the corridors of the skyscraper, emitting a chilling laughter.

There was another rumor among the tenants, which may well have grounds. Allegedly, from the bomb shelters of this building there are secret underground passages to some secret government facilities.

Read also: Little-known facts about the legendary Moscow skyscrapers.