Why is the Moscow Metro so grandiose compared to other Soviet architecture
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As a child I loved descending into the metro. Meeting up with friends at Kropotkinskaya or Mayakovskaya, waiting for them to show up and just taking in the beauty. It was like an oasis. Then I went to study at the MSU, built in the same period and style, and loved it too.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClXTAMdHwvWdmFyOlQmEtpQ
It is so good.
To the other points raise, I never quite understood the multi-decade Moscow housing shortages. The USSR (and now Russia) had internal travel passports, and at least back then you couldn't just pick up your bags and move to a different city. Why were more people than houses allowed to immigrate to Moscow? Maybe someone has some historical insight into this?
Labour demand. Moscow used to have lots and lots of factories and these factories needed workers. Increasing industrial capacity was seen as more important than providing every worker's family with their own flat right now, so stopgap measures like communal flats, dorm-style flats, hotel-style flats were used. Some are occupied to this day by people waiting for their proper flat since 1972.
That applies to the oldest stations in the city's center. Many stations build even in 1980s are not so deep & suitable for the task, though they may have some special means integrated too.
The English experience was very well-understood by socialists and communists (Marx and Engels themself had kickstarted their efforts in Manchester, after witnessing - and arguably exploiting, given their ownership of factories - the terrible conditions of the industrial working classes). It makes sense that proper housing would have been at the forefront of the industrialization efforts in the USSR, to avoid ending up in those same conditions; but industrialization itself was being pushed at breakneck speed, forever negating any progress achieved on the housing side. Hence a perennial state of "we should do something about housing!!"...
Marx never owned any factories - if anything he was near permanently destitute and often living off handouts from friends like Engels. A lot of his correspondence is complaining about money problems - often to Engels.
Engels family owned factories, and in fact his father sent him to Manchester to work at one to try to get him to turn away from his radical ideas, but which appears to have had the opposite effect. At several points his family basically threatened to cut him to try to get him to stop his political involvement, but kept relenting. You're indirectly right in that Engels certainly did profit via financial support from his family, and eventually, a few years before retirement, reached partner at the Manchester factory of the family firm.
This puts the Moscow Metro bomb shelter efforts solidly a decade later than London's conversion of Tube stations into dual-use bomb shelters, which started shortly pre-nuclear as a response to the unique challenges of defending London from the Blitz (London was highly dense and radionavigation was coming into use, largely defeating blackouts as a damage control measure). The United States made various runs at similar projects from the '50s to the '80s but they never got particularly far (which is a statement that goes generally for US civil defense efforts), probably in large part because the US never actually faced bombing like Great Britain had.
Anyone I spoke with who used Moscow metro, compared to New York and London, people say Moscow always wins hands down. Huge stations, wi-fi on trains and fresh breeze - not 30°C on central line in London during summer.
Notably, the noise almost disappears if the track leaves the tunnels for open air—so I have to wonder what's special about tunnels in those foreign systems.
What's funny is that we usually do not notice its beauty because we got used to it.
And I don't travel a lot so I cannot compare.
BUT
In the past years we indeed got wi-fi, air conditioning and stuff. Some of trains are colored in thematic things, like:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%...
Check it out, they look really great!
https://www.google.com/search?q=sankt+petersburg+metro&tbm=i...
Equally pleasing! :)
The practical result is mainly seen in two ways. The first is when extremely interesting questions end up with no answers (the running joke is entire comment chains of [deleted]s). But the second is that when a question does receive an answer, it is usually brilliantly and thoroughly answered, with assumed followup questions answered as well. And those posts end up getting linked to by other social media platforms, paraphrased and summarized on websites like Atlasobscura, and plagiarized by clickbaiters.
But mods are afraid to be strict and delete bad-quality posts and replies, because apparently there is a way for ordinary redditors to complain to Reddit, who can then assign the sub to other mods who promise to be tolerant. Corporate Reddit wants people asking the same things again and again, and posting replies regardless of quality, because that means engagement.
* (A good example of this is any post on a mainstream travel reddit asking about travel to Iran. Many tourists go to Iran – nationalities other than the US and UK can get visas, and they overwhelmingly enjoy their time there. For 30 years it has been a common rite of passage for Eastern European backpackers, their first trip outside the Europe–Turkey–Caucasus region. On dedicated travel forum websites, people know this. But Reddit threads quickly amass replies from Americans like “Dude, you’re going to get beheaded.”)
That's not quite true. Sources are strongly encouraged but not required. However, if you're asked for sources and don't provide them then yes, you will probably get deleted. [1]
In practice, it's usually pretty obvious which replies aren't going to be able to back themselves up, and they almost always fail the "in-depth" test too making it a moot point.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sourc...
It doesn't have to go to the extreme of AskHistorians, because there just aren't enough experts on all the various topics that get discussed here to mandate scholarly monographs in replies, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
The other really cool thing was the Yandex app for routing on the system, which a) worked completely offline, and b) would show you which car of a train to get on and off (and at which doors) to make the most efficient transfer between trains at stations. Simply stunning.
Building grandiose government buildings also happens in the West. Right now in Germany government buildings are doing fine whereas private buildings crumble.
Stalin's ego, turned into an architectural style. That's why.
No need to spend 3 screens of writing on this.
Are you interested in getting a two-word answer or in learning about the history of the Soviet Union, the Metro, its view of socialism, ideals, etc?
A brief dismissive answer like your teaches virtually nothing, and the reader does not come away from it any more informed than before. It also does a disservice to HN by discouraging intellectual curiosity. Not to mention that it's against HN guidelines[1], which say:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
When you go to Moscow metro, think think how many people had to die building it, repressed while building it, robbed while building it, starved while building it for you to see that beauty.
Had I had a way, I would've ordered all and every piece of Stalinist work to be scraped off, and buried.
You don't see foreigners walking ogling at Svastikas in Berlin metro. It all was meticulously demolished, bulldozed, scrubbed, and buried.
I lived in that building for several years and it is ornate and intricate example of Stalinist architecture, very much in line with subway stations built in the same period.
Subway stations built in different periods used the prevailing architectural style of the time. It is just that not too many tourist see them as they tend to be well outside Moscow centre.
What do you mean? They don't. They cite it as an example of "Stalinist Classicism":
> In fact, Stalin is most associated with "Stalinist Classicism", which is very ornate, so it wasn't just restricted to the Metro. Example: MGU, Moscow State University.
> But the Metro is not the only piece of architecture that rejects simplicity or blandness in Moscow from Stalin's lifetime. In fact, Stalin is most associated with "Stalinist Classicism", which is very ornate, so it wasn't just restricted to the Metro. Example: MGU, Moscow State University..