How the underground palaces of socialism were built

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Outwardly, almost nothing has changed on the spacious train station square. The endless lines of cars still run in all directions, the wheels of trolleybuses rustle softly on the asphalt, and the trams move jingling. The stream of pedestrians never stops flowing along wide sidewalks and lingering at the entrances to railway stations.

Only to the side did it imperceptibly rise and, freeing itself from the enclosures that hid it, a monumental and austere building crowned with a large silvery dome was revealed.

- And what's that? - the newcomer will ask. And, hearing in response that this is a new entrance to the metro, he will think: "Our Moscow is being decorated!"

But, crossing the vast station square, most of those who arrived in the capital do not even suspect that under them, far in the depths of the earth, there is a whole city with spacious streets and passages, with halls of marble palaces flooded with light, with numerous staircases and lobbies.

However, even Muscovites who use the metro every day need to strain their imaginations in order to really imagine how long carriages, sparkling with bright colors and mirrors of windows, sweep along steel tracks every few seconds under a multi-meter layer of earth, and under them, at even greater depths, run along other tunnels the same elegant trains.

Under the old station square, the genius and labor of the Soviet people built the world's largest underground station, Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya. The construction of this station is a new brilliant victory for Soviet technology.

UNDERGROUND PALACES

The station "Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya" is one of the links of the Big Ring of the Moscow Metro, its fourth stage.

In the difficult years of the Patriotic War, when the enemy divisions were still clinging to Soviet soil, Stalin's wise will already revealed to our people the paths of a new, even wider and more powerful peaceful construction. At the same time, Comrade Stalin approved the project of the 4th stage of the Moscow metro.

The twenty-kilometer ring of underground roads should encircle the entire central part of the capital, cut through seventeen districts of the city, connect the most important Moscow stations with direct communication: Leningradsky, Severny, Kazansky, Kursky, Belorussky, Kievsky and Paveletsky. Now this gigantic structure is close to completion.

The first section of the new line was opened to traffic in January 1950, the second - in January this year. With its introduction, travel around almost all of Moscow - from the Central Park of Culture and Leisure through Zamoskvorechye, the eastern and northern parts of the capital to the Belorussky railway station, stretching for fourteen kilometers - began to take only twenty minutes.

The Moscow metro has long won the reputation of the best metro in the world and has firmly retained it. Our underground stations are genuine palaces that have nothing to do with the dirty and gloomy, smoky and cramped stations of the London, Paris or New York "underground".

Capitalist firms view the underground railways as a commercial enterprise whose main task is to generate income. Why would they spend extra money on decorating stations? Would a fancy station give more profit? Whoever needs to go will buy a ticket and so on.

We are building new metro lines for the convenience of the city's population, in order to quickly transport passengers from one district of the capital to another. And most importantly, we build for ourselves. We strive to make our underground roads not only comfortable, but also beautiful.

Let everyone who gets here feel more cheerful and joyful in their souls.

Four stations of the new section of the Big Ring are worthy of complementing the wonderful necklace of underground palaces that adorn the bowels of the Moscow land. Each of them has its own special architectural appearance, its own unique artistic features.

The very name of the station "Belorusskaya", as it were, suggested to the authors of the project, laureates of the Stalin Prize N. Bykova, I. Taranov and G. Opryshko, the right decision. All of its design is in the Belarusian folk style. Twelve paintings laid out from pieces of colored marble reflect the flourishing of the national economy, science and culture of Soviet Belarus.

The next station, Novoslobodskaya, is decorated with wonderful decorative stained-glass windows created by the artist Korin from multi-colored glass. Thirty-two stained-glass windows tell about the creative work of the Soviet people. Colored with all the colors of the rainbow, rays of light penetrate these transparent paintings and mix with the soft light of crystal chandeliers.

On the front wall of the station's main hall, a huge mosaic panel dedicated to the struggle for peace is laid out of multi-colored smalt.

The aboveground vestibule of the Botanical Garden station is part of a new twelve-storey residential building still under construction and is organically included in the composition of the building. The vault of the spacious underground hall is supported here by sixteen pylons faced with light marble. On the upper part of the pylons there are bas-reliefs praising the masters of high yields, Michurin gardeners.

All four new underground palaces compete with each other for the originality of the architectural concept, the lightness and grace of forms, the richness of decorations, the abundance of air and light. But the most majestic and ceremonial is the head structure of the new line - the station "Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya". The authors of the project of this station, the architect Academician A. Shchusev and the artist P. Korin, were awarded the Stalin Prize of the second degree.

The vaults of the central hall are supported by massive marble columns. Eight large mosaic panels speak of the unfading glory of Russian weapons, remind of the victories of our people over foreign invaders throughout its history. The last three panels depict the heroic events of the Great Patriotic War - the oath of Soviet soldiers leaving for the front, the capture of the Reichstag by our troops, and the victory parade on Red Square in Moscow.

EIGHT FLOORS UNDER GROUND

The technical side of this largest of all Moscow metro stations is no less remarkable. Suffice it to say that in order to locate its structures, the builders had to create such an extensive underground excavation in the earth that an eight-story building could easily fit in it!

The Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya station has the largest landing hall. Its width reaches nine meters, and its height is nine and a half. The solemn "grand staircase" that connects the hall with the sloping galleries leading to the escalators makes it even more grandiose.

The length of the central hall is one hundred and fifty meters. Its vaults lie on seventy-two columns. For comparison, it can be pointed out that there are forty-six columns in the vast hall of the Kurskaya-Koltsevaya station.

The Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya station is one of the most complex tunnel structures in the world. Trains move here on two intersecting horizons, connected to each other and to the surface by many transitions. Fifteen different escalators of the station can carry almost two million passengers per day.

The builders had to solve a very difficult task here: without interrupting the movement of trains on the existing line, connect the new station with the old one and reconstruct numerous exits to the surface. The builders have completed this task in full. Where earlier passengers had to make a rather long journey along several stairs and passages, which sometimes took almost as much time as the trip itself, now powerful escalators carry people directly from the platforms to the elevated lobbies.

A common pavilion of two intersecting underground lines stands between Leningradsky and Severny railway stations. Four escalators connect it to the old station and three to the new one.

On the other side of the square, to the Kazansky railway station, passengers from both stations get on the second system of escalators.

In the future, it is planned to lay two more exits to the surface from the new station - to the Okruzhnaya railway station and to the 26-storey building of a huge hotel being erected nearby.

FROM CAR TO CAR

For the construction of the newly opened section of the Great Ring, its builders had to remove about a million cubic meters of soil. All this soil had to be not only raised to the surface, but also taken out of the city.

The builders coped with their task in a very short time thanks to the powerful high-performance mechanisms with which they were armed by the Soviet industry. Throughout the entire path of the soil - from excavation to unloading outside the mine - human hands did not touch it.

During the construction of the Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya station, a disassembled excavator was lowered underground. There the car was assembled, and she dug a giant pit for an underground unit, filling trolley after trolley with soil.

The rock, crushed by pneumatic jackhammers of the tunnel-diggers, was picked up and thrown onto the conveyor by a powerful Soviet-designed OM-510 electric loader. The conveyor carried the rock to the trolleys.

The electric locomotive pulled the trolleys to the vertical shaft of the mine and put them in the cage of the electric lift. On the surface, a mechanical pusher pushed the trolleys onto the overpass, and the mechanical tippers overturned them over bunkers, under which dump trucks stood ready.

So the soil passed from car to car until it was outside the borders of Moscow. Here, the land taken out of the city's bowels is used for planning the territory, filling ravines and pits. As a result, along with the laying of underground roads under the city, ready-made construction sites for the construction of new houses appear on its outskirts.

LAND AND WATER

Subsoil water causes a lot of trouble for the builders of underground roads and palaces. It continuously seeps through the thickness of the earth or suddenly blocks the path of the sinkers, meeting in the form of whole underground rivers.

The army of powerful pumps of Metrostroy is capable of pumping out 20 thousand cubic meters of water per hour. This amount would be enough in excess to supply an entire city with a million inhabitants.

Naturally, ordinary street gutters are unable to accommodate such a flow of water. Therefore, before starting the excavation of the next mine, the metro builders have to expand the nearest drains, or even lay new ones.

To protect the finished tunnels from water seepage, cement mortar is injected between the tubing and the soil. Expensive lead used to be used to caulk the seams between the individual tubing segments. During the construction of the new line, the metro builders have successfully replaced the lead with a special expanding cement developed by Professor V. Mikhailov.

KOMSOMOLTS WORK

The construction of the new section was completed in an unusually short time.

Suffice it to say that the rate of penetration of underground tunnels far exceeded the design one and reached 150 meters per month at the bottom.

A large role in this was played, of course, by the comprehensive mechanization of production. But no matter how perfect and powerful any machine is, the quality of its work depends on the person who drives it. The most wonderful instrument is only good in skillful hands. Thousands of metro builders show examples of such skillful Stakhanov labor.

There are many young workers in this friendly team of subsoil explorers, who recently took off the uniforms of students of vocational schools and factory training schools.

Young people quickly master the complex technique of underground and artistic work and keep up with experienced metro builders.

The underground hall of the Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya station was built by a youth team of tunnellers. Komsomol members Viktor and Pyotr Rykhlov so mastered their difficult profession that they fulfilled two norms each.

And when the sinking was completed, the brothers began to help the finishers in their painstaking and delicate work.

Komsomolets installer Oleg Gavrilin laid the cable and installed bronze chandeliers in the central hall of the Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya station. The complexity and responsibility of this work will become quite clear if we mention that each of the ten chandeliers weighs thirty pounds and consists of one and a half thousand separate parts!

Komsomol-molders Nikolai Telegin and Oleg Zhuravlev are the same age as the Moscow metro. Both were born in Moscow in the same year when the first stage mines were laid. Together with their peer Komsomol marble worker Vasily Salin and other young finishers, they worked on decorating the stations of the new site.

In a few days, young craftsmen mastered the most complex operations, which usually take two to three months to learn, boldly applied new methods and achieved excellent finishing quality.

… And now all the work has been completed. The new line was commissioned.

Millions of Muscovites remember its creators with gratitude.

And the metro builders have already moved on to the next sections and with the same enthusiasm are storming the bowels of the Moscow land in order to fulfill with honor to the end the task set before them by the great leader of the Soviet people, Comrade Stalin.