N.A.Milyutin

Nikolai Milyutin, politician, architect and architectural theorist, was one of the most influential figures at the heart of the debate about architecture and urban planning in the 1920s and 1930s. Extraordinarily active, he was both a leading politician and urban theorist. Of all the architectural groups active at that time, he was closest in outlook to OSA (The Association of Contemporary Architecture), and became close friends with its leader Moisei Ginzburg. It was their shared beliefs combined with Milyutin’s political influence that made the creation of Narkomfin possible. A committed modernist, Milyutin defended the achievements of the soviet Avant-garde until his death in 1941, even when the movement was out of favour.

Nikolai Milyutin was born on 21st December 1889 into a large St Petersburg family, the son of a fish trader. From a young age he was attracted to the Socialist Democratic movement. He took part in the 1905 January worker’s uprising and was head of the Bolshevik group at Volny Polytechnic where he studied in the architectural faculty for a year until it closed in 1909. He then entered the Shtiglits Fine Art School where he studied in the painting faculty for four years. During his studies he earned a living working in various trades. In 1912 he was voted delegate of the Clerks’ Trade Union. As he became increasingly involved in the trade unions he began to study the question of social welfare. After the beginning of the first world war when the trade unions were closed, Milyutin took part in the organisation of an underground bureau of trade unions, of which he was elected a member.

Towards the end of 1915 Milyutin was called up and served in the 308 foot infantry. He continued his Bolshevik campaigning within the army. In July 1917 he was sentenced to death for organising an armed uprising to seize an area of St Petersburg – which was only overturned at the demand of his squadron. Milyutin was one of the organisers of the uprising and storm of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution.

Between 1918 and 1919 Milyutin held various posts within the new Soviet bureaucracy – and in 1919 he was made a member of the Peoples Commissariat of Labour and a member of the Small Sovnarkom (The Council of the People’s Commissars) and soon became head of it. He worked closely with Lenin at this time. One of his main interests was social welfare including the condition of workers’ housing. From this time until his death, he held many important posts, giving him an extraordinary authority in the debate about town-planning. He was, literally, one of the builders of the new Soviet state.

Milyutin’s posts included: 1919 member of the college of People’s Commissariat of Labour and member of the Small Sovnarkom, 1920-1921 commissioner of VTsIK (The All Russian Central Executive Committee), STO (Council of Labour and Defence) and Central Committee of the Communist Party in Orlov province and later Voronezh province. From 1921-1924 Milyutin was Deputy Commissar for Social Security; 1924 -1929 Commissar of Finance; 1929-1930 Chairman of the Small Sovnarkom; 1930-1931 Deputy Chairman of Tsentrosoyuz, and 1931-1933 Deputy Commissar for Enlightenment.

Milyutin was head of the People’s Commissariat for Finances (Narkomfin) when the Narkomfin building was commissioned. In Narkomfin, architectural solutions were found for the political and social problems faced by the Soviet state.  Milyutin believed that the old apartment system in which each family provided for their own daily needs, was insufficiently efficient to meet the needs of the rapidly industrialising new Soviet Sate. These and other ideas were explored in his book Sotsgorod (The Planning of Socialist Towns) (1930).

They key to the creation of a new ‘Soviet’ way of life, he believed, were collectivised services. He believed that if services for laundry, the production of food and looking after small children were provided, that another 30 per cent of the urban population would be available to work at the service of the Soviet state, half of whom would work in industry and half in providing these very services. This would increase work power without increasing the population and therefore place no extra pressure on housing. Milyutin believed that the collectivisation of these services would lead to many positive results including, “

1. The emancipation of women from domestic chores;
2. The reduction and possibly termination of the need to bring more work power into the cities;
3. The reduction in the need for new housing construction;
4. The increase of industrial labour;
5. The improvement of living conditions for the working population and
6. The raising on to a higher level of the cultural life of man.¹

Key to this new world was the dissolution of the family unit, which Milyutin, like many at the time, believed would cease to have the same structure or significance in an industrialised society, specifically from an economic point of view, and that new collective units would replace the family as consumers and producers. He envisaged a world in which adults were housed separately in individual adjoining units. There would be access to each other’s units for intimate relations. Family life would be replaced by communal life. In contrast to some architects of the time, Milyutin believed that it served the goal of efficiency if the individual units could also be used for study and leisure as well as sleep and that citizens should be permitted to own some private possessions that they would store in the units. Milyutin’s designs for living units were very close in design to those developed by Ginzburg in the Section for Standardization for Stroikom between 1928 and 1932.

Milyutin’s approach was undoubtedly humane. His radical ideas were an attempt to rationalise and humanise the rapid industrialisation of the country. He was against the forced collectivisation of human needs, and believed that these ideas should be introduced gradually and be dictated by human needs. He writes: “Our contemporary housing must be housing of the transitional type, in which the male and female worker, on the one hand, are able to live in a group, including in the still familiar form of the family, and on the other, are able to use, if they so wish at least the most elementary forms of collectivised domestic services.”²

In Sotsgorod, Milyutin developed his ideas for the reconstruction of domestic life in the Soviet Union in great detail. He also designed specific building types including two different schemes for a 3-storey residential block for 400-800 people containing canteens, libraries and other communal facilities. These were based on his analyses of the designs of Mikhail Barshch, Ginzburg, Okhitovich and Ivan Leonidov. Both schemes were made up of living units divided into groups, each with their own collective kitchen, bathrooms and toilets. The buildings over looked woodland and fields. They were to be built economically on a timber frame and as little brick as possible, which was in short supply at this time.

Clementine Cecil