House on the quayside

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The house on the Uferstrasse, 2007

The house on the embankment or house on the quay ( Russian Дом на набережной / Dom na nabereschnoi ) is an unofficial but widespread name for a residential building in Moscow directly on the bank of the Moskva River , on the Bersenevskaya embankment diagonally opposite the Kremlin . According to the purpose of the building, its official name was originally the House of Government ( Дом правительства / Dom prawitelstwa ).

description

Night shot, 2016

The building was erected in the years 1928–1931 on an area of ​​around three hectares . It stands on the artificial island between the Moscow River and the water diversion canal near the historic Samoskvorechye district , next to the Bolshoi-Kamenni Bridge , which ends on the other bank right next to the Kremlin walls.

It was built according to the design of Boris Iofan , a famous architect of the Stalin era, who was responsible for numerous buildings of the time as well as for the never realized project of the Palace of the Soviets (which, by the way, was directly opposite the house on the embankment on the opposite Moskva River). Bank should stand) became known. The house is considered an example of so-called Russian constructivism . The monumental building, with its gray-dominated facade, offered the members of the government and high-ranking party functionaries for whom it was built, an extraordinarily high level of living comfort for the time, especially in comparison to the extreme housing shortage that prevailed in large cities of the Soviet Union at the time. While the simple urban population almost exclusively had to be content with multiple rooms in run-down old buildings, the residents of the new house on the Uferstrasse received spacious multi-room apartments with five-meter-high rooms, telephone connection, gas stove and central heating, as well as a number of community facilities such as a sports hall and tennis court that were only accessible to residents , Kindergarten, library and laundry. Until the house was completed, the members of the state apparatus were mainly accommodated in the Kremlin itself and in some of the city's hotels.

During the Great Terror of the mid to late 1930s, around 250 residents, classified under various pretexts as “traitors” and “enemies of the people”, were arrested and most of them were executed, including Valentin Trifonov . His son Yuri Trifonov described the fearful everyday life of the house residents in his novel Das Haus an der Uferstrasse (also known in Germany as Das Haus an der Moskva ). It was precisely this book by Trifonov that gave the house its name, which is still popular today, “House on the Uferstrasse”.

In the 1994 Oscar- winning film The Sun That Deceives Us , the house on Uferstrasse is the setting for the first and last scenes.

Nowadays, the building is still used as a residential building, although it is no longer one of the most luxurious residential areas in Moscow. Nonetheless, the apartments are in great demand due to their central location and the representativeness of the house and are therefore very expensive. A museum has been housed in the building since 1989, where visitors can familiarize themselves with the history of the house. The museum is run by Yuri Trifonov's widow, Olga Trifonova .

Known residents (selection)

Quote

“I lived in this house once. No, this house has long since died and disappeared, I lived in another one, but in these huge dark gray concrete walls that are like a fortress. The house towered over the two-story houses, small villas, churches, bell towers, old factories, granite balustrade streets, and the Moscow River flowed past on both sides. It stood on an island, like a ponderous, ludicrous ship without masts, chimneys, and steering wheel, a huge box, an ark crammed with people, ready to swim away. Where? Nobody knew, nobody had a clue. To the people who walked past the walls in the street, in which hundreds of tiny citadel windows shone, the house appeared unshakable and eternal like a field: after thirty years the dark gray of the walls has not changed. "

- Yuri Trifonov

literature

Web links

Commons : House on the Uferstrasse  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yuri Trifonow: The Disappearance . Berlin 1989, p. 5, quoted from: Karl Schlögel: Terror and Dream: Moscow 1937 . Hanser, Munich 2008, p. 93.

Coordinates: 55 ° 44 ′ 40.9 ″  N , 37 ° 36 ′ 42.5 ″  E