In March 2023, the village, conceived as a garden city, will be 100 years old. Over the past thirty years, it has changed a lot, but it has preserved wooden fences, gardens, and a special atmosphere. Although there is no silence here anymore — the metropolis is getting closer to the dacha oasis in the heart of Moscow. We have collected interesting facts about the artists’ village and invite you to take a walk through its streets

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Tatiana Filippova

1. Lenin was the “father” of the village of Sokol

Everyone, of course, remembers that Muscovites were greatly spoiled by the housing issue. In the early twenties of the last century, it was very sharp: there was nothing to build housing for the new government. Actually, like everything else: factories, factories, theaters and kindergartens. Famine, devastation, peasant uprisings forced the “father of the NEP” Vladimir Lenin on March 15, 1921 to come up with a proposal to replace the prodrazverstku with half the tax. This decision was the first step in the transition from war communism to a new economic policy, followed by others.

On August 8, 1921, Lenin signed a decree on cooperative housing construction. Its essence is that citizens of the Country of the Soviets who have the means can build their own housing themselves. Over the next two years, the Moscow City Council brought the regulatory framework under this decree, and in 1923 the first cooperative partnership, Sokol, appeared in Moscow.

Surikov Street in the mid-1920s.

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wikipedia.org

2. “Sokol” is not just a village, but a garden city

The new government had to transform Moscow from a city with sleepy streets and golden domes of churches into the capital of the world’s first socialist state. Accordingly, a Master plan for the development of Moscow was developed, on which a special commission worked under the leadership of architects Alexey Shchusev and Ivan Zholtovsky. The New Moscow plan represented the polycentric capital and introduced the concept of a garden city.

The author of this popular urban planning concept at the beginning of the twentieth century is the British utopian sociologist Ebenezer Howard, who believed that the modern city has outlived itself, it suppresses all the best in a person and provokes the worst. In 1898, he published the book “Garden Cities of the Future”, in which he proposed his alternative to urbanism – small villages with low houses and homesteads that would be built on waste land. The owners of such a garden city should have been its inhabitants.

On the streets of the village “Sokol”.

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Tatiana Filippova

Howard’s ideas at the beginning of the twentieth century were popular in many countries of the world, including Russia. The utopian dream began to be realized even before the revolution — progressive merchants built model villages with flower beds, tennis courts and cricket grounds at factories. In the twenties, another attempt was made to build a paradise on earth. About twenty garden villages were laid on the outskirts of Moscow — each with its own parks, libraries, sports and playgrounds. But only the village “Sokol” has reached our days.

The plan of the artists’ village “Sokol”.

3. The village was not built for artists

Why the village was named “Sokol” is still unknown. There are three versions. The first is that they were going to build it at first in Sokolniki, but something turned out to be wrong with the place there, and the emblem of the cooperative — a falcon holding a house in its claws – was already ready, and they did not change it. According to the second version, “Falcon” — from the name of the construction tool “plastering falcon”. The third claims that the village was named after the well-known agronomist and animal breeder A. Sokol, who lived next door and bred purebred pigs in his yard.

Any of the three versions may turn out to be the only true one, just as it is true that Sokol was not originally a village of artists. The partnership included employees of various People’s commissariats, economists, teachers, agronomists, technical intelligentsia. And artists. The first chairman of the board of the cooperative was the chairman of the trade union “Vsekohudozhnik” Vasily Sakharov. The cooperative has leased a plot of 49 acres on the outskirts of the ancient village of Vsekhsvyatsky with the obligation to build it up in 7 years with two hundred houses.

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Tatiana Filippova

The shareholder of the cooperative settlement had to pay 10 and a half gold chervonets for entry, 30 — when allocating a plot and 20 — at the beginning of construction. The total cost of the cottage was 600 chervonets. The salary of a worker in 1923-1924 ranged from 40 to 100 rubles a month, so membership in a housing cooperative was not affordable for everyone.

Initially, the streets of the village had very simple names associated with their location — Central, Cozy, Park, Telegraph. Then, at the suggestion of the artist Pavlinov, they were renamed in honor of Russian artists and musicians. Since the village was never completed (only 104 cottages out of 200 were built), the names of the composers disappeared over time.

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Tatiana Filippova

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Tatiana Filippova

4. The village has become a platform for architectural and spatial experiments

Rebuilt many times, the village still makes a magical impression — quite possibly because of the decisions that were laid down in the twenties. Its layout is based on the theory of space perception developed by the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky. There is also a broken street that seems endless, and “Michelangelo’s staircase” — a narrowing street ending in a garden. The street seems to dissolve into the greenery of the garden. All these techniques pursued one goal — to make a small village on a larger scale and majestic.

Yin-Yang House, architect Vladislav Platonov.

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wikipedia.org

Residential building, architect N. V. Markovnikov.

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wikipedia.org

Cottages were built according to individual projects. Most of them were designed by Nikolai Markovnikov, the chief architect of the Moscow Kremlin in 1914-1919. Among the authors of the projects were Alexey Shchusev and the Vesnin brothers, who created several houses that became symbols of the village “Sokol”. Unfortunately, only two of them have survived to this day. The artist Pavel Pavlinov recalled that the Vesnins’ house seemed fabulous to him: “… A chopped tower with carved, painted yellow and blue columns at the porch on the open veranda. Even the wooden roof gutter, hollowed out of a single trunk, was decorated with multicolored carvings. Later I found out that the Vesnins had studied the architecture of the Russian North specifically — this was reflected in their Sokolsky projects.” 

Vologda Hut, architects Vesnin brothers.

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wikipedia.org

5. A wonderful future was being built in the village

In the field of social experiments, the village also kept up with its era. Before the war there was a tennis court, excellent volleyball, basketball, football and athletics grounds and playgrounds for playing small towns, croquet and lapta. And a new type of kindergarten was opened at the corner of Surikov and Bryullov Streets, in which only one professional teacher worked. The mothers of the children who were on duty at the kindergarten took turns helping her. Until 1930, there was also a German language study group at the kindergarten: teachers Sicilia Frantsevna and Nadezhda Petrovna walked with children daily through the then undeveloped neighborhoods, making sure that they spoke only German to each other.

A two-family house, architect Z. M. Rosenfeld.

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6. Among the famous “Sokolians” are the Stalinist artist Alexander Gerasimov and the Sixties artist Yuri Vizbor

A house built in 1937 for the artist Alexander Gerasimov, winner of four Stalin Prizes and the first president of the USSR Academy of Arts, has been preserved on Levitan Street. The place for him was “knocked out” by Kliment Voroshilov, after his portrait, painted by Gerasimov, was sent to Paris for the World Exhibition (and received the Grand Prix there).

Gerasimov was born in the Tambov region, was the son of a prasol (cattle dealer), graduated from a parochial school, but, to his father’s chagrin, did not continue the family business, but went to St. Petersburg to study painting. After graduating from the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where Serov, Korovin, Arkhipov and Pasternak were his mentors, he was drafted into the army (it was 1915). After demobilization, the artist returned to his homeland, and only in 1925 decided to move to Moscow. Here he has been in poverty for some time, but after the Grand Prix of the Paris Exhibition, his career is going up. However, according to legend, he has to hide the winning painting under the carpet in the workshop of his house on Sokol, because some of the people depicted on it have already been declared enemies of the people and shot.

The house of the revolutionary Ivan Bibikov.

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wikipedia.org

Multi-figure canvas “Meeting of the Council at the People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry G.K. Ordzhonikidze” added feelings to the artist. “To my deep regret, the personalities I portrayed one by one went into oblivion, and, of course, I had to remove them from the canvas. Sometimes it was necessary to change the figures up to four times in one place of the painting. More than a hundred portrait sketches alone were destroyed. Emotional excitement not only interfered with work, but also led to gloomy thoughts that not today or tomorrow you can be there yourself.”

Here, on the Falcon, Gerasimov created completely different works full of the joy of existence: “The Song of the Starling”, “Noon. Summer rain”, as well as the famous “Village bath”. As they say, in order to paint it, the artist invited half a dozen models to his bathhouse, built on the site. The bathhouse, by the way, has been preserved, although it has become dilapidated.

Alexander Gerasimov’s house-workshop.

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wikipedia.org

Yuri Vizbor spent his childhood not in a cottage, but in one of the two- and three-storey houses, the predecessors of the “Khrushchev”, which in the early thirties built up the even side of Vrubel Street. Part of the territory allocated to the village “Sokol” was selected by the NKVD for its employees. Apparently, Yuri Vizbor’s father, Latvian Juozas Vizbor, at that time an operative of the OBHSS, got a room here, but his family did not live here for long — in 1938, Juozas Vizbor was shot at the Butovo training ground. His wife escaped the camp of the wives of traitors to the motherland only because she and Juozas were not painted. But she and her son were immediately evicted from the room on the Falcon, so Yuri Vizbor was a “sokolyanin” for only four years.

Other famous residents of the village include film director Roland Bykov and actress Elena Sanaeva, revolutionary Ivan Bibikov, pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Zykov, Soviet artists Pavel Kirpichev, Pavel Pavlinov, Nikolai Ponomarev, sculptor Andrey Faidysh-Krandievsky.

The house of Roland Bykov in the village of artists “Sokol”.

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wikipedia.org

7. In 1935, the Maxim Gorky plane, nicknamed the “flying Titanic”, crashed on the village

In 1935, a giant agitator collapsed on the Sokol, an agitator plane created at the suggestion of a group of Soviet writers and journalists. The idea to build such an aircraft and name it after Maxim Gorky arose in 1932, and already in 1933 the preliminary design of the ANT-20 aircraft was ready.

Although this giant (the length of the hull is 33 meters) was created for propaganda purposes, it could be used as a passenger and transport, as well as serve as a mobile headquarters of senior management — inside there were not only comfortable chairs, but sleeping cabins, washbasins and a buffet with hot snacks.

The first flights on the Maxim Gorky were performed by test pilot Mikhail Gromov, and the day before the crash, French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who came to the Soviet Union as a journalist, took the helm.   

House 4 on Levitan Street after the plane crash.

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wikipedia.org

On May 18, 1935, the giant aircraft had to make another demonstration flight over the Central Airfield of the capital, which was located on the Khodynka field. After landing, he was supposed to be transferred from TsAGI to the propaganda squadron. Representatives of both departments were in the cockpit: the pilot TsAGI Zhurov handed over control to the aviator of the propaganda squadron Mikheev. The flight was not difficult, so the creators of the plane were allowed to ride on the plane together with their families: in addition to 11 crew members, there were 37 people inside, including 6 children. The “Flying Fortress” was accompanied by a two-seater plane and a fighter; compared to them, the Maxim Gorky should have looked especially impressive.

Because of one of these two “kids”, a catastrophe occurred: a fighter pilot began to perform aerobatics in dangerous proximity to the ANT-20. At the top point of the “dead loop”, the plane hovered and, losing speed, crashed onto a giant slowly passing under it. A few seconds later, an explosion occurred, and Maxim Gorky fell on the village of Sokol. Everyone who was inside was killed, but the villagers miraculously survived, although several houses on which the fragments fell were destroyed.

8. The village has been demolished many times

According to legend, the first attempts to demolish cottages, which began in the 1950s, were stopped by Stalin. He visited a construction site on the neighboring Novopeschanaya Street and said something kind about the village. This was enough for a while, but Stalin died in 1953, and five years later, in 1958, there was a plan to build multi-storey residential buildings on the Sokolsky territory. Residents fought for their land as best they could, and they were lucky, after four years the project was canceled. But soon a new one appeared. This continued until 1979, when the village of Sokol was put under protection as a monument to urban planning of the first years of Soviet power.

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Tatiana Filippova

9. A small chapel on the edge of the village — the work of the famous Roman Klein

The village of Sokol stands on the edge of the former soldiers’ cemetery, where participants of several wars that Russia waged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Crimean to the Russian-Japanese, were buried. The one—story Neo-Gothic building is the chapel of this cemetery. It was built in 1911 according to the project of Roman Klein, a famous architect who left about 60 buildings to Moscow, including the buildings of the Museum of Fine Arts (now the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), the Muir and Meriliz department store (now TSUM), the Colosseum cinema (today’s Sovremennik Theater).

The chapel building, designed by architect R. I. Klein.

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Tatiana Filippova

Unfortunately, the attitude towards the chapel has been dismissive for a long time. In the 1990s there was a vegetable shop, and later – a Thai massage parlor. And only in 2018 the chapel was recognized as a monument of regional significance, and two years later it was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The soldiers’ cemetery “Arbatets” existed until the 1960s, when it was decided to level it to the ground, and in its place to break a square. In 2015, local historians, with the assistance of local residents, organized a memorial memorial in the middle of the square. If you come for a walk around the village, do not pass by the modest old monument and be sure to take a look at the chapel.

The chapel was handed over to the ROC about two years ago. Before that, the building housed a vegetable store, and then a Thai spa.

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wikipedia.org

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Tatiana Filippova

10. Cottages in the village “Sokol” — one of the most expensive types of Moscow housing

In the new, perestroika time, the first buyer of Sokolyanskaya land was the first legal Soviet millionaire Artem Tarasov, which is quite logical — a successful Soviet cooperator bought a house in the most famous Soviet cooperative settlement.

The Sokolians have no complaints about him — but subsequent buyers were no longer so modest in their desires and historical cottages were demolished without a twinge of conscience in order to build modern villas in their place. For thirty years, the village has greatly changed its appearance and has grown greatly in height. There is little left of the comfortable environment created by wooden houses of one or two floors, but the idea of having a private house almost in the center of Moscow is still attractive, so houses in the village of Sokol, according to Avito Real Estate experts, are one of the most expensive types of housing. The lower limit is about 80 million rubles, the upper one is growing all the time. Moreover, the house is likely to be a monument, which implies more minuses than pluses.

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Tatiana Filippova

11. WHAT CAN I BUY AND RENT IN THE VILLAGE NOW

An example is the house of the Soviet muralist Andrei Faydysh-Krandievsky with a plot of 12 acres, put up for sale last summer. The master not only lived here, but also worked — he sculpted well-known busts of Gagarin and Titov from nature. The cost of the house is 150 million rubles (757 576 rubles per m2). They offer to lease the land for 49 years or buy it into ownership.

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avito

The house is 330 m2 on a plot of 15 acres500 000 ₽

 per month

Housing is regularly rented in the artists’ village. Currently, there are several offers on Avito, the most interesting of which is a house on Vereshchagin Street for long—term rent for half a million rubles a month. Rent a country idyll with an area of 330 sq. m. meters and with a plot of 15 acres will cost 500 thousand rubles a month. From the outside, the cottage looks like a hundred years ago: wooden facades, a pointed roof, a terrace with wicker chairs, on which you can still see summer residents sitting by the samovar. Inside, nothing remains of the former interiors: ordinary modern housing with five bedrooms, four bathrooms and a combined kitchen-dining-living area. The attic floor is equipped with a study in case the future owner wants to work remotely.

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Avito

12. AND WHAT DO THE LOCALS SAY?

Today, the most diverse public lives in the artists’ village — descendants of the first inhabitants, “new Russians” who bought real estate here at the dawn of the noughties, millennials renting housing. We talked to Ivan, who was born and raised in Sokol: “Our house was built in 1927-1928 (the author of the project is architect N.V. Markovnikov), that is, it is one of the oldest houses in the village — there are less than half of them left here. In the 1990s and 2000s, many houses were demolished, and new ones were built in their place from scratch.

I was born here, my father was born here, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather moved here from Arbat in the 1920s. The settlement was not built for the elite, ordinary employees lived here. As long as I can remember, there has always been a threat of demolition over the “Falcon” — after all, it was never completed, only half was finished. Already during the construction process, it became clear that garden cities are not profitable, and Moscow needs a completely different type of housing. My grandmother always lived with the idea that we would soon be evicted, and even more so in our time — it’s such a tasty morsel for everyone.”

Ivan’s house in the 1920s and now.Tatiana Filippova

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