Again about "Shch-854"
On September 23, 2021, the premiere of the film “Ivan Denisovich” Gleb Panfilov “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn The story, which had the original title “Shch-854. One day of one prisoner" opened the world of the writer Solzhenitsyn, and Soviet literature - the topic of political repression as such.
In 1982, Solzhenitsyn recalled in an interview with the BBC: “It is absolutely clear: if Tvardovsky the editor-in-chief of the magazine, no, this story would not have been published. But I'll add. And if Khrushchev at that moment, it would not have been published either. More: if Khrushchev had not attacked Stalin one more time at that very moment, it would not have been published either.”
257 witnesses to the truth. Who and how helped Solzhenitsyn complete his “GULAG” Read more
Here we must keep this in mind: Solzhenitsyn himself, in two decades, went from a talented writer whose abilities delighted Tvardovsky to a man whose works, alas, far from historical truth, were actively used by the Western agitprop machine against the Soviet Union.
For those who are interested in this topic, I refer you to the material “One fact of Alexander Isaevich. Why is Solzhenitsyn a writer and not a historian?”, written seven years ago.
One fact of Alexander Isaevich. Why is Solzhenitsyn a writer and not a historian? More details
On a different path
But in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” Solzhenitsyn did not yet rise to historical generalizations, but talked about, as one of the critics wrote, “the camp through the eyes of a peasant.”
For people living at that time, the opportunity to openly talk about repression was extremely important, because it affected many in one way or another.
But the question is: who needs “Ivan Denisovich” in 2021? Especially this one, completely redone. Director Panfilov in an interview with Kommersant said: “I took a different path and came up with my own story of Ivan Denisovich based on the story. And it turned out: “Five days of Ivan Denisovich” - five key days of his life. Starting with the first - when, on the eve of the 1941 parade on Red Square, he arrived in Moscow to receive a new ZIS-3 gun and deliver it to his unit at his battery near Volokolamsk.”
“Stalin didn’t know what was going on”? 50 years and “One Day” Read more
Characteristics of the main character
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is a man with a difficult fate. Unjustly convicted, he is forced to live in a camp for many years, trying not to lose his human appearance. Shukhov endures all the hardships of his camp life with dignity: he does not lick plates, does not inform on his cellmates, does not pretend to be sick in order to evade work.
Work became salvation for Ivan Denisovich. He cannot sit idle, so he takes on any job. He doesn’t grovel before anyone, but, understanding the laws of the prison world, he tries to make his life easier through mutually beneficial communication with the right people. For example, he maintains friendly relations with the director Cesar Markovich, who often receives packages from home and has settled well in the camp. He is used to working with his hands, either sewing slippers for someone or a padded jacket. From this he received a double benefit: the prisoners thanked him and treated him well, and he himself enjoyed his work.
Stalin is a fool, smokes tobacco...
Do you want to have a serious conversation about that time? If you don’t wait, Panfilov will twist the barrel at you in the best traditions of Ogonyok in the late 1980s. Again we have before us a real hero, who has become an innocent victim of Soviet tyranny, which is ready to wipe everyone and everything into the camp dust.
It would seem that it had long been established that there was no general accusation of prisoners of war of treason, and those who ended up in the Soviet camp constituted an absolute minority. And the Gulag system itself looked different in different years and in different places, and it had nothing in common with Hitler’s system of extermination.
What to do, for example, with the fact that the author of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, in this very system of total destruction that the Gulag depicts, was cured of cancer? How does this fit into the pictures drawn by him and drawn by those who make films based on his works?
The case of Professor Kurganov. Who came up with 110 million victims of Stalin? More details
Plot
After shots of a mysterious shining camp point, the plot moves into the military past of Ivan Denisovich. In the summer of 1941, our hero from an engineer (for Solzhenitsyn he was a simple peasant) became an artilleryman, and then heroically fought near Moscow until he was captured. Shukhov refused to cooperate with the Nazis, so he and other prisoners, considered “consumables,” were allowed to clear mines on the road.
Technically, it is very simple: in front of a company of Krauts, the entire group of prisoners slowly walks along a snowy path, when someone stumbles upon a mine - it explodes, whoever tries to escape gets a bullet in the back. But the survivor gets, firstly, a lunch of soup with dumplings and Wiener schnitzel, and secondly, a prize to choose from: go to live in Germany or return to your family. Ivan Denisovich, stunned by one of the explosions, is lucky: a girl, invisible to the others, suddenly appears to him, takes him by the hand (another soldier intuitively clings to him) and leads him straight along the damned snowy road forward, past all the mines. And when the minefield is passed, the girl disappears, and a couple of prisoners rush headlong to run to their own. The German officer sees them off with the words: “Let them run, I don’t envy them.”
And for sure: at first the fugitives are greeted with hugs, like heroes, but then stern people explain to them that they cannot escape from fascist captivity without being recruited. So both are sent to camps for ten years.
Still from the film “Ivan Denisovich”
Shooting - not moving bags
One could, of course, say that “people will figure it out themselves.” But this is unlikely, since young people’s idols are characters who do not understand much simpler historical issues. If a blogger with almost 19 million subscribers, Mrs. Ivleeva does not know in what century Peter the Great , what his surname is, the surname Dzhugashvili , should we expect her fans to have a serious conversation about the negative and positive in the Soviet era?
In Panfilov, everything is reduced precisely for primitive perception: here is an inhumane system in which there was nothing good, and here is an innocently suffering martyr. Accept the historical picture as it is, and that’s it.
And this is not the first case of primitivization of history. In the "Union of Salvation" the Decembrists were turned into punks trying to destroy the state out of hooligan motives, in "Zoya" a communist was molded into a Christian martyr, and so on. Although at the state level we are, at least officially, waging a fierce fight against attempts to falsify history. But what to do with the fact that schoolchildren are offered works by Solzhenitsyn in the program, which is a crime to give to children without commentary or explanation?
“The Gulag Archipelago”: through the eyes of a writer and statistics Read more
The Creator and the “Gopniks”
This is not the first time that Panfilov produces masterpieces of this kind. The Romanovs” back in 2000 . Crowned family,” the amount of oil in which would make even the last Russian emperor vomit. What does this have to do with a serious understanding of the Romanov tragedy? Well, about the same as a striptease show for pure and immaculate love.
Not everyone knows, but in Mikhalkov’s notorious “Anticipation” and “Citadel,” which can hardly be considered anything other than an outrage against the history of the Great Patriotic War, Panfilov was the author of the script. That is, for all this trash and frenzy, “thank you” needs to be said not only to Nikita Sergeevich , but also to Gleb Anatolyevich.
Judging by the first reaction of the audience, the public did not like “Ivan Denisovich”. But our filmmakers, as we know, do not draw conclusions, preferring to consider their critics “gopniks” and “Stalinists.”
The story of one book: “The Gulag Archipelago” Read more
Religious drama
The action moves to 1951. Ivan Denisovich has ten days left in prison. He is shaking, not only from the cold, but also from the fact that he is afraid of making the slightest mistake, for which he will be given an additional sentence. And he definitely needs freedom: he has two daughters there. Their mother died, they ended up in an orphanage, and they used to write two letters a year to their father in the camp (as much as was allowed), and then they fell silent. Shukhov is mortally afraid for them: if trouble had happened. And so in the morning of the day when the action unfolds, Ivan Denisovich is given a letter from the eldest, seventeen years old...
Naturally, not the entire film is retold here, and there will not be a word further about the plot. But it should be noted that this “Ivan Denisovich” is in many ways a religious drama about finding God in moments of great ordeal. The first thing Ivan Denisovich does when he wakes up is to talk about faith with his Baptist neighbor (he tells him a lot about the Apostle Paul and the secret meaning of imprisonment, which helps to find God). And the girl who appeared to Shukhov during the war was his daughter, who, by the will of God, came to him and saved him. And this is not the last miracle in the picture.
Philip Yankovsky and Inna Churikova. Still from the film
Who will direct the new Chapaev?
By the way, Panfilov was originally going to present “Ivan Denisovich” in May 2021, on the 75th anniversary of the Victory. But the pandemic saved us from such a dubious “gift” for the holiday.
It seems that the backbone of our cinematic community is not ready for change: the ideological principles of the 1990s are firmly seated in the heads of the creators, and this also applies to young directors and screenwriters.
But “Ivan Denisovich” cannot raise patriots. And, if the state is thinking about the future, it is necessary now to give young people a product of a completely different quality and ideological content.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Best quotes Read more
And the former head of the propaganda and agitation department of the Sverdlovsk city committee of the Komsomol, communist Gleb Panfilov, cannot be changed in his old age.
“Russian Leonardo” – Vladimir Shukhov
Vladimir Shukhov was born on August 16, 1853 in the small provincial town of Grayvoron, Belgorod district, Kursk province. At the age of eleven he entered the St. Petersburg gymnasium, where he showed ability in the exact sciences, especially mathematics, and immediately became famous for proving the Pythagorean theorem in a way that he invented himself. The surprised teacher praised him, but gave him a bad mark, saying: “Correct, but immodest!” However, Shukhov completed his studies with a brilliant certificate.
On the advice of his father, Vladimir entered the Moscow Imperial Technical School (now Moscow State Technical University named after N. E. Bauman), where he had the opportunity to receive fundamental physico-mathematical training, an engineering specialty, and at the same time master crafts. As a student, Shukhov registered a remarkable invention - “a device that sprays fuel oil in furnaces using the elasticity of water vapor” - a steam nozzle. It was so simple, effective and original that the great chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev placed a drawing of it on the cover of his book “Fundamentals of the Factory Industry.” And Ludwig Nobel, the head of a huge oil concern and the brother of the founder of the prestigious prize, immediately acquired a patent for its production from Vladimir. In 1876, V. Shukhov graduated from college with a gold medal. Academician Pafnutiy Lvovich Chebyshev, who noticed the outstanding abilities of the young mechanical engineer, made him a flattering offer: to conduct joint scientific and pedagogical work at the university. However, Vladimir was more attracted not by theoretical research, but by practical engineering and inventive activity.
Stereo camera by V. G. Shukhov
A business trip in 1876 to Philadelphia for the World's Fair was fateful for the young engineer. There he met A. V. Bari, a native of Russia, who had already lived in America for several years, participated in the construction of buildings for the World Exhibition, being responsible for all the “metal work,” for which he received the Grand Prix and a gold medal.
In the summer of the same year, A.V. Bari and his family returned to Russia, where he began organizing a bulk oil transportation and storage system. He invited Shukhov to head the company’s branch in Baku, the new center of the rapidly developing Russian oil industry. And in 1880, Bari founded a construction office and a boiler plant in Moscow, offering V. G. Shukhov the position of chief designer and chief engineer. Bari was not mistaken about his young colleague. In this extraordinary business and creative tandem, many brilliant inventions were born. “They say that Bari exploited me,” Shukhov later wrote. - It's right. But I also exploited him, forcing him to carry out even my most daring proposals.”
Within six months, V. G. Shukhov was the first in the world to carry out industrial flaring of liquid fuel using a nozzle he invented, which made it possible to effectively burn fuel oil, which was considered a waste product from oil refining; its huge lakes in the vicinity of oil refineries poisoned the soil. To store oil and petroleum products, Shukhov created the design of a cylindrical tank with a thin bottom on a sand cushion and with walls of stepped thickness. This design had the least weight with the same strength of its surface: the pressure of the liquid in the tank on the wall increases with depth, and the thickness and strength of the wall increase accordingly. And the sand cushion under the bottom takes on the weight of the liquid, making the bottom of the tank thin. For the distillation of oil with decomposition into fractions under the influence of high temperatures and pressures, he developed an industrial installation. And this was just the beginning of his fast-paced engineering career.
Pages of V. G. Shukhov’s workbooks. The end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century.
FUCK YOU, RED!
Women have always liked Vladimir Grigorievich. He was talented and good-looking. It is not surprising that in the early 1890s the famous actress O. L. Knipper, who later became the wife of A. P. Chekhov, fell in love with him. But Shukhov did not accept Olga Leonardovna’s advances.
Soon Vladimir met his future wife - the daughter of a railway doctor, Anya Medintseva, who came from an old Akhmatov family. He had to woo the 18-year-old green-eyed beauty for quite some time. In 1894 the wedding took place. Anna Nikolaevna bore him five children - Ksenia, Sergei, Flavius, Vladimir and Vera.
All their lives they had a tender, touching relationship. The photographs taken by Shukhov have been preserved, in which members of his large family are lovingly captured - having tea on the veranda of the dacha, reading, playing the piano... Even professionals still admire the stereoscopic photograph of his daughter Vera swinging on a swing: Shukhov managed to stop the moment, preserving the dynamics of the moment and the girl’s lively mood, which was an almost impossible task for the photographic technology of that time. His engineering and creative talent is clearly visible through the tiny print. He was generally passionate about photography and even said: “I’m an engineer by profession, but a photographer at heart.”
The sedate Anna Nikolaevna looks at us from old photos. And Vladimir Grigorievich himself is smart, with a kind, intelligent, slightly tired face. Shukhov’s contemporary N.S. Kudinova described him this way: “Vladimir Grigorievich is a man of average height, thin, with surprisingly clear and unblemished blue eyes. Despite his age (at the time we met he was 76 years old - Ed.), he is always smart and impeccably neat... And what an abyss of attractiveness, humor, and depth in everything!” His son Sergei recalled: “He valued self-esteem most of all in people, as equals, without in any way betraying his own superiority, he never gave orders to anyone and never raised his voice at anyone. He was impeccably polite in his treatment of both the servants and the janitor.”
Connection drawings for radio tower elements. Shukhov Tower Foundation.
Shukhov was a cheerful, gambling person. He loved opera, theater, chess, and was fond of cycling. Eyewitnesses said that one day Bari ended up in the Alexander Manege, where bicycle racing was taking place. The fans went wild. “Give it up, redhead, give it up!” - they shouted to the leader. The red-haired guy raised his hands victoriously at the finish line, turned around, and Bari was dumbfounded when he recognized the winner as the chief engineer of his company.
However, Shukhov’s main “love object” always remained work. “In 1891-1893, on Red Square in Moscow, a new building of the Upper Trading Rows was built with Shukhov coverings (see page 4 of the cover), so elegant and light that from below they seemed like a cobweb with glass embedded in it,” says great-granddaughter of V. G. Shukhova Elena Shukhova. “This effect was achieved by the arched truss invented by Shukhov, in which the traditional rather massive braces and racks were replaced by thin radial ties with a diameter of about a centimeter, working only in tension - the most beneficial type of force for metal.”
In 1895, Shukhov applied for a patent on mesh coverings in the form of shells. This was the prototype of the hyperboloid tower he designed, which soon revolutionized the entire world's architecture. “Faced with the question of the lightest covering, Vladimir Grigorievich invented a special system of arched trusses that work in tension and compression thanks to wire rods attached to them. The location of the rods and the dimensions of the trusses are determined by the researcher under the condition of the least weight of the structure. ...This idea of finding the most advantageous designs lies at the basis of almost all of Vladimir Grigorievich’s technical works. He conducts it in a harmonious and simple mathematical form, illustrating his thoughts with tables and graphs. Vladimir Grigorievich’s essay on the most advantageous form of reservoirs is based on this idea,” noted Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovsky. The very idea of such grid structures and amazing hyperboloid towers came to the mind of a Russian engineer when he saw a simple willow basket made of twigs turned upside down. “What looks beautiful is durable,” he said, always believing that technical innovations are born from careful observation of life and nature.
Modern view of the radio tower on Shabalovka. Photo by Andrey Afanasyev.
HYPERBOLOID OF ENGINEER SHUKHOV
The first samples, which marked the creation of a completely new type of load-bearing structure, were presented to the public by Shukhov during the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod. These were eight exhibition pavilions: four with hanging coverings, four with cylindrical mesh vaults. One of them had a hanging covering of thin tin (membrane) in the center, which had never been used in construction before. A water tower was also erected, in which Shukhov transferred his grid to a vertical lattice structure of a hyperboloid shape.
“The weight of Shukhov’s “roofs without rafters,” as their contemporaries called them, turned out to be two to three times lower, and the strength was significantly higher than that of traditional types of coverings,” says Elena Shukhova. — They could be assembled from the simplest elements of the same type: 50-60 mm strip iron or thin corners; The arrangement of insulation and lighting was simple: in the right places, instead of roofing iron, wooden frames with glass were laid on the mesh, and in the case of an arched roof, the differences in heights of different parts of the building could be very successfully used for lighting. All designs provided for the possibility of easy and quick installation using the most basic equipment such as small hand winches.” Meshes made of strip and angle steel with diamond-shaped cells have become an excellent and lightweight material for the manufacture of long-span suspended roofs and mesh vaults.
Mesh ceilings: the exhibition pavilion designed by V. G. Shukhov (1896) and the oval hall of the British Museum designed by N. Foster.
The buildings became widely known. All the newspapers wrote about them. High technical perfection, external simplicity and spaciousness of the interior spaces under the soaring network of suspended ceilings - all this created a real sensation. The shell in the form of a hyperboloid of revolution became a completely new building form that had never been used before. It made it possible to create a spatially curved mesh surface from obliquely installed straight rods. The result was a light, elegant and rigid structure that was easy to calculate and build. The Nizhny Novgorod water tower carried a tank with a capacity of 114,000 liters at a height of 25.6 m to supply water to the entire exhibition. This first hyperboloid tower remained one of the most beautiful building structures in Shukhov. After the exhibition was completed, it was bought by the wealthy landowner Nechaev-Maltsev and installed in his Polibino estate near Lipetsk. The tower still stands there today.
Water tower in Yaroslavl. 1911
“The works of V. G. Shukhov can be considered the pinnacle in this area of architecture,” testifies Elena Shukhova. “Their appearance, unlike anything before, organically follows from the properties of the material and completely exhausts its capabilities in constructing a form, and this “pure” engineering idea is in no way disguised or decorated with “extra” elements.”
Orders poured in to the Bari company. The first was an order for a metallurgical plant in Vyksa near Nizhny Novgorod, where it was required to build a workshop using hyperboloid structures. Shukhov executed it brilliantly: spatially curved mesh shells significantly improved the usual design. The building has been preserved in this small provincial town to this day.
Light, elegant water towers were in truly great demand at that time. Over the course of several years, Shukhov designed and built hundreds of them, which led to a partial typification of the structure itself and its individual elements - stairs and tanks. At the same time, Shukhov did not have twin towers. Demonstrating an amazing variety of forms, he proved to the whole world that an engineer, as the ancient Greeks believed, is a true creator.
Construction of a double-curvature shell-slab for a metallurgical plant workshop in the city of Vyksa, Nizhny Novgorod region. 1897
The equipment of the water towers included a steam piston pump. Especially for him, Shukhov developed an original transportable design of a samovar-type boiler. Vladimir Grigorievich said that it is no coincidence that the boiler looks like a samovar: “My wife complained at the dacha that the samovar did not boil for a long time. I had to make her a samovar with boiling pipes. This is what became the prototype of the vertical boiler.” It is now called steam pipe.
The construction of many water towers was also required by the development of the railway network. In 1892, Shukhov built his first railway bridges. Subsequently, he designed several types of bridges with spans from 25 to 100 m. Based on these standard solutions, under his leadership, 417 bridges were built across the Oka, Volga, Yenisei and other rivers. Almost all of them are still standing.
Openwork masts designed by Shukhov to accommodate rangefinder posts made warships less noticeable. Russian battleship "Emperor Paul I" (1912).
NEITHER HERE OR HERE
We also owe Shukhov a modern water supply system. Especially for her, he designed a new water-tube boiler, which began to be mass-produced in 1896. Using his own experience in the construction of oil tanks and pipelines and using new modifications of his pumps, he laid a water supply system in Tambov. Based on extensive geological research, Shukhov and his colleagues drew up a new water supply project for Moscow over three years.
For the Moscow Main Post Office, built in 1912, Shukhov designed the glass covering of the operating room. Especially for him, he invented a flat horizontal truss, which became the prototype of spatial structures made of seamless pipes, which were widely used in construction several decades later.
Construction of the Bryansk (now Kyiv) station. Architect I. I. Rerberg, engineer V. G. Shukhov.
The last significant work performed by Shukhov before the revolution was the landing stage of the Kyiv (then Bryansk) station in Moscow (1912-1917, span width - 48 m, height - 30 m, length - 230 m). Shukhov used an exclusively rational installation technique, which was proposed to be the basis of all station coverings. The project, alas, was not destined to come true: the war began.
Shukhov hated war. “I consider it necessary to make a significant reservation about love for the motherland,” he wrote. — Christian morality, according to which the peoples of Europe were raised, does not allow the extermination of other peoples for the sake of love for their homeland. War, after all, is a manifestation of the brutal nature of people who have not achieved the ability to resolve the issue peacefully. No matter how victorious the war may be, the fatherland always loses from it.”
But he still had to participate in the war. Shukhov could not stand aside either as an engineer or as a patriot. “One of the main tasks at the beginning of the First World War was the design and construction of boatports - large ships intended to serve as gates to docks where damaged ships were repaired,” says Elena Shukhova. — The design turned out to be successful. The next order was the construction of floating mines. And this problem was quickly solved. He developed light mobile platforms where guns for accurate and long-range shooting were installed. For them there were no points in space that were invincible.”
The war ended, but 1917 broke out. Bari emigrated to America. Shukhov resolutely rejected numerous invitations to leave for the USA or Europe. In 1919, he wrote in his diary: “We must work regardless of politics. Towers, boilers, rafters are needed, and we will be needed.”
Advertisement for boilers designed by V. G. Shukhov, 1895.
Meanwhile, the company and the plant were nationalized, the family was evicted from the mansion on Smolensky Boulevard. I had to move to a cramped office on Krivokolenny Lane. Shukhov, who was already over sixty, found himself in a completely new situation. The Bari construction office was transformed into the Stalmost organization (currently it is the research design institute Central Research Institute Proektstalkonstruktsiya). The Bari Steam Boiler Plant was renamed “Parostroy” (now its territory and the surviving structures of Shukhov are part of). Shukhov was appointed their director.
Shukhov’s son Sergei recalled: “My father lived hard under Soviet rule. He was an opponent of autocracy and did not put up with it during the Stalinist era, which he foresaw long before it began. I didn’t know Lenin closely, but I had no love for him. He told me more than once: “Understand that everything we do is not needed by anyone or anything. Our actions are controlled by ignorant people with red books, pursuing unclear goals.” Several times my father was on the brink of destruction.”
V. G. Shukhov’s installation for thermal cracking of oil, 1931
“SHOOT CONDITIONALLY”
The Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense decided: "to establish, as an extremely urgent matter, a radio station in Moscow, equipped with instruments and machines with sufficient power to ensure reliable and constant communication between the center of the republic and foreign countries and the outskirts of the republic." Poor radio communications could cost the young Soviet republic defeat in the war, and Lenin understood this well. Initially, it was planned to build five radio towers: three with a height of 350 m and two with a height of 275. But there was no money for them, the five towers turned into one, a place was allocated for it on Shabolovskaya Street and “cut down” to 160 m.
An accident occurred during the construction of the radio tower. Shukhov wrote in his diary: “June 29, 1921. When lifting the fourth section, the third broke. The fourth fell and damaged the second and first.” It was only by luck that no people were injured. Summons to the GPU, long interrogations immediately followed, and Shukhov was sentenced to “conditional execution.” The only thing that saved us from a real bullet was the fact that there was no other engineer in the country capable of continuing such large-scale construction. But the tower had to be built at any cost.
As the commission subsequently established, Shukhov was not at all to blame for the accident: from an engineering point of view, the design was impeccable. The tower almost collapsed on the heads of the builders only because of the constant savings on materials. Shukhov warned about such a danger more than once, but no one listened to him. Entries in his diaries: “August 30. There is no iron, and a design for the tower cannot yet be drawn up.” “September 26. I sent projects of towers 175, 200, 225, 250, 275, 300, 325 and 350 m to the GORP board. When writing: two drawings in pencil, five drawings on tracing paper, four calculations of networks, four calculations of towers..." "October 1. There is no iron”...
“To erect a structure of such unique scale and bold design in a country with a undermined economy and a destroyed economy, with a population demoralized by hunger and devastation, and only recently ended by the Civil War, was a real organizational feat,” says Elena Shukhova.
Everything had to start again. And the tower was built. It became a further modification of the mesh hyperboloid structures and consisted of six blocks of the appropriate shape. This type of construction made it possible to construct the tower using an original, surprisingly simple “telescopic” installation method. Inside the lower support section of the tower, elements of subsequent blocks were mounted on the ground. With the help of five simple wooden cranes, which stood on the next upper section of the tower during the construction process, the blocks were lifted one by one, gradually increasing in height. In mid-March 1922, the tower, which was later dubbed “an example of brilliant construction and the pinnacle of construction art,” was put into operation. Alexei Tolstoy, inspired by this construction, creates the novel “Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid” (1926).
Nine years later, Shukhov surpassed his first tower design by building three pairs of mesh multi-tiered hyperboloid supports for the passage of 1800 m long high-voltage power lines across the Oka River near Nizhny Novgorod with heights of 20, 69 and 128 m. And although the supports had to withstand the weight of multi-ton wires, taking into account ice freezing , their design turned out to be even lighter and more elegant. The authorities “forgave” the disgraced engineer. Shukhov became a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, received the Lenin Prize in 1929, the star of the Hero of Labor in 1932, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and then an honorary academician.
WHERE DOES THE MOTHERLAND START?
But for Shukhov this time was perhaps the most difficult. The youngest son, Vladimir, who served under Kolchak, went to prison. To free his son, Vladimir Grigorievich transferred all his patents worth 50 million in gold to the Soviet state. Vladimir was released, but he was so exhausted and exhausted that he never came to his senses and died in 1920. In the same year, his mother, Vera Kapitonovna, passed away, followed by his wife...
Work saved me. Shukhov created so many different structures that it is impossible to list them. All major construction projects of the first five-year plans are associated with his name: Magnitka and Kuznetskstroy, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, the restoration of objects destroyed during the Civil War and the first main pipelines... Few people know that it was he who designed the famous rotating stage of the Moscow Art Theater, the transparent ceilings of GUM, the State Museum of Fine Arts. . A. S. Pushkin, Petrovsky Passage, the glass dome of the Metropol... Thanks to his efforts, an architectural monument of the 15th century was preserved - the minaret of the famous madrasah in Samarkand. The tower tilted heavily after the earthquake and was in danger of falling. In 1932, a competition for projects to save the tower was announced, and Shukhov became not only the winner of the competition, but also the leader of the work to straighten the minaret using a kind of rocker. Vladimir Grigorievich himself said: “What looks beautiful is durable. The human eye is accustomed to the proportions of nature, and in nature that which is durable and purposeful survives.”
The end of the 85-year-old engineer's life was tragic. In the age of electricity, Vladimir Grigorievich died from the flame of a candle thrown over himself. I was ruined by the habit of using strong “triple” cologne after shaving, generously lubricating my face and hands with it... A third of my body was burned. He lived for five days in terrible agony, and on the sixth, February 2, 1939, he died. Relatives recalled that until the end of his days he retained his characteristic sense of humor, saying during bandages: “The academician was burned”... Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
In 1999, the famous English architect Norman Foster received the title of honorary peer and lord for the mesh ceilings of the courtyard of the British Museum. At the same time, he always openly admitted that he was inspired in his work by Shukhov’s ideas. In 2003, at the exhibition “The Best Designs and Structures in the Architecture of the 20th Century” in Munich, a gilded model of the Shukhov Tower was installed.
Elena Shukhova writes: “For all the uniqueness of his talent, Shukhov was the son of his time - that short and irretrievably gone era about which the Russian thinker said: “We are experiencing the end of the Renaissance, we are experiencing the last remnants of that era when human strength and effervescent energy were set free.” their play gave rise to beauty...? These words of N.A. Berdyaev, spoken by him in 1917, are usually associated in our minds with the Silver Age, the heyday of art, literature, and philosophical thought, but they can rightfully be attributed to the technology of that time. At that time, culture and the scientific and technical sphere of life had not yet become as tragically separated as they are today; the engineer was not a narrow specialist, blindly limited by the sphere and interests of his specialty. He was, in the full sense of the word, a “Renaissance man” who discovered a new world, possessing “symphonic”, as Shukhov defined it, thinking. Then technology seemed to be a life-building principle, it was a worldview acquisition: it seemed that it was not only a way to solve practical problems facing a person, but also a force that created spiritual values. Then it still seemed that she would save the world”...
INCOMPLETE "ABC" OF SHUKHOV'S INVENTIONS
A - familiar aircraft hangars;
B - oil barges, boat ports (huge hydraulic gates);
B - aerial cable cars, so popular in the ski resorts of Austria and Switzerland; the world's first suspended metal ceilings for workshops and stations; water towers; water pipelines in Moscow, Tambov, Kyiv, Kharkov, Voronezh;
G - gas holders (gas storage facilities);
D - blast furnaces, high-rise chimneys made of brick and metal;
F - railway bridges over the Yenisei, Oka, Volga and other rivers;
3 - dredgers;
K - steam boilers, forge shops, caissons;
M - open hearth furnaces, power transmission masts, copper foundries, overhead cranes, mines;
N - oil pumps, which made it possible to extract oil from a depth of 2-3 km, oil refineries, the world's first oil pipeline 11 km long;
P - warehouses, specially equipped ports;
R - the world's first hyperboloid radio towers;
T - tankers, pipelines;
Ш - sleeper rolling plants;
E - elevators, including “million-dollar” ones.
