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作者

Phillip Schroeder

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.49,Issue2,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Abstract This article examines the development of the Leningrad subway second line as a tool to make the diverse city space merge and shrink. While planning the Leningrad subway, architects and engineers had to consider recent and historical developments. Bringing together urban developments from the nineteenth century up to the reconstruction in the 1940s was crucial for the construction of this urban infrastructure and the city space. The blue line, which opened in 1961, cuts through the city on a straight line. During the planning and construction process, city planners considered various routes and developments to bring together rather different parts of Leningrad and make the city grow into one urban space. Whereas the perception of city spaces is mostly connected to its surface, the subterranean structures play a crucial role to understand not just the development of the city space itself but also its current perception. Introduction—From Schemes to History In 2017, a Russian blogger published a new, rather satiric map of the Saint Petersburg metro (Figure 1). Throughout the years, the scheme was shared and posted on various social networks. When taking a first glance at the scheme, it seems to not really differ from the official displays shown in metro cars, stations, or around the city. Figure 1. Associative metro scheme of the Saint Petersburg metro, by apocalypself. But a closer look reveals that the author connected all the stations to certain places in the station vicinity on the surface of the city. By redrawing the map according to an infrastructural system, the blogger changed the purpose of its visual representation—a purely horizontal perspective became interconnected with a vertical1 view combining metro lines, subterranean stations as dots, and the city surface. Although this scheme with red, blue, green, yellow, and purple lines is well known within the city, the new map pictures a different Saint Petersburg by adding information and altering the principles of cartography.2 It may serve as an example to show the importance of maps for the perception of space on one hand and, on the other hand, how not only maps but also infrastructures (depicted by them) may affect mental maps.3 The scheme shows that the subway system is more than a purely utilitarian mean of transportation within the everyday life of the Saint Petersburg commuter. While buildings on the surface dominate our understanding of urban spaces, underground structures are mainly perceived as a familiar transit space or they are not even considered in our understanding of the city.4 The visual representation in case of a subway is limited to schemes.5 Such a transit space is usually utilitarian—we do not question it, but use it.6 Commuters or tourists tend not to question schemes; they learned how to read them and do not scrutinize their simplifications. There is no reason to question the graphical representation of urban infrastructures in everyday life: it has to be simple and understandable.7 It has to illustrate the important things—how to navigate through a metropolis and how to reach your desired destination. “The shape [of the map] is subordinated to its function,”8 as Karl Schlögel describes it. For example, when arriving at the airport, the important points of the infrastructure of Saint Petersburg are therefore the metro station Moskovskaia and the desired destination—such as the station Nevskii prospekt because of its likely spatial proximity to the tourist’s hotel. Consequently, the surface of the city and its underground tend to exist disconnected from each other.9 Yet, the author of this map (Figure 1) demonstrates that it is possible to show their interconnections and to tie these spaces together. Maps are not just crucial for our perception of space, but may also be seen as sources to understand space and its long-term development. Maps were used to plan districts, or the routes crossing these and therefore offer valuable clues when trying to understand the space they belong to. In this essay, I am examining where the linear journey of the second (blue) metro line is taking the passengers, and what the metro and its map are hiding from the tourist or everyday commuter during their rides.10 If we focus on the second (blue) metro line in particular, it enables us to understand the development of the city space and the author’s intention, when he wrote Stalinki (buildings from the Stalin era) to describe the station Park Pobedy, or when he placed the drawing of a UFO (unidentified flying object) immediately next to the station Gor’kovskaia (Figure 1).11 The blue line is the one determining eye-catcher cutting through the city from north to south, connecting its very ends. One could think that riding this line, without any twists and turns, makes passenger travel through present-day Saint Petersburg fast and comfortable. A micro-history of the Leningrad/Saint Petersburg metro shows the deep entanglements of maps, infrastructure, parts of the city, urban planning, and the development of the whole city throughout historical turning points. Finally, there is the question to how the subway system became a factor for urban change on one hand and to what extent Leningrad has been a contested city within the ideological framework of the Soviet Union and especially concerning Moscow’s leading role within the Soviet system on the other hand.12 I am therefore investigating the history of this blue line by placing it into a broader context. The article aims to bring together the history of infrastructure, its planning processes, and the city scape13 and to explain the entanglements of the underground infrastructure with the surface of the city. I argue that especially the blue line became a connecting mean, bringing together very different parts of Saint Petersburg, making the city space shrink and connecting the Petrine city center with eighteenth-century living quarters and finally reaching out to the “peripheral” socialist Leningrad. It became part of the “Urban Order.”14 Planning this infrastructural system, as I will show, was strongly connected to competing imaginations of the city space and ideas about how it should develop.15 Building the second metro line contributed making the city accessible and “legible,”16 adding one more mode of transportation.17 Showing this is achieved with the help of historical maps and explanatory texts as well as interpretations connected to them which were made during the different planning processes. Present-day subway maps guide the traveler through a vibrant city space in the eclectic architectural diversity of Saint Petersburg. First Maps, First Plans In 1925, Lev Aleksandrovich Il’in (1880-1942) became the first chief architect of Leningrad and remained in this position until 1938.18 The late 1920s show a growing interest in the development of Leningrad’s urban space. The chief architect Il’in and his planners started working on a scheme to depict all districts of Leningrad and ordered the first aerial photographs of the city to better understand its shape.19 Until 1933, Il’in’s planners published a number of first drafts for the reconstruction of various districts and the city on the basis of these photographs and the earlier district schemes.20 Until 1935, they finalized a first reconstruction plan for the whole city. Although this plan was rejected by Moscow officials in the same year,21 Il’in delivered a detailed report about the workings of the city space in the 1930s, including an outline of the main transportation hubs and main transportation lines. His map, showing this mobility and transportation situation in Leningrad, may have also referred to possible future locations of metro stations, since one of the routes already mentioned was quite similar to the blue line, which was built later. Besides, a subway had been discussed in Saint Petersburg since the late nineteenth century and the idea was revisited by city planners during the late 1920s.22 Due to the rejection of Il’in’s development plan, he and his planners had to quickly draft a new sketch without any further details. When the development focus shifted to the southern parts of the city, a subway disappeared from the city planners’ sight for some time. Although this first plan was rejected, Il’in’s schemes and photographs kept influencing city planners’ decisions for the upcoming years. While Leningrad planners had problems to enforce their visions for first general plans, the Moscow metro was built and opened during the 1930s. It not only became a part of urban planning, but furthermore a particular space within the urban space addressing political visions. Soviet metro construction had to embrace the practical use of this infrastructural system within the city space and to plan and organize a new ideological space when building the underground stations.23 Finally, 1938 may be seen as the year of birth of the Leningrad metro, but just as the general plans beforehand, it became a field of negotiations with Moscow institutes and officials—especially about how it should address political visions through station design. The integration of a metro system within the Leningrad urban space, which got reimagined during this years, became another concern.24 After some initial discussions in Leningrad, Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin (1904-1980), head of the city executive committee, asked the central committee in Moscow for permission to construct a subway system.25 Although Moscow politicians supported Kosygin’s ideas in principle, Leningraders had to hand over their plans to Metrostroi, the planning institute of the Moscow subway. After handing over their first outlines, nothing else happened. Illarion Davidovich Gotsiridze (1897-1968) and his Metrostroi planners did probably not even touch the Leningrad subway plans until 1941, when suddenly, on January 21 (after some further conferences and additional letters to Moscow), the ministry for transportation issued a directive “concerning the construction of a metro in Leningrad.”26 It included an inaccurate and incorrect route plan, which was probably copied from an earlier project proposal written by planners from the Department for Architecture and Planning in Leningrad (APO—Arkhitekturno-planirovochnyi otdel) or the Leningrad Institute for Municipal Economy (LNIIKKh—Leningradskii nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut kommunal’nogo choziaistva).27 The central committee, namely, the minister for transportation Lazar’ Moiseevich Kaganovich (1893-1991), supported this decision with a resolution 126-54ss, asking Gotsiridze to “immediately begin working on the implementation of the new plans.”28 For this very first planning step, Moscow institutes and officials to some extent usurped the first initiatives from Leningrad. However, with the advance of the German army, all plans to construct a metro in Leningrad were halted. Finally, in 1944, after the devastating impacts of the Second World War, the new chief architect of the city, Nikolai Varfolomeevich Baranov (1909-1989), declared the construction of the Leningrad metro to be a central part of the broader reconstruction plans for the city and emphatically demanded to construct “own stations”29 altering the Moscow experience in subway construction.30 In 1946, planning institutes in Moscow and Leningrad transformed the Upravlenie stroitel’stvom No. 5 into the Lenmetrostroi and established the Len-metroproject.31 Although Leningrad now had its own subway construction institutes, negotiating the Northern capitals subway with central planning institutes proceeded. During this process, an own Leningrad style of metro construction was established.32 Finally, in November 1955, the first (red) line was opened just in time to celebrate the thirty-eighth anniversary of the October Revolution. It connected the city center with Leningrad’s large living quarters and factories in the southwestern periphery and linked the terminus rail stations with one another.33 From Petersburg to Leningrad—Or from Leningrad to Petersburg During the construction of the first line, city architects and planning institutes had started working on the network’s extension. From 1952 onward and after consultation with the city executive committee, the APO under the supervision of the third chief architect of Leningrad Valentin Aleksandrovich Kamenskii (1907-1975) started to deliberate on further developments in cooperation with the Len-project34 and the Len-metroproject. Despite the integration of the development of the subway into the new 1955 development plan, planning institutes also referred to preliminary work of Kamenskii’s predecessor Baranov. During the construction of the first metro line, the executive committee repeatedly underlined its relevance and Kamenskii stressed the importance of a rapid development of the subway network because of the insufficient capacities of trams making the local traffic “narrowly working.”35 Given that busses and trolleybuses were not suitable as a remedy, the development of a larger and well-functioning metro system was consequently considered as being indispensable to support the ongoing growth of Leningrad. In late 1952, the city executive committee and the planning institutes started to discuss sketches for route plans of the second metro line and proposed the Moskovsko-Petrogradskoe-route to complement the first line. Terminal stops of this line were supposed to be the stations Ėlektrosila in the south and Ploshchad’ L’va Tolstogo in the north, while the station Tekhnologicheskii institut in the city center was planned to be the first cross-platform interchange station. Already during the construction of the first metro line, Aleksei Kosygin stated that he wanted the metro to very soon handle 30 percent of the passenger volume, whereas Kamenskii later adjusted this percentage, following his consideration of the records from the first line in operation. In his view, the subway should be able to handle 19 percent of the overall commuter traffic until 1965.36 One important factor for the extensions of the network were efforts in the construction of new residential areas during the postwar reconstruction of the city. Because of the rapid construction of residential buildings in the southern parts of the city along Moskovskii Prospekt, city architects anticipated a growing need of mobility on a north-south axis.37 Thus, after examining the density of public transportation in separate parts of the city, the APO together with the Len-project team supported the demands of the executive committee. During the 1940s and 1950s, planners repeatedly gave out special tickets in busses and trams, which commuters and passengers had to either return or throw into special containers when leaving means of public transportation. Based on this information, planners got an idea about commuter flows and necessary interconnections between different parts of the city. Furthermore, they used a rather “speculative” factor in the planning process: their development plans. On the basis of proposed future living quarters, industrial zones, and recreation areas, the planners tried to determine the future movement patterns and required routes within the city space.38 Incorporating the future vision and prospective city space was another important part of planning the urban transportation system. In addition, Baranov and Kamenskii referred to some ideas of their predecessor Il’in. Considering his pre-1935 sketches for urban development, they pointed out the need to connect “old” and “new” parts of the city to make workplaces, cultural and educational institutions, and recreation areas accessible for all citizens.39 Considering these prewar plans, the architects also show their understanding of the city space and how it should develop—the ensemble of Saint Petersburg had to shrink and receive linkages. Although the city center had a high number of trams and busses, historical districts such as Vasil’evskii Island and Petrogradskii District lacked public transportation. Both had experienced extensive growth of population and hence an increase in housing construction during the late nineteenth century.40 This deficit in historical parts of Leningrad was exacerbated by a lack of means of transportation within the urban districts under construction. Just as the executive committee, the planning institutes outlined the importance of urban mobility, namely, the extension of the subway system: The implementation of a new, absolutely reliable transportation system will have a huge impact on the growth of mobility. The metro will establish a link between the southern, south-western, western, north-western and partly northern districts of Leningrad and the city center and furthermore between themselves.41 This quotation from documents of the Len-project shows that the subway was anticipated to integrate the peripheral districts of the city into the larger structure of the whole city and was meant to establish a fast link to connect new districts with the city center. While the metro functioned as an elementary instrument to overcome spatial separation within Leningrad,42 the infrastructure development to interconnect districts with each other had to take a back seat. Since metro lines were meant to forge diametral and radial links, they resolved the existing problem of spatial segregation between peripheral districts and the city center. This, however, did not concern interconnections between peripheral districts or movements within the city center itself, as we will see later. Planners attached new or evolving districts to subway stations and created transportation hubs around this new infrastructure system. Hence, the subway became an elementary part of the city planning strategy and consequently of envisioning the future Leningrad. Although the new transportation infrastructure was meant to overcome spatial differences and establish some kind of spatial proximity all over the city, it led to further micro-planning around the upcoming routes—stations had to become accessible in the first place and develop into transportation hubs within their districts or “micro-districts.”43 Thus, city planners created a new hierarchy within the city space, attaching it to the accessibility of the new main transportation infrastructure. Furthermore, the quotation clearly reveals the exposed importance of the historical Saint Petersburg around Nevskii Prospekt as the center for a socialist Leningrad. The specific alignment and layout of the lines show that the region around Nevskii Prospekt was meant to be a transit space and melting pot.44 Baranov and Kamenskii used the metro to relocate the biggest part of the transit traffic to the underground. Heading South—Integrating the Socialist Leningrad The route of the second metro line in Leningrad is nowadays represented on maps by the blue line already mentioned. The lower half of this route was built to tie the new living quarters around Moskovskii Prospekt to the rest of the city and resulted from the idea for the construction of large housing blocks around this particular street, which came up during the 1930s. Lev Il’in was instructed to shift focus from the “old imperial” Saint Petersburg and to reconstruct it in the southern periphery (Figure 2). Figure 2. Revised general development plan from October 1935. These visions came from Moscow and comprised a “new socialist” Leningrad, which had to somehow be detached from the old imperial city. For Moscow city planners, Nevskii Prospekt and the historical core of the city represented Russia’s imperial era and the evolving capitalist system. Leningrad had to be reconstructed accordingly, the region around Nevskii Prospekt had to become a peripheral district and some kind of museum displaying the tsarist past. By rejecting Il’in’s plans, Moscow planners showed how “professional interests . . . met ideological objectives.”45 Leningrad architects had to subordinate their plans to ideological ideas about the socialist city, and although Baranov reworked these plans after the Second World War to focus on the actual needs of the existing city, some tendencies remained.46 Baranov and Kamenskii still opted for the construction of living quarters in the southern periphery because of the sheer necessity of residential space in the postwar period.47 At the same time, Baranov shifted the development focus back to the historical city center and returned to Il’in’s ideas of micro-districts around it. One special project was the construction of seaside areas on the northwestern islands in the river mouth. Despite Baranov’s rather different plan for the postwar reconstruction of Leningrad, development tendencies around Moskovskii Prospekt remained, but the new socialist center was never realized.48 Instead, the southern center grew into a local transportation hub around the House of Soviets (Dom Sovetov) and became a smaller peripheral co-center.49 This new development focus shows that the city architects were able to enforce their ideas of the city space after World War II. The infrastructure became a connecting mean to negotiate needs and establish links. Although the route for the second metro line had already received a name and been given main directions, the planning process continued until 1955. Because of the recent housing construction, the Len-metroproject group under supervision of Sergei Sergeevich Kazantsev suggested to extend the southern part of the route and use Moskovskii Victory Park (Moskovskii park Pobedy) as a terminal station.50 The park was rebuilt as a memorial and recreational area during the reconstruction in the mid-1940s, when the former chief architect Baranov was thinking about the greening of the city. Baranov designed a sports complex and living quarters directly adjacent to this recreation zone. By connecting this area to the city center and other districts, architects revealed another shift in their policies for the development of their vision of a socialist Leningrad and its urban infrastructure: one of the results, while searching for a socialist city design, was to use public transportation to equalize journeys through cities and to eliminate “spatiotemporal restraints.”51 Whereas Soviet city planners were always concerned with making city spaces equal and everything accessible, public transportation dealt mostly with getting the masses from their housing blocks to plants or industrial areas.52 Baranov and Kamenskii now started to not only consider the journey to work, but addressed the so-called “blagoustroistvo”—that means, among other things, recreation, that is, culture and sports.53 In addition, the subway followed an underground route of Moskovskii Prospekt, which was the main route to Leningrad for travelers coming from Moscow. It became heavily populated because of the aforementioned housing construction during the 1940s, wherefore most inhabitants of the Moskovskii District had to commute to the industrial areas around Ėlektrosila (a production site for power machines), to the old-established factory Skorokhod, or they had to change at the station Tekhnologicheskii institut to get to the Kirov Plant via the red line. Apart from making workplaces and the city center accessible, the blue line was supposed to provide access to the railway stations. By establishing a connection to the railway system, the subway also had potential to relieve pressure from the railway routes, which were used heavily by people living outside the city or by Dacha-commuters on the weekends.54 To roughly determine the locations of prospective stations, planners used “research and simple observations,”55 an expression used in 1956 by Len-project, before Len-metroproject started to determine the exact locations for the stations in another planning phase. The most important ones were Tekhnologicheskii institut as the main (and first) cross-platform station and the station Ėlektrosila at the factory of the same name. Between them, the stations Frunzenskaia and Moskovskie vorota were built. Frunzenskaia was located adjacent to a department store, while Moskovskie vorota served as a connecting point for the factory Skorokhod. Another station was planned at Sennaia Square (Sennaia ploshchad’) as the terminal point of the Moskovskii Prospekt leading to the city center. Furthermore, this square was a prerevolutionary hub at the border of the “narrow city center”56 with marketplaces and connecting roads between Nevskii and Moskovskii Prospekts. It was therefore intended to serve as another hub near the center and the famous Oktiabr’skii market (Oktiabr’skii rynok).57 As already mentioned, aftereffects from the 1930s development plans and the construction of residential blocks generated new commuter flows near the House of Soviets and made the area in front of the building a transportation hub. In Il’in’s reconstruction plans, this colossal building was meant to become the actual new city center (Figure 2).58 Though, Baranov marginalized the building when reconstructing the city in the 1940s and it became rather peripheral than central. But still, the Moskovskaia Square (Moskovskaia ploshchad’) in front of it turned into an assembly point for other means of public transportation, the connecting square became a meeting place for air passengers arriving from Pulkovo Airport (until 1973 named Airport Shosseinaia), and the area gained importance for the southern districts of the city. Due to this development, Kamenskii and Kazantsev were rethinking the design for the Moscow district transportation hub and decided to extend the blue line to the station Moskovskaia, which opened in 1969.59 The new metro route created an underground copy of Moskovskii Prospekt. Railway tracks were meant to be limiting boundaries for the development of the Moskovskii District in the East and West, while the avenue (where a huge number of construction projects were concentrated) became the central part of it.60 Basically, the planning process for the second line in the southern parts of the city followed two historical developments: this line had to integrate “socialist Leningrad,” which was planned and to be constructed during the 1930s, and had some serious impacts despite its rejection in the postwar period. Furthermore, it was intended to solve historical problems, which had intensified during the construction of the Moskovskii District. It duplicated one of the main routes to the city center, leading to Sennaia Square since Saint Petersburg’s early days. Planning this southern part, or first uchastok (section, segment), as planners called it, made the lower part of the blue line appear. Since the linear avenue above the tunnels stood model for the construction of its subterranean counterpart, metro tunnels and stations were indeed constructed almost on a line between Moskovskaia and Sennaia Square. Whereas Moskovskii Prospekt offered the possibility to travel along the Pulkovo meridian61 on the city surface from its very periphery to its center, the metro accelerated this journey and made parts of the district surface along the avenue disappear for travelers and tourists. Only the formative House of Soviets at the station Moskovskaia as the dominating building near the southern transport hub in the south, the busy Sennaia Square at the end of the avenue, and the Moskovskii Victory Park, where you can nowadays find the main building of the Russian National Library, remain notable points of the surface of Leningrad/Saint Petersburg. Heading North The debate about an extension of the blue line to the north dragged on for some time—Kamenskii and his architects demonstrated their ideas in the city development plan of 1955. Stations were located at Ploshchad’ Mira (today Sennaia Square),62 Nevskii prospekt and at the Marsovo pole (Field of Mars) to make the historical city center accessible. Coming from a prospective station at the Field of Mars, the planners envisioned a tunnel crossing the river Neva, linking Petrogradskii Island to the southern bank of the river, and mitigating the disruptive effect of the river. Doing so, they addressed a prerevolutionary problem of Saint Petersburg and tried to attach the Northern parts of the city to the center. Although this planned development was suitable for the linear blue line, first plans envisaged to proceed with tunnel and station constructions toward another recreation area in the northwestern parts of Leningrad. The second metro line was initially supposed to terminate at the SM (Sergei Mironovich) Kirov Stadium and the SM Kirov central park for culture and recreation (Tsentralnyi park kul’tury i otdykha—CPKiO). Furthermore, planners thought about splitting the line, with another route heading to Vasil’evskii Island.63 The northern districts became a more relevant part of the city development plans in the postwar time, when Baranov was heavily revising the projects of a socialist Leningrad in the southern periphery. His idea was to use the northern islands in the river mouth as a huge recreational zone, with the Kirov Stadium and Primorskii Victory Park (Primorskii park Pobedy) as its central parts, envisioning a maritime Leningrad, growing along “the banks of the river Neva around the maritime Kremlin of the country—the Peter and Paul Fortress.”64 Concurrently, Vasil’evskii Island was to become an even bigger residential district with further plans for the construction of living space in its western parts toward the region of today’s cruise ship terminal. Apart from the northern islands, Baranov also thought about the development of the districts upward from the Great Nevka (Bol’shaia Nevka) river as a long-term reserve for eventual residential areas.65 Kamenskii and Kazantsev used this urban development as a reason to shift the focus of urban transportation. The second uchastok (section, segment) of the second metro line was planned to be constructed from the mid-1960s on and to connect the southern districts already accessible with another recreation area via the city center.66 The transfer station Tekhnologicheskii institut linked the biggest living quarters and the most important factories and working spaces with the second line and therefore gave commuters the opportunity to travel from their homes to work and for leisure to parks, stadiums, and the city center with its cultural and educational institutions. Another part of the communist ideology and the socialist idea of city planning was taken into account: the first priority was to connect the working masses with their working places—this was the task of the first metro line. The second metro line took now care of recreational, educational, cultural, and sportive activities for the working people. Simultaneously, it addressed Baranov’s plan for a maritime Leningrad, developing along the waterfront. Although city planners could not fully implement their ideas (especially concerning transportation), Baranov and his successor Kamenksii were still able to construct parks and sports complexes. The infrastructural utilization of these recreation zones was only realized during the 1990s and the construction of the fourth and fifth metro lines, since other developments had seemed to be more important until that time.67 Just recently, the new Gazprom Arena, which replaced the Kirov Stadium in 2017, received special attention because of the FIFA World Cup 2018.68 After the city development plan of 1955 was issued, the city executive committee asked Kazantsev to work on a draft for a development plan of the Leningrad metro for the next ten years. In its written order, the executive committee put forward an idea for the metro development in the next years and even gave it to a local newspaper.69 It voted for a continuation of the first line and the already planned southern part of the second line. The plan was not to cross the river Neva a second time, but its distributary, the Great Nevka. Their version envisaged a tunnel between a station in the center of Petrogradskii Island and the terminal station of the first line at the Finland railway station. As far as the southern part of the second line was concerned, the order from the executive committee was identical with the city development plans by Kamenskii and Kazantsev: solely the city center was planned to be connected in a different way. While both projects included a 6.6 km long segment heading from the station Tekhnologicheskii institut south to Moskovskii Victory Park, the city committee (and a first draft from the Len-metroproject) wanted the second line to continue and terminate in the historical city center and not to cross the Neva river at all. The terminal station in this plan was the Ulitsa Zheliabova near Nevskii Prospekt.70 City planners had to implement two concepts: one related to blagoustroistvo and the other one still focused on getting projects completed quickly and bringing the people to work. In the course of the extensive construction of housing in the northern parts of the city, the APO, Len-project and Len-metroproject quickly rejected the first draft on the extension of the first line to Petrogradskii Island.71 For this line, they had already planned another extension to the area around the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (Leningradskii politekhnicheskii institut) in the northeastern parts of the city and they tried to adhere to their prospective routes from the general development plan of 1955. Thus, a north-south axis had to be added to the second line, cutting through the city from the southern House of Soviets at Moskovskii Prospekt via Nevskii Prospekt in the city center and to proceed to the peripheries north of the Great Nevka. Finally, the planning institutes revised this plan to some extent. They decided not to construct the stations near the northwestern Primorskii Victory Park and the SM Kirov Stadium, to make the line even more direct, and to consider the potential construction of housing blocks north of Petrogradskii Island.72 Kamenskii was forced to negotiate demands from the city executive committee as well as proposals from the planners for the prospective development of Leningrad and he therefore had to refrain from his idea of making recreation areas accessible. Due to the continued growth of Leningrad’s population and the city committee’s policies, the creation of living space became a top priority.73 Connecting Old and New? In 1958, the executive committee and the ministry of transportation approved the metro development plan.74 In 1959, the first tunnel works around the future station Ėlektrosila started and Lenmetrostroi was able to construct the first section of the second line until 1961. The second segment, cutting through the city center heading to Petrogradskii Island, was opened in 1963, even prior to the deadline.75 During the ongoing construction of these segments, the head engineer of the Leningrad metro, Viktor Semënovich Sorokin again underlined the “construction of the metro lines in blocks.”76 Sorokin emphasized that the lines existed separately from each other, with intersections only in the city center. Diametral or radial lines were supposed to cut through the city, connecting peripheral districts like the Kirovskii and Moskovskii Districts, both in the southern part of the city, or Vyborgskii and Petrogradskii in the north via the station Tekhnologicheskii institut in the city center. Since planners only defined the location of the terminal stations of the new line at the beginning of the planning process, they now encountered difficulties in integrating vestibules and entrance buildings into the densely built-up urban center. During the planning process, the APO had to discuss various possibilities to extend the network around Nevskii Prospekt. Especially narrow streets and spatial constrictions because of existing constructions led to difficulties. Although architects had envisioned two stations (Nevskii prospekt and Marsovo pole), only one was realized. Planning processes within the periphery in the southern parts of the city had been rather simple: either architects integrated stations during the planning processes, or they came upon quite large and open territories, which made it possible to easily integrate new constructions. However, in the city center, they met with building, zoning, and architectural restrictions. After reconsidering commuter flows, the APO and Len-metroproject decided to construct only one station on the main street of the city center,77 but had to still find a suitable location for vestibules and entrances. Hence, the architects V. P. Shuvalova, Aleksandr Kuz’mich Andreev (1913-2001), and Aron Solomonovich Getskin (1917-1994) decided to build underground vestibules to avoid the demolition of any existing buildings.78 While entrances to the stations were crucial, architects had to discuss the possibilities around Nevskii Prospekt. One of the earlier names for the project was Gostinyi dvor and it aimed at integrating the vestibule into the department store Great Gostiny Dvor (Bol’shoi Gostinyj Dvor).79 Furthermore, there were projects named Plekhanov Square (Ploschchad’ Plekhanova, today Kazanskaia ploshchad’) and Ulitsa Zheliabova (today Bol’shaia koniushennaia ulitsa). Plekhanov Square is located immediately in front of the Kazan’ Cathedral, one of the central points on Nevskii Prospekt directly opposite of the Zinger building and next to the Griboedov channel. Building a vestibule in this location was not just challenging due to the channel’s position directly beside the underground constructions, but also problematic, as a new infrastructural building blocked the view of two historical sights—Kazan’ Cathedral and the Zinger building.80 The Ulitsa Zheliabova option was finally declined because of the narrow streets and surrounding buildings. For entrances and vestibules, architects encountered another, rather new problem. Whereas the first line came with distinctive entrance buildings designed to be palaces for the working people,81 the architecture of the second line became simpler, mostly to be cost-efficient during the construction. With this trend, architects responded to the famous directive of the central committee, initiated by the new first secretary Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) and titled “About the abolition of debaucheries in planning and architecture,”82 which demanded architecture to become more functional and standardized. Planning the architecture for station pavilions and the station halls may be seen as the most noticeable shift in planning practices of this urban infrastructure after the Stalin era.83 Getskin and Shuvalova, influential architects from Len-metroproject, designed a tipovoi proekt (model project) for the entrance pavilions of the subway stations.84 They had to be simple and functional and much smaller compared with the entrance “palaces” of the first line. Still, their integration was not possible everywhere in the city. In case of the station Nevskii prospekt, planners wanted the historical avenue to remain untouched and not to be transformed by “new” Soviet architecture buildings.85 This view shows again the perception of different districts as either historical or as Soviet areas. Whereas, until the Second World War, the historical part was meant to be reconstructed, planners now started to protect it even from smaller changes through subway pavilions. Since entrance buildings are the only visible parts of the subway on the city surface, they establish a connection between the blue dots on the map and the actual infrastructure system itself. One important exception was the station Ploshchad’ Mira. During an anti-religious campaign in 1961, the Saviour Church on Sennaia Square (Tserkov’ Spasa na Sennoi) was destroyed to make place for a metro pavilion. This pavilion, designed by Getskin and Shuvalova, had to dominate the new design of the square and was therefore of exceptional importance.86 Another challenge was the station Petrogradskaia (during the planning process named Ploshchad L’va Tolstogo), which was to be located near the central square of the historical Petrogradskii District, which is dominated by nineteenth-century buildings. It had become one of the most important residential areas during the late nineteenth century and regained this position during the 1920s.87 The executing architects Iaroslava Evgen’evna Moskalenko (1925-2014) and Aleksandr Andreev had to deal with high building density similar to the one found on Nevskii Prospekt. Again, architects had to find a way to construct entrances and vestibules without damaging the existing surface and historical constructions. Moskalenko and Andreev therefore decided to integrate the vestibule for the station Petrogradskaia into the House of Fashion (Dom Mod) immediately next to the Lev Tolstoi Square (Ploshchad’ L’va Tolstogo).88 The further extension of the metro line to the north addressed one major problem of the city development since its early days: passing the river Neva. With the construction of the station Gor’kovskaia, planners accomplished the solution for this problem and connected the two parts of the city with an underground transportation network, which did not depend on lifting bridges or the river Neva at all. The station Gor’kovskaia can be found immediately next to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the north bank of the river and became the only station of the second line in a historical district, which was constructed with an entrance building.89 Peter the Great had founded the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1703, laying the foundation for his future capital.90 In the 1950s and 1960s, the region around the fortress consisted of living quarters and the zoological garden as the southernmost part of the Petrogradskaia storona. Extending the blue line to this historical district dealt with the problems caused by the separating river, interconnected the living quarters of the Petrogradskii District with other parts of the city, and provided the option to further develop residential districts on the northern bank of the Great Nevka river. Conclusion The journey from station Moskovskaia to Petrogradskaia in a metro car takes around thirty minutes. Going on foot would take the traveler around three hours. While a subway passenger navigates through a planished city space with maps or schemes during a metro ride in monotonous tunnels without any views, the pedestrian is able to notice that the blue line—as it is visualized on the metro scheme—is cutting through a multifaceted city space. Moskovskaia, Nevskii, and Petrogradskaia are connected by dark tunnels and the blue express trains make it easy to travel to the stations on the map. Still, the perception of space is strongly connected to the map itself and the surroundings of the metro stations. During the planning phase of this infrastructural network, planners had to consult existing maps and draw new ones to incorporate the proposed system. To understand the space connected to a blue line and furthermore the entire urban space, it is necessary to return to these maps, bring them together, read them, understand them, and connect them to the explanatory texts91 from the development plans or letters. The blue metro line in Saint Petersburg makes it possible to take a ride from the northern center of the city, to its southern periphery—or vice versa. It made factories and train stations accessible by connecting them to the first, red metro line. Therefore, it was addressing prerevolutionary and recent problems of the urban development, planners became aware of during reconstruction discussions in the 1930s and 1940s. On one hand, Baranov and Kamenskii dealt with principle structural problems of the city and made the crossing of the river Neva easier. On the other hand, they integrated new residential districts in danger of becoming a detached periphery,92 and industrial districts. Furthermore, to some extent, they interconnected all of them with each other. The construction of the second line was therefore connected to historical challenges of the city, addressed contemporary problems and developments, and gives hints about architect’s visions about a future Leningrad. It was constructed to bring these different parts of the growing city together. In the current metropolis, the perception of this particular blue line, and the scheme it forms part of, demonstrates that the aim of bringing different parts of the city together was successfully achieved. The blue line literally made the urban space shrink.93 Unlike with the first subway line, planners incorporated new ideas for the movement of Soviet citizens through the city space. The objective of Lenmetrostroi and the construction of the first line had been to reorganize the journey to work. With the blue line, architects also considered leisure time and cultural activities. Designing this infrastructural system and this particular line was oriented on actual mobility issues of the growing city and was capable dealing with actual needs of its citizens. Although the subway construction in Leningrad and other Soviet cities—except the primus inter pares, Moscow—was constantly lacking behind actual plans, needs and growth of population, the planning processes, visions and ideas connected to it show that it brought benefit and partly contributed to the regimes “. . . claim of having outstanding public transport.”94 During the 1970s and 1980s, and even until the present day, the subway system has been extended further, and today, it reaches out to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era Leningrad with its distinctive housing blocks. It became an essential part of public transportation—living without it within the agglomeration of Saint Petersburg would be unbelievable today. And yet it also became an object, commuters and guests use every day without questioning it. A closer look at its history and the discussions during the development process highlights that a journey along the blue line takes its passengers through three centuries: from the beginnings of the Petrine fortress on Hare Island, the eighteenth-century living quarters in the Petrogradskii District, the imperial center of the Russian Empire around Nevskii Prospekt, and finally to the Stalinist Leningrad in the southern “periphery.” Today, the well-known metro map is shaping the perception of the city space,95 somehow narrowing it, making it connected and intertwined. In the case of Saint Petersburg, the subway map makes the dividing river Neva somehow disappear—you will find it on the map, but it does not affect you any longer. On their way to work from the southern living quarters around today’s Kupchino District, commuters may think that they have a long journey traveling up the blue line to, for example, Petrogradskaia, but they still rely on the subway making the journey rather short in comparison with a bus ride or a walking tour. Whereas spaces (and mostly urban spaces) are taken for granted, this shows that the formation of Saint Petersburg as one large metropolis is closely connected to the maps and infrastructural systems used by commuters in their everyday life. Concurrently, these planning processes, maps, and infrastructures were connected to visions of a future city space and negotiating the structure, representation, and understanding of the city. To question such matters, especially with regard to urban spaces, to question urban infrastructures, their maps, and their historical developments greatly improves our understanding of space, as is illustrated in this essay. Acknowledgments The impetus for this article came from a presentation that I gave at the conference “New Approaches in Central and East European History: The Digital and Spatial Turn,” which was organized by the University of Göttingen, Department for Medieval and Modern History and the Nordost-Institut, IKGN e.V. Lüneburg, and financed by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media of the Federal Republic of Germany (BKM) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). I would like to express my gratitude to the conference organizer Dr. Katja Wezel for supporting me and encouraging me to further develop my topic and write this article. Furthermore, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.