Cerp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) Steel Factory, Moscow

Lotte Jacobi, Sign for the Cerp i Molot(Hammer and Sickle) Steel Factory, Moscow, Russia, ca. September 27-October 3, 1932

In the early 1930s, a prime example of the new wave of industrial development in the USSR under Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan could be seen in Moscow at the Cerp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory. Lotte Jacobi noted in her Daybook that she visited the factory five times (on September 27, 29, October 1-3, 1932). She documented many facets of the facility and its surroundings in both 35mm and larger format photographs, the latter made especially for publication.  

Soviet Industrialization and Cerp i Molot

Soviet industrial strength was built on the bones of the Russian Empire’s industrialization, which began in the late nineteenth century. Up through the 1850s, the Russian Empire was largely a feudal agrarian society, with many millions of citizens still living in serfdom. It wasn’t until 1861, under the reign of Tsar Alexander II, that a series of liberal reforms led to the emancipation of the serfs, both in Russia and in the ethno-states that fell under its sphere of influence, including Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania (Kappeler 206, 218). Within decades, the emancipated serfs, referred to now simply as peasants, began a slow migration to the population centers in the empire to find jobs. Russia’s heavy industry, which had been primarily focused in the Ural Mountains, began to expand significantly in urban areas, including Moscow (303).

Lotte Jacobi, Exterior of the Cerp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) Steel Factory, exterior, Moscow, ca. September 27-October 3, 1932

Lotte Jacobi, Factory Workers with Molten Metal Pouring from a Furnace at the Cerp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) Steel Factory, Moscow, ca. September 27-October 3, 1932

In 1872, Julius Guzhon, a French industrialist, decided to take advantage of the recently laid rail lines in and around Moscow and founded what would become an integral piece of both Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet heavy industry: the Association of the Moscow Metallurgical Plant, also known as the Guzhon Plant (Murphy 330). The factory, seizing on the rapid, albeit disjointed, industrialization in Russia, as well as the newly freed peasants, quickly became a fixture in Moscow. It successfully weathered both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, though both caused trouble for Guzhon and his workers, many of whom fled back to the countryside during the Civil War that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (330). In the subsequent years, as the newly formed Soviet Union navigated Lenin, Trotsky, the New Economic Policy, and Stalin’s takeover, the number of workers rebounded from approximately 800 in September 1920 to 5,000 in 1927 (330). In 1918, the plant became nationalized, like so many during that period, and it was officially renamed Cerp i Molot, or Hammer and Sickle, the state emblem of the Soviet Union that symbolized the union of workers and farmers. 

Lotte Jacobi, Factory Workers at the Cerp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) Steel Factory, Moscow, ca. September 27-October 3, 1932

Lotte Jacobi, Female Factory Worker at the Cerp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) Steel Factory, Moscow, ca. September 27-October 3, 1932

People’s Houses and Workers’ Clubs

Developing alongside factories was a phenomenon known as narodnye doma, or People’s Houses. These were places where workers and their families were given the “opportunity to socialize, attend lectures, read and…improve themselves” (Siegelbaum 79).  The 1905 Revolution gave activists in the young trade union movement the chance to build on these People’s Houses and grow them into educational and cultural societies (79). These societies became the underpinnings of workers’ clubs, standalone social clubs whose members were associated with specific factories or unions. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many such clubs began to take over old monasteries, a sign of the expectation of atheism from the Communist Party.

Lotte Jacobi, Adult Students Learning How to Write at a Factory (Cerp i Molot/Hammer and Sickle?), Moscow, Russia, ca. September 27-October 3, 1932

Workers’ clubs were also intended to bring together the diverse pool of workers, as the first Five-Year Plan, running from 1928 to 1932, saw another massive influx of people into the cities in the Soviet Union (Kuromiya 86). Coming from both within the city, and more so from the surrounding farmland, the population of workers at Hammer and Sickle was incredibly diverse. Many rural peasants, disillusioned with farm life after Stalin’s deKulakization and collectivization campaigns, emigrated to the city. It’s estimated that at least 23 million Soviet peasants moved to urban centers between 1926 and 1939. Moscow alone saw a population increase of nearly 60% during the First Five-Year Plan (Hoffman 847). The workers’ club acted as an extension of the heterogeneity of the factory population.

The increase in workers demanded a more specialized space, and in 1930, a competition was held to design a Palace of Culture for Moscow’s Proletarian District, which included Hammer and Sickle (Siegelbaum 82). Architect Ivan Leonidov’s proposal was chosen; it encompassed a complex that included a ‘“mass action theater...library, winter garden, observatory…and restaurant” (83). Fully completed in 1937, the Palace of Culture became a beacon of Soviet Communism under Stalin, integrating constructivist architecture and bucking the trend of utilizing old monasteries. Though workers’ clubs were advertised by Soviet leadership as, “an ideal location for the workers to enjoy leisure time” (Hung 562), it is evident that they did little to bridge the cultural gap between rural and urban workers. Indeed, “the former peasants who displayed strong collectivist tendencies among themselves did not cooperate with other groups of workers” (Hoffman 125).

Cerp i Molot in 1932 and After

It was at this cultural turning point between 1932 and 1933, as the Soviet Union ended one Five-Year Plan and began the next, that Lotte Jacobi arrived (Gough 66). Portions of the Palace of Culture, where Hammer and Sickle workers would gather with their families to debate Communism, modern society, and other topics, were being completed as she arrived. Jacobi would bear witness to the difficulties faced integrating unskilled peasant workers with urban factory workers at Cerp i Molot. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cerp i Molot was renamed the Moscow Metallurgical Factory. It closed in 2011, and today the 58-hectare property has undergone massive renovations led by Dutch firm MVRDV. It was projected to be completed in 2021 and that the complex would include homes, offices, schools, and a hospital (Frearson).

Contributor: Charles True

Works Cited:

Frearson, Amy. “MVRDV Chosen to Transform a Moscow Factory into a Housing Development.” Dezeen, 28 Apr. 2014, https://www.dezeen.com/2014/04/28/mvrdv-win-serp-molot-factory-transformation-in-moscow/.

Gough, Maria. "Portrait Under Construction: Lotte Jacobi in Soviet Russia and Central Asia." October 173, Summer 2020, pp. 65-117.

Hoffman, David L. “Moving to Moscow: Patterns of Peasant In-Migration during the First Five-Year Plan.” Slavic Review 50, No. 4, 27 January 2017, pp. 847-857. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500466. Accessed 11 Nov. 2021.

Hoffman, David L. Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941. Cornell University Press, 2000.

Hung, Chang-Tai. “A Political Park: The Working People’s Cultural Palace in Beijing.” Journal of Contemporary History 48, No. 3, July 2013, 556-577, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23488422. Accessed 13 Nov. 2021.

Kappeler, Andreas. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Pearson Education, 2001.

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin: Profiles in Power. Pearson Longman, 2005.

Murphy, Kevin. “Opposition at the Local Level: A Case Study of the Hammer and Sickle Factory.” Europe-Asia Studies 53, No. 2, 2001, pp. 329-350, http://jstor.org/stable/826351. Accessed 13 Nov. 2021.

Siegelbaum, Lewis H. “The Shaping of Soviet Workers’ Leisure, Workers’ Clubs and Palaces of Culture in the 1930s.” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 56, Fall 1999, pp. 78-92, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27672597. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.