Nikolai Miliutin

Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin, alternatively transliterated as Miliutin (, – 4 October 1942) was a Russian trade union and Bolshevik activist, participant in the October Revolution in Petrograd and Soviet statesman and architect. After the revolution Milyutin held various executive appointments in Soviet Russia related to social security, urban and central planning and finance; reaching that of Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR in 1924–1929. Milyutin is, however, remembered as an urban planner and an amateur architect, author of Sotsgorod concept, and as the editor of Sovetskaya arkhitektura magazine in 1931–1934.

Biography

Milyutin was born in Saint Petersburg; his grandfather was a port stevedore, his father a fisherman and fishmonger of noble origins who also attempted to return to farming and work in the port; after Nikolay's birth he was injured at work and lived the remainder of his life on a disability pension, then already in place in Russian Empire. Despite father's wishes, teenager Nikolay was not inclined to business, rather, he tried to get an education and at the same time was involved in politics. In 1915 he was drafted into the army but never saw active combat service, always stationed near Saint Peterburg and engaged in Bolshevik operations. Since then and until 1941 he held a variety of appointments in regional and national economic agencies: deputy Commissar of Social Security in 1921–1924, Commissar of Finances of the RSFSR in 1924–1929, chairman of the Lesser Sovnarkom in 1929–1930, deputy chairman of Tsentrosoyuz in 1930–1931, deputy Commissar of Education of the RSFSR in 1931–1933. Since 1930 he chaired the Housing Commission within the Communist Academy and edited Sovetskaya Arkhitektura magazine, the only professional magazine left after dissolution of SA magazine. In 1940 he finally obtained an architect's diploma at the Moscow Architectural Institute but declining health precluded him from further contributions. Milyutin was confined to bed by summer of 1941. After the start of the Second World War, he was evacuated to Sverdlovsk as part of the Construction Department of the Palace of Civil Engineering. In May 1942, Milyutin was allowed to defend his Ph.D. thesis on the topic “The Marxist Theory of Socialist Settlement” without exams. He died in Moscow in October 1942.

Innovations

Linear city

Milyutin's concept of city development outlined in his 1930 book, Sotsgorod (Socialist City), was superficially similar to an earlier de-urbanist concept of a linear city put forward by Mikhail Okhitovich. Unlike Okhitovich, whose linear city was terminated with industrial hubs and thus limited in growth, Milyutin's concept allowed for practically unrestricted linear growth. His concept was based on decentralisation of industry, which needed to be spread in a thin line along a mainline railroad route, ideally - according to the natural flow of production from raw supplies to finished goods (Milyutin concentrated on gigantic mass production plants like the GAZ or the STZ). The housing zone, separated from the industrial zone by a park strip, would develop concurrently, and ideally residents will be settled directly across their employers, eliminating the need for private or public transportation. In another departure from linear city, he did not insist on building housing in a continuous strip; on the contrary, Milyutin proposed a less expensive model of initially isolated housing hubs spread along the main line which might, eventually, merge into a continuous housing belt. Each building consisted of two blocks, set back against each other and merging at a common staircase. A campus of Milyutin's barracks was built in Moscow; his original flat roofs were replaced with traditional sloped ones. All these cheap and unsafe buildings have been demolished.