Palaces of Shelter

 

 

 

By

Stephen Daker

IN EARLY MARCH 2022, anonymous antiwar activists 

flyposted the Moscow Metro with maps of the metro 

systems of Kyiv and Kharkiv, two Ukrainian cities then 

being shelled by the Russian army. The posters featured 

texts below the maps reminding Moscow transit riders 

that, at this precise moment, men, women, and children 

were sleeping in the metros of these two cities in order 

to take shelter from Russian artillery. Beneath that was 

the slogan “NO WAR.” 

 

The gesture of these activists was a reminder of the 

solidarity that once built all three of these metro sys-

tems, each of which was constructed according to the 

same extraordinarily high standards, based on the pre-

cept that public transit architecture should be more 

than just a rudimentary way of helping people get from 

point A to point B, instead serving as “palaces for 

the pZeople.”

 

The Moscow Metro gets all the attention — a Stalinist 

monument loved by many who hate literally everything 

else about Stalinism. From the opening of its first line 

in 1935 to its most recent extensions, the Russian cap-

ital’s subway has been celebrated not just for its 

reliability — in a context where things working properly 

is often hard to find — but for its spectacular architec-

ture. Metro architects like the Kharkiv-born Alexey 

Dushkin combined constructivism, classicism, and the 

architecture of ancient Egypt to create grandiose, 

haunting underground cathedrals. But admiring

Moscow is only scraping the surface 

of the Soviet underground. Sixteen 

metro systems were constructed in the 

USSR, four of them in Ukraine — exten-

sive networks in Kyiv and Kharkiv, with 

mini systems in Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih. 

All four are architecturally flamboyant 

and built incredibly deep under-

ground — so deep that the stations can 

serve as bomb shelters if needed. This 

hadn’t happened to any of these systems 

except Moscow during the Great Patri-

otic War. Until now, that is.

 

The Kyiv Metro was the USSR’s third after Moscow 

and Saint Petersburg, with the first line complete 

in 1960, during the Khrushchev Thaw — it was the 

first system to have been built “clean,” without 

Gulag labor. Its earliest stations combined 

the decorativeness of Moscow with light, 

optimistic, modern ideas. There are grot-

toes like Universytet station, with its red 

marble walls, boasting niches with busts 

of scientific and cultural luminaries like 

Dmitri Mendeleev and Ivan Franko, and 

there are also concrete hangars like Dnipro 

station, on a bridge overlooked by statues 

of a man holding Sputnik aloft and a woman 

letting doves of peace fly free. Kyiv’s sta-

tions were mostly extremely deep, with 

Arsenalna still the deepest in the world at 

105.5 meters below ground; it was com-

pleted, after all, one year before the Cuban 

Missile Crisis. The Kharkiv Metro is the more innovative and 

modernist of the two networks. It was built mostly in the 

1970s, with spacious, vaulted stations decorated with 

futuristic, science-fiction motifs.

Both cities kept up these standards even 

as the Soviet system began to fall apart 

in the 1980s. Kyiv stations of that 

decade, like the Kazimir Malevich–

inspired Palats Ukraina and the 

Byzantine-inspired Zoloti Vorota, are 

every bit as enormous and opulent as 

those in Moscow. Kyiv and Kharkiv have 

both built some fine stations after inde-

pendence, though before the war, the 

capital’s network was increasingly 

overcrowded. 

 

Kyivites and Kharkivites tend to be very 

proud of their metros, regardless of their 

opinions on the system that built them 

and the frustrations of day-to-day travel. 

But that doesn’t mean anybody would 

choose to sleep there — though many 

have been surprised at how well pre-

pared members of the Metro staff were for war. 

 

Extensive toilet facilities and water fountains, 

usually hidden from the public, were opened up 

as people started to bring their sleeping bags, 

pets, and scattered possessions into the Metro. 

A recent estimate at the time of this writing 

states that around fifteen thousand people are 

sleeping in the Kyiv Metro every night, with a 

similar number in Kharkiv. Right now, these 

metro systems aren’t just monuments to what 

transit design can achieve. As city residents 

shelter in these generous, beautiful marble 

halls, they act as a standing reproach to the 

barbarism taking place on the ground’s surface. 

 JACOBIN