Leningrad's Transport Infrastructure and Socio-economic Changes in the Life of the City in the 1950s – 1960s.

Yarmolich Fedor Kuz'mich PhD in History Researcher, St. Petersburg AI RAS 183456, Russia, Saint Petersburg, ul. Zhukova, 1 f.k.1985@mail.ru

Effective development of the territory surrounding a person becomes the key not just to a comfortable life, but to a certain extent to his survival. Not by chance F. Braudel pointed out that "any activity comes into conflict with space, overcomes the restrictions imposed on it and adapts to them" ^{[1, p. 43]}. One of the mechanisms for adapting space to the needs of human life is the road. Transport infrastructure connects both different regions of the world or individual socio-economic regions of the country, as well as the territory within the city: "transport links play an important role in the formation of agglomerations. Their spatial development, time spent on movement and mobility of the population depend on the organization of transport communications" ^{[2, p. 96]}. Based on the materials of Leningrad, it is proposed to study to what extent the road infrastructure of the city corresponded to the socio-economic changes of the 1950s – 1960s (the settlement of the central districts of Leningrad, the reform of the working week and the growth of the urban population).

As part of the solution of the housing problem, which was started in the USSR in the second half of the 1950s, the settlement of the central part of the city was carried out in Leningrad, where Leningraders lived mainly in communal apartments, in new urban areas, where citizens were provided with separate living space. Under these conditions, the city's road transport system had to ensure the transit of the urban population from their places of residence in the new districts to their places of work, which were located in the central part of Leningrad. The second task that faced the city's road infrastructure, in the context of the reform of working hours and an increase in free time, was to ensure the transportation of Leningraders from their places of residence to the cultural and leisure institutions of the city, which were also mainly located in the center of Leningrad.

New factors of urban everyday life, of course, affected the work of the road transport infrastructure, but even before these changes (in the first half of the 1950s), it experienced certain difficulties in organizing the movement of Leningraders. One of them was the excessive density of city streets: "until the end of 1957, housing construction in Leningrad was located mainly in small blocks with an area of 4-6 hectares. ... formed an excessively dense network of streets, which ... worsened the conditions of urban traffic" ^{[3, p. 38, 40.]}. To a certain extent, not very high mobility of the population could level the existing difficulties in the road economy of the city in the first half of the 1950s. In 1950, there were 540 trips per Leningrad resident per year, in 1951 – 547, and in 1954 – 520 ^{[4, l. 27]}. In the second half of the fifties, the situation begins to change. In 1956, one resident of Leningrad made 565 trips a year, in 1957 – 594, and in 1958 – 614 ^{[5, l. 28]}.

The difference in the indicators of the first half from the second half of the decade is explained by the fact that in the first half of the decade, the bulk of Leningrad residents lived, worked and rested in the central districts of the city, in the second – the policy of settlement of the central districts began, which led to the fact that part of the urban population begins to move to new urban areas that were on the outskirts of the city, and places works and cultural and leisure facilities were located in the city center: "residential areas in the areas of Shchemilovka, Bolshaya and Malaya Okhta, etc. Engels, Avtova, Moskovsky Ave., etc. are populated in large part by persons working in the city center. This caused an increase in both labor and cultural trips at the expense of the population of new residential quarters. So, for example, in the Nevsky district, where there is a large housing construction on Shchemilovka, in 1947, along the ave. Obukhov Defense passed 53.5 tons of people to the Nevsky District Council area in both directions per day (by tram and bus). In 1958, 86.8 thousand people traveled on the same section (including a new parallel highway), i.e. 63% more" ^{[5, l. 28]}.        

The new urban reality and the transport problems it has led to are reflected both in the literature ^{[6, p. 218]} and in the "Technical and Economic foundations of the draft General Plan for the Development of Leningrad. 1959", which described the whole complex of problems that were characteristic of Leningrad in the late 1950s. Attention was drawn to the fact that the city's street network was shredded and oversaturated with unregulated intersections, the carriageway of many streets and even the main city highways was narrow, and a number of districts where a significant part of the population of Leningrad lived did not have the necessary normal communication with the city center (where museums and theaters were located) by road infrastructure. For example, this was typical for Moskovsky Prospekt ^{[7, l. 55, 56]}.

Difficulties in organizing the movement of Leningrad's population at the turn of the 1950s – 1960s became so obvious and affected the quality of life of citizens that they were reflected in the pages of the city's periodical press. Answering readers' questions sent to the editorial office of the newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda, the head of the Department of Urban Transport and Roads A.P. Zhukovsky stated that "the situation in the center is still tolerable – the transport network is quite well developed here, but in new areas transport is clearly lagging behind the rapid pace of housing construction. And we must honestly admit that this gap is increasing more and more from year to year" ^{[8, p. 2]}.

Paying attention to this, A.P. Zhukovsky in no way exaggerated the colors around the problem. In the 1960s, the proportional population ratio between the central and new districts of the city continued to change: "the rapid development of new districts of Leningrad causes an increased influx of population from the center to the periphery. By the end of 1971, the population of the five central districts (Dzerzhinsky, Kuibyshevsky, Smolninsky, Oktyabrsky and Petrogradsky) had decreased by almost 30 percent compared to 1959. At the same time, the population of the Leningrad center is aging due to the outflow of mostly young families to new areas" ^{[9, p. 57]}. Such a proportional ratio in the distribution of the population in the urban space led to the fact that a resident of Leningrad spent more and more time in transport, making trips from home to work and from home to theaters, cinemas, museums, etc. 

Of course, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Leningrad authorities sought to solve the transport problem: new roads, interchanges, bridges, cargo duplicates of the main city highways were built, the subway developed, new public transport routes were laid, the fleet of buses, trams, trolleybuses and much more were replenished. The road logistics problem has been seriously studied at the theoretical level. The scientific search was reflected, in particular, in the "Technical and economic foundations of the draft General Plan for the Development of Leningrad", where a new terminological apparatus was used for more productive planning of the mobility of the population, for example, the "distance module". Using this module, the territory of Leningrad was divided into 5 zones located in relation to the city center in the form of concentric rings, 3 km wide. This made it possible to identify the main areas of residence of the population and their remoteness from places of work and recreation. The use of this technique demonstrated that in the late 1950s the bulk of the population (83%) lived at a distance of up to 6 km from the city center. The city authorities did not want to put up with this and assumed that in the 1960s this situation had to be changed, ensuring that 46.9% of the total urban population remained in the zone up to 6 km from the city center, and in the zone from 6 to 12 km from the center, the population had to increase to 48.9% ^{[10, l. 2-12]}. Of course, such a plan, which was generally implemented in the 1960s, greatly increased the load on the city's road system.   

Despite the steps taken, in the 1960s the city authorities could not completely solve the logistical problem of Leningrad. This is evidenced by the analysis of the Leningrad resident's time budget. During the seven months of 1966, temporary losses in the Leningrad industry amounted to more than 6 million man-days, which was caused precisely by shortcomings in the organization of transport work: "an increase in the distance of passengers' trips to the place of work associated with the development of the city, the lag in the development of the urban transport network from the needs of passenger transportation, as well as serious shortcomings in the organization of transport work they cause large expenditures of time among the population in the morning and evening parts" ^{[11, l. 22]}.

The unresolved problems in the transport system of the city can only be partially explained by the insufficient attention of the Leningrad authorities to this issue, as evidenced by the already cited publication by A.P. Zhukovsky, in which it was noted that in comparison with other major cities of the USSR, the situation with the road infrastructure in Leningrad is not the best ^{[8, p. 2]}. But it would not be right to fully assign responsibility for this to the city authorities. There were, of course, objective reasons. Among them is a significant increase in the population of Leningrad from 2.6 million in 1950 to 3.5 million in 1970 . Another reason can be attributed to the fact that even in the conditions of Leningrad's transition to the micro-district planning principle, which assumed the placement of cultural institutions near the places of human residence, it was not possible to achieve this in full. Even in the 1960s, the main recreation centers were located in the city center, as evidenced by the technical documentation for the 1963 Master Plan: "almost all the largest and a significant part of the small cultural and educational institutions are concentrated in the areas of old buildings, mainly in the central part of the city," the mentioned document gave a specific figure: 70% of all leisure facilities were located in the central part of the city ^{[12, L. 18, 19]}. Such a disparity led to the fact that in the second half of the 1960s, in the structure of the movement of Leningraders around the city, up to 80% accounted for cultural and household purposes, and only 20% were related to work ^{[13, pp. 145, 147]}.

In the mid-1970s, it was recognized in the specialized literature that the logistical problem has no solution within the framework of the accepted theoretical model of urban planning: "urban transport to a certain extent came into conflict with the modern system of urban settlement and the planning structure of urban settlements, which limits the possibility of rational development of a particular urban organism and to some extentthat leads to excessive population density" ^{[14, p. 60]}.

In an effort to overcome the expanding space of Leningrad, to ensure the rapid movement of the growing urban population, the city authorities built new roads, bridges, etc. But all this did not allow the road infrastructure to overcome the spatial factor that F. was thinking about. Braudel, and properly connect the city. The new socio-economic reality of the 1950s – 1960s, which was formed under the influence of the settlement of the city center, the reform of the labor week and the population of Leningrad, set such tasks for the road infrastructure of the city that it could not completely solve.  

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