Cat House in Smolensk.

Cat House in Smolensk.

On the Ascension Hill of Smolensk, next to the Ascension Women's Monastery, which gave the name to the hill in the sixteenth century, there is a building strange for the city center - a seven-storey box of a building burned out from the inside, which received a lot of nicknames from the townspeople - "Iron", "Teapot" and even "Cat House". These are the remains of the first residential “high-rise” in the city, built in the early thirties according to the project of architect Oleg Vutke. "House of the Paris Commune" - an example of the style of late constructivism, according to the author, was to become a visible architectural alternative to the Assumption Cathedral towering above the city and a symbol of the new life of Soviet citizens. Seven floors (no elevator), heating, radio and electricity... and that’s it. Water was only on the first floor - there was a dining room and laundry room, and in the basement, where showers and latrines were located. Communards had to despise philistine life and live collectively, without being distracted by washing and cooking. Therefore, with a capital box of silicate brick, the internal partitions of the house were made temporary and residents could change at their discretion. True, the audibility was appropriate, but, again, the Communards had nothing to hide from each other. However, almost from the moment of construction, the house has earned a bad reputation. Built on the site of the monastery cemetery, where, according to legend, the parents of Natalia Naryshkina, the mother of Peter the Great, were buried, it immediately overgrown with eerie legends, the number of which only increased over time. They featured witches, ghosts, and even demonic entities. And with the life of the communards did not work out - had to constantly run for any need to the first floor and back, and when the children went, the unsuitability of the house for families was finally manifested. That’s when the “House of Communards” became the “Iron”, and later the “Teapot” – small stoves for heating water or cooking appeared in almost every room, and the house desperately “smoke”. Attempts to refine the building failed – neither the elevator nor the water supply did not fit into the original concept, and would have cost more than the construction of a new house. And then the temporary internal partitions began to collapse. So it is not surprising that by the end of the thirties the house was considered a model of wrecking activities of German spies. Architect Oleg Vutke, a German by nationality, after being charged in 1938, was shot at the Butovo polygon. Tellingly, the powerful box of the house withstood shelling and bombing of the Great Patriotic War, and, after the liberation of Smolensk, people continued to live in it. At first, from desperation - after the war, the Smolyans and the fortress wall lived, but as the city was restored, the slums of the "Teapot" became less and less attractive. Reputation near the house has become quite bad - and murder, and suicide (mainly falling out of windows), regular fires, in general, after another fire in the 70th year, the building was not restored, the tenants were resettled, and the failed symbol of new life, which was fixed another name "Cat house", firefighters began to use for training. In the eighties, the building was finally abandoned, and it became a place of gatherings, first Soviet, and then Russian informals of all stripes. Today, the House of the Commune evokes complex feelings. On the one hand, it is a real monument of architecture, which has few analogues. On the other hand, the ruins in the city center cause an oppressive feeling. There is no point in restoring the house, and repurposing, at least for now, is impossible. Well, the gloomy fame as a magnet attracts to this house all sorts of specialists in the “supernatural”, making it, as they say, widely known in narrow circles and, accordingly, another Smolensk landmark, albeit very peculiar.