Architect Han van Loghem went to Siberia in 1926 to build houses for workers. His later lectures about this, and the letters of his wife Berthe, are the basis of a documentary about this adventure. NEMO Kennislink spoke to the makers.
Archives are more than miles of paper; they are treasure troves full of beautiful stories – most people just don't come into contact with them. Historian Gijs Kessler (Russia specialist at the International Institute of Social History (IISH)) wanted to change that. Together with filmmaker Pim Zwier, he chose a small, personal archive to share.
It became the socialist adventure of architect Han van Loghem (1891-1940) in 1920s Russia. This man's small archive contains letters, lectures and photos that reveal a forgotten period full of ideals and disillusionment, happiness and personal sorrow.
Artist or businessman?
Han van Loghem wanted to build spacious and bright homes for workers, who often lived in slums. In the Netherlands he had built social housing in Haarlem and designed several streets for Betondorp. Yet he was not happy here, according to Pim Zwier. “Van Loghem was very enthusiastic and more of an artist than a businessman. He wrote in 1917 that society was commercializing, while he wanted to focus on building itself, on creating.”
After the Russian revolution (1917), the Dutch engineer and communist Sebald Rutgers (1879-1961) founded an autonomous colony in Siberia, near the farming hamlet of Kemerovo (Red Hill). Gijs Kessler:“Lenin wanted Rutgers to set up the coal industry and then hand it over to the Soviet government. So it wasn't about making a profit.”
Rutgers needed engineers and skilled craftsmen to start this colony from the ground up and brought it from abroad. Van Loghem was one of these settlers and traveled to Kemerovo in 1926. Zwier:“He wanted to contribute to a more just society. Socialists believed that it was realized in the Soviet Union. Van Loghem really thought he would be happier there.” His wife Berthe Neumeijer (1890-1981) and their four children remained in the Netherlands in the meantime.
The adventure
Once in Kemerovo, Van Loghem was completely in his element, according to the sources. From scratch he was allowed to design an entire district with five thousand workers' houses, schools and public buildings. He wrote how incredibly productive he could be. Measuring land, drawing designs and then building without the interference of all kinds of difficult commissions, gave results within a few months.
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However, this soon changed. Kessler:“Stalin had different ideas than Lenin, who had died in 1924. From 1926 he pursued a deliberate, centralized industrialization policy, and autonomous structures such as the colony did not fit in well with this. In 1927 the colony came under Russian rule again and the foreign engineers were increasingly opposed. In the end, most left that year, disillusioned.”
Van Loghem continued to work as long as he could, but he had fewer and fewer skilled workers at his disposal. Kessler:“The construction industry in Russia then still revolved around farmers who worked in construction for part of the season. You didn't have professional construction workers, like in the Netherlands. In addition, the farmers built with wood, because you could work longer with it. You can't build when it's freezing. These farmers were not interested in concrete walls or building with bricks.”
Vermin and cows
The archive footage in the documentary shows how shabby the Russians lived. Van Loghem saw himself as their savior, as is apparent from his lectures. He would improve their living conditions with his progressive ideas, but his architectural style was not very popular.
Zwier:“The workers and farmers in Kemerovo wanted a piece of land near their house for a cow, a chicken coop and a vegetable garden. They would rather have a detached wooden cabin than a stone terraced house. Another objection was that pests could move much more easily through terraced houses.”
The workers were allowed to participate in the discussion about the building plans and protested against the construction. Van Loghem was delighted to write that his terraced houses would get off the ground anyway – in the name of technical progress. Kessler:“Yes, he does come across as a tyrant. But isn't it more common for architects to develop their ideas without listening carefully to the wishes of future users?”
Triangle ratio
Also on a private level, Van Loghem's world was turned upside down in Kemerovo:he fell in love with Tini, an enthusiastic Dutch socialist who also worked in the colony. Kessler:“It was more than an affair. It was a period of enormous personal fulfillment for him and he became more and more detached from his life in the Netherlands.”
Not surprising that this made his wife nervous, especially when you realize that letters were on the way for weeks. Berthe traveled to Siberia to save their marriage. You hardly notice this in the letters to her parents during this period. She was delighted with the beauty of the vast Siberian landscape or wrote about the unsanitary conditions in the colony.
Hard grounding
Because foreigners were no longer wanted under Stalin and they preferred to see their children grow up in the Netherlands, the couple decided to leave Russia. However, it was difficult for Van Loghem to find work in the Netherlands, now that he carried the communist label with him. He built little more until his death in 1940. He lectured extensively about his Siberian experiences and wrote about engineering in specialist journals.
Long after his death, Berthe began her memoirs. She was surprised that her impending marriage did not appear in her letters. In the end she only wrote ten pages, but together with the letters and photos from the Russian period that have been preserved, this retrospective forms the story of the documentary Building in the midst of loneliness.
Resources
The makers went to Russia to look for old footage and a lot comes from the Kemerovo museum. We see black-and-white film and photo material of the construction activities and workers in the factories, but also of the beautiful nature in the area. The images are accompanied by pieces of text from the letters and lectures, read by the actors Gonny Gaakeer and Stijn Westenend.
Zwier:“We have chosen to only use text and images from the 1920s because we want to take viewers back in time. And the image had to fit the perspective of Han and Berthe, as emerges from their texts.”
Kessler:“We are very happy with boxes of letters and photos that come from people's attic. They offer us a nice window into history.” The documentary is not only proof of this, but also an appeal to the viewers:don't throw away the old family archive. There is a good chance that you will make a researcher happy with it.