“allow us to build the third vault”

The third head of Metrostroy after Pavel Rothert and Yegor Abakumov was the famous builder, general director of the movement of the 1st rank - Ilya Gotsiridze. The Krasnye Vorota station on the Sokolnicheskaya Line owes its design with three vaults to him.

Ilya Gotsiridze is one of the first metro builders who stood at the origins of the Moscow Metro. He was born in Georgia in 1897. He studied at the Moscow State Institute of Railways (MIIT) and received the specialty of track engineer. Worked on the reconstruction of the pre-port hub in Vladivostok. At Metrostroy he was a site manager, in charge of the 16th and 21st mines. He headed the Moscow Metrostroy in 1939.

The 1935 book “How We Built the Metro” preserves Ilya Gotsiridze’s memories of the construction of the Krasnye Vorota station. At that time it was called “Krasnovorotskaya”. Engineer Gotsiridze saw this deep, three-vaulted station with a spacious central hall, flooded with light from chandeliers. There were no analogues to this project in world practice, but all calculations said that the station would be strong and reliable.

Gotsiridze had opponents who did not believe in the bold idea of ​​building a station with three vaults at great depth. So the American engineer George Morgan, apparently not knowing what Soviet builders were capable of, insisted on a double-vaulted station. With this option, the middle hall would simply become a small corridor with a low ceiling connecting the two platforms.

Almost in despair, Gotsiridze once again checked all the calculations, made sure that they were correct and turned to the People's Commissar of Railways of the USSR Lazar Kaganovich: “Allow us to build the third vault!” The metro builder was given the go-ahead, and he did not disappoint. The Krasnovorotskaya station was commissioned. Escalators, which at that time were called moving stairs, were used here for the first time. By the way, the pylons in the station hall are lined with shrosha marble, brought from Gotsiridze’s native Georgian village.

Later, Ilya Gotsiridze supervised the launch of Mayakovskaya, the first column of the deep station. In 1938, at the international exhibition in New York, its design and architecture were awarded the Grand Prix. In 1939, Gotsiridze was transferred to the construction of a tunnel under the Amur.

In 1941, he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Railways (NKPS) of the USSR, and during the war he became the head of the Main Directorate of Military Reconstruction Work of the NKPS of the USSR, and at the same time headed the Railway Troops. After the creation of the USSR Ministry of Transport Construction in 1954, he was appointed Deputy Minister.

Ilya Gotsiridze was awarded three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Kutuzov, 1st degree, as well as the USSR Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree for the improvement and introduction of the shield method of tunneling in the construction of the Moscow Metro, which increased labor productivity in underground work.

The third head of Metrostroy passed away in 1968. His memorial is located in the columbarium of the Novodevichy cemetery, very close to the memorial of Tatyana Fedorova, the first woman to head the mine.

INTERESTING

Ilya Gotsiridze’s brother – Victor Gotsiridze (1910-1995) headed the Tbilisi metro construction, Hero of Socialist Labor. One of the Tbilisi metro stations is named after him. The second brother, Mikhail Gotsiridze (1905–1993), was the director of the Dzerzhinsky plant named after Ya.M. Sverdlov.