Our Revived City of Minsk / Prefabricated Homes - Tales of Soviet Women Workers for Peace, 1951 #1

From the Soviet press, 1951

The Academy of Sciences building Shkel worked on (1968 photo)

Lyudmila Shkel, Housepainter:

Every time I look at Minsk, I recall the city as I first saw it back in 1944, shortly alter it had been liberated from the Hitlerite invaders. To all intents and purposes, there was no city. On all sides of the Government House, which had survived, stretched a wasteland of charred ruins of destroyed buildings and heaps of ashes and debris. But today Minsk is again a beautiful, rapidly growing city.

I look at the buildings in the construction of which I took part. One of them is a four-storey school. Here, in warmth and comfort, the children are now seated behind their desks in light and spacious classrooms. Another is the large building of the new maternity hospital, the like of which never existed in Minsk before. Without exaggeration it can be said that the hospital is like a real palace. I remember with what joy we painted the interiors of the reception rooms, the wards and other rooms. Many new citizens of the Soviet Union have by now been born in this splendid hospital.

Together with my brigade of painters, consisting of six young women trained in a trade school, I also participated in the construction of one of the city’s most beautiful large apartment houses, and did interior decoration in the main building of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences and a new large department store on the city’s central thoroughfare, Sovielskaya Street.

We are now working on a new large apartment building on Karl Marx Street. It is almost finished. The interiors of the comfortable and spacious flats are getting their final coat of paint. Here, as in the other buildings, our first concern is to do a good job with utmost speed, so that the new tenants can move in and hold their housewarming parties as soon as possible. We will have the satisfaction of knowing that the Soviet people who are going to live here will be grateful to us, the builders

Taisia Ivanova, engineer and technologist at the prefabricated house factory in Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, is a trail-blazer in this field of production. The standard homes which her plant ships to all parts of the Soviet Union are simple to put up and help to raise quickly entire settlements providing attractive and comfortable dwellings to thousands of Soviet people. The workers, engineers and technicians of the Petrozavodsk plant are steadily increasing their output for peace.