Kinoteatr Udarnik, Movie theater in Yakimanka District, Moscow, Russia.
Kinoteatr Udarnik is a defunct cinema in the House on the Embankment complex, at Serafimovicha Street 2. Its four-storey constructivist building has a stepped roof over the auditorium and a curved dome of pale, vertically ribbed panels; blue three-dimensional Cyrillic letters spelling "УДАРНИК" stand on a metal frame on the facade. Inside are marble finishes, parquet floors and a foyer with a coffered domed ceiling.
Designed by Boris Iofan with his brother Dmitri, the cinema was added to the House on the Embankment project in 1927 and built on over 3,000 reinforced-concrete piles. It opened on 7 November 1931 as the USSR's largest sound cinema, with 1,500 seats; its first film was Sergei Yutkevich's "Zlatye gory". In 1935 it hosted public screenings of the first Soviet film festival.
The name "Udarnik" refers to a shock worker, a title for labourers who exceeded production targets. In 1935 the cinema hosted public screenings of the first Soviet film festival, while closed showings for foreign guests and Soviet film workers ran at the House of Cinema. The foyer held an estrada for musical performances before screenings.
The cinema stands at ulitsa Serafimovicha 2, in the south-eastern part of the House on the Embankment complex, facing Bolotnaya Embankment. The nearest metro stations are Borovitskaya, Kropotkinskaya, Polyanka and Oktyabrskaya. The bus stop Bolotnaya Ploshchad, renamed from Kinoteatr Udarnik in October 2021, is served by routes m1, m9, 297, 538, n11 and e10. The building no longer operates as a cinema.
Boris Iofan's 1930–1931 drawings show a sliding metal skylight in the roof of the auditorium, and a report signed by him mentions one built in the first half of 1931. No document confirms it ever worked once the cinema opened. The foyer ceiling is a dome with coffered recesses, which shapes its acoustics.
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