The 'May Brigade' in The USSR
In 1930 May took virtually his entire Frankfurt staff to Russia. May's Brigade amounted to a task force of 17 people, including Lihotsky, her husband Wilhelm Schuette, Arthur Korn, the Hungarian-born Fred Forbat, the Swiss Hans Schmidt, the Austrian-born Erich Mauthner and the Dutch Mart Stam. The promise of the "Socialist paradise" was still fresh, and May's Brigade and other groups of western planners had the hope of constructing entire cities. The first was to be Magnitogorsk. Although May's group is indeed credited with building 20 cities in three years, the reality was that May found Magnitogorsk already under construction and the town site dominated by the mine. Officials were indecisive, then distrustful, corruption and delay frustrated their efforts, and May himself made misjudgements about the climate. May's contract expired in 1933, and he left for British East Africa (Kenya). Some of his architects found themselves unwanted by Russia, and stateless.
The 1995 documentary film Sotsgorod ("Socialist Cities") interviewed some of the last survivors of these groups: Lihotzky, Jan Rutgers, and Phillipp Tolziner of the Bauhaus Brigade, and visited four of the planned cities: Magnitogorsk, Orsk, Novokuznetsk and Kemerovo.
May worked, farmed and completed some architectural work in Kenya, then returned to Germany after the end of World War II. From 1954 through 1956 he led the planning department in Hamburg, was involved in several large housing projects in other cities, and died in 1970.
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