A 1950s stove door in the basement of the Leform shop on Povarskaya Street

A 1950s stove door in the basement of the Leform shop on Povarskaya Street. The house, built in 1952, where Sergey Mikhalkov lived with Natalia Konchalovskaya, was, like thousands of other houses of the time, centrally heated, though from boiler houses of its own, unlike the thousands of houses that had been heated by stoves in the very recent past. Yes, at the beginning of the last century Moscow was a very cold city: in the 1920s and 30s, inside the Garden Ring there were 1,170 buildings with central heating and, accordingly, 1,760 boiler houses serving them, while all the rest were heated by stoves, which was costly, laborious and ineffective. The general plan for the district heating of the capital had been in preparation since 1931, but the works it envisaged were colossal and beyond what could be accomplished in a short time. By the middle of the century far from all districts received heat from a combined heat and power plant, chiefly only the new ones, and, as you can see, many houses in the centre were still heated by boiler houses of their own. Although the high-rise on Kudrinskaya, standing opposite Mikhalkov's house (then an apartment block on Uprising Square), was already heated from a power plant in 1951