Brumfeld Restating Classicist Monumentalism in So

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early
1950s
Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architec

ture, 1930s–early 1950s
William C. Brumfield
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century On
wards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.3
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture dur
ing the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of
communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of
1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The
project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolution
ary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that
neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s
nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo
the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but
prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together
with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role
in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamato
ry style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different
ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgat
ed as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments
on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective archi
tectural styles.
Keywords: neoclassical revival, prerevolutionary Russian architecture, constructivism, socialist realism, Stalin-era
architecture, Academy of Architecture, post-Soviet architecture
Soviet architecture, like cinema, was not only a highly visible expression of political pow
er but was also subjected to pervasive ideological pressures in the name of communist
ideology. The typical scholarly narrative about Soviet architecture presents it as initially
defined by a highly motivated avant-garde that drew on engineering and technology to
create rational approaches to construction design. The main modernist avant-garde
movements to shape Soviet architecture were constructivism and rationalism, both linked
by their negation of ornamentation, seen then as a manifestation of bourgeois, capitalist
exploitation. This Soviet avant-garde, as certain specialists explain, was associated with
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1950s
contemporary movements such as the Bauhaus and the International modern style. Less
er known is the reaction against Soviet modernism that occurred in the early 1930s—dur
ing Stalin’s reign—with the accelerated industrialization campaigns of the five-year plans,
formulated and directed by the state for total mobilization of the economy. Factory design
(production) was placed in the realm of engineering, while major urban projects were as
signed to the realm of culture and were expected to show signs of cultural heritage. The
architecture of Stalin’s state found its expression—its voice, I would say—in classicist
monumentalism.
The culturally defined markers of the classical system of orders reflected the hierarchal,
bureaucratized social structure of the Stalinist state. They also reflected a statist cultural
position demanded by the turn from the doctrine of worldwide revolution toward the Stal
inist formulation of “socialism in one country,” that is, the development of the Soviet
Union as the beacon of Marxism-Leninism. Instead of a “withering away of the state,” de
fined by Friedrich Engels as the ultimate result of Marxism, the power of the Soviet state
expanded as the struggle with class enemies intensified. It has to be noted that this ten
dency toward neoclassical architecture projecting the power of the Soviet state had paral
lels in fascist states during the 1930s.
Monumentalism is a product of size and scale (such as the Egyptian pyramids), but it also
typically involves stylistic, decorative markers that visibly define the structure as a “mon
ument”—a building endowed with prestige and importance. The traditional, and most fre
quently used, source for these monumental markers is the stylistic system derived from
classical Greece and Rome. The systematic revival of classical styles and stylistic markers
in Europe during the Renaissance led to a new classicism—neoclassicism—that was espe
cially prevalent in France and England, Europe’s major imperial powers in the eighteenth
century. From the reigns of Catherine the Great through Alexander I (victor over
Napoleon), Russia adapted neoclassicism from Western imperial centers, especially in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as an expression of the glory of the Russian
Empire. Every educated Russian—including the radical Marxist intelligentsia—under
stood neoclassicism as the expression of state power and privilege, above all in the imper
ial capital of St. Petersburg. Against the negation of ornamentation in avant-garde mod
ernist Soviet architecture of the 1920s, the architectural design of the Stalinist state
reacquired decorative elements derived from the earlier prerevolutionary neoclassical im
plementations. Depending on the vantage point, one may see this process as an ironic
communist expropriation of the style of the capitalist and imperial expropriators.
The visual evidence accessible to anyone who visits central Moscow today shows us that
Soviet architecture—by definition, state architecture—had adopted variants of the neo
classical style beginning in the 1930s. As the center of world communism, Moscow was to
project the visually imposing image of a “model socialist city,” a term that became wide
spread in the early 1930s. Indeed, architecture was to proclaim this message as an ex
pression of the visual culture of communism. Neoclassism, with its columns and capitals,
cornices and pediments, was to serve as a proclamatory style, the ideal means for the im
age projection of triumphant communism. However, the mechanism and sources of the
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Soviet adoption of neoclassicism have not been carefully explored, particularly as an ex
pression of communist visual culture. This chapter provides the critical context and the
logic behind the reassertion of neoclassicism in the 1930s.
In making this case, I will also sketch out the trajectory of modernist (avant-garde) Soviet
architecture as an essential part of the dialectical development that eventuated in the
adoption of neoclassicism as the proclamatory style of communist supremacy. Without a
discussion of the avant-garde in Soviet architecture, which exacted sizeable aesthetic in
fluence domestically and internationally, and itself frequently gestured toward monumen
talism, one cannot understand the reasons for the radical shift of state policy in architec
tural style—toward neoclassicism—during the Stalin era. The shift involved a careful and
methodical justification of neoclassicism, in part by saying what it was not and what it
was reacting against. When establishing the genealogy of the 1930s neoclassicism, I pro
pose that Stalinist visual culture found a ready architectural platform in an analogous
neoclassical reaction that took place in early twentieth-century Russia, after the Revolu
tion of 1905 and before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Hereafter I refer to this earlier
neoclassical reaction as the “prerevolutionary neoclassicism” or “early twentieth-century
neoclassicism.” Ultimately I argue that Russian neoclassicism in the twentieth century,
both before the Russian Revolution, in its imperial iterations, and in the 1930s, as an ex
pression of Soviet power, was supported by ideologies opposed to modern styles (func
tional or decorative) in the name of a unified social and aesthetic vision employed to pro
claim state power and collective cohesion.
Before offering the discussion of Soviet monumentalism’s long reign and enduring legacy,
I introduce the prerevolutionary adoption of neoclassicism in commercial architecture as
a precursor to the proclamatory classicist monumentalism of Stalin-era architecture. I
demonstrate that this neoclassical revival was supported by monarchist, ideologically
conservative critics reacting against the “bourgeois” style moderne (Russia’s equivalent
of art nouveau). I then discuss the 1920s Soviet avant-garde (with its culmination in con
structivism) as a cultural movement against which monumentalism reacted. In the 1930s,
classicist monumentalism triumphed in the built environment as a proclamation of “mod
el socialism” and its claim to power in Soviet architecture.
Reviving Neoclassicism at the Beginning of the

Twentieth Century
As I have demonstrated in other publications, a clearly articulated neoclassical revival
had occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to seemingly deca
dent, bourgeois values of the style moderne (Russia’s equivalent to the Vienna
Secession).1 The political climate for this revival must be understood as a national crisis
of identity, where the post-1905 Russia desperately searched for a sense of stability and
national coherence in the aftermath of massive political and social unrest, which inadver
tently led to the rise of Bolshevism. Although the prerevolutionary style moderne and the
later Soviet avant-garde were very different cultural phenomena in very different political
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environments, each was labeled suspect by supporters of the neoclassical revival, who de
rided modernism as lacking the values of a unified social order within a strong state. In
deed, the key representatives of the neoclassical revival such as Ivan Zholtovskii achieved
prominence in both its prerevolutionary and Stalinist iterations. For both groups of re
vivalists—prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary—the earlier nineteenth-century neo
classicism, and particularly the work of Andreian Zakharov in imperial St. Petersburg,
provided models to be emulated.
The prerevolutionary neoclassical revival in Russian architecture, extending from the lat
ter part of the first decade of the twentieth century until the Russian Revolution, formed
part of a larger cultural movement that encompassed both artistic and intellectual life. In
the forefront of refined neoclassical aestheticism stood the journal Apollon, which began
to appear in 1909 under the editorship of the poet and critic Sergei Makovskii. A literary
journal with an interest in the visual arts, Apollon contained frequent commentary sup
porting the new classicism in architecture, as well as copiously illustrated articles on the
neoclassical revival and its ideological significance in support of Russia’s imperial status.
In this journal the revived neoclassical form in Russian architecture was praised from a
monarchist perspective as an expression of aristocratic nobility and imperial grandeur in
opposition to the bourgeois values of the style moderne. Although the neoclassical revival
flourished in Moscow, in an ideological sense the revival was centered in St. Petersburg,
which, as the imperial capital, not only contained the defining monuments of an earlier
nineteenth-century neoclassicism but also housed the cultural and architectural journals
that propagated the early twentieth-century neoclassical revival.
The origins of the neoclassical revival can be traced most clearly in the work of Ivan
Fomin (1872–1936). His mentors at the turn of the century included modernists such as
Fedor Shekhtel and Lev Kekushev, and Fomin himself made a significant contribution to
the new style (style moderne) with his interior designs.2 More important, however, was
the influence of Aleksandr Benois, an arbiter of taste and culture who in 1902 published
an article entitled “Picturesque Petersburg” in World of Art (Mir iskusstva). Benois de
fended the capital’s classical architectural heritage at the expense of its new architec
ture.
In 1908, Fomin published a statement in the journal Bygone Years (Starye gody), in which
he polemicized that modern architecture lacked an essential unifying force present in the
neoclassical period.3 Fomin and Georgii Lukomskii praised the neoclassical revival for its
normative aesthetic principles. At the Fourth Congress of Russian Architects, held in Pe
tersburg in January 1911, Lukomskii gave the most concentrated expression of his advo
cacy of the neoclassical revival. Dismissing the style moderne as a rootless invention of “a
little decade-long epoch of individualism,” the critic noted the return to principles in ar
chitecture.4 Yet in praising the return to classical monumentality for modern urban hous
ing, Lukomskii was imposing an architectural ideal from the precapitalist era within an
environment created by and for private financial interests. The prerevolutionary neoclas
sical revival appeared in commercial architecture, such as large retail stores, where the
fashion for classical detail coexisted with an expression of modern structure and con
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struction technology. Notable examples include Marian Lialevich’s building for the firm of
F. Mertens (1911–1912) on Nevskii Prospekt and Vladimir Shchuko’s apartment building
for the military engineer Konstantin Markov at Kamennoostrovskii Prospekt 65 (see Fig
ure 1), its massive articulation of the classical order (1910–1911).5
Figure 1 St. Petersburg. Konstantin Markov apart

ment building, Kamennoostrovskii Prospekt 65.
Photograph © William Brumfield, January 2, 2017
The critique of the prerevolutionary neoclassical revival was made forcefully in 1914 in
two articles on the social aspect of contemporary architecture by the critic V. Machinskii.
In the opening remarks to his second article, Machinskii attacked not only the changing
fashions of individualism in the arts but also the sterile imitation of historical styles. From
the perspective of rapid urbanization and its concomitant social change, Machinskii as
cribed the decline of aesthetic sensibility to the loss of cultural hegemony on the part of
the nobility, which was succeeded by competing social groups engaged in a capitalist
process of “mutual struggle and self-definition.” In his view, even the triumph of the bour
geoisie in developed Western countries would prove ephemeral before the rise of the
working class.6
Even as the prerevolutionary neoclassical revival achieved ascendancy over prerevolu

tionary modernism, there were signs that the debate had lost its relevance as the existing
social and economic order moved more deeply into crisis during World War I. In January
1916, the architect Oskar Munts (1871–1942) published an essay entitled “The Parthenon
or Hagia Sophia,” which appeared in response to another article by Aleksandr Benois in
praise of neoclassicism.7 Having reviewed the familiar explanations for the neoclassical
revival—as a reaction against the “unceremonious moderne,” and as a reflection of the
creative stagnation of the age—Munts rejected the application of a supposedly eternal
stylistic system to modern structures:
It is both significant and horrible that this neoclassicism, just as much as the infat
uation with free decorative forms [the moderne] threatens a general catastrophe:
the complete separation of so-called artistic architecture from construction itself,
with its technical, engineering innovations. … In order to avoid the catastrophe, it
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is necessary to return architecture to its eternal source—to purposeful, intelligent
construction, the principle of which is so imposingly expressed in the temple of
Hagia Sophia.8
On the eve of the collapse of the monarchy in 1917, proponents of a new, rational era in
architecture (among whom were the critics of prerevolutionary neoclassicism, Machinskii
and Munts) dismissed both the style moderne and the neoclassical revival. On the other
hand, Lukomskii and Lialevich wrote of their belief in the eventual coming of a new so
ciopolitical era but remained advocates of classical tectonics.9 The ramifications of this
train of thought can be found in Lukomskii’s book Contemporary Petrograd (Sovremennyi
Petrograd), published a few months before the so-called bourgeois revolution in February
1917.10 The normative tendency in Lukomskii’s writings on neoclassicism reached an ex
treme in the book’s call for an “artistic dictatorship.” The nostalgic reference to Peters
burg during the golden age of Alexander I, a century earlier, represented an attempt to
revive the myth of the imperial capital and of Russia itself. The collapse of the empire did
indeed bring about a dictatorship, ostensibly of the proletariat, although not one immedi
ately concerned with aesthetic or planning issues.
Lukomskii’s advocacy of a controlled urban design would become, mutatis mutandis, ac
cepted practice in the Soviet period. After 1917, the appeal of the neoclassical revival on
aesthetic and ideological grounds proved transferable to the heroic enthusiasm of the
early period of Soviet power, when architects such as Fomin, Belogrud, and Shchuko pro
duced numerous designs for public buildings in the so-called Red Doric or proletarian
classical manner.
The fact that almost every architect of prominence during the first two decades of Soviet
architecture (e.g., Ivan Fomin, the Vesnin Brothers) had built or designed in some variant
of neoclassicism before the revolution suggests that Soviet modernism, and construc
tivism in particular, were related to a rationalist interpretation of neoclassicism.11 Yet the
protean nature of neoclassicism—as a term and as an architectural phenomenon—de
mands a careful definition of its often contradictory impulses. The neoclassical revival in
communist visual culture of the 1930s was derived from high classical and Renaissance
models. When these models were revived in the 1930s by architects such as Ivan
Zholtovskii, they were presented as a cultured response to faceless modernism.
The Avant-Garde Alternative: Monumental in

Scale, Muted in Stylistic Voice
From the perspective of the innovators of the 1920s, Russian prerevolutionary architec
ture—whether modern or neoclassical—had achieved little as a reflection of the values
and requirements of the modern age. In their interpretation, architecture had served a
narrow segment of the ruling class. Yet certain prerevolutionary design visions provided a
bridge to the new era. Even as the country plunged into civil war in 1918, groups of ar
chitects in Moscow and Petrograd envisioned workers’ settlements that represent an ex
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tension of the “garden city” movement that first arose in England in 1898 through the
work of Ebenezer Howard and had appeared in Russia during the decade before World
War I.12 More monumental designs drew upon massive, archaic forms of neoclassicism
(reminiscent of the heroic architectural visions of the French Revolution), such as
projects by Ivan Fomin and Andrei Belogrud for a Palace of Workers in Petrograd.13 In
their association of proletarian culture with a muscular interpretation of classicism, these
designs could later be seen as prototypes for a neoclassical revival in the 1930s, but in
the early revolutionary period they were little more than abstract sketches.
Indeed, the poverty and social chaos of the early revolutionary years propelled other ar
chitects toward radical ideas on design, many of which were related to a thriving mod
ernist movement in the visual arts. Lissitzky’s concepts of space and form (proun), along
with those of Kazimir Malevich (planit) and Vladimir Tatlin, played a part in the develop
ment of an architecture expressed in “stereometric forms,” purified of the decorative ele
ments of the eclectic past. The experiments of Lissitzky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Malevich
in painting and of Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko in sculpture had created the possibili
ty of a new architectural movement, defined by Lissitzky as a synthesis with painting and
sculpture.14
The assumption that a revolution in architecture (along with the other arts) would accom
pany the Marxist-Leninist political revolution was soon put to the test by social and eco
nomic realities. Russia’s industrial base lay in shambles; technological resources were ex
tremely limited in what was still a predominantly rural nation; and Moscow’s population—
poorly housed before the war—increased sharply as the city became in 1918 the center of
a thoroughly administered state. One of that state’s earliest edicts, in August 1918, re
pealed the right to private ownership of urban real estate.
Nonetheless, the prerevolutionary building boom in apartments and commercial buildings

in various decorative styles (including the neoclassical revival) had established a viable
foundation for urban development on a large scale. Furthermore, the Russian architectur
al profession was relatively intact after the emigration that decimated other areas of
Russian culture in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Amid diverse architectural
alliances, one Moscow institution served as the gathering ground for architects and
artists dedicated to the Bolshevik Revolution as a platform for innovation in the arts and
to an exploration of the social ramifications of the new aesthetic movement in a Leninist
context. Named VKhUTEMAS (the Russian acronym for Higher Artistic and Technical
Workshops), and established by Lenin’s decree, the organization was formed from the
merger in 1918 of two art schools: the Stroganov School and the Moscow School of Paint
ing, Sculpture, and Architecture.15 Originally known as the Free Workshops, the new enti
ty acquired its name after a reorganization in 1920.16 In 1925, it was reorganized again,
subsequently to be called the Higher Artistic and Technical Institute (VKhUTEIN).
VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN was not the only Moscow institution concerned with the teach
ing and practice of architecture in the 1920s, but it was unique in the scope of its con
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cerns (including the visual and the applied arts) as well as in the variety of viewpoints
that existed there before its closing in 1930.
Theoretical direction for VKhUTEMAS was provided by the Institute of Artistic Culture
(INKhUK, also founded in 1920), which attempted to establish a science “examining ana
lytically and synthetically the basic elements both for the separate arts and for art as a
whole.”17 Its first program-curriculum, developed by Wassily Kandinsky, was found too ab
stract by many at INKhUK, and Kandinsky soon left for Germany and the Bauhaus. But
the concern with abstract, theoretical principles did not abate with Kandinsky’s depar
ture. Indeed, the issue of theory versus construction became a source of factional dispute
in Soviet modernism.
In the early 1920s, the Higher Workshops established the Working Group at INKhUK and
began to exhibit architectural sketches in Russia and in Germany (for example, in Berlin
in 1922). In 1923, the nucleus of the group—which included Nikolai Ladovskii, Vladimir
Krinskii, Nikolai Dokuchaev, and for a time Lissitzky—formed the Association of New Ar
chitects (ASNOVA), an organization devoted to the “establishment of general principles in
architecture and its liberation from atrophied forms.”18 Its members called themselves ra
tionalists. The group and its name arose in the ideological context of the early Soviet vi
sion of the transformative power of innovative architecture. In their view, the new archi
tecture would be based on a deep study of basic geometric principles, their development
in space, and the psychological bases of perception of architectural forms.
The theoretical programs developed by Ladovskii and his colleagues were closely related
to the work of Lissitzky and Malevich, whose architectonic models (Lissitzky’s prouns and
Malevich’s planity or arkhitektony) represented the refinement of “pure” spatial forms.
For Malevich, architectonic forms were a logical extension of his “Suprematism.”19 Even
as art and sculpture influenced the development of modern architectural design, architec
ture was seen by early Soviet modernists as the dominant synthesis of art forms in the
new era. (Cf. the work of Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut during the same period.)
Most of the projects realized during the 1920s belong to a group of architects known as
the constructivists (or functionalists). Devoid of ornamental detail, the streamlined, mod
ernist aesthetic of constructivism served as a statement of progress “under socialism.”20
Despite the polemics between the rationalists and constructivists, their origins and goals
had much in common. Like the rationalists, the constructivists drew inspiration from
modernism in painting and sculpture. In 1920, the year of genesis for so much in Russian
modernism, the brothers Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner released their “Realistic Mani
festo,” with its praise of kinetic rhythms and negation of outmoded concepts of volume.
Yet they reaffirmed the integrity of art and disputed the credo of the faction within
INKhUK that called upon artists and designers to turn to utilitarian, “productionist” (and
political) goals.21 The importance of “pure” artistic experiments in spatial constructions
to the evolution of the principles of constructivism is demonstrated in the work of Alek
sandr Rodchenko, who in 1921 stated that “construction is the contemporary demand for
organization and the utilitarian application of materials.”22
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In the early 1920s, the evolution of constructivist ideas at INKhUK passed through vari
ous polemical phases. The term konstruktivizm was still broadly interpreted and had not
yet acquired the functionalist emphasis of the mid-1920s. The art faction, influenced by
Kandinsky, was opposed by the “productionists”—associated with the Left Front of the
Arts—who anticipated an age of engineers supervising the mass production of useful,
nonartistic objects.23 A reaction to both sides, particularly the former, led in 1921 to the
formation of a group of artists-constructivists: Aleksandr Vesnin, architect; Aleksei Gan,
art critic and propagandist24; Rodchenko, sculptor and photographer; Vladimir and
Georgii Stenberg, poster designers; and Varvara Stepanova, set designer.
Soviet artists and architects of the modern movement experienced considerable success
in Europe, particularly among the intelligentsia, who were often favorably disposed to
ward the social experiment underway in the Soviet Union and saw the Russian avant-
garde as a fitting manifestation of an unshackled society.25 Lissitzky, who spent much of
the 1920s in Germany but maintained contacts in the Soviet Union, served as a propagan
dist for the movement. During that decade, Russian artists active at VKhUTEMAS and
INKhUK visited the West (Kandinsky, Malevich, Gabo, Pevsner), while Western architects
visited, and in some cases worked in, the Soviet Union (Bruno Taut, Ernst May, Erich
Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier).26
Although in the early Soviet period, the means were lacking for large-scale architectural
projects, architects understood that the time would come for major allocation of state re
sources for building projects. Therefore, the discussion of the essence of Soviet architec
ture assumed critical importance. The crux of the early debate between the rationalists
(formalists) and constructivists lay in the relative importance assigned to aesthetic theory
as opposed to a functionalism that was derived from technology and materials. In 1920,
constructivist proponents declared “uncompromising war on art” and maintained that ar
chitectural design must not be separated from the utilitarian demands of technology. Moi
sei Ginzburg accused the rationalists of ignoring this principle. ASNOVA found the con
structivists guilty of “technological fetishism.” Constructivists responded with the terms
“naive,” “abstract,” and “formalist.”27 Yet both groups shared a concern for the relation
between architecture and social planning; and both insisted on a clearly defined structur
al mass based on uncluttered geometric forms.
Until 1925, the constructivists had little more to show in actual construction than their
more theoretically minded colleagues, the rationalists. Social and economic reconstruc
tion severely limited the resources available, particularly for structures requiring a use of
modern technology. The most advanced of constructivist works in the early twenties were
wooden set designs by Alexandr Vesnin, Varvara Stepanova, and Liubov Popova.28
Nonetheless, by 1924, constructivist architects had acquired vigorous leadership in Alek
sandr Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg, an articulate spokesman in polemics with ASNOVA. In
1924, Ginzburg published Style and Epoch, which established the theoretical and histori
cal base for a new architecture in a new age, devoid of the eclecticism and aestheticism
of capitalist architecture at the turn of the century.29 The following year the construc
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tivists founded the Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA); and in 1926, the Union be
gan publishing the journal Contemporary Architecture, edited by Ginzburg and Vesnin.
Perhaps the most accomplished example of the functional aesthetic is Ginzburg’s own
creation, the apartment house for the People’s Commissariat of Finance (Narkomfin,
1928–1930), designed in collaboration with Ivan Milinis. Ginzburg had just completed his
architectural training at the Milan Academy of Arts, when World War I broke out; and af
ter returning to Russia, he continued his studies at the eminent Riga Polytechnic (then
evacuated to Moscow).30 In addition to theoretical works establishing the principles of
constructivism in architecture, Ginzburg contributed in the 1920s to the development of
housing concepts with emphasis on the social aspects of modern communal living.31
Ginzburg’s concept of functionalism in the Narkomfin project created a defining example
of Soviet modernism that could be applied on an expanded scale. Indeed, Ivan Nikolaev’s
design of the “student village” for the Textile Institute in Moscow (1929–1930) demon
strated a monumental scale without decorative additions (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Moscow. Student Village of Textile Institute

(Ordzhonikidze Street). Main entrance.
Photograph ©William Brumfield, August 19, 2018
The most productive proponents of constructivism were the Vesnin brothers: Leonid, Vik
tor, and Aleksandr, all of whom had completed their education in St. Petersburg before
World War I and launched successful careers.32 The culminating project in the Vesnins’
constructivist oeuvre was an extension of the concept of the workers’ club, conceived as a
large complex of three buildings to serve the social needs of the Proletarian District, a
factory and workers’ district in southeast Moscow. The site overlooked the Moscow River
and was adjacent to the Simonov Monastery, part of whose walls were razed in construct
ing the project. The central element, however, was the club building itself, built in 1931–
1937. The prolonged construction period illustrates that constructivist projects could be
carried through even during the 1930s, provided they followed a clear, functional design.
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Transition to Classicist Monumentalism: The

Palace of the Soviets
During the early five-year plans (the first began in 1928), the metaphorical connections
between “construction” and the creation of a new society were exploited as a part of the
cultural revolution promulgated by Stalin and his party apparatus. The clearest example
of this socio-architectural dialectic was the demolition of Konstantin Ton’s massive
Church of Christ the Redeemer and the international competition for the signature build
ing on the site, the Palace of the Soviets.33 It is ideologically telling that the word
“palace” was chosen for this project—a nominal announcement of the approaching em
brace of neoclassical monumentalism. The guidelines established by the construction
committee signaled a move toward classical models that would become a basis for “so
cialist realism” in architecture.
The Palace of the Soviets was to exploit modern technology in ways that became clearer
during the fourth phase of the competition, in 1932–1933. By the middle of 1933, the
project had been awarded to a team consisting of Boris Iofan, Shchuko, and Gelfreikh,
who over the next six years developed the artistic and technical aspects of the structure
to their final forms: halls with a seating capacity of 21,000 and 6,000, set within a rectan
gular base with endless columniation. From this base (or stylobate) a tiered structure
formed of massive pylons was to rise to a height of 315 meters, crowned by a 100-meter
statue of Lenin.34 A trip to the United States in 1935 gave the architects an encouraging
view of the technical possibilities for the gargantuan project, and by 1937, work had be
gun on the foundation pit, excavated to limestone bedrock at a depth of 20 meters below
the level of the adjacent Moscow River. By 1940, the steel frame began to rise above
ground level from the concentric circles of the ferroconcrete foundation; but the outbreak
of war halted construction. Various attempts to resurrect a diminished project proved fu
tile, and in 1958–1960 the foundation pit was converted into the basin for an outdoor
heated swimming pool (130 meters in diameter) designed by Dmitrii Chechulin. Despite
the failure of the Palace of the Soviets project, the development process played a critical
role in providing technical experience and design motifs for the postwar Stalinist sky
scrapers.
Urban construction in the 1930s glorified the achievements of the new industrial power
and transformed the cityscape of the country’s two major centers. The earlier disputes
between the “urbanists” and “deurbanists” was resolved in favor of regulated but inten
sive urban development as set forth in a speech by Lazar Kaganovich at the Central Com
mittee plenum in June 1931.35 As a result, both Moscow and Leningrad developed com
prehensive city plans that were to serve as a setting for the new monumental architec
ture. By the time the Moscow plan, by Vladimir Semenov and Sergei Chernyshev, was
adopted in 1935, measures were underway to implement a reconstruction of the Soviet
capital.36 The Okhotnyi Riad market area between the Bolshoi Theater and the Kremlin
was cleared, and the former Tverskaia Street—renamed in honor of Maxim Gorky in 1932
—was widened and endowed in 1936–1940 with rows of buildings designed primarily by
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Arkadii Mordvinov in an eclectic, vaguely Italianate style that defined the early phase of
Stalinist monumentalist architecture.37 Other major projects included the construction of
Peace Prospekt as the main thoroughfare in the north of the city; the design of the Gorky
Park of Culture and Rest (1934–1936, to a design by Aleksandr Vlasov); and the first
phases of the Moscow subway, whose stations displayed lavishly decorative, often neo
classical, approaches to monumentalist design.38
Even as the functional architecture of industrial production continued with the help of
Western engineers and specialists in the Urals and on the Volga (particularly in Stalin
grad), the blossoming of surface decoration on the buildings of the new administrative
and cultural “superstructure” reflected a diminution of functionalism and the increasing
domination of neoclassical monumentalism. The Academy of Architecture was founded in
1933 to define the aesthetic content of socialist realism, with its basic premise of the
“critical assimilation of the heritage.” The architecture of the totalitarian state was, in im
itation of its imperial predecessors, to adapt academic styles of the past to a new ideologi
cal and technical environment.39 A telling example of this development is provided by the
return to prominence of Ivan Zholtovskii, whose prerevolutionary devotion to the Italian
Renaissance found new applications in the design of major buildings during the Stalinist
period. A signature example is his apartment house for the Moscow City Soviet
(Mossovet) at Mokhovaia Street 13, opposite the Kremlin (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 Moscow. Mossovet apartment house,

Mokhovaia Street 13. The slogan above the cornice
reads “Communism will triumph.” It was removed in
1990.
Like prestigious neoclassical revival projects by architects such as Vladimir Shchuko, the
design was based on a Renaissance model—in this case Andrea Palladio’s Palazzo del
Capitaniato in Vicenza. Built to the highest standards in 1932–1934, the structure was in
terpreted as a direct rebuff to constructivism. Soon after completion, it was transferred to
the United States Embassy as its main building. When the embassy received a larger
building in 1953, the structure was transferred to the Soviet tourist agency Inturist,
which placed a large sign proclaiming “Communism will triumph,” the clearest expres
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sion of ideology with triumphalist, retrospective architecture. (The sign was removed in
1990.)
This restatement of monumentalism cannot be attributed solely to Stalin or his closest ad
visers, although they surely approved of it.40 Rather, it represented both a reaction
against monotonous architecture falsely associated with constructivism (whose projects,
due to economic and technical limits, were often subverted by the poor quality of finish)
and a preference by the “people”—or the rapidly evolving party elite—for an architecture
of decoration and monumentality representative of the power of the Soviet state. One
sees parallels to the early twentieth-century reaction against the prerevolutionary style
moderne derided as “bourgeois” from an imperial, statist position (see earlier).
Just as the earlier autocrats erected triumphal arches and palaces in celebration of the
state, its victories, and their supreme role in both, so the new order expected its achieve
ments to be celebrated with an appropriately grandiloquent style. The construction of
multistoried monoliths in Moscow symbolized the hierarchy of technical-administrative
cadres and separated them from the masses, whose spartan living conditions were
masked in the 1930s by grand “parks of culture,” by the expansion of the Moscow sub
way, and by the ornamented building facades that arose along the wide boulevards and
squares of reconstructed Moscow. Avant-garde modernism had no place in this architec
tural order, and its demise was completed at the First All-Union Congress of Architects in
June 1937 as former modernists accepted the party’s direction or remained silent.
Monumentalism as Expression of Postwar Sovi

et Triumph
The Soviet retrospective revival reached its apogee in the monumental postwar Stalinist
towers. The unprecedented destruction visited upon the Soviet Union by World War II
(approximately 30 percent of the national wealth) cleared the way for a new wave of gar
gantuan construction projects as cities such as Stalingrad, Minsk, Kharkov, and Kiev were
rebuilt from the ground up. Architecture reached even greater heights of monumental
ism, epitomized in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the rise of “Stalinist gothic” build
ings. Cities from Warsaw to Tashkent exhibited examples of the style; but the center re
mained Moscow, where eight tower buildings were planned in a display of a decorative
pastiche that included classicizing elements from the unbuilt Palace of the Soviets as well
as ornamental motifs from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite architecture. At
the same time the towers borrowed noticeably from early twentieth-century Manhattan
neogothic skyscrapers such as the Woolworth Building, designed by Cass Gilbert and con
structed in 1910–1912.41 Skyscrapers had long embodied for Russians the dynamic spirit
of American capitalism and were frequently described in Russian architectural publica
tions at the turn of the twentieth century.42 The fact that the Stalin-era socialist realist
towers partially replicated that dynamic spirit, along with a capitalist blend of modernist
monumentalism, is something less emphasized in discussions of communist visual culture.
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A leading proponent of tall buildings was the architect Viacheslav Oltarzhevskii (1880–
1966), who had worked with Ivan Rerberg before the revolution in the design of one of
Moscow’s first towers (the Northern Insurance Company). He went to the United States
for study purposes in the 1920s and became one of the few Soviet experts in Western sky
scraper construction. Caught by the Stalinist purge machinery in 1938 (Third Moscow
Trial), Oltarzhevskii returned from penal exile in 1943 and was elevated in the late 1940s
to the position of Doctor of Architecture in recognition of his expertise in tall buildings.43
Among the first to be completed was a twenty-four-story apartment building with ramify
ing wings on the Kotelnicheskaia Quay to the southeast of the city center. Designed by
Dmitrii Chechulin, assisted by a team of architects and engineers, the building was erect
ed in 1948–1952 at prominent location near the confluence of the Iauza and Moscow
Rivers. Apartments were restricted to those with the highest level of state access. On the
north of the Garden Ring, Aleksei Dushkin designed an office and apartment building at
Lermontov Square (1953); and in the same area, Leonid Poliakov built the Hotel
Leningrad (1949–1953) near the Leningrad Station. The west portion of the Garden Ring
was marked by an apartment building by Mikhail Posokhin and A. Mdoiants at Insurrec
tion Square (1950–1954); and at the southwest portion of the Ring stands the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade on Smolensk Square, by Vladimir Gelfreikh and
Mikhail Minkus (1948–1953) (see Figure 4).
Figure 4 Moscow. Building of Ministry of Foreign Af

fairs and Foreign Trade.
Photograph © William Brumfield, October 13, 2018
Further to the southwest beyond the Moscow River is the most curious of the group: the
sprawling Hotel Ukraina, designed by Arkadii Mordvinov with the participation of
Oltarzhevskii (built in 1950–1956).
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The most imposing of the seven tower buildings was the new central building of Moscow
State University on Lenin (formerly Sparrow) Hills. Lev Rudnev, Pavel Abrosimov, and
Aleksandr Khriakov built in 1949–1953 a tower with a spire overlooking all Moscow. The
main architect, Rudnev, had played an important role in defining Soviet monumentalism
with buildings such as the M. V. Frunze Military Academy (1932–1937; in collaboration
with V. O. Munts). The Academy’s rectangular bulk was implemented in a style that I call
“early totalitarian massive,” with an unyielding grid of square windows above a long sty
lobate.44 The university building represents a later, flamboyant stage of statist architec
ture and was designed as a self-contained and tightly regulated community, a melding of
utopian notions of communism with the consummate elitism of the late Stalinist period.
Although it too suggests elements of early Manhattan skyscraper design, its vast ramify
ing symmetry is unique. In the original published design, the Moscow University tower
was surmounted by a gargantuan statue of a Soviet scholar. Although Stalin had earlier
suggested that the Palace of the Soviets serve as a pedestal for the 100-meter statue of
Lenin, it was he who insisted that the university scholar statue be replaced by a spire,
thus unifying Moscow with a series of needle-pointed skyscrapers. Bombastic and profli
gate in the design of interior space, the Moscow University tower—like its lesser spired
counterparts—served, as intended, to dominate the city.
Ultimately, only seven of the eight projected towers were built. The fate of the eighth pro
vides an insight into the vagaries of large state-sponsored projects in the postwar period.
Originally planned for administrative purposes, the eighth tower was to occupy land
cleared of the nineteenth-century commercial buildings southeast of Red Square. In 1947,
work began to commission a design by Dmitrii Chechulin, and by 1953 the massive stylo
bate base was complete. The death of Stalin brought the expensive project to a halt, how
ever; and the stylobate subsequently served as the base of the Hotel Rossiia, built in
1964–1967 by the same Chechulin in an austere “techno” style. Although functional, the
looming bulk of the hotel (at that time the largest in the world) was considered inappro
priate for a site next to the Kremlin, and the hotel was demolished in 2006. After many
proposals the site was allocated to the Zariadye riverside park, built in 2014–2017 to a
design by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Thus, Western capitalism devised a
means to preserve the historic scale of the Kremlin.
The placement of these seven postwar towers—and lesser buildings in the same style—
defined key points in the topography of Moscow, a capital intended as a beacon to the so
cialist world. This role was emphasized by the towers’ large spires, redolent both of me
dieval bell towers and of the Admiralty spire in St. Petersburg. The Russian built environ
ment had for centuries been characterized by an unplanned array of low structures (usu
ally wooden) punctuated by vertical dominants such as churches and bell towers. On a
larger scale the late Stalin-era buildings continued this model. Although not all of these
“tall buildings” (vysotnye zdaniia) were originally designed with the spires, they obtained
them in the final designs as a recognition of their symbolic and visual role in a city that
would retain a largely horizontal, “communal” profile.
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1950s
The Stalinist towers were by no means the only expression of statist monumental archi
tecture. Stalin’s architects were also encouraged to spread the forms of St. Petersburg’s
late neoclassicism throughout the Soviet Empire. The decision in late Stalinist architec
ture to revert to models both of the tsarist period and of American capitalism might seem
ironic, but Stalin and his associates had a greater sympathy for the monumentality of pre
revolutionary culture than for the innovative, rationalist, cosmopolitan thought of the
1920s, loud in its debates and obviously a hotbed of deviationism. Monumental architec
ture in a historicist form allowed for a proclamatory style that could express “the main
ideas of the epoch”—reminiscent of the call for a unifying sociocultural idea in architec
ture at the beginning of the century expressed by the prerevolutionary champions of neo
classicism.45 The revival of neoclassical monumentalism in the 1930s and 1940s was
joined by a postwar reversion to neo-Muscovite forms. Apart from nationalistic overtones,
this move provided a link with the architecture of potentates such as Ivan the Terrible,
whose role in Russian history was glorified during the Stalinist era (cf. Sergei Eisenstein’s
cinematic interpretation of Ivan).
The Stalin-era towers were vastly regressive in their wasted space and elaborate decora
tion—isolated points of opulence in a country wracked by destruction and deprivation.
This lack of functional and economic rationalism exemplifies the principle elucidated by
the Czech semiotician Jan Mukařovský, of substitution for vanished functions.46 The usual
considerations of design, material, and use of a structure were displaced by symbolic
functions, denoting, in the case of Stalinist Russia, the power of the state, the glory of
Muscovite culture, the central position of Moscow in the communist world, and the om
nipotence of Stalin himself—the “Great Architect of Communism.”
Post-Stalinist Simplification
The period following Stalin’s death, in March 1953, was marked by a sober reassessment
of priorities in light of the acute housing crisis in Moscow and other cities. A reaction
against decorative styles (the campaign against ukrashatelstvo) was instituted as a pre
requisite for standardized architecture during the building campaigns of the Khrushchev
era. Yet constructivism was ignored as a precedent in the early post-Stalinist years.
Teams of engineers and architects began to produce standardized plans that could be
widely applied with relatively simple technology, while the pursuit of a historical frame
work for architectural style was largely discarded—as indicated by the abolition of the
Academy of Architecture in the early Khrushchev era.47
The acceleration of standardized construction achieved an impressive volume, first with

five-story apartment buildings that appeared throughout the country, and subsequently
with mass-produced buildings as high as twenty stories—in rare cases even higher.48 The
industrialization of building and the curbing of decorative pomposity produced, however,
a different set of problems. Apart from the general monotony of design, even the creative
project conformed to the processes of standardized, “industrial” construction, based on
prefabricated modules or precast concrete forms assembled on site. Soviet architects
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1950s
were faced with a narrow range of options limited by mass construction methods and
meagre financial resources. In no small measure, architecture had been supplanted by
engineering in the routinized production of buildings issuing from design bureaus.
The most prolific practitioner of postwar Soviet modernism was Mikhail Posokhin, who
had collaborated in the design of the Stalinist apartment tower on Insurrection Square
but then shifted into the new functionalism, interpreted in Moscow on a sweeping scale
appropriate to the confidence of the Sputnik era. Posokhin adapted the international mod
ern style, with its glass and aluminum facades, to industrialized methods of construction
in the creation of such ensembles as Kalinin Prospekt (1964–1969; also known as the New
Arbat), extending westward from the Kremlin and Arbat Square.
His design for the Kremlin Palace of Congresses (1959–1961, in collaboration with A. Mn
doiants and others) had the appearance of a modern concert hall, with a marble-clad rec
tangular outline marked by narrow pylons and multistoried shafts of plate glass. In its pri
mary function as the site of Communist Party meetings, the Palace of Congresses opened
on the first day of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, which witnessed the culmination of
Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign. Indeed, the contrast between late Stalin
ist monumentalism and the neutral modern style of the Khrushchev Palace of Congresses
could not have been greater or more expressive of the pragmatic values of a technocratic
state. Yet both shared an affinity with the contrasting varieties of American capitalist ar
chitecture in the twentieth century, from the proclamations of Manhattan and Chicago
“skyscraper gothic” to the streamlined rectilinear blocks of the International Style.
At the same time, it should be noted that Russia has for centuries emphasized the display
of political markers in architecture. These “verticals of power”—from sixteenth-century
votive churches to Stalin-era apartment towers—proclaim the presence and endurance of
central authority. In the final (1990) version of his novel First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenit
syn compellingly evokes a sense of elite Stalinist architecture as a structure of privilege
and power. The novel’s action occurs during the period when the seven main towers were
under construction.
Post-Soviet Postscript: The Monumental Lega

cy Abides
The simplification of design remained dominant in late Soviet design until the collapse of
the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, after which revivalist styles reappeared in office and
apartment buildings. Throughout Moscow, ziggurats crowned with retro ornamentation
arose in stylistic echoes of the Stalinist towers. Notable examples are the tellingly named
Triumph Palace (Triumf Palas) apartment tower in the Sokol region of Moscow and the
Oruzheinyi Lane Business Center, both of which were roundly criticized for their aesthet
ic pretentions. Andrei Trofimov, the main architect of the Triumph Palace, spoke of follow
ing the features of the earlier Soviet towers and even added a spire to the final design of
the central tower. Beset by technical difficulties during and after its prolonged construc
Page 17 of 25

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tion (2001–2006), the massive project has ramifying lower structures in the manner of
Moscow University and Hotel Ukraine.
The Oruzheinyi Lane complex was designed by Mikhail Posokhin, son of the Mikhail
Posokhin who had co-designed one of the Stalinist towers (as discussed earlier). Although
begun in 2006, the sprawling complex experienced aftershocks from the 2008 global fi
nancial crisis that extended its construction until 2016. Located at a highly visible point
on the Garden Ring in central Moscow, the structure is swathed in cascades of glass
framed by innumerable receding vertical planes—an echo of Manhattan tower setbacks
(see Figure 5).
Figure 5 Moscow. Oruzheinyi Lane Business Center.

View from Sadovaia-Triumfalnaia Street.
It, too, has a pinnacle, although lower than Triumph Palace.
Yet the appearance of these retrospective “heritage” designs that echo the pre- and
postrevolutionary neoclassicism are isolated examples within a larger proliferation of
high-tech skyscrapers epitomized by Moscow City, a gargantuan development project
(comparable in scale to London’s Canary Wharf), launched in the early 1990s with the
support of mayor Iurii Luzhkov. Fueled by substantial government investment and de
signed by an array of international architectural firms, this concentration of streamlined
towers is monumental in scale yet little concerned with retrospective gestures. Contem
porary Moscow monumentalism thus seems placed within two competing impulses, each
of which has its connections to the global architectures of capitalism. While the retro
spective, neo-Stalinist designs can be compared to postmodernism, the international com
mercial towers hearken to the architectural fashions of major financial centers in Europe
and beyond. Each of these impulses exists within the peculiar Russian variety of state
Page 18 of 25

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capitalism. In this quasi-pragmatic context, the scattered examples of neo-Stalinist archi
tecture seem less a revival than a curious relic marketed as luxury for a moneyed elite.
Bibliography
Brumfield, William C. “America as Emblem of Modernity in Russian Architecture, 1870–
1917.” In Thresholds (Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technolo
gy), 32 (2006): 26–32.
Brumfield, William C. “Anti-modernism and the Neoclassical Revival in Russian Architec

ture, 1906–1916.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (December 1989):
371–386.
Brumfield, William C. “Architecture and Urban Planning.” In The Soviet Union Today: An
Interpretive Guide, edited by James Cracraft, 163–172. Chicago: Educational Foundation
for Nuclear Science, 1983.
Brumfield, William C. The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: Uni

versity of California Press, 1991.
Brumfield, William C., ed. Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian
Dreams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Brumfield, William C. “Russian Architecture and the Cataclysm of the First World War.” In
Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and
Institutions, edited by Steven G. Marks et al., 165–188. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014.
Cooke, Catherine, ed. Russian Avant-Garde Art and Architecture. London: Academy Edi
tions, 1983.
Dabrowski, Magdalena. Liubov Popova. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
Ginzburg, Moisei. Style and Epoch. Translated by Anatole Senkevitch. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1982.
Khan-Magomedov, Selim. Aleksandr Vesnin and Russian Constructivism. New York: Riz
zoli, 1986.
Khan-Magomedov, Selim. Pioneers of Soviet Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
Lissitsky, El. Russia: Architecture for a World Revolution. Translated by Eric Dluhosch.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.
Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Mukarovsky, Jan. “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture.” In Structure, Sign, and
Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, translated and edited by John Burbank and
Peter Steiner, 236–250. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.
Page 19 of 25

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Paperny, Vladimir. Kul’tura Dva. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985. [English edition: Architecture
in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002]
Ruble, Blair. “From Palace Square to Moscow Square: St. Petersburg’s Century-long Re
treat from Public Space.” In Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopi
an Dreams, edited by William Brumfield, 145–175. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Notes:
(1.) William C. Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1991), chap. 6.
(2.) Vladimir G. Lisovskii, I. A. Fomin (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1979), 10–11. Fomin’s designs
for houses in both the modern and neoclassical styles appeared in Ezhegodnik Obshchest
va Arkhitektorov-Khudozhnikov (Annual of the Society of Architect-Artists), no. 1 (1906):
116–119.
(3.) Ivan Fomin, “Istoricheskaia vystavka arkhitektury v S.-Peterburge,” Starye gody (July–
September 1908), 178.
(4.) Georgii Lukomskii, “Arkhitekturnye vkusy sovremennosti,” Trudy IV S”ezda russkikh

zodchikh (Petersburg, 1911), 28. A similar attack against “excessive” individualism ap
peared in Lukomskii’s “Novyi Peterburg (Mysli o sovremennom stroitel’stve),” Apollon
(1913), no. 2: 9.
(5.) After the revolution Lialevich (1876–1944) returned to Warsaw, where he pursued an
architectural career. He died during the Warsaw Uprising. Boris M. Kirikov, “V rusle
neoklassiki,” Stroitel’stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada (1977), no. 6: 40–43. On Shchuko, see
Tatiana Slavina, Vladimir Shchuko (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1978).
(6.) V. Machinskii, “Arkhitekturnye zametki,” Zodchii (1914), no. 25: 297–300.
(7.) Oskar Munts, “Parfenon ili Sv. Sofiia? K sporu o klassitsizme v arkhitekture,”
Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel’nik (1916), no. 2: 19–22. The article by
Benois, which appeared during November and December in the newspaper Rech’, took as
its point of departure the neoclassical, retrospective trend in a recent show of student
projects at the Academy of Arts.
(8.) Munts, “Parfenon ili Sv. Sofiia?,” 22.
(9.) “Za arkhitekturu,” Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel’nik (1916), no. 9: 116.

The polemic continued in subsequent issues during 1916, with replies from both Munts
and Duodecim. See also Lukomskii, “Novyi Peterburg,” 10.
(10.) Sovremennyi Petrograd (Petrograd, n. d.), 30. Subtitled “A Sketch of the History of
the Appearance and Development of Neoclassical Construction,” the volume represents a
Page 20 of 25

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compendium of Lukomskii’s major writings on the neoclassical revival—including the
1913 and 1914 issues of Apollon.
(11.) On the relation between modern classicism in Russia and the rationalist approach to
design before and after the revolution, see Selim Khan-Magomedov, Aleksandr Vesnin and
Russian Constructivism (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 15, 34. The early Soviet fascination
with “proletarian classicism”—reminiscent of architecture following the French revolu
tion—is illustrated in Tatiana Suzdaleva, “Otkrytie naslediia revoliutsionnogo romantiz
ma,” Arkhitektura SSSR (1989), no. 2: 98–105.
(12.) A survey of new plans for workers’ communities is contained in Vigdariia E. Khaz
anova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 51–71.
More generally on early planned communities in Russia, see S. Frederick Starr, “The Re
vival and Schism of Urban Planning in Twentieth-Century Russia,” in The City in Russian
History, ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 222–242;
and Brumfield, Origins of Modernism, 295, 321n95.
(13.) The Belogrud design was modeled on the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, with addition
al components in the Florentine style. For a detailed analysis of the projects for this com
petition, see Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 125–127.
(14.) Russia: Architecture for a World Revolution, trans. by Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1970), 28–34. Lissitsky’s essay was originally published in 1930 as Russ
land, Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1930)
and republished, with supplementary material, as Russland: Architektur für eine Weltrev
olution (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965).
(15.) For a summary of the organizational history of VKhUTEMAS, see Khazanova, Sovet
skaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 200–201. See also Christina Lodder, Russian
Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 113–114.
(16.) The revolutionary ambiance of the Free Workshops is conveyed in Elena Ovsianniko
va, “Svobodnye ili gosudarstvennye,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (1988), no. 10, 23–27.
(17.) Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 204.
(18.) Vigdariia E. Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926–1932 gg. (Moscow:

Nauka, 1970), 39–41. On Ladovskii, see Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, “N. Ladovskii,” in
Margarita I. Astaf’eva-Dlugach, et al., Zodchie Moskvy: XX vek (Moscow: Moskovskii
rabochii, 1988), 135–144. A biographical sketch and excerpts from the writings of
Dokuchaev are contained in Mikhail G. Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob
arkhitekture (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), vol. 2, 186–210. On Krinskii, see Barkhin, ed.,
Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture , 105–127.
(19.) Kazimir Malevich, The Nonobjective World, trans. by Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: P.
Theobald, 1959), 27–102 (with illustrations). See also Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura
Page 21 of 25

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pervykh let oktiabria, 24–26; and A. Shumov, “Ot ploskosti k prostranstvu,” Arkhitektura
SSSR (1990), no. 4: 54–60.
(20.) Major publications on constructivism in English include Christina Lodder, Russian

Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); and Selim O. Khan-
Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1987).
(21.) The Realistic Manifesto and the Pevsner brothers’ relation to the Moscow avant-
garde are examined in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 34–42. See also Steven A. Nash,
“Sculptures of Purity and Possibility,” and Christina Lodder, “Gabo in Russia and Ger
many,” in Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism, eds. Steven A. Nash and Jörn Merk
ert (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1985), 23–26 and 51–54, respectively.
(22.) For a summary of Rodchenko’s role in the formulation of the constructivist view of
geometric form as a function of economy of material, see Lodder, Russian Constructivism,
22–29. See also Alexander Lavrentjev, “Alexander Rodchenko’s Architectural Language,”
in Alessandra Latour, ed., Alexander Rodchenko 1891–1956 (New York: New York Chap
ter, American Institute of Architects, 1987), no pagination; and David Elliott, ed., Rod
chenko and the Arts of Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
(23.) A survey of the constructivists and their Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA) is
contained in Kirill N. Afanas’ev and Vigdariia E. Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektu
ry 1926–1932 gg.: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1963), 65–68;
with statements pertaining to the movement, 69–105. The impact of the constructivist
movement in architectural design is surveyed in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 118–
180; and Anatole Kopp, Constructivist Architecture in the USSR (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1985).
(24.) Aleksei Gan’s programmatic statement Konstruktivism (Tver: Tverskoe izdatel’stvo,

1922) adopted an antiaestheticist approach that would be pursued by the major architec
tural theoretician of the movement, Moisei Ginzburg. Gan’s work is examined in Khazano
va, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 20–22; Lodder, Russian Constructivism,
98–99; and John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism (New
York, 1976), 217–225.
(25.) On Western modernist architects in the Soviet Union, see Anatole Kopp, “Foreign
Architects in the Soviet Union during the First Two Five-Year Plans,” in William C. Brum
field, Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 176–214.
(26.) I. Kokkinaki surveys the links between Soviet and Western architects of this period,
with emphasis on De Stijl, in “K voprosu o vzaimosviaziakh sovetskikh i zarubezhnykh
arkhitektorov v 1920–1930-e gody,” in I. M. Shmidt et al., eds., Voprosy sovetskogo
izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva i arkhitektury (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976), 350–382.
(27.) Afanas’ev and Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926–1932 gg., 50–53,
43–44, 70–72.
Page 22 of 25

1950s
(28.) Popova’s development of architectonic forms in painting and her substantial contri
butions to constructivism are noted in Magdalena Dabrowski, Liubov Popova (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 20–25.
(29.) Stil’ i epokha (Moscow, 1924). In English: Style and Epoch, trans. by Anatole Senke
vitch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). On the constructivist approach (primarily
Ginzburg’s) to design, see Catherine Cooke, “‘Form Is a Function X’: The Development of
the Constructivist Architects Design Method,” in Russian Avant-Garde Art and Architec
ture, ed. Catherine Cooke, 34–49 (London: Academy Editions, 1983).
(30.) Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, M. Ia. Ginzburg (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo literatury po

stroitel’stvu, 1972). A biographical sketch and a selection of Ginzburg’s writings are pre
sented in Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, vol. 2, 266–320.
(31.) For an analysis of Ginzburg’s work within the context of housing and urban planning
debates, see Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki (Moscow: Nauka, 1980),
72–74, 164–165, passim. On Ginsburg’s Narkomfin housing complex (built for the
People’s Commissariat of Finance) and Soviet housing design of that period, see Milka
Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918–1933,” in Russian Hous
ing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, eds. William Craft Brumfield and Blair
A. Ruble (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 85–148. For plans of the various Narkomfin apartment configurations and
photographs of the building in its original form, see Nikolai Bylinkin, Vera Kalmykova,
Aleskandr Riabushin, and Galina Sergeeva, Istoriia sovetskoe arkhitektury (1917–1954)
(Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1985), 46–47. A discussion of the building from the perspective of
theories of communal housing is presented in Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi
piatiletki, 168–171.
(32.) Leonid Vesnin graduated from the Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1909, and Aleksan
dr and Viktor graduated from the Institute of Civil Engineering in 1912. See M. A. Il’in,
Vesniny (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1960); A. G. Chiniakov, Brat’ia Vesniny (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, 1970); and S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Aleksandr Ves
nin (Moscow: Znanie, 1983).
(33.) A summary of the Palace of Soviets competition is presented in Bylinkin et al., Istori
ia sovetskoi arkhitektury, 70–74; and Antonia Cunliffe, “The Competition for the Place of
Soviets in Moscow, 1931–33,” Architectural Association Quarterly (1979), no. 2, 36–48.
Commentary on the first phase of competition and reproductions of a large sample of en
tries—including the three main winners, by Boris Iofan, the American architect George O.
Hamilton, and Zholtovskii—are presented in N. Zapletin, “Dvorets Sovetov SSSR (po ma
terialam konkursa),” Sovetskaia arkhitektura (1932), no. 2–3, 10–116.
(34.) For an analysis of the Iofan design in its variant forms, see Eigel, Boris Iofan
(Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1978), 80–117.
Page 23 of 25

1950s
(35.) Nikolai Miliutin reported on this shift of policy and presented an adaptation of his
own theories to it in “Vazhneishie zadachi sovremennogo etapa sovetskoi arkhitektury,”
Sovetskaia arkhitektura (1932), nos. 2–3, 3–9.
(36.) An analysis of the 1935 plan by Semenov (an early disciple of the English Garden
City theorist Ebenezer Howard), as well as competing proposals in 1931–1933, is present
ed in Vladimir N. Belousov and Olga V. Smirnova, V. N. Semenov (Moscow: Stroiizdat,
1980), 80–102. For discussions leading to the plan, see also Khazanova, Sovetskaia
arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki, 273–303. Semenov’s views, which included an attack on
constructivism in the name of returning the artistic element to architecture, were pre
sented in a series of articles in Stroitel’stvo Moskvy in 1932–1933 and recapitulated in the
chapter “Arkhitekturnaia rekonstruktsiia Moskvy,” in Voprosy arkhitektury (Moscow,
1935), 119–158.
(37.) The work of Mordvinov is surveyed in Astaf’eva-Dlugach et al., Zodchie Moskvy: XX

vek, 244–250. His apartment houses on Gorkii Street were built at an accelerated pace
that included the extensive use of prefabricated components.
(38.) On Moscow’s major reconstruction projects during the late 1930s, see Bylinkin et
al., Istoriia sovetskoi arkhitektury, 83–87.
(39.) On the ideology of the principle of “critical assimilation” in socialist realist architec
ture, see Cunliffe, “The Competition for the Place of Soviets,” 41–42. The basic forum of
the academy’s mission was the journal Akademiia arkhitektury, published in 1934–1937.
A corollary of the emphasis on “critical assimilation” was the raising of the cultural level
of the architectural elite, to which end leading architects at the academy were sent on an
extended trip to Europe. This exposed them, in time-honored Russian fashion, to the mas
terpieces of Western culture, yet also enabled them to meet distinguished contemporary
architects such as Le Corbusier. See Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob
arkhitekture, vol. 2, 458. The exemplar of this retrospective revival was Ivan Zholtovskii.
See Selim Khan-Magomedov, Ivan Zholtovskii (Moscow: S. E. Gordeev, 2010).
(40.) For a discussion of the Stalinist administrative apparatus and the development of
Soviet architecture, see S. Frederick Starr, “The Social Character of Stalinist Architec
ture,” Architectural Association Quarterly (1979), no. 2, 49–55: and Vladimir Papernyi,
Kul’tura Dva (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985).
(41.) Surveys of the tower skyscrapers include Ikonnikov, Arkhitektura Moskvy, 112–119;
and Zhuravlev et al., Arkhitektura sovetskoi Rossii, 185–190.
(42.) Extensive material on prerevolutionary Russian appraisals of American skyscrapers

is contained in William C. Brumfield, “Russian Perceptions of American architecture,
1870–1917,” in Brumfield, Reshaping Russian Architecture, 43–66.
(43.) V. K. Oltarzhevskii published a lavish survey of the Stalin-era towers: Stroitel’stvo

vysotnykh zdanii v Moskve (Moscow: Gos. izdat. literatury o stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture,
1953).
Page 24 of 25

1950s
(44.) For a brief survey of Rudnev’s career, see Astaf’eva-Dlugach et al., Zodchie Moskvy:
XX vek, 167–174; and V. Asse (Rudnev’s assistant), “Lev Rudnev,” Arkhitektura SSSR
(1985), no. 1, 101–107.
(45.) The most insistent statements on the role of monumental historicism in late Stalinist
architecture came from critics such as Mikhail Tsapenko and Ivan Matsa, formerly head
of VOPRA and a leading figure in the Academy of Architecture. See Ivan Matsa, “Sovet
skaia arkhitektura—novyi etap v razvitii mirovoi arkhitektury,” Arkhitektura SSSR, 17–18
(1947): 11–14; and Mikhail Tsapenko, O realisticheskikh osnovakh sovetskoi arkhitektury
(Moscow: Gos. izdat. literatury o stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture, 1952).
(46.) See “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture,” in Structure, Sign, and Function:
Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, translated and edited by John Burbank and Peter
Steiner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 236–250, with specific reference to
p. 245.
(47.) A clear statement of the shift from historicist ornamentation was Lev Rudnev’s arti
cle “O formalizme i klassike,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 11 (1954): 30–32.
(48.) The early stages of Soviet industrialized apartment construction, between 1955 and
1960, are surveyed in Zhuravlev et al., Arkhitektura sovetskoi Rossii, 215–229. In English,
see William C. Brumfield, “Architecture and Urban Planning,” in James Cracraft, ed., The
Soviet Union Today: An Interpretive Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), 164–
174.
William C. Brumfield
Department of Slavic Studies, Tulane University
Page 25 of 25

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Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architec­

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Reviving Neoclassicism at the Beginning of the

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Figure 1 St. Petersburg. Konstantin Markov apart­

Photograph © William Brumfield, January 2, 2017

Even as the prerevolutionary neoclassical revival achieved ascendancy over prerevolu­

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

The Avant-Garde Alternative: Monumental in

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Nonetheless, the prerevolutionary building boom in apartments and commercial buildings

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Figure 2 Moscow. Student Village of Textile Institute

Photograph ©William Brumfield, August 19, 2018

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Transition to Classicist Monumentalism: The

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Figure 3 Moscow. Mossovet apartment house,

Photograph ©William Brumfield, August 6, 1987

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Monumentalism as Expression of Postwar Sovi­

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Figure 4 Moscow. Building of Ministry of Foreign Af­

Photograph © William Brumfield, October 13, 2018

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

The acceleration of standardized construction achieved an impressive volume, first with

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Post-Soviet Postscript: The Monumental Lega­

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Figure 5 Moscow. Oruzheinyi Lane Business Center.

Photograph ©William Brumfield, August 8, 2018

It, too, has a pinnacle, although lower than Triumph Palace.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Brumfield, William C. “Anti-modernism and the Neoclassical Revival in Russian Architec­

Brumfield, William C. The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: Uni­

Dabrowski, Magdalena. Liubov Popova. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991.

Khan-Magomedov, Selim. Pioneers of Soviet Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

(1.) William C. Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley:

(4.) Georgii Lukomskii, “Arkhitekturnye vkusy sovremennosti,” Trudy IV S”ezda russkikh

(6.) V. Machinskii, “Arkhitekturnye zametki,” Zodchii (1914), no. 25: 297–300.

(8.) Munts, “Parfenon ili Sv. Sofiia?,” 22.

(9.) “Za arkhitekturu,” Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel’nik (1916), no. 9: 116.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

(17.) Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 204.

(18.) Vigdariia E. Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926–1932 gg. (Moscow:

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

(20.) Major publications on constructivism in English include Christina Lodder, Russian

(24.) Aleksei Gan’s programmatic statement Konstruktivism (Tver: Tverskoe izdatel’stvo,

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

(30.) Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, M. Ia. Ginzburg (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo literatury po

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

(37.) The work of Mordvinov is surveyed in Astaf’eva-Dlugach et al., Zodchie Moskvy: XX

(42.) Extensive material on prerevolutionary Russian appraisals of American skyscrapers

(43.) V. K. Oltarzhevskii published a lavish survey of the Stalin-era towers: Stroitel’stvo

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 03 April 2020

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architec

Figure 1 St. Petersburg. Konstantin Markov apart

Even as the prerevolutionary neoclassical revival achieved ascendancy over prerevolu

Monumentalism as Expression of Postwar Sovi

Figure 4 Moscow. Building of Ministry of Foreign Af

Post-Soviet Postscript: The Monumental Lega

Brumfield, William C. “Anti-modernism and the Neoclassical Revival in Russian Architec

Brumfield, William C. The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: Uni