Harry Dadswell
Seven Stalinist Silhouettes
A review of Katherine Zubovich, Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 2021) and Deyan Sudjic, Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow: Boris Iofan (1891-1976) (Thames & Hudson, 2022).
Nothing prepares you for the impact of Moscow’s architecture. I first saw the city late on a January night in 2019 when I arrived at the four glass-fronted pagodas of the British Embassy to start a three year posting. This quirky construction (2000, Richard Burton) was opened during a lost era of optimism in UK-Russia relations. A time when Blair and Putin, newly installed as Russian President, enjoyed close contact and made public expressions of mutual admiration. Nearly two decades later, the optimistic building, filled with modern art and inscribed with British and Russian poetry on its perimeter walls, seemed a curious outlier. Just as the political context had darkened, so the embassy appeared lost amidst the ominous underlit Soviet-era buildings that surround it.
Most dramatic of all the Embassy’s neighbours are two Stalinist silhouettes, the Russified skyscrapers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1953, Vladimir Gelfreykh and Adolf Minkus) and the Hotel Ukraine (1957, Arkady Mordvinov and Vyacheslav Oltarevsky). These buildings are from a family of skyscrapers (technically high-rises, or vysotki in Russian) , known as the Seven Sisters, which were built under Stalin after the Second World War. Their designs lodge in the imagination of Moscovites and visitors alike, in part due to their curious amalgamation of styles. The spires of their wedding-cake silhouettes mimic the fifteenth century towers of the Kremlin, archetypal symbols of the Russian style although designed by Italian architects. They combine baroque, gothic, and classical features, laden with sculptures and decoration in a style the writer Jonathan Meades dubbed ‘muchism’. Yet the building techniques that allowed such scale and height to be achieved owed much to the inspiration of American skyscrapers. Their grandeur embodied the capital status of Moscow that had only returned from Saint Petersburg in 1918 after the Russian Revolution.
The ornate architecture of the Seven Sisters differed greatly from the radical modernism of the Constructivist architecture of 1920s and 30s Moscow, outstanding examples being the Izvestiya building (1927, Grigori and Mikhail Barkhin), Rusakov workers’ club (1928, Konstantin Melnikov) and Narkomfin building (1930, Moisei Ginsburg and Ignaty Milinis). Constructivism combined Communist ideology with advanced technology and engineering. It defiantly rejected the past, using glass, concrete and metal to create a style stripped of ornamentation. Its goal was to change how ordinary people lived by constructing the spaces in which they lived and worked. The buildings of this period often emphasised communal living, with personal space reduced to a minimum and inhabitants encouraged to engage in group activity. Architecture was no exception to the experimentation and innovation across the arts of the time, although few projects were completed owing to financial constraints and the disruption of the civil war. Many plans, such as El Lissitzky’s ring of horizontal skyscrapers of 1925-6, Georgii Krutikov’s flying houses of 1928, or houses carried on people’s backs like snails, were too ambitious or eccentric to leave the drawing board.
The shift to Stalinist architecture in the 1930s was part of the wider rise of rise of ‘socialist realist’ culture. The doctrine was first declared by veteran writer Maxim Gorky at a Moscow congress of writers in 1934. Gorky stressed the need for art to be accessible to a wide public, to present inspirational everyday scenes of socialist construction and for overtly political content. In painting, Aleksandr Deyneka, Isaak Brodsky and Yury Pimenov filled canvasses with muscular workers and bucolic agricultural scenes. In music, Dmitry Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (1937) earned official approval for its accessible and heroic sound after Stalin’s decision to walk out early from a performance of the more experimental opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (1934) provoked a scandal. In architecture, experimental constructivist forms were replaced with more conservative, grander, neo-classical constructions decorated with sculptures and carving.
This new architecture arrived in Moscow with the 1935 city plan. Wide boulevards were laid out to link the city’s concentric ring roads like spokes. The most celebrated example, Gorky street, was dramatically widened and lined with huge buildings whilst older buildings were demolished or moved. The city’s renowned metro also opened in 1935 with relatively minimalist stations, though stations grew increasingly ornate in design under Stalin.
Architectural grandiosity reached a peak after the Second World War in 1947, eight hundred years after Moscow was founded by prince Yuri Dolgoruky (Yuri Long-Armed). The celebrations saw the unveiling of a statue of Dolgoruky on horseback on Gorky street (the immortalising of a pre-revolutionary ruler infuriated old Communists), the handing out of nearly two million Dolgoruky medals and the announcement of eight new skyscrapers (of which seven were built). In these early days of the Cold War, these towers were to symbolise the renewed post-war strength of the state and seize the imagination of visitors just as the skyscrapers of Manhattan had done so in the early twentieth century.
Working in the British Embassy, the neighbouring Ministry of Foreign Affairs loomed large in our imaginations. Russian newspapers carried images of stern Ambassadors exiting through its long, heavy doors having been informed that members of their staff had been declared persona non grata. Our Russian counterparts seemed to revel in its hulking, Gothamesque mass. One diplomat even wrote to invite me to a meeting in the ‘Tower of Evil’. As architecture it is enthralling. Thick mullions run between its windows up its front and appear to give the 172- metre tower an upward momentum. Side towers decorated with discs and spikes have a curiously Aztec feel. A hollow Kremlin-style tower was added to the top to Russify its American-style design, reportedly on the orders of Stalin.
Across the river from the embassy is the Hotel Ukraine, owned by the Radisson Collection chain. Despite being taller than the Ministry, at 206 metres, its handsome silhouette somehow seems less oppressive in its size. Whilst the Ministry jostles for its place amongst other towers, the Hotel sits serenely on a river bend. The architect Mordvinov diluted the mass of the central tower with eight smaller decorated residential towers. The success he achieved is a contrast to his massive but less charming Gorky street buildings (dubbed ‘Lutyens at gunpoint’ in reference to late Imperial New Delhi by Owen Hatherley).
Moving clockwise along the Garden Ring, the ring road that replaced the city ramparts demolished in the 1820s, the third tower is the 156 metre Kudrinskaya Residential building (1954, Mikhail Posokhin and Ashot Mndoyants). In style it is the quirkiest of the seven. Posokhin would go on to be Moscow chief architect and author of famed modern works such as the former Comecon building (1970), reminiscent of an open book, the Kremlin Palace of Congresses (1961) and the Olympic Stadium (1980), sadly now demolished. Before finding his confident modern voice, Posokhin’s 160 metre tower seems to draw on New York’s 180 metre Manhattan Municipal Building (1914, William K. Kendall), although its elements sit together uneasily. The octagonal spire with triangle and circle decoration is especially quirky (reminiscent of a Nicholas Hawksmoor church spire). The attraction of the building comes in other details, including a series of statues around the base (everything from a man with a gun to a woman with a cello) and an ornate ground floor department store now boarded up.
A further pair of towers sit on the north-eastern side of the Garden Ring, the first is the 138 metre Red Gate building (1953, Alexey Dushkin), the only one of the seven built over a metro station. It takes its name from a nearby eighteenth century Rococo triumphal arch demolished in 1928 to ease traffic congestion. Dushkin achieved renown for his metro stations: Kropotkinskaya (1935), the pharaonic feel of its five-star topped capitals inspired by the Great Temple of Ammon at Karnak, Ploschad Revolutsii (1938), a gallery of bronze sculptures and Mayakovskaya (1938), with its metal arches built in an airship factory and ceiling decorated with mosaics depicting a day in the life of the country. Dushkin’s tower was also built with a deliberate lean as a portion of the soft clay ground underneath it was frozen during construction. The lean corrected itself when the ground thawed and shrank.
Nearby to the north is the smallest of the seven, the 136 metre Leningradskaya hotel (1953, Leonid Polyakov and Alexander Boretsky), now owned by Hilton. Standing on Komsomolskaya Square, Moscow’s busiest railway junction, it has the strongest Russian accent of the Seven. Its red-striped facade and green copper spire most clearly echo the towers of the Kremlin. Polyakov was another metro architect, with Arbatskaya (1953), Kurskaya (1950) and Oktyabrskaya (1950) to his name. Built as a luxury hotel for visiting delegations, the Leningradskaya’s grand lobby is a marvel, decorated with a gold moulded ceiling, brass chandeliers and bronze lionesses. A sculpture commemorates the 1242 battle on the ice, when Alexander Nevsky lured an army of Teutonic knights in armour across a frozen lake that cracked under their weight (immortalised by Eisenstein’s 1939 film with a score by Prokofiev). A record-breaking chain chandelier of fifteen and a half metres is suspended in the staircase. This grandeur would prove the hotel’s undoing. Polyakov’s promising career would be cut short by the criticism of his hotel for the ‘bourgeois excess’ of its decor by Stalin’s successor Khruschev and in 1955 he was stripped of his earlier Stalin Prize for the design.
To the east is the Kotelnicheskaya embankment building (1952, Dmitry Chechulin and Andrei Rostkovsky), at 176 metres it was briefly the tallest building in Europe. Its plan is unusual: a hexagonal tower base with a trio of sub-towers. The decoration is whimsical with ice-cream swirls, thistle tops and circular cut outs, though restrained in comparison to the nearby Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Like many Soviet architects Chechulin was forced to adapt, chameleon-like, to changing officially-approved styles. Chechulin’s long career stretched from the neo-Grecian vestibules of Dinamo metro station (1938), to the modernist Nintendo 64-shaped House of Government known as the White House (1981), partially burnt in 1993.
Further out to the south-west is the final Sister: Moscow State University (1953, Lev Rudnev). At 236 metres, it overtook Kotelnicheskaya to become the tallest building in Europe until 1990. Rudnev won the commission to design the University after a previous design by Boris Iofan (we will encounter him again) was rejected. It looms over the city from the height of Sparrow Hills, lit up at night like a lantern. Despite being much shorter than the 443 metre Empire State Building (1931, Shreve, Lamb and Harmon), Moscow State University uses 90 per cent of the structural steel owing to its bulk. Given its size and dramatic hilltop location it is perhaps the most impressive of the Seven Sisters, though inspiring awe rather than affection. Rudnev had a history of designing fearsome buildings for the military in Moscow, especially the Frunze Military Academy (1937), a monolithic slab with rows of square windows to mimic rows of soldiers in a regiment, and the Ministry of Defence (1951). Yet his most appealing design was his eighth sister in Warsaw, the Palace of Culture and Science (1955), which incorporated Polish-inspired decoration. Once loathed by many as an unwanted gift and symbol of Soviet occupation, many Varsovians have now embraced this tower as a city symbol with perhaps more vigour than Muscovites who have older city monuments than the Seven Sisters to celebrate.
These seven skyscrapers were both the hubristic apogee of Stalinism and a ticking time bomb under it. They lie at the heart of two new studies of Soviet architecture. Katherine Zubovich’s work begins with the perceptive comment:
Moscow’s postwar skyscrapers symbolised the
stability and longevity of the Stalinist regime in the wake of Soviet victory in 1945. Yet in the day-to-day life of the capital these buildings were destabilising structures that rose only to create new chasms in late-Stalinist society.
Zubovich brings impressive archival research and analysis to bear on defining the social chasms created by the Seven Sisters. She documents the familiar social tensions generated by all housing developments: the homes of poorer residents demolished for construction to begin with their former residents moved to the outskirts, builders exasperated by costly design changes by architects, elite residents complaining about noisy lifts, the intense lobbying of officials to secure desirable flats, the poorer builders and prisoners involved in construction that are denied the opportunity to live in the flats they have made.
The more surprising insights come from the fraught creative dance of the architects with their government patrons. Zubovich quotes the notes of an official at a closed meeting at which Stalin said that “without a good capital, there is no state” and spoke with admiration for Paris. That same official claimed to see a blue pencil sketch by Stalin of a tower with a command for 26-32 stories (Zubovich is reminded of a star architect sketching on the back of a cocktail napkin). She analyses the meteoric rise of an obscure architect Georgii Gradov who wrote to Khruschev in 1954 to condemn his colleagues for an obsession with aesthetics rather than construction. Khruschev not only seized on this report to support a rapid change in architectural policy, but turned up to heckle a major architectural conference to suggest that outmoded architects should be given ‘aesthetics’ rather than flats to live in. These debates find an echo in the cartoons of Soviet satirical magazines Krokodil(Crocodile), cited by Zubovich. A grandmother looks with sadness at one of the Seven Sisters and says she pities the residents who can no longer gossip with their neighbours. The condemnation of Stalinist architectural excess sees a daughter mistaking her father’s building design for a cake.
Deyan Sudjic’s study of the architect Boris Iofan (1891-1976) by contrast takes an individual, not a city, as its starting point. Iofan’s story also ranges beyond Moscow: from his upbringing in the Ukrainian port of Odessa, his studies at the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg, through to his architectural apprenticeship in Rome. Later in life Iofan built memorable Soviet pavilions for the 1937 Paris Exposition and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Iofan’s Paris pavilion, carrying Vera Mukhina’s iconic sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, stood opposite Albert Speer’s eagle-topped Nazi pavillion topped with an eagle. The image of the two facing off against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower became iconic of the approaching cataclysm of the Second World War.
Yet it was in Moscow that Iofan worked and lived for most of his life and where his most ambitious project, the Palace of Soviets, was planned. His home was in the House on the Embankment (1931), a constructivist behemoth he designed to house the Bolshevik elite who since the Revolution had lived in luxury hotels and the Kremlin. Its luxurious features included central heating, gas ovens, and telephones. The saga of its inhabitants, many of whom were executed in the purges of 1937, has been documented in Yuri Slezkine’s dizzying study The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. (2017).
Both studies also explore the striking American and Italian cultural influences on Stalinist architecture, notwithstanding a general climate of suspicion and cultural isolationism. Zubovich documents delegations of Soviet architects travelling to the US in the 1930s to study building techniques. In New York, the Empire State Building, the Radio City Music Hall in the Rockefeller Centre (1932, Edward Durell Stone), Chrysler Building (1930, William van Alen), Woolworth Building (1913, Cass Gilbert) and Manhattan Municipal Building were top of their list. Visits were also made to Washington DC, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago and Atlantic City. Sudjic cites Iofan’s description of his first glimpse of the skyscrapers of Manhattan:
The first impression the skyscrapers make when you approach New York by steamer is truly unforgettable. Their immensity is simply stunning, a fantastic mountain range with peaks in the shape of geometric forms rising out of the water. It is hard to believe that this ridge was created by human hands.
Yet on his return to Moscow, a foreign visitor recalled how his initial enthusiasm for New York had cooled:
It represents an ugly expression of capitalism. The skyscrapers are tall, rectangular boxes, made of shiny steel and stone, made to hide the ghettos of the poor beneath them. This is the architecture of the rich, eh? There is no spaciousness, no room to breath.
Whilst keen to learn from American building techniques, Soviet architects would seek to achieve more harmonious cityscapes, freed as they were from the pressures of market forces. Americans had made a start in limiting the chaos of New York’s skyline with the 1916 zoning resolution that required skyscrapers to be set back from surrounding roads. There was also a dose of utopian dreaming involved too. There are striking similarities between the Seven Sisters and the utopian book The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) by American architectural illustrator Hugh Ferris (1889-1962), a work translated into Russian in the 1930s, though not mentioned by either author. Ferris depicted an ideal city filled with wide, stepped ziggurat towers on boulevards. Aleksandr Medvedkin’s comedy film New Moscow (1938) also includes wildly ambitious projections of the future city, though attempts to poke fun at this vision led censors to ban the film before release. In many respects, as Owen Hatherley has noted, American and Soviet architects were locked in a strange mirror dance: in the 1920s Soviet cutting- edge constructivist experiments coincided with architecturally conservative gothic skyscrapers in America, by the 1950s the Seven Sisters seemed anachronistic compared to their American counterparts such as the modernist UN headquarters (1953, Harrison and Abramowitz) and Lever House (1952, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill).
Perhaps more surprising is Iofan’s Italian connection charted by Sudjic. During his ten year stay from 1914 to 1924, Iofan met his wife, Olga Sasso-Ruffo, the daughter of an Italian duke and Russian princess, joined the Italian Communist Party and filled endless sketchbooks with images of Roman and Italian architecture. Iofan would study at the Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti under architect Manfredo Manfredi, who completed the Rome’s ‘giant typewriter’ monument to Victor Emmanuel II (1935) in Rome, a monument that Sudjic sees as an influence on the similarly overblown Palace of the Soviets project. Iofan later worked with Armando Brasini, an architect who found favour with Mussolini and who designed buildings for the Italian empire in Libya, Albania, and Ethiopia. Sudjic suggests Iofan and Brasini went on to live parallel careers, seeking to further their artistic visions in alliance with dictators and ultimately disappointed that their most ambitious plans were never achieved. Iofan, like several exiled Russian cultural figures such as Prokofiev and Gorky, was persuaded to return to the Soviet Union with the promise of a bright creative future. His wife Olga was seized with emotion on their arrival and reportedly kissed the sacred Russian soil.
After his work on the House on the Embankment, Iofan would embark in 1931 on a quarter of a century odyssey to build a 416 metre Palace of Soviets, a design that would have been the world’s tallest building. Iofan lost control of the design and the project would increasingly torment him. The failure to build this gargantuan stepped tower, topped with a statue of Lenin, is now remembered as a defining symbol of Communist hubris. When the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (1883, Konstantin Ton) was demolished in 1931 to clear way for the palace, Iofan gloated that the old building was ‘huge and cumbersome, looking like a cake, or a samovar… The proletarian revolution is boldly raising its hand against this cumbersome edifice which symbolises the power and taste of the lords of old Moscow.’ Iofan’s greatest achievement was to win a series of architectural competitions which generated 160 professional entries, with 24 from abroad. Bold modern constructivist designs by Moisei Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers and Ilya Golosov were rejected in favour of Iofan’s initially comparatively modest proposal. To attract greater publicity, foreign architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Iofan’s former Italian colleague Armando Brasini were paid to enter designs. Stalin eventually telegrammed his views on the winner in a text revealing his suspicions of the religious sympathies of leading Soviet architects:
Of all the plans for the Palace of the Soviets, Iofan’s is the best. Zholtovsky’s project smacks of Noah’s ark. Shchusev’s is just another Cathedral of Christ the Saviour but without the cross (‘so far’). It is possible that Shchusev hopes to ‘add on’ the cross later.
His gruff suggestions for improvements to Iofan’s design were to make it taller, to put a hammer and sickle electrically lit from within at the top, or on a column next to the palace of a height as tall as or a little taller than the Eiffel Tower, and to put statues of Marx, Engels and Lenin at the front.
Later Iofan would have to change his design further, forced to accept rival architects Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh on his design team. Although their joint design had been defeated in the competition (a giant copy of the Doge’s Palace in Venice), they developed Iofan’s design without his knowledge, increasing the tower’s height and the size of Lenin on the top. Iofan accepted these changes but reportedly despaired as Stalin, Shchuko and Gelfreikh pushed his design beyond Soviet engineering capability to build. Once construction began the foundations repeatedly flooded, something Muscovites saw as a sign of divine displeasure for the dynamiting of the old Cathedral. The initial steel frame for the lower floors was swiftly dismantled when war began in 1941 to construct anti-tank defences for the city. Iofan’s attempts to revive the Palace by reducing the height of the tower went nowhere as attention shifted to the Seven Sisters project (one small consolation was that the architectural legacy of the Palace would live on in the Seven Sisters). In the anti-Semitic campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ of 1948, Iofan lost his separate commission to build the Moscow State University tower. Stalin’s successor Khruschev would eventually cancel the Palace of the Soviets project entirely, at a time when he was rolling back Stalinism in architecture. The original construction site was turned into an open- air swimming pool. Iofan would design little more of note until his death in 1976.
Khruschev de-Stalinised Soviet architecture before he famously de-Stalinised the Communist Party in his 1956 secret speech to the 20th Congress. The Palace of the Soviets and Seven Sisters were also the antithesis to the utilitarian and pared-back modernist architecture introduced by Khruschev. He condemned the cost of the Seven Sisters, suggested their silhouettes were church-like and shifted the government’s attention to building mass housing at a time of nationwide shortage. As a result, a planned eighth sister in Zaryadye overlooking Red Square by Dmitry Chechulin was cancelled. Plans for Kyiv to receive a Sister of its own were curtailed and the Hotel Ukraine (1961, Anatoly Dobrovolsky) lost its spire and grand columns before completion.
For all the strangeness of the Palace of the Soviets project, reading Sudjic’s Tower of Babel-esque account of Iofan’s tortured efforts to keep his dream alive makes one occasionally regret that the Palace never came into reality. Instead the palace took on a phantom existence. From 1935 to 1957 the nearest metro station was called ‘Palace of the Soviets’, propaganda films (including New Moscow) began to include the silhouette of the Palace on the horizon. Instead of building a tower that would have loomed over the Kremlin and violently changed the balance of the historic centre of Moscow, Iofan’s most important legacy was his work to preserve the city’s most famous landmarks from German bombers by wrapping them in camouflage.
With the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour rebuilt in the 1990s, the memory of the Palace of the Soviets lives on only as a strange footnote in Moscow’s dramatic architectural history. The Seven Sisters by contrast have secured a firm place in the city’s imagination, encouraging new post-Soviet imitations such as the Triumph Palace (2006, Andrey Trofimov) and Oruzheiny tower (2016, Mikhail Posokhin). Yet these buildings continue to bear witness to the troubled lives of those who designed and built them. It is hard to come to terms with the painful historical memories of their construction. The Moscow GULAG museum preserves a scrap of wood discovered in the Kotelnicheskaya tower inscribed by prisoner Ivan Astakhov who helped to build it:
Year of birth 1896
convicted by order to 10 years
put finishing touches on the tall building.
That is how we lived
in this country.
For all their impressive architectural design, there is no escaping the repression that surrounded the construction of the Seven Sisters. Having once lived amongst them, I am moved to say that you can love bad buildings, and you can hate good buildings. But brilliant buildings are often the ones that you love and hate at the same time.