SOVIET ARCHITECTURAL AVANT-GARDES: Architecture and Stalin’s Revolution from Above, 1928–1938 by Danilo Udovički-Selb

Author:Danilo Udovički-Selb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

THE SHAPING OF ARCHITECTURE IDEOLOGY WITHIN THE STALINIST PROJECT: UNREACHABLE “PROLETARIAN” ARCHITECTURE YIELDS TO UNATTAINABLE “SOCIALIST”

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Emblematic of the slowness of the efforts to Stalinize architecture, that is, to explain it in terms of an elusive “socialist” realism were the repeated postponements of the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Architects from 1933 to 1937. The reason for the delays hinged on the difficulties that the Union’s communist leadership experienced in imposing their will, not only on the masters of the architectural avant-garde, but also on the youngest generation of architects, including the young communists. What is significant, however, is that the demands for abandoning modern architecture were not coming from either the Central Committee or the Politburo, at least until February 1936. Still uncertain whether matters were truly under control, the party group (the former VOPRA) kept postponing the date with increased anxiety, including outright panic as the jubilee year 1937 approached, and could not be bypassed. The dictates of the party kept falling short of convincing the leadership of the SSA to stop advocating constructivism, while struggling to impose their policy even to the Komsomol architects (the communist youth). The latter did not see the point of abandoning modernism in exchange for an architecture that the SSA party leaders themselves struggled to define or demonstrate.

For the same reason, early on, the authorities asked the CIAM to delay the Moscow meeting scheduled for 1933. The SSA’s party organization sustained a desire to host such a congress, while dismissing CIAM’s modernism at home, points to the complexity of the architectural politics started in 1928 with Stalin’s Cultural Revolution. The efforts to curtail constructivism over the decade used three vehicles: The new journals such as Arhitekturnaja Gazeta; the enforced exercises of “self criticism” at the “Creative Consultations” (Tvorcheskie Soveshchanija) within the SSA; and the secret actions of the SSA party cell. So, the actual turning point was not the April 23, 1932 Central Committee as thought thus far, but February 1936 when the growing general political repression started taking aim pointedly at modern architecture. By the 1937 Congress of Architecture, constructivism had become anathema. Still, it took two more years to finally silence the proponents of the so-called “boxy architecture” on the building sites. The stratagem, like we saw Ginzburg doing in Kislovodsk, was to call “socialist” realism whatever you built, or else, winning competitions on conservative images, and then building what was your actual intent.

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