Stalin's Architect by Deyan Sudjic

Author:Deyan Sudjic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Iofan in the fedora, with Andrei Prokofiev (left), leader of the construction team, inspecting work on the foundations of the palace in 1938, with the president of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin (centre).

The Palace of the Soviets reached its maximum height in the 1939 version.

The reality behind this gloss was jarringly different. A letter in Vyacheslav Molotov’s files dating from 1938 – sent to him by Antonina Baturina, an Old Bolshevik and a party member since 1906 – suggests a project on the edge of fiasco. With insights from her son, an artist working for Iofan, she portrays creative stalemate and a dysfunctional team too terrified to admit it.

I am close to the youth of the Komsomol [a Leninist youth organization]…for some reason they hesitate to report to you as the chairman of the commission for the construction of the Palace of Soviets that they are at a dead end….The project of the architect Iofan was accepted in principle, but the final design of the project had to take place through the joint work of the appointed expert commission, the author Iofan and his two assistants, Gelfreikh and Shchuko.

The expert commission has turned out to be unviable. Iofan, Gelfreikh and Shchuko have taken its work on themselves, and the creative study has been shouldered by a group of young architects. They are horrified by the responsibility that has been entrusted to them. They support Comrade Iofan, and they sit drawing endlessly for days. But he offers them no guidance and no direction, just vague remarks. ‘It won’t do, it’s still weak, it still needs more work…’ It’s brought them to despair. They worry that the whole venture will end with them being locked up by the NKVD…And as time has passed, they have discovered defect after defect.43

She goes on to point out the impossibility of creating such a colossal building in so short a period of time, noting that ‘the Pantheon took fifty years to build’. She suggests that the engineers have calculated that the palace will use as much electricity as is required for the whole of Moscow. She predicts that ‘in winter Lenin’s hand will freeze up. The icicles, which will fall just at the entrance to the palace, will threaten visitors with serious injury.’44

Could Iofan be accused of opportunism? He had joined the Communist Party out of conviction, not calculation, but it is certainly true that his career in the Soviet Union was based on a steady stream of official commissions. These came from his close connections with the communist hierarchy in the Soviet Union and his ability to give its members the state buildings that reflected their ideology, as expressed by Lazar Kaganovich and Aleksei Tolstoy.

Every architect’s career is based to a greater or lesser extent on the skill with which they perform the survival dance with the rich, the powerful and the famous – this is an essential aspect of the profession. Each depends on the other; the variable is the nature of the balance of power between architect and client.

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