In December, we published Anna Bronovitskaya's review of three articles by Olga Kazakova on Soviet architecture at the beginning of the thaw. One of the main terms used in the text - "Soviet post-war modernism", evoked a critical response from the historian and architect Felix Novikov. Let's not hide from a terminological dispute: we are publishing a note criticizing this concept and Anna Bronovitskaya's answer.
Felix Novikov
We did not agree so
In the first paragraph of Anna Bronovitskaya's review "Three Articles on Modernism", published on archi.ru on December 25, 2014, there is one line that puzzled me and I will cite it here, changing the case of the first word: "… a phenomenon that we have just agreed to call Soviet post-war modernism." It is not clear from the following text when and with whom this agreement was reached and how wide the circle of those who agreed with it. Howbeit, but word post-war in this context it is absolutely unacceptable because it is anti-historical.
The first post-war decade from the year of Victory until the end of 1954 was a deaf Stalinist time with decisions about the opera Great Friendship, the movie Big Life, the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad, with the case of poisoning doctors, in the air of which the emergence the modernist movement was decidedly impossible, unthinkable. And if this happened, it would immediately receive the label of "cosmopolitanism" and "admiration for the West" with subsequent defeat at the root. And when in 1947 the students of the Moscow Architectural Institute - officers and soldiers who had seen the pre-war architecture of Prague, Budapest and Vienna, returned to their studies, reproduced the features of constructivism in their graduation projects of high-rise buildings, their work was rated "satisfactory" and the leading teacher Leonid Nikolaevich Pavlov was fired from institute.
Perhaps I am the only surviving witness to the "Active of Moscow Architects on the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the opera" Great Friendship "by V. Muradeli and the creative tasks of Soviet architects", which took place on March 12, 15, 17, 19, 1948. I was a twenty-year-old fourth-year student and will forever remember the acuteness of that discussion. For those who "agreed" I strongly advise you to read the transcript of that asset, published by the CA of the USSR in 1992 in the blue cover of the Architect's Library under the title "Forgotten Pages of the History of the Union of Architects". You will feel the post-war atmosphere in a professional environment and understand how far the mindset of architects and Soviet architecture were then from modernism.
The apogee of the Stalinist style was the architecture of VDNKh in 1954 and, perhaps to the greatest extent, its main pavilion of Yuri Shchuko. And just four years later, in 1958, another was erected - the Soviet pavilion of the World Exhibition in Brussels by Anatoly Polyansky, which became the "first swallow" of Soviet modernism. What a contrast! In this short period of time, Khrushchev made a speech at a meeting of builders in the Kremlin, a decree "On the elimination of excesses …", the 20th party congress, the first Soviet satellite in space, the world opened up and many competitions were held that gave rise to modernist projects.
When I say “we”, I mean my peers, those architects who lived, studied, designed and built in Stalin's time, those who were the founders of the modernist movement, remember the spirit of the “thaw” in which it arose and developed. While this is still possible, the terminology concerning the creativity of our generation should be negotiated with us. Otherwise, this time will appear in the discussions and research, in the "criteria for assessing this period" in a false light.
Let's agree - let it be just Soviet modernism. No adjective. This was the name of the first exhibition of modernism at the MUAR in 2006 and the exhibition in Vienna in 2012. After all, there is French modernism, there is American, Indian, Senegalese. And what else can you call ours? Of course, he is Soviet. Which is what I did in 2004, initiating the arrangement of the aforementioned first exhibition with this name. ***
Anna Bronovitskaya
Reply to Felix Novikov
Dear Felix Aronovich!
Let me answer your remarks prompted by the wording in my note. Firstly, I apologize for the incorrectly expansive "we", which, indeed, does not cover everyone who should have taken part in the discussion about which generally understood term will henceforth be used when talking about Soviet architecture of the late 1950s - early 1980s. I want to note, however, that the discussion is not over, that alternative options are also used: "post-Stalinist architecture", "the Soviet version of the international style of the second half of the 20th century" and others. Your weighty word, of course, will be heard.
Secondly, I would like to clarify the reasons why, in the rather lively discussion of this subject in the last three years, it was the combination “Soviet post-war modernism” that most often sounded. In the international context, as you undoubtedly know, there is a fairly clear division between modernism of the 1920s and 1930s and post-war - Post-War Modernism, aka Mid-Century Modern. In the Russian tradition, we usually call the architecture of the 1920s avant-garde, even if we are talking about completely mainstream buildings, or, which is even less accurate, but generally understandable, constructivism. Soviet architecture of the late 1950s - 1970s has more in common with the international modernism of the same - or slightly earlier - time than with the interrupted (though not completely) domestic tradition of modern architecture. "Post-war" in this case serves as an indicator distinguishing it from "pre-war", speaks of belonging to the second half of the twentieth century, and in no way means that modernism began immediately after the end of the war, in the years that you describe so vividly. I now read quite a lot of periodicals from the late 1940s, and in my opinion, it was in something even darker time than the second half of the 1930s, although, fortunately, it did not come to a full-scale repetition of the Great Terror then.
For all that, personally, I have nothing against your proposed version of "Soviet modernism" - this is in any case a label that needs decoding, and two words are better than three.
Respectfully, Anna Bronovitskaya
