A strange metamorphosis has taken place in the history of Stalinist architecture in Russia over the past couple of decades. The subject itself suddenly lost its old name. Instead, the term "Art Deco", which had previously been firmly tied to the style of the 1925 Paris International Exhibition, arose and rather firmly established itself in the specialized literature. It was a cheerful late Art Nouveau version with classic décor elements. It became popular for a short time in Western architecture of the 1920s and 1930s and was never directly related to the Stalinist architecture completely isolated from the outside world by the Iron Curtain and developing according to its own specific laws. The only formal similarity between these two phenomena was that both are variants of eclecticism. But with fundamentally different laws of shaping, artistic roots and emotional content.
These differences are much more important for understanding architecture than the accidental similarity of facade decoration elements. They allow you to recognize the buildings of the Stalinist era at first glance and unmistakably, without confusing them with any variants of free Western architecture.
In my opinion, the explanation for this substitution of names is obvious. This is part of the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin, his regime and his cultural policy. The term "Stalinist architecture" initially has a well-established negative connotation. The term Art Deco, on the other hand, is purely positive. It evokes associations with the free living and developing Western architecture, fatally unlike the Soviet one of the 30s and 40s. Being proud of the legacy of "Stalinist architecture" is psychologically much less convenient than being proud of the legacy of "Soviet Art Deco". And the desire to be proud of the entire Soviet architectural heritage, ignoring its sinister content, the real artistic level and stylistic affiliation, has recently been very noticeable in the professional environment.
Thanks to the disguised name change, new generations of architects and architectural historians grow up with the conviction that there was nothing specific in the architecture of the Stalinist era. On both sides of the Iron Curtain (which, however, many have also long forgotten), approximately the same thing happened, and the evolutionary processes in architecture were common. To understand why this is categorically wrong, it makes sense to delve into the history of the issue.
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In the history of Soviet architecture, written in Soviet times, its Stalinist period was terminologically distinguished in no way. The expression "Stalinist architecture" did not exist for obvious reasons. Under Stalin, all architecture was equally "Soviet", despite the absolute doubtfulness of its first, constructivist, but, according to the official version, successfully overcome in the early 1930s.
In Khrushchev's times, the adjective "Stalinist" acquired a negative connotation, but, despite the stylistic revolution arranged by Khrushchev, it was not applied to architecture. The architecture continued to remain permanently "Soviet", only overcoming the delusions of the times of "decoration".
In Soviet times, the official history of Soviet architecture was, on the whole, purely charlatan. No cataclysms, sharp and violent style reforms were found in it. In the presentation of Soviet architects, the history of Soviet architecture was a natural evolutionary process. The views and creativity of all Soviet architects changed smoothly and organically due to natural reasons, albeit in accordance with the instructions of the party and government.
However, unofficially, the term "Stalinist architecture" also existed under Soviet rule. It was used in a professional environment as colloquial, along with the "Stalinist Empire", "Stalinist eclecticism" and even more offensive "vampire style".
After the collapse of Soviet power in the 90s, the term "Stalinist architecture" gained legitimacy in professional literature, albeit reluctantly. Rather, it happened under the influence of Western architectural studies.
In the nineties, new euphemisms began to appear, abolishing the concept of "Stalinist architecture" in order, firstly, to deprive this phenomenon of negative associations and, secondly, to introduce it into an international context. To present it as something spontaneous and artistically organic is quite in the traditions of Soviet architectural studies. The problem is that both of these tasks are unsolvable.
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Stalin's cultural (including architectural) reforms turned the Soviet architectural life of the 1920s, already rather flawed, into something unimaginable from a professional point of view.
Beginning in 1927, opportunities for normal professional reflection and discussion began to rapidly disappear. In the publications and speeches of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the remnants of common sense need to be dug out from under the rubble of ritual nonsense and senseless Marxist rhetoric. From the outside, it should have looked as if Soviet architects suddenly went crazy. In any case, since about 1930, free professional communication between Soviet and Western colleagues ceased.
Around the same time, architecture in the USSR finally ceased to be a free profession. The right to free choice of orders, customers and partners is a thing of the past instead of the right to individual entrepreneurship. All the architects of the country were turned into employees and assigned to the design offices of departments and people's commissariats. An abyss lay between Western architects and their Soviet colleagues, with whom they still tried to communicate for some time. Their interlocutors found themselves in a completely different status - they could no longer speak on their own behalf and express their own judgments, because they obeyed not only the political, but also the departmental leadership.
If in 1932 the Soviet government had not refused the International Congress of Modern Architecture (SIAM) to hold the planned Moscow congress, it would have been an extremely ugly sight. On the one hand, European architects, independent and responsible only for themselves and their own words. On the other, hunted Soviet officials. Dialogue between them would be impossible. In fact, this is how the First Congress of Soviet Architects with foreign guests, held in 1937, looked like.
In the spring of 1932, a style reform that was being prepared throughout 1931 took place. Modern architecture was outright banned. Now it was prescribed to use "historical styles" in the design without fail. That is, all Soviet architects were forced to become eclectic overnight and focus on approved designs. The censor body controlling this activity was the Union of Soviet Architects of the USSR, where members of the independent art associations destroyed in 1932 were forcibly driven. Key projects were approved directly by Stalin.
Since that time, all official creativity in the USSR (not only architectural) has become compulsory. As a result, there was an almost instantaneous degradation of professional culture. Not only the way of exterior decoration of buildings has changed, but also the very essence of design. The achievements of modern architecture - the ability to work with space, function and structures, the understanding of an architectural object as an integral spatial structure - have been forgotten.
The essence of the new era was expressed around this time by Alexei Shchusev, who understood the meaning of what was happening faster and more successfully than others: “The state requires pomp.” [I] Everything else was not interesting to the approving authority, so it should not have interested architects either. As Moses Ginzburg put it in 1934: “… today you cannot speak of a building plan like a rope in a hanged man’s house.” [Ii] The prohibition of work on the plan meant the end of architecture as a spatial art, its translation into the art of decorating facades. Since only the facades were of interest to the higher authorities, who took over the leadership of the architecture at that time.
Behind these facades were hidden a small number of typical and completely uninteresting planning schemes of public buildings and residential sections, primitive apartment layouts. Rare projects that are original in structure (such as the Palace of Soviets, the Theater of the Red Army or post-war skyscrapers) owe their appearance to the vulgar and highly unprofessional fantasies of the party leadership. Or - at an early stage - the re-facing of the facades of already designed or even constructed constructivist buildings under the new rules (for example, A. Vlasov's All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions building). Quite a lot of such mutant houses appeared in the first half of the 30s.
To this must be added the purely feudal character of construction under Stalin. Official architecture served only the everyday needs of the privileged strata of Soviet society and the ideological needs of the regime. Mass housing and urban construction, which in the 19th century posed the tasks for architects, the solution of which led to the emergence of modern architecture, seemed to be absent in the USSR at that time. Slum barrack towns for workers, built out of necessity in gigantic numbers, were outside the bounds of the bossy interest, and therefore the professional interests of the architectural community. They were designed, of course, but without any publicity.
Another important aspect. The creativity of any artist (architect, writer, etc.) changes and evolves as his artistic outlook and creative tasks change. From the personal creative evolution of individual characters of the era, its artistic evolution is formed. Stalin's censorship stopped the personal creative evolution of all Soviet architects. Their personal attitude and personal views no longer played any role. Consequently, spontaneous professional evolution in Soviet architecture also ceased. Artists and writers still had niches for personal creativity - architects did not.
The history of Stalinist architecture is the history of the evolution of censorship installations, the influence on which individual architects had zero.
Thus, in a matter of years, Stalinist architecture was formed - a unique phenomenon, unlike anything familiar at that time. And it has practically no points of contact with the architectural culture in the outside world - regardless of its orientation and stylistic features.
From the point of view of the foreign architectural community, Soviet architecture fell out of the world cultural movement after 1932. It has become something alien, absurd and not falling under any professional criteria and assessments.
Soviet architects could stylize anything - to the best of their bosses' instructions - ancient Rome, the Italian Renaissance, or the American eclecticism of the 1920s and 1930s. All this did not change the content of Stalin's "architecture" and did not in any way make it akin to what was happening outside the borders of the USSR.
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The first attempt to come up with a sparing designation for Stalinist architecture was made by Selim Omarovich Khan-Magomedov in the 90s. He coined the term "post-constructivism" - in relation to the first phase of Stalinist architecture - 1932-1937. Basically, there is nothing wrong with coming up with a new name for a familiar phenomenon, why not. But this cunning term deliberately awakens false associations with other artistic eras - natural and self-developed (post-impressionism, post-cubism, etc.). It turns out that early Stalinist architecture grew out of constructivism in the same natural way as post-impressionism from impressionism - due to the solution of professional problems and the evolution of artistic thinking.
Here we have nothing of the kind. Stalinist architecture arose as a result of gross violence against artistic creativity. The architects were forbidden to design in constructivism (in any other style, but at their own choice and according to their own taste - too) and were told to come up with ways of decorating architecture that suit their bosses. At first in a relatively wide framework, then everything is narrower and narrower … The results were sometimes funny and bizarre, but always ridiculous. And, most importantly, there was nothing natural in this process from the very beginning. From it, you can easily understand how the concretization and refinement of the boss's tastes took place. As the censorship criteria were worked out and the highest approved samples were accumulated (by the end of the 1930s), curiosity, absurd excitement and the last hints at the individuality of decisions disappeared from Stalin's architecture.
With the same success, Nazi architecture can be called "post-Bauhaus" - if the task was to mislead someone. It is surprising that Khan-Magomedov himself viewed early Stalinist architecture as something independent and healthy, and not dancing on the bones of his beloved constructivism.
The term "post-constructivism" has taken root in Russian architectural studies and successfully plays the role of chattering and distorting the real picture of the events of Soviet architectural life of the 30s
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An even more sinister and defiantly anti-scientific trend has emerged since the late 1990s. Stalin's eclecticism is more persistently presented in the professional community as a kind of offshoot of European architectural evolution. For this purpose, the alien term "Art Deco" is hung on it. Like a mask completely different from the face behind it.
The European eclectic version of late modernity was a fun, free phenomenon and did not obey any binding rules. And had a direct tendency to transform into modern architecture.
State-owned, completely devoid of individuality, sadly pompous or hysterically excited Stalinist eclecticism is a phenomenon of a completely different kind. Generation of a completely different society and a completely different culture - both social and artistic. Moreover, as already mentioned, completely isolated from the outside world.
Yes, some foreign architectural press got into the Soviet Union. But only the one that was allowed by the censorship. It was also not available to the entire architectural community. And what is most important, the free search for sources of inspiration in it - as it happened in the 1920s - was completely ruled out.
The formal resemblance of random decorative techniques does not change anything here. Style and style are not synonymous. It is important that in this case the principles of shaping are different.
Stalinist eclectics only at first glance did about the same thing as the Art Deco architects - they decorated the facades of their buildings with neoclassical elements. That was where the similarities ended. Western Art Deco architecture was a full-fledged phenomenon. Behind it stood free spatial thinking, freedom to solve functional and constructive tasks, and freedom to choose a decor. Generally - freedom. Nothing of the kind stood behind Stalinist architecture. Only censored unified schemes and compositional techniques. Except that sometimes Western buildings, which are considered to be Art Deco architecture, became the permitted object of stylization.
The diaries of the artist Yevgeny Lanceray throw light on how the “early Stalin” style was formed. He was friends with Shchusev, often visited Zholtovsky and wrote down in his diary his impressions of the events in the retelling of both key executors of the Stalinist architectural reform.
A note dated August 31, 1932, six months after the prohibition of modern architecture:
“At Yves. V. Zholtovsky, through. affectionate. Interesting stories by I. Vl. (not caricatured?) about the turn to classicism.
Kaganovich: “I am a proletarian, a shoemaker, I lived in Vienna, I love art; art should be joyful, beautiful. Molotov is a lover of beautiful things, Italy, a collector. Very well-read.
About the removal of Ginzburg, Lakhovsky (?) From the professorship, their work - a mockery of the owls. power. A joke about the house built by Ginzburg. "That they still got off cheaply." Br. Vesnins - for the last time they were allowed to participate. Zholtovsky and Iofan, a communist architect, are invited to the meetings. About the role of Shchusev; about the role of Lunacharsky - as he was ordered to give feedback on J.'s project: he stayed for 2 hours, approved; then he called the cell, the cat. vs; wrote the theses against J.; ordered to "get sick." Al. Tolstoy ordered to write an article [iii] (under "our dictation") for classicism (Shchusev: "here is a scoundrel, but yesterday he scolded me the classics"); J.: "I knew that there would be a turn." [iv]
Here is Lanceray's entry, dated September 9, 1935, three years after the previous one:
“… On the 8th in the evening I was at Zholtovsky's; there is a genius chaos in architecture. The work is terribly difficult; everyone is on the nerves; We fought with K [aganovich] from 1 to 3 am. He rejects everything, hardly looks. Looking for a "Soviet" style, while other members of the government want a classic one; persecution against the baroque. " [v]
That's the whole Art Deco …
From afar and squinting strongly, you can confuse various options for eclecticism with each other, especially if the details are sometimes similar. The tradition, which developed back in Soviet times, to identify styles only by the features of the facade decor, is very conducive to such a substitution of concepts.
With about the same success, you can call a hornless cow a horse, referring to external similarity, the number of legs and the way of reproduction. But it’s better not to do this.
Stalinist architecture is Stalinist architecture. With its unique genesis and its own unique physiognomy. No plastic surgery can change this face. Barshch, Mikhail. Memories. In: MARKHI, vol. I, M., 2006, p. 113. [ii] Lessons from the May Architectural Exhibition. USSR architecture. 1934, no. 6, p. 12. [iii] Alexei Tolstoy “The Search for Monument”, Izvestia, February 27, 1932. The article was published the day before the announcement of the results of the All-Union Competition for the Palace of Soviets (February 28). [iv] Lanceray, Eugene. Diaries. Book two. M., 2008, p. 625-626. [v] Lanceray, Eugene. Diaries. Book three. M., 2009, pp. 189-190.
