The history of Soviet architecture is traditionally and with good reason divided into three stylistic eras that differ sharply from each other:
- The era of early modern architecture (the so-called "Soviet avant-garde" or "constructivism") - from the early 1920s to the early 1930s;
- Stalinist architecture (the so-called "Stalinist neoclassicism") - from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s;
- The era of Khrushchev and his successors (the so-called "Soviet modernism") - from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1980s.
All three artistic eras corresponded to three different political regimes flowing into one another - with very different social and economic systems: pre-Stalinist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist.
It is logical to assume that the term "Stalinist architecture" also refers to the architecture that emerged under the Stalinist regime. But this is where the problem arises. Stalin's regime did not appear in 1932; it began to take shape rapidly five years earlier. The process of Stalinization of the country covered all aspects of its life, including architecture. Just for the time being, he did not touch on the artistic aspects of architecture.
The moments of the change of the Soviet stylistic eras are dated quite accurately according to government decrees.
The era of modern architecture in the USSR began somewhere in 1923-1924. and lasted a matter of 6-7 years. Constructivism was actually banned on February 28, 1932, when in the resolution of the Council for the Construction of the Palace of Soviets on the distribution of prizes in the all-Union competition in 1931 (and in reality, in the decision of the Politburo of 1932-23-02), an indication was made of the mandatory use of "techniques classical architecture ". After that, no projects, devoid of decor and not stylized as something historical, were approved in the USSR. The new Stalinist state style, which arose in such a violent way, existed for almost a quarter of a century and did not outlive Stalin much.
The end of Stalinist architecture was marked by the All-Union Meeting of Architects and Builders in November-December 1954, organized by Khrushchev. At the meeting, the Stalinist Empire style was condemned for its high cost and "decoration".
But this is about changing the state style. Stalinization of architectural typology and design organization began several years before the introduction of forced neoclassicism in the USSR and survived it for a long time.
The starting point for this process can serve as the XV Congress of the CPSU (b), held in December 1927 and headed for "collectivization". He recorded Stalin's victory in the internal party struggle and the beginning of his social and economic reforms - the elimination of the market economy and the introduction of universal forced labor on the state. In the same year, the revision of the first versions of the first five-year plan began, initially proceeding from the continuation of the NEP and the balanced development of agriculture and industry, mutually supporting each other. The plan of Stalin's industrialization, on the contrary, provided for the accelerated development of heavy and military industry at the expense of all the country's resources, the destruction of the free civil economy, the expropriation of all property of the population in favor of the government and the transformation of all labor in the USSR into various versions of forced labor. In architecture, which quickly became entirely state, these processes were reflected more than clearly.
The process of eliminating the NEP took about 2.5 years and was fully completed by the end of 1930. It led to the complete elimination of not only private industry and trade, but also the entertainment industry and public service infrastructure. The physiognomy of the country and its structure have changed dramatically. Private housing construction froze. Disappeared private restaurants, cafes, taverns, theaters, fairs and fairground entertainment ceased to exist.
For architecture, these changes were fatal. After a very short period of prosperity, private architectural and construction bureaus and firms disappeared or were turned into state offices. Since 1930, architecture has ceased to exist as a free profession - all the architects of the country were assigned to one or another government department.
In 1927-1928, the possibility of free professional discussions was almost completely blocked, which is clearly seen in the journal "Contemporary Architecture". In accordance with the new social structure of society, a new architectural typology began to take shape, this time purely state.
First of all, the official idea of solving the housing problem has changed. In the mid-1920s, Gosplan specialists predicted the future solution of the housing problem in the traditional way - by providing the population with apartments. However, the plans of the first five-year plan did not provide for financing the massive construction of apartment housing for everyone. Only the ruling stratum, a few percent of the entire urban population, was to be provided with comfortable apartments at the state expense.
Private investment in housing, which far exceeded state investments in 1924-1928, completely ceased by 1930 due to the total impoverishment of the population and the prohibition of private trade. The unnaturally rapidly growing population of cities and workers' settlements was settled in a planned manner in barracks and dugouts, which at that time became the most massive type of Soviet housing.
In state propaganda, the refusal to build apartment housing for workers was received in 1928-1930. the name of the campaign for “socializing everyday life”. The government's policy to provide workers with only the cheapest, slum housing was masked by insane ideological slogans about the progressiveness and ideological importance of communal housing without personal kitchens, bathrooms and the ability to lead a family life. Then there were numerous projects of communal houses, sometimes brilliant in an artistic sense, but with an invariably inhuman organization of life.
The construction of large public baths was to compensate for the inability to wash at home.
After 1928, the place of the destroyed entertainment infrastructure began to be occupied by "workers' clubs", which played primarily a propaganda role. Small clubs with various functions quickly gave way to large Palaces of Culture, the main place in which was occupied by concert halls for holding ceremonial meetings.
Huge theaters, competitions for which began to be held in the late 1920s, in the midst of the economic catastrophe and terror in the country, were also a purely Stalinist phenomenon. They had nothing to do with the flowering of theatrical art, on the contrary, it was just then hopelessly degraded. But in many large cities and republican capitals, halls appeared for holding party conferences and meetings. At first, these theaters were designed in constructivism, but after 1932 they began to grow in columns.
State-owned kitchen factories, canteens and bakeries, designed to provide the same food to the entire urban population, were to replace the destroyed private catering infrastructure, food trade and small bakeries. A catastrophic drop in product quality was programmed at the same time.
New giant factories and industrial complexes, which had a purely military meaning and quickly became barrack "social cities" for their builders and workers, were also an invention of the Stalinist era. They were built close to sources of raw materials and energy, often in completely deserted places. Workers were brought there by force and in a planned manner. The calculation of the population of such cities was based on the absence of "extra" residents not employed in the production and maintenance of the plant.
Such urban planning and these types of buildings were unthinkable a few years ago, during the NEP with its relative civil liberties. In the conditions of free trade and private enterprise, they could not arise, there would simply be no one to use them.
The new purely state architectural typology that emerged after 1927 became a symptom not of social progress, but, on the contrary, an obvious sign of the social and economic degradation of the country and the population. It arose only as a consequence of the catastrophic Stalinist reforms for the country's population.
So, we can reasonably say that the era of Stalinist architecture in the USSR came not in 1932, but in 1927-1928. Soviet constructivism in the last four to five years of its existence has produced a huge number of brilliant projects and buildings, but this was already Stalinist architecture - in terms of social meaning, typology and functional content.
The architectural design of the era of the first five-year plan was reorganized in full accordance with the social and economic characteristics of the new state regime, but for some time it retained the same style.
Only in 1932 did the process of Stalinization of Soviet architecture finally come to an end with the introduction of the official state style and total artistic censorship.
