Between Modernism and Socialist Realism: Soviet Architectural Culture under Stalin's Revolution from Above, 1928–1938 Author(s): Danilo Udovički-Selb Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 68, No. 4 (December 2009), pp. 467-495 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2009.68.4.467 . Accessed: 07/07/2015 10:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.59.226.32 on Tue, 7 Jul 2015 10:59:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Between Modernism and Socialist Realism Soviet Architectural Culture under Stalin’s Revolution from Above, 1928–1938 danilo udovicˇki-selb University of Texas at Austin talinism in architecture was abolished two and a half munist leadership of the union experienced in controlling years after Stalin’s death, on 4 November 1955.1 the union’s decision-making process. For the same reason, SWhat was known as Socialist Realism was struck the Soviets asked CIAM to postpone the Moscow meeting down by a joint statement of the Central Committee of the scheduled for 1933. The Politburo’s sustained desire to host Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet government fol- such a congress in Moscow in the years to come, while it lowing year-long consultations with representatives of the dismissed modernism at home, illustrates the complexity of profession. Using language reminiscent of the modern the architectural discourse that Stalin started in 1928 with movement’s critique of eclectic historicism, the Soviet com- his Cultural Revolution, or Perestroika (reconstruction). muniqué called for nothing less than a reintroduction of The fact that the party operated in strict secrecy further modernism in terms strikingly consonant with those of the complicated the maneuvering.4 Athens Charter of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architec- The difficulty in agreeing what Socialist Realism ought ture Moderne (CIAM).2 to mean in architecture was compounded by the divergent In contrast to this swift return to mainstream mod- stylistic preferences of the party’s top leadership. Such ambi- ernism, the Stalinization of Soviet architecture in the 1930s, guity opened a space for some architectural diversity, which following the Sixteenth Party Congress, had been a much was widened by the degree of tactical tolerance that was longer and more complex undertaking. It not only sparked accorded Constructivist architecture until the end of the intense debates among architects, it also met resistance 1930s. The two most notable examples of such diversity were from the public, who continued to admire the modern the Vesnin brothers’ Moscow Palace of Culture, inaugurated architecture that had been conceived by the avant-garde in in 1937 (its striking modernist interiors are virtually unex- the 1920s. Open support for progressive architecture was plored to this day); and Moisej Ginzburg’s all-but-forgotten felt as late as 1937, one of the harshest years of the Terror, 1938 sanatorium at Kislovodsk, whose signature modernism or the Great Party Cistka (the massive purge of party was hidden in the forbidding mountain range of the northern ranks).3 Caucasus the (Figures 1, 2).5 A reassessment of the last ver- Emblematic of the slowness of the effort to Stalinize sion of the Palace of the Soviets (1934), a hyper-Stalinist proj- architecture was the repeated postponement of the First ect of oppressive monumentality, offers another unexpected Congress of the Stalinist Union of Soviet Architects (ini- illustration of the surviving spirit of both modernity and tially scheduled for 1934 in the wake of the Soviet writers’ modernism in the Soviet Union under Joseph Visarionovic assembly). This was caused by the difficulties that the com- Stalin.6 Appropriate recognition of the importance of these 467 This content downloaded from 128.59.226.32 on Tue, 7 Jul 2015 10:59:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions projects entails a new interpretation of this historic turning tecture, analogous to that preferred by the Nepmen. As a point in Soviet architecture—and in Soviet culture at large. result, at the turn of the decade Soviet progressive archi- This reconsideration of this phenomenon, which completely tects found themselves squeezed between the nouveau riche reshapes heretofore accepted interpretations, including those NEP elite, whom they had resisted since the mid-1920s, in the sole, pioneering book on the topic (1994),7 is based on and a rising class that also favored conservatism. That newly available Soviet archives.8 seemed to leave little space for innovative architecture. The effort to sustain the Russian modernist cause in In the spring of 1928, coinciding with the national the 1930s was launched in the dramatic events that sur- competition for the Lenin Library in Moscow, the progres- rounded the 1928 competition for the Lenin Library, when sive SA (Sovremenaja Arhitektura: Contemporary architec- the modernists appealed to the party to help them defend ture) the official journal of the OSA (Society of modern architecture. The response was the creation of an Contemporary Architects), published a letter by a group of architectural organization composed of party members, the young architects from the Ukrainian city of Harkov calling VOPRA (the All-Union Society of Proletarian Architects), for help and support from the Moscow modernists (Figure which, one year into the Cultural Revolution could not but 3).11 The group was fervently devoted to avant-garde archi- be sponsored behind the scenes by the party leadership. tecture and was distressed at what they perceived as mount- More than endorsing a principled position, VOPRA, an ing conservatism in their town, which was increasingly essential tool of Stalin’s Perestroika of cultural and eco- dominated by pre-revolutionary architects who kept the nomic policies, sought to monopolize the terms of the younger ones at bay. In a desperate attempt to break the debate. grip of academic architecture, which threatened to monop- olize the profession, they formed the Iniciativnaja Gruppa to resist the trend. Their appeal fell on fertile ground. The The Lenin Library Competition: The Debate leaders of Soviet modern architecture shared their concerns, Having replaced Lenin’s New Economic policies (the NEP) and the turbulent competition for the Lenin Library, one in 1928 with centrally mandated five-year-plans, Stalin of the decade’s most prestigious projects to be located in the embarked on an effort to control the modernist art move- heart of Moscow across from the Kremlin walls, dramati- ments that had flourished in the previous decade.9 The cally exposed the same issues. intention was not so much to impose a particular style as to The competition was juried by the Moskovskoe replace spontaneous architectural expression with effective Arhitekturnoe Ob3cestvo (MAO), a pre-revolutionary control. What mattered was to adapt “reality” to a perceived Moscow architectural society reinstated in 1923. It was historical plan, allegedly entrusted to the Bolshevik leader- organized in two parts. One was open to the entire profes- ship. Existing spontaneous movements were to be gradu- sion, the other only to invited architects. Because of its con- ally infiltrated and reined in. By 1930, without ever servative jury, the open contest for the library attracted renouncing modernity and modernization per se—a fewer than ten entries. In addition to the four invited archi- declared ideological premise of the Revolution—Stalin’s tectural teams, including the Vesnin brothers Aleksandr ruling party took into its own hands what until then (1883–1959), Viktor (1882–1950), and Leonid (1880–1933), belonged primarily to the artistic professionals. Supplanting who introduced Constructivism in architecture with their independent initiative, direct and indirect dictates from the 1923 Palace of Labor, the entrants included several well- power centers were to define everyday reality, ultimately established academic figures from Tsarist times. Out of four draining intellectual discourse of all substance.10 invitees, only the Vesnin team had radically renounced their Toward the end of the 1920s, the nouveaux riches of conservative pre-1914 architecture. The other invited par- the NEP (the so-called “Nepmen”) were gaining influence ticipants were the conservative engineer Il’ja Rerberg, on architecture in proportion to their growing economic already active in the previous century and derided in SA for power. A telling example was the 1927 Italianate GosBank his post office on Tverskaja Street, a historicist building by the classicist Ivan Zoltovskij (1867–1959), a well-estab- awkwardly stripped of its ornament (Figure 4); the Ukrain- lished architect of the Tsarist era. ian Vladimir 4cuko (1879–1939); and the