Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  The history of the competition for building the Palace of the Soviets has been written in detail many times over, even though to this day there has been no complete, source-based account of the decision-making processes involved.8 Writers have concentrated chiefly on the aesthetic side of the project, the competing styles and conceptions, and have judged the overall course of events as proof of the thesis that the powers that be and Stalin personally were able to bend the architects and builders to their own will. That is not mistaken, but nor is it entirely persuasive. Utopian dreams have no power in themselves; there is merely a constellation in which utopian aspirations predominate and indeed become overwhelming. And, above all, there is no project without the artists, their talent, their imagination and their determination to make of their ideas a reality.

  The competition for the Palace of the Soviets sought to close the gap in the skies that had been opened up with the demolition of the cathedral. It was a phase of intensive searching and of a frantic effort to fill a vacuum. It was as if Andrei Platonov had anticipated this situation when he wrote his novel The Foundation Pit in 1929–30. In that novel he makes his engineer ponder the task of creating a mighty new building:

  In a year’s time the entire local proletariat would leave the old town and its petty properties and take possession of the monumental new home. And in another decade or two, some other engineer would construct a tower, in the very centre of the world, where the toiling masses of the whole earth would happily take up residence for the rest of time. From the point of view of both aesthetics and static mechanics Prushevskii could already see what kind of structure would be required in the centre of the earth, but he was unable to get a sense of the psychic structure of the inhabitants of his common home in the middle of the plain, let alone imagine that of the people who one day would live in the tower at the centre of the earth.9

  And yet it had all started out much more straightforwardly. It began merely with the idea of building a ‘Palace of Labour’. During the festivities celebrating the founding of the USSR in the Bolshoi Theatre on 31 December 1922, Sergei Kirov had proclaimed that the Union needed a new building if in future all the deputies were to meet in one place. As a prestigious building, it would have to be open and transparent, linked with the whole world by radio, and provided with masts for tethering Zeppelins. A 1924 memorandum of ideas lists all the functions of such a building:

  Headquarters of the World Revolution, headquarters of the Third Communist International, Centre of the World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All international, revolutionary congresses, the All-Union Congresses of the Soviets and the Russian Communist Party, conferences and mass meetings will be held in this building. The proletariat of all countries will join in the construction … generations of Red Builders of all nations will be stimulated by this monument. It will act as a giant magnet, drawing everything into its field of influence, and it will cause the forms of houses, streets, squares and cities to orientate themselves by it.10

  Whereas during the period of reconstruction people made do with provisional solutions, as in the case of the Bolshoi Theatre and the conservatoire, at the time of the great upheaval after 1929 the Soviet leadership returned to the idea, and in a letter dated 17 April 1931 invited leading Soviet architects, such as Aleksei Shchusev, Vladimir Shchuko, the brothers Aleksandr and Viktor Vesnin, Nikolai Ladovskii and others, to draw up guidelines for an All-Union competition. The location for the building they had in mind, a building that should be appropriate to the ‘character of the age’, was a different one – to the north of the Kremlin and Red Square, between Okhotnyi Riad, Bol'shaia Dmitrovka and Tverskaia. A high-ranking jury was formed to report to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR – i.e. the government; the designs that had been submitted were published in the All-Union Building Exhibition and discussed in public. Izvestiia of 31 July 1931 published not only an updated and more specific programme for the next stage of the competition but also nominated a new location – Viktor Balikhin, a member of the avant-gardist association of new architects, had proposed it: the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.11 By December 1931, 272 designs had been submitted, twenty-four of them by foreign architects. The Museum of the Plastic Arts (after 1937, the Pushkin Museum) put the prize-winning designs on show between December 1931 and June 1932; its location was almost opposite the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which now lay in ruins. From March 1932 the contest entered its final phase, now consisting of two rounds. The criteria for the building had once again been modified – a space for mass demonstrations had ceased to be obligatory and the palace was now to include a strong vertical component. The final victory in the competition went to the design submitted by Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gel'freikh.

  The Moscow competition was one of the most fascinating architecture competitions of the age and can be placed alongside the competitions for the League of Nations building in Geneva and the pavilions for the international exhibitions in Paris and New York.12 What was envisaged was a building of the future, appropriate to a new society. There was scarcely a form, a style, that was not represented. The competition proved to be a meeting point for the imagination, the ambition, the proving ground of styles and the last word in technical advances, a true laboratory of the architecture of the twentieth century. Highly symbolic and expressionist trends stood cheek by jowl with technical and functionalist approaches. Machine-like shapes coexisted with echoes of the Italian Renaissance, quotations from classical architecture stood alongside borrowings from skyscraper building styles. The entire architectural international avant garde came together for the Moscow competition: Hans Poelzig, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Armando Brasini, together with the leading Soviet architects.13

  Figure 38.2 Boris Iofan (left) with his wife in conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright during a coffee break at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in Moscow 1937; they had first met during Iofan’s visit to America in 1935.

  ‘The success of their design has been explained as the victory of the conservative, regressive, anti-modern trend, and this has been referred to in the same breath as the process of bringing into line the artistic and architectural associations that had existed more or less in a state of war with one another up to 1932. Frank Lloyd Wright spoke of ‘grandomania of the American type’ and even called on the victor, Boris Iofan, to stop work on the building and rerun the competition in order to ward off a loss of prestige for the USSR.’

  In the event, the project of Iofan, Shchuko and Gel'freikh won the day. The success of their design has been explained as the victory of the conservative, regressive, anti-modern trend, and this has been referred to in the same breath as the process of bringing into line the artistic and architectural associations that had existed more or less in a state of war with one another up to 1932. Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn became disillusioned. As late as 1937, when construction had already begun, Frank Lloyd Wright spoke of ‘grandomania of the American type’ and even called on the victor, Boris Iofan, to stop work on the building and rerun the competition in order to ward off a loss of prestige for the USSR. Iofan replied, ‘Never mind, we will tear it down in ten years.’14 But Iofan had no intention of doing that; as we can now see from the sources, he fought for the success of his ideas from the outset and with the greatest possible personal commitment, as well as by exploiting his connections with the Soviet leadership, at first with Rykov, who was subsequently executed, and then with Molotov. The ‘building of the century’ did not spring from the Party leadership, or even from Stalin, but from the head of an artist and architect of great talent, perhaps even genius.

  Rome, New York, Moscow: the genius of Boris Iofan

  Iofan’s design has its own history. In his initial design for the first competition, Iofan had still envisaged two separate, detached buildings containing the Great and Small Halls and a stand-alone campanile-like tower with a sculpture. In t
he second competition he took a decisive step by combining the two into a single building, integrated in the vertical form of the tower that was now to be crowned by a statue of Lenin. The basic shape of an upwards-thrusting tower whose plinth concealed the functional rooms and simultaneously served as a pedestal for a monumental piece of sculpture was fixed in 1934. The subsequent modifications of the design up to 1937 are no more than variants of this one basic idea, oscillating between a compact massive form and a dynamic upwards-thrusting shape. Iofan was thought at the time to be too young and inexperienced for such a project, and so two colleagues were assigned to assist him, both representatives of the neoclassical tradition of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts – Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gel'freikh – who favoured a massive cubic, terraced form, whereas Iofan gave the building a cylindrical shape, thinning out as it rose, treating the structure as a stylobate, as the foundation of a row of classical columns culminating in the Lenin statue. That gave the building its dynamism and even an unbridled, vertiginous lightness.15 The building was conceived as a beacon, the new centre of Moscow and the nation.16

  The trio had attempted to reconcile form and function. The subterranean storeys beneath the podium contained the installations necessary for the running of the building: electricity, fire prevention, security guards, management, supplies, air-conditioning, garages, etc. The main entrance to the palace lay on the Kremlin side. You entered the foyer via a splendid 100 metre-long staircase. The palace itself led through magnificent corridors to grand salons, reception rooms and suites. The centre of the building was the Great Hall, 140 metres in diameter and 97 metres high, intended to hold 20,000 people seated in gently rising rows in an amphitheatre-like auditorium beneath a mighty dome. In the west wing, the so-called Little Hall could seat 6,000. The Great Hall was intended for use as the ‘parliament of the Soviet people’, a suitable location for the country’s most important political events, whereas the Little Hall had space for theatre, cinema and other entertainments. The floors above the Great Hall contained offices, but also a variety of museums. Visitors would be able to travel up to the viewing platform, right up to the statue of Lenin, and from there they could enjoy the view of the city. The building was to be crowned by a statue of Lenin in stainless steel. It was to be 75 metres tall, thus giving the building a total height of 415 metres.

  The Palace of the Soviets was to be a building of superlatives – and not simply as regards its dimensions.17 Visitors could move through the building on sixty-two escalators linking the different floors or travel to the top in one of the ninety-nine lifts. It was conceived as a sophisticated high-tech building in which everything had been thought of in advance: the communications systems, the air-conditioning in the rows of seats, the acoustics and the lighting. Film shows and direct broadcasts from the palace to the country as a whole would be enabled, and consideration had even been given to the installation of a TV studio. Listeners would be able to understand a speaker’s every word without difficulty. Here were grandstands for diplomats and the press corps. The Little Hall featured all the technical facilities needed for scene changes on the stage, including the presentation of tractors and aeroplanes, swimming events and ice-skating. The complex had been treated as a Gesamtkunstwerk – from the configuration of the lifts to the furnishings and the wall frescoes. Painters and sculptors were commissioned to grapple with great themes: the history of the International’s struggles for liberation, the main stages of the revolutionary movement in Russia, the Revolution, the Civil War and, above all, the country’s industrialization. The texts of the ‘Stalin Constitution’ were to be engraved in stone on the walls for all to read. The coat of arms of the USSR was to be fixed to the inside of the dome in the Great Hall – also known as the ‘Hall of the Constitution’ – and the chandeliers were to be given the shape of the hammer and sickle. What with the frescoes, reliefs and sculptures, the observer might easily find himself reminded of the heroic and triumphalist décor of the building’s predecessor. On closer inspection, however, the influences defining his programme pointed in different directions: to Rome and New York.

  Boris Iofan (1891–1976) was indeed very young to have won the competition to construct the building of the century. He was born in Odessa in 1891and studied painting and sculpture at the Institute of Art between 1903 and 1911, after which he went, via Paris from 1914 to 1916, to Rome, where he studied architecture and engineering. He worked as an assistant to Emmanuel Manfredi, who had been charged with completing the monument for Victor Emanuel II, and also with Armando Brasini, who was to become one of the leading architects of fascist Italy. Boris Iofan, whose brother Dmitri was a well-known architect in St Petersburg, stayed in Italy until 1924, joining the Communist Party, where he became acquainted with Antonio Gramsci, among others. Having returned to Moscow, he built a number of houses and institutes in a restrained classical modernist style; his most important works, however, were the residential complex of Government House, the sanatorium in Barvikha, near Moscow, and the USSR Pavilion in Paris in 1937 and New York in 1939. During the war he was evacuated to Sverdlovsk, and after the war ended he worked on plans for the reconstruction of destroyed Soviet cities – as well as on new versions of the Palace of the Soviets.18

  However, these biographical details of his life do not tell us the whole story. While he was in Rome, Iofan took a profound interest in Renaissance architecture, but more particularly in the architecture of classical Rome, and in general he was concerned more with the classical heritage as such. His fascination with classical antiquity is everywhere in evidence: some critics detect in Vera Mukhina’s sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman the forward-driving momentum of the Victory of Samothrace, while others believe it to have taken the tyrannicides Harmodios and Aristogeiton as its model;19 the towers are thought to be reminiscent of the Colossus of Rhodes or the Pharos of Alexandria. Similarly, the mighty dome of the Great Hall undoubtedly testifies to the impression made on him by the Pantheon. The fact that Armando Brasini – who after all hailed from fascist Italy – took part in the competition was undoubtedly the result of his relationship with Iofan. Even more illuminating, however, is the revelation that it was Brasini himself who was responsible for the idea of a tower as the centrepiece of the design for the Palace of the Soviets. Brasini wished to allude both to the mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian and to a famous Old Russian church in Kolomenskoe, near Moscow. The verticals of Iofan’s design have their origin, therefore, in the Roman context and lead back directly to Brasini’s atelier.20

  But there was one other powerful source of inspiration. In 1934, while engaged on the preparatory technical work on the project, Iofan and his colleagues visited the United States. Their aim was to learn from the pioneers of skyscraper construction, so as to be able to solve the extraordinary technical problems of the palace. Needless to say, Iofan and his colleagues made a point of visiting the largest and the most important construction site in the Americas in the age of the New Deal: the Rockefeller Center in New York City. This was where Iofan had his ‘skyscraper revelation’, which was not the least important factor in leading him to giving even greater emphasis to the verticals of the palace in his revised design.21 The Russians were able to make a study of everything in New York and take from it whatever they deemed important: reinforced concrete construction methods, skyscraper technologies, air-conditioning, fast lifts, lighting systems, and the logistics of large building projects. As far as the aesthetics of the project were concerned, Iofan may be presumed to have been immune to skyscrapers. His criticism of the ‘chaos of New York’, the lack of structured ensembles, reappears in his writings even decades later. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impact of his trip to America is unmistakable. His sketch for the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry (planned for Red Square) clearly bears the marks of the Rockefeller Center; the design of the foyer, with its frescoes and reliefs, is highly reminiscent of New York, as is his preference for specific materials and details. The Lenin sculptur
e in stainless steel – like Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman earlier on – reminds us of the Atlas on the Rockefeller Plaza. Iofan, a lover of elegance and luxury, must have felt overwhelmed by the interior of Radio City Music Hall. In the same way, the viewing platform on the Palace of the Soviets, that prosaic tourist attraction at the foot of a quasi-sacred monument, undoubtedly derives from the view from the roof of the middle block of the Rockefeller Center. Iofan’s design of the Soviet Pavilion for the New York World Fair in 1939 may be seen as a Soviet version of the New York original on Fifth Avenue.22

  Figure 38.3 View from the west of the waste land on which the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had previously stood; the Kremlin can be seen in the background.

  ‘The fact was that this vacuum could be eliminated only by means of a building that put everything else in the shade and obliterated all memories, not just by its sheer size, volume and height, but by virtue of the spirit of the new building that would come to replace the old one that had been blown up.’