Moscow Architecture between Stalinism and Modernism

Abstract

Recent changes in Moscow's urban structure combine the post-Soviet and the early Soviet aesthetical and ideological patterns in a very contradictory way. The master plan of 2004 with its vision of the ‘‘new capital’’ of the year 2020, is essentially orientated along the lines of its 1935 predecessor. Striking similarity of the mechanisms of the visual celebration of Moscow as a capital city of Russian Federation is, however, based on the opposite economies. The goals of a representative architecture in Moscow are being intertwined with the demands of a new economic settings for architectural planning. The choice of architecture from the 1930s and 1950s as a pattern of orientation for some buildings planned for the most prominent spaces in Moscow is seen here as an oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, considered in the context of political discourses and urban policy.

Keywords:

• Moscow architecture
• architecture and society – Russia
• modernism – Russia
• post-Soviet urban policy

Notes

1. The master plan was presented to the Moscow Duma in 1999, but its final version only passed its final reading in April 2005. Some parts of the plan have already been realised since 2000. The text can be found at http://www.mos.ru

2. In 1931–1932, an international competition for the master plan of Moscow and the building of Palace of the Soviets was launched, inviting many renowned architects from abroad to participate, among them Le Corbusier. The rejection of these projects signalled a turn away from the ideas of ‘Neues Bauen’ (‘new architecture’) and the ‘functional city’.

3. See recent publication: Clark, Katerina, Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space, in The Landscape of Stalinism. The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, eds Evgeny Dobrenko & Eric Naiman, 2003, pp. 3–18. University of Washington Press, Seattle and London.

4. The word ‘perestroika’ also means ‘reconstruction’.

5. To notice that the right-wing nationalist movement ‘Pamyat’ is also located in this context.

6. www.patriarchia.ru

7. Schögl, Uwe, Proletarischer Klassizismus. Sowjetische Architektur der Stalinzeit, in Jan Tabor (ed.), 1994, vol. 2, p. 795.

8. See lemma ‘Postmodernism”, in Gusejnov (2003).

9. Los Angeles Times, Sunday, January 14, 2001; http://home.comcast.net/∼gfreidin/columns/Putin