Scholarship on Stalinism's temporal culture often relies on interpretations of the period's architecture. Architecture serves as the springboard for Sergei Kavtaradze's characterization of the Stalinist “chronotope.”Footnote ² As the “iconic-ideal-cultural form” of the period, it also forms the basis of Katerina Clark's analysis of Stalinist temporality.Footnote ³ Perhaps most famously, Vladimir Papernyi uses architecture as the entry point for one of the most extensive discussions of Stalinist temporal culture in his magisterial Culture Two.Footnote ⁴ All of these studies seize upon the sudden and rapid revival of the forms and styles of the past, which came to dominate Soviet architecture from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s.

One approach treats the historicism of Stalinist architecture as signaling a reactionary shift in Soviet temporal culture, part of a “Great Retreat” across all spheres of social and political life. The rival conception sees in historicism an aesthetic of “timelessness” and “perfection,” which expressed Stalinism's self-characterization as an eternal, utopian present. While favoring the latter interpretation, I believe that neither is entirely accurate in its account of Stalinist attitudes towards time, which preserved a future-oriented perspective. To be sure, this no longer revolved around utopian expectations. Rather, the regime endorsed the cultural myth and eponymous policy of “the immortalization of memory” (uvekovechenie pamiati), the striving to ensure posterity's grateful and perpetual remembrance of the heroic Stalinist era. Indeed, this task of “immortalization” fell largely upon architecture, in its most symbolically-charged and monumental incarnations.

Accordingly, as this paper argues, historicist architecture was employed not to evoke the “timelessness” (and, thereby, perfection) of the alleged utopian present, but to communicate in an artistic language that would remain understandable to future generations. Furthermore, traditional materials, architectonic forms, and decorative mediums were particularly amenable to the tasks of “immortalization” because of their time-tested physical durability. The paper thereby proposes a new interpretation of Stalinist historicist architecture as, paradoxically, future-oriented. It also nuances our understandings of Stalinist futurity itself. As in other facets of Stalinist culture, the outlook on the future implicit in “immortalization” was shamelessly self-aggrandizing, but it nonetheless demonstrated an acute dependence upon the favorable judgement of posterity. This, I believe, betrays underlying anxieties beneath the veneer of triumphalism exuded by Stalinist official culture.

In the period of First Five-Year Plan (1928–31), professional groupings of avant-garde architects, traditionalists, and more eclectic practitioners competed fiercely for regime support and commissions. As in other spheres of artistic production, in 1932 the Stalinist leadership moved to abolish this relative pluralism in favor of an amalgamated Union of Soviet Architects (henceforth, SSA), which held its inaugural congress in 1937. There, once again in line with general cultural policy, the SSA proclaimed “socialist realism” as the mandatory architectural “method.” Yet because this proscription was ambiguous (for one, having been developed for Soviet literature), it was filled with specific meaning through trial-and-error, mediated by indirect official signals, throughout the 1930s.Footnote ⁵

One of the key transformations in Soviet architectural practice was a sudden and near-universal turn to historicism, which was induced by two key events. On the theoretical level, it was implicit in the dictate of the “critical assimilation of the heritage of the past” (kriticheskoe osvoenie naslediia proshlovogo), which emerged out of the design competition for the Palace of the Soviets. As the key project of the decade, it received direct attention from the political leadership, including Stalin personally.Footnote ⁶ Following the international phase of the competition (in which all submissions were rejected), the February 28, 1932 report of the Construction Directorate suggested that in the future, concept development “should focus on using…the best of classic architecture.”Footnote ⁷ In response, the pre-Congress, skeleton structures of the SSA initiated a research program into the “assimilation of heritage,” as did the recently-founded Academy of Architecture, which immediately published translations of Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti, and Andrea Palladio.Footnote ⁸ The architectural community received a clear signal to change direction from its only patron, the Soviet regime.

While Boris Iofan's winning entry certainly appealed to history, the Palace of the Soviets was never built, and the design was perennially revised.Footnote ⁹ “The critical assimilation of the heritage of the past” was an abstract postulate, and, as Richard Anderson argues, “what constituted classical architecture, and which classical techniques were desirable remained open questions.”Footnote ¹⁰ In part, the original answer to these was Ivan Zholtovskii's residential building on Moscow's central Mokhovaia Street (1934), which was widely held up as the concrete embodiment of the new official requirements.Footnote ¹¹ Heavily reliant on Palladian principles (of which Zholtovksii was a lifelong devotee), it boasted giant pilaster columns topped with composite order capitals, classical cornices, and elaborate balustrades. A triumphal arch marked the grand entrance of this monumental seven-story building, the façade of which was clad in sandstone-imitation ceramic. The project was generously funded, which was crucial given the eschewal of standardized components.Footnote ¹² Following its completion, critics hailed it as the model for future work, and dubbed it “a nail in the coffin of constructivism” (this was the main avant-garde grouping at the time).Footnote ¹³ Having signaled the general direction, the regime was able to force a speedy and relatively bloodless transition to historicism through a monopoly on commissions, control over architectural education, an obedient Union and Academy, and the threat of professional and even criminal “consequences” for those refusing to adapt to the new demands.Footnote ¹⁴

While Zholtovskii's creation marked a watershed, the building was in several senses unique. For one, it flagrantly disregarded the parallel dictate that Soviet architecture remain contemporary and reflect the new socialist epoch. Buildings, in theory if not in practice, were to amalgamate the old and the new, and historicist designs could be denounced (often for ulterior reasons) as “archaic,” “anachronistic,” “restorationist,” “academic,” “stylized,” or “retrospectivist.” Throughout the period, not only did industrial and civil constructions (and even some residential and administrative buildings) continue to be constructed in a functionalist mold, several key monumental buildings followed hybrid designs. Examples include Moscow's Lenin Library (1940) and the Moscow Hotel (1935), the original designs of which were constructivist, but were later overlaid with classical forms and decorations.Footnote ¹⁵

Further, Zholtovskii's faithfulness to Palladianism (indeed, Papernyi went so far as to label the Mokhovaia building “an expanded and slightly modernized version of Palladio's Loggia del Capitaniato” in Vicenza) contrasted markedly with the eclecticism of Stalinist architecture, which not only accommodated several “acceptable” historical styles, but typically combined various elements of these within a single construction.Footnote ¹⁶ This had less to do with the “freedom” of the architect than with interventions by non-professionals and the general “cumulativist” practice of architectural competitions (whereby the winner was forced to incorporate the “best ideas” of other submissions into the final design).Footnote ¹⁷ As a result, the architectural palette of the time was so wide that scholars have difficulty agreeing on an appropriate stylistic label, speaking alternately of Stalinist neoclassicism, empire, baroque, and gothic.”Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless, general patterns can be discerned, and the common view is that Stalinist architecture followed in a broadly-conceived classical tradition (particularly in its Graeco-Roman, Renaissance, and neoclassical iterations) up to the late 1930s, after which the emphasis shifted to specifically Russian neoclassicism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as well as to vernacular (narodnye) elements. While acceptable in the 1930s, the residential building on Mokhovaia Street was increasingly criticized as the demands for national themes in architecture peaked in the postwar years. Thus, the extent to which historical elements dominated over contemporary design, and the specific architectural style that was selected for revival differed between individual projects, as well as throughout the period as a whole. Nonetheless, however one conceives of it, the historicism of Stalinist architecture was palpable, particularly in its most symbolically-charged, monumental incarnations. Because the paper is concerned with the meanings and functions of historicism in Stalinist architectural practice as such, rather than its changing composition (from hybridity to purer traditionalism, from quasi-classicism to the Russian national style), what follows is a largely synchronic account delimited to the period 1932–1954, in which similar studies conventionally operate.

The historicist turn in Soviet architecture has been a fruitful ground for theorizing Stalinist temporality. The immediate response is to treat the embrace of historicism in architecture as echoing a wider conservative restoration, which enveloped various spheres of cultural and political life following the First Five-Year Plan. This “Great Retreat” saw the abandonment of Revolutionary emancipatory projects in favor of greater differentials in wages and status, the reassertion of traditional gender roles and family policy, conservative educational reform, and the relaxation of anti-clericalism.Footnote ¹⁹ On the level of aesthetics, the historicist turn in architecture represented a reversion to the philistine, petty-bourgeois tastes of Stalin and his coterie, and the equally “backwards” preferences of the masses—both of which were modeled on pre-Revolutionary aristocratic tastes.Footnote ²⁰ As Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1937: “nothing pleases [the Russian masses] so much as the gleam of marble columns under high ceilings, glittering chandeliers, unmistakable luxury as they had to look up to it when it decided their fate, when they ate out of luxury's hand if they ate at all.”Footnote ²¹ But more importantly than tastes (which the regime seemed ready to ignore in other areas) historicist architecture allowed the Soviet Union to be “identified with images of imperial greatness,” and created the “illusion of a ‘noble past’…a magnificent, centuries-old world culture” conveying an essentially nationalist mythology.Footnote ²² These connotations became particularly important from the mid- to late-1930s, as nationalism became a major strategy of regime legitimation.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, the historicist turn in Stalinist architecture was eventually supplemented by a parallel push for heritage preservation and restoration.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, the regime's aesthetic conservatism expressed a fear of uncontrolled change represented by experimentation of any kind.Footnote ²⁵ In this view, therefore, historicism was both expressive and constitutive of reactionary developments, a reversion to bourgeois tastes and a nationalist, authoritarian politics. Accordingly, Anders Aman labels Stalinist architecture “traditionalist,” Peter Lizon—“regressive,” Alexei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze—“conservative” and “retrospective.”Footnote ²⁶

While intuitively plausible, the above position relies on the supposedly natural link between historicism and conservatism. Increasingly, this assumption is being challenged by those querying the specific meaning and connotations of historical revivalism within the cultural politics of Stalinism. These interpretations cluster around the idea of Stalinism as a self-styled utopia; a culture that cultivated an aura of total perfection and hence “timelessness.” It is with this emerging orthodoxy that the remainder of the paper is chiefly in dialogue with.

As Lars Blomquist contends, “totalitarianism [was…] its own utopia,” inevitably characterizing itself as the ideal society. This strategy served as a pillar of legitimation, not only by trumpeting the perfection of the status quo, but also, crucially, by signaling the absence of political alternatives (being already perfect, the order could not be changed for the better).Footnote ²⁷ The notion implied the end of history: because the future could not, by definition, hold anything new, it effectively disappeared from temporal culture in favor of the eternal present. Fundamentally restructuring the Bolshevik teleocracy, Stalinism “introduced a new temporality: the concluded future (a kind of future pluperfect).”Footnote ²⁸ With the utopia “already having been built, the future…already arrived…the only thing that remained was to experience utopia,” as Evgenii Dobrenko puts it.Footnote ²⁹

Because the present was the final moment of history, heritage—including architectural styles of the past—was sifted for what would make it into the final “circle of inheritance.”Footnote ³⁰ “‘Progressive’ world culture acquire[d] a superhistorical significance and eternal relevance,” Boris Groys explains.Footnote ³¹ Therefore, it would be incorrect to see the revival of historical styles “as a mere regression into the past, because [Stalinism] insists that it is an absolute apocalyptic future in which distinguishing between past and future is no longer meaningful.”Footnote ³² Furthermore, the eclectic revival of heritage was not merely expressive of the new temporal regime, it was also instrumental in demonstrating the culmination of history in the utopian present. Assembling a “collage of historical styles,” from classicism to art deco, quite intentionally imparted a sense of completion, timelessness, and eternity.Footnote ³³ Thus, as Clark contends, historicist architecture, which “transcended ordinary time and crossed into timelessness,” conferred upon Stalinism “the status of an ontological ultimate.”Footnote ³⁴ In this view, architecture's eclectic use of the forms and styles of the past solidified Stalinism's claim of having achieved an eternal, utopian present.

The above conception is powerful and, to some extent, is corroborated by studies in other spheres of Stalinist culture and politics. For instance, in literature, scholars note that no utopian science fiction novels were published between 1931 and 1957.Footnote ³⁵ Equally, the idea of the future communist utopia was marginalized in the Stalinist corpus of political writing.Footnote ³⁶ I believe, however, that the argument over-reaches itself in conflating the “end of the future utopia” with the abolition of futurity as such, in favor of the eternal present. Although utopian speculation about the future was indeed proscribed, alternative ways of relating to the future were endorsed and propagated by the regime. One such mode, I contend, was the fantasy of posterity's remembrance. In Stalinism's architectural expression, this was revealed in the dictate that monumental constructions “immortalize the memory” of the present before a future audience. As this paper demonstrates, appreciating this function can contribute to understanding Stalinist historicism as paradoxically future-oriented. Specifically, historicist architecture was seen as an amenable artistic language for communicating with posterity (allegedly, it being stable and enduring). Furthermore, traditional materials, architectonic forms, and decorative mediums were viewed as superior vehicles for “immortalization” because of their supposedly time-tested physical durability. To be sure, I am not denying various other factors influencing the transition to historicism, nor the fact that this transition was ultimately “forced” by the regime. Yet the fact that historicism was effective for immortalizing memory—and that Soviet architects were able to articulate this (convincingly, so it would seem)—was a key consideration contributing to historicism's official endorsement.

In arguing the case for Stalinism's utopian self-characterization and attendant pursuit of a “timeless” aura, scholars often point to contemporaneous discourse. For instance, Andrei Ikonnikov, Papernyi, and Yuri Slezkine all refer to commentaries on the Palace of the Soviets, which characterized the proposed building as “stand[ing] without aging, forever,” and “lasting forever, as the whole idea of our society is eternal.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet a closer examination reveals that building for “eternity” was a poetic metaphor, subordinated to the idea of “immortalizing the memory” of the present. The regime placed this task on the Stalinist architectural agenda quite explicitly, and from the very beginning. In fact, the official title of the Palace—the main project of the 1930s—was “The Palace of the Soviets—A Memorial to V. I. Lenin” (by the end of the decade, it was increasingly referred to as a monument “to the Stalinist epoch”).Footnote ³⁸ In 1937, at the first congress of the SSA, Politburo member Vlas Chubar΄ reminded architects of their charge to “create great historical monuments, which would show posterity the glory of our epoch.”Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, in wartime, head of the all-Union Committee for Architectural Affairs Arkadii Mordvinov exhorted architects to immortalize the Second World War in their urban reconstruction projects and monument designs, reminding them of their “grave moral responsibility before posterity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Accordingly, key projects of the postwar years—Moscow's high-rises and metro stations, the Volga-Don canal, and others—were fashioned and presented as Victory monuments.Footnote ⁴¹ All major constructions, even those not memorializing specific events, were pronounced “monuments to the era.”Footnote ⁴² Thus, the Stalinist architectural oeuvre was described as “the stone pages of a monumental chronicle,” a “bequest” to posterity, a contribution to the “treasury,” and “gold reserve” of Soviet culture.Footnote ⁴³

The striving to “immortalize memory” does not sit well with the idea of Stalinism's cultivation of a “timeless” aura, in which the future was collapsed into the eternal, utopian present. The emphasis on “future generations” and “posterity” was marked, although in keeping with the interdict on discussing the communist future directly, these categories were rather vague and disembodied. Nonetheless, this was a distinct, future audience; in 1943, for instance, Politburo member Mikhail Kalinin called on architects to reconstruct Soviet cities “for the centuries,” even though, he admitted, this would be at odds with the immediate tasks of rebuilding the devastated country, and “would delay construction and cost a lot.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Further, the very idea of the “Stalinist epoch,” whose glorious events were to be immortalized, operated within a fundamentally modern, linear temporal model, allowing the period to be characterized as a distinct “stage” in historical development. As such, it can be said that Stalinist monumental constructions were “creation[s] erected for the specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events… alive in the minds of future generations”; they were fundamentally “prospective.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Stalinist monuments incarnated the more universal striving to self-commemoration (rather than a totalitarian pursuit of “timelessness”), however disproportionately central “immortalization” was to Stalinist culture.

The turn to historicism in Stalinist architecture can be interpreted in light of this “immortalizing” objective. I contend that the forms and styles of the past were not mobilized as a collage demonstrating the culmination of history in the utopian present. Neither were past forms selected for preservation in the eternal now for their perceived “perfection” or “progressiveness,” as Groys and Papernyi suggest.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rather, it was the forms and styles themselves that were considered inherently “timeless” because of their empirically-demonstrable, continuous usage throughout history. This made them an artistic language par excellence for communicating with posterity. Specifically, classicism and the Russian national/vernacular style were expected to remain familiar even in the longue durée of cultural development.

The persistence of classical and national forms and styles ostensibly proved their enduring vitality. Architects spoke of forms “tested by the centuries,” “sustained by the centuries,” and which had “survived several millennia.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The artist Aleksandr Deineka, defending planar architectural decorations (of cornices, floors, and ceilings), contended that their use throughout history “confirmed their vitality.”Footnote ⁴⁸ “For two thousand years architecture of various periods returned time and again to the extremely stable elements of Greek architecture,” argued art historian Georgii Borisovskii, “the order is a classic example of an architectural form that existed for centuries and never lost its importance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In a SSA conference on monumental architecture earlier that year, art historian Sergei Toropov claimed that Russian monuments and memorials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries “outlasted the centuries and we still admire the walls, the stone slabs…which continue to live.”Footnote ⁵⁰

History was the litmus-test of superior forms, and popular traditions, their receptacle.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1939, Moisei Ginzburg referred to popular art as “sets of artistic devices selected by generations upon generations of people as most appropriate”; a “‘natural selection’ of artistic elements that become models.”Footnote ⁵² As the artist Nikolai Sokolov claimed in 1945: “everything great continues to live not in academies, but in life, in the language and culture of peoples, including in the language of architectural representations.”Footnote ⁵³ Mikhail Tsapenko's definitive late-Stalinist treatise on socialist realist architecture argued that popular art creates realist representations and forms “because it gradually develops these based on the slow selection of the most reasonable.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Although this logic appeared to introduce a tension between national/vernacular elements and the more international and elitist classical tradition (both of which Stalinist architecture was to “critically assimilate”), theorists were quick to dispel this misconception. “One must never oppose classic architecture (specifically, Graeco-Roman classicism) to the line of popular art, for the genuinely classical was at the same time genuinely popular,” expostulated one 1937 editorial in the flagship journal Arkhitektura SSSR.Footnote ⁵⁵ Russian architecture specifically was characterized as the true custodian of the classical tradition (which it allegedly received via Byzantium), while in the west classicism was said to have degenerated.Footnote ⁵⁶ Instead, the logic primarily restricted borrowings from the monumental cultures of India, China, and Meso-America, as these had never been part of the homegrown architectural tradition.Footnote ⁵⁷

Soviet architects were charged with carefully sifting through the forms of the past to discover specific patterns. One 1940 book promised to analyze “the reasons why this or that group of constructions or a city as a whole became outstanding architectural monuments [and,] summating this analysis, to present conclusions applicable to city planning in the USSR.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In perhaps one of the oddest examples of this logic, several studies in the postwar period attempted to deduce the universal “laws of proportion” from unabashedly selective samplings of classical and Russian monuments.Footnote ⁵⁹

The crucial point was that traditions that had already stood the test of time and endured for centuries with little change could be expected to last into the future. Accordingly, Soviet architecture building for posterity was expected to mimic these time-hallowed forms and styles. In 1940, architect Georgii Gol΄ts voiced a common sentiment in stating that “art has a future only when it relies upon the past.”Footnote ⁶⁰ As his colleague Aleksei Shchusev explained later that year, new theater houses “are charged with describing our epoch in the coming centuries and should, undoubtedly, be marked with pronounced national architectural features.”Footnote ⁶¹ Tsapenko similarly argued that recently-built metro stations, high-rises, and other constructions arrived at their “representations and forms as consistent patterns from the contemporary development of the culture of Soviet socialist nations,” and that these national forms were “directed not towards the past, but to the present and future.”Footnote ⁶² The supporting statement for Leonid Pavlov's 1954 design of the Pantheon (that was to house Stalin's embalmed body) argued that a building which “must stand for thousands of years…cannot reflect the specific style of the moment…[but] should be founded on Russian and Soviet traditions,” which were more enduring.Footnote ⁶³ Seen in this light, historicism served the future-oriented goals of “immortalization,” rather than the cultivation of a “timeless” aura supporting Stalinism's utopian self-characterization.

In support of the latter argument, however, proponents also point to Stalinist architecture's cynical use of the “simulacra of permanence,” which bestowed an illusory appearance of durability.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was typically achieved by employing materials that were historically associated with robustness (and hence bestowed, to an extent, a traditional appearance). Thus, Andrew Jenks argues that “monumental slabs of granite and marble reflected the durability and strength” of the Stalinist order.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, Mikhail Yampolsky contends that monuments cultivated “a fundamental solidity…to express the idea of not being subject to time, of extrahuman temporality, of ahistoricity.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In support of this idea, proponents may point to the Stalinist practice of imparting an appearance of permanence even to temporary constructions. Papernyi and Dobrenko, for instance, note the pavilions of the 1939 All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), which were variously embellished to give them a permanent look.Footnote ⁶⁷

This exhibition, planned and redesigned continuously from 1935, was to showcase the achievements of Soviet collectivized agriculture. The massive affair involved the development of 136 hectares in Moscow's suburbs, on which were constructed hundreds of pavilions and auxiliary structures devoted to various branches of production, agricultural regions, and constitutive republics of the USSR. After years of delays, the 1939 exhibition presented a grand ensemble appealing to national and classical styles; indeed, even some cowsheds were adorned with columns and triumphal archways.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, its monumentality was largely fictious. Pavilions’ wooden columns and façades were plastered to resemble stone.Footnote ⁶⁹ Interiors were decorated in a way typically associated with permanent constructions, including paneling and decorative reliefs.Footnote ⁷⁰ Most sculpture was executed in plaster, while the central, twenty-five meter Stalin monument was constructed of hollow ferroconcrete blocks (that began to crumble within a few years). These “simulacra of permanence” gave an illusion of structural durability, and, indirectly, lent an air of immutability to their ultimate author—the Stalinist regime.

This model fails, however, to account for the requirement, implicit in the “immortalization” project, that Stalinist monumental constructions possess a real permanence. After all, architecture was selected as the chief medium of “immortalization” precisely because of its capacity to be “an extremely durable monument to the epoch and a witness to posterity,” in the words of People's Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii Lunacharskii.Footnote ⁷¹ It had to be durable if it was to preserve the “memory of an epoch and its feats better than other arts…for millennia,” explained the head of the all-Union Committee for Architectural Affairs.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, the 1939 VSKhV pavilions were exceptional, and were not reflective of a disingenuous use of the traditional “simulacra of permanence” in Stalinist architecture generally. Rather, it may be more accurate to see the constructions of the 1939 VSKhV as situated in the liminal space between permanence and ephemerality that exhibition pavilions have historically occupied.Footnote ⁷³ After all, the VSKhV had been reconceptualized in the middle of its construction (in 1937), and was suddenly required to remain open for five years, rather than a single season.Footnote ⁷⁴ Many completed pavilions had to be reconstructed; hence, in part, the contradictory crossbreed of wooden structures and permanent surface embellishments/facing. Eventually, in line with the ever-greater centrality that “immortalization” assumed in Stalinist culture, the postwar VSKhV was remodeled as a permanent exhibition and many pavilions were again rebuilt—this time as truly permanent structures.Footnote ⁷⁵

Of course, it is difficult to disentangle the normal demands for structural integrity from the extraordinary demands that these objects stand in perpetuity as “prospective monuments” to their era. However, the latter was attested to by the volume of experimental research into perdurable materials, architectonic forms, and “synthetic” decoration (through monumental art). One example of this research into longevity is the work carried out throughout the 1930s by the Construction Directorate for the Palace of the Soviets. The design of the gargantuan Palace (which, as mentioned, was framed explicitly as a memorial to the Lenin-Stalin era), envisioned a stripped classical, multi-tiered cylindrical composition which would integrate monumental and decorative artwork. This included not only the giant statue of Lenin topping the Palace, but also 31,500 m² of wall paintings, 3,800 m² of mosaics, 4,800 m² of majolica, 11,000 m² of interior bas-reliefs, seventy-two large sculptures, 650 busts and smaller sculptures, and nineteen monumental sculptural groups standing 10–14 meters tall—which were to “tell future generations about [this] great time, about the building of communism, about the indestructible power of the teachings of Lenin and Stalin.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Accordingly, the Construction Directorate developed special metal alloys and cement mixes, eventually creating superior “Palace of the Soviets” grades of steel and cement.Footnote ⁷⁷ Special anti-corrosion lacquers, coatings, and enamels were also reportedly developed.Footnote ⁷⁸ The sculptor Sergei Merkurov calculated that the special corrosion-proof casing of the main Lenin statue would guarantee its service for one thousand years.Footnote ⁷⁹ The materials laboratory of the Academy of Architecture also claimed to have developed a highly-robust type of asbestos canvas (“which will preserve artwork forever”) and promised to deliver non-electrostatic paints (which would repel corrosive dust particles).Footnote ⁸⁰ Hardier fabrics were also being developed for tapestries: wrinkle-free, moth resistant, and impervious to sunlight.Footnote ⁸¹

Nonetheless, in their quest for durability, architects often turned to the past, biasing them in favor of historicism. The heightened significance of monumental constructions, as objects built for the centuries, raised the stakes for the success or failure of innovations. Thus, at the very outset of the project, Lunacharskii warned that “one cannot experiment on [the Palace of the Soviets], spending colossal resources and materials and dealing a blow to the proletariat's prestige.”Footnote ⁸² After all, as a later Resolution of the SSA explained, “the Soviet architect should remember that…every architectural mistake, executed in concrete and stone, is almost impossible to fix.”Footnote ⁸³ Equally, innovation was limited by the low level of technical sophistication and the endemic lack of resources. With the emphasis on rapid construction of monumental works, it was felt that there was simply no time for real experiments. The writer Aleksei Tolstoi, in a lengthy Izvestiia article elaborating on the newly-decreed requirement of “critically assimilating heritage,” explained that while “whole epochs shaped architectural styles [and] generations of stonemasons built gothic cathedrals,” the current socialist epoch “sets a different pace for art and its implementation.” However, Soviet monumentalists were to be “aided by all the cultural heritage of the past.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Similarly, the 1938 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) proclaimed that “the creation of our classics, our style of monumental-decorative sculpture, would take too long if we did not look back at classical works in all their breadth. This will be of vital importance for the creation of gigantic edifices, particularly the great construction projects of communism.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Designs of the Palace of the Soviets vividly exemplified the conclusions drawn from such circumstances and demands. The final design was approved in 1934, with the end of the Third Five-Year Plan (1943) set as the expected completion date for all substantial construction. Rather than experiment with perdurable innovations, architects increasingly turned to the past to select hardy materials, architectonic forms, and artistic mediums which had, in retrospect, withstood the test of time. Thus, for instance, at a 1938 meeting discussing materials for facing the Palace, the Chief Architect admitted:

“We live in time and space, we cannot keep making laboratory experiments…which do not give us definitive results on the durability of materials. All of these experiments should be tested by life. Laboratory experiments are insufficiently advanced, they cannot take everything into account.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Instead, Palace designers extensively monitored and evaluated the condition of historical monuments. As early as 1932, the Deputy Head of Construction of the Palace of the Soviets requested that the State Central Archive establish how extant Russian monuments had been built so robustly as to have outlasted the centuries. Landmarks to be investigated included the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, the recently-demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, St. Isaac's Cathedral in Leningrad, Etienne Falconet's “Bronze Horseman” monument, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and others. Palace designers were particularly interested in the type of materials and cements used, the techniques for mounting external facing, and the preservation measures carried out.Footnote ⁸⁷ Similarly, a later commission studying the Marble Palace and other aristocratic estates near Leningrad reported on the unacceptable state of their centuries-old marble facing, which had fractured, chipped, and suffered from encrustation and discoloration in the harsh northern climate.Footnote ⁸⁸ Accordingly, the architects of the Palace eventually decided upon granite facing, as this was “the only one guaranteed to last for centuries,” with which “in 600 years the building will still be young.”Footnote ⁸⁹

At points, this logic degenerated into a rather fantastic research program. Architects argued for rediscovering the lost techniques of classical and ancient Russian fresco-painting, and the paint composition used in thousand-year-old Armenian miniatures, in an effort to secure maximal longevity for the Palace.Footnote ⁹⁰ Extra justification for the Palace of Soviets’ gigantic size was inferred from Egyptian sphinxes, whose colossal features could be made out clearly despite millennia of erosion.Footnote ⁹¹ To be sure, propagandists also saw opportunities for capitalizing on the romantic appeal of recovering the achievements of great civilizations. Thus, for instance, one popular book falsely claimed that the special make of cement developed for the Palace of the Soviets (DS-300) was based on Roman cement: “the best in the world…which holds up after a thousand years as after a day, never ages or weakens.”Footnote ⁹²

Along with hardy materials, the past was to be scoured for durable architectonic forms. At a 1944 Moscow Union of Soviet Sculptors and Artists (MOSSKh) discussion, the sculptor Leonid Shervud referred to Corinthian columns he had seen in Rome: “they are preserved, they stood for tens of centuries, and make up a form that demonstrates that the material is well-utilized and extraordinarily preserved.”Footnote ⁹³ Within a few years, this sentiment was echoed at the highest level. Aleksandr Gerasimov, President of the USSR Academy of Artists, noted that the “classical column represents a fine mathematical calculation in terms of durability”; even though some may say that classical columns are archaic, he explained, “may we have more of such ‘archaism’!”Footnote ⁹⁴

Finally, the same logic influenced the selection of the mediums of decorative monumental art. The latter was expected to concretize architecture's ideational content through figurative means, which was crucial for “immortalization.” As art historian I. Sosfenov explained, even though architectural constructions “become the main witness to one's epoch in subsequent centuries…the content of an architectural representation is highly circumscribed.” Architects, he went on, “turn to art and sculpture [for] at the heart of synthesis…is the desire of developing and specifying the ideal and representational content of architecture.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Accordingly, the Academy of Architecture reactivated research into monumental and decorative art by opening a Studio for Monumental Painting in 1935.Footnote ⁹⁶ That very year, monumentalists began to publicly affirm the perdurable qualities of mosaics.Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed, very soon the construction of secular mosaics was restarted (after a century-long gap in Russian practice), being first implemented in “Maiakovskaia” station of the Moscow subway (1938). In the supporting statement for his design, the Chief Architect of the station, Aleksei Dushkin, explained the significance of the medium: “What is a mosaic? Cobalt glass, pieces of which are fixed on a cement base to create a picture, the colors of which do not fade. The mosaic is eternal!”Footnote ⁹⁸ With the success of the “Maiakovskaia” mosaics widely touted, the medium, “conspicuous for its centuries-long permanence,” was planned for the Palace of the Soviets where, as the artist Vladimir Frolov promised in one 1940 article, “the eternal material [would be employed] for highly-artistic portraits of [the] epoch's political functionaries and of important historical events.”Footnote ⁹⁹

One sees a similar argumentation for reviving the use of outdoor and indoor frescoes, also championed for the ability “to fix for a long time…economic and cultural achievements”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The medium “lives for millennia,” and artists historically used frescoes to tell epic stories, it was noted. “With the passing of years, the fresco only gains in durability and [depth of] color,” and, thanks to the thin film of crystals coating the surface, “it may be cleaned, washed, and disinfected.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Not coincidentally, frescoes were to be employed extensively in the interior decoration of the Palace of the Soviets. While mosaics and frescoes were the main mediums dredged up from historical experience and revived by Soviet monumentalists, the same logic was also applied to Roman murals, sgraffito, tempera and encaustic painting, and tapestries—all held up for their exceptional, historically-proven durability.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus, sifting through the past to discover perdurable materials, architectonic forms, and decorative mediums biased Soviet monumental art towards historicism in significant ways.

At the same time, most claims of having developed or rediscovered perdurable materials, architectonic forms, and decorative mediums were, undeniably, vastly exaggerated. Durability in practice was diminished further by poor quality construction and the lack of adequate funding and materials. Granite's hardiness, after all, would not affect a ferroconcrete structure's longevity, if the former was employed only for facing (which was typically the case). Yet it would be incorrect to treat the above declarations, juxtaposed against the overall “façadeness” of Stalinist constructions, as disingenuously cultivating Stalinism's aura of “timelessness” and “permanence.” After all, many of these discussions took place at closed meetings and conferences, or in professional journals with a limited public audience. Caught between the competing constraints of rapid construction, limited resources, and the demand to “immortalize” by building durable constructions, architects were inevitably forced to cut corners and otherwise dissimulate. But, as in exaggerations of industrial output (tufta), the target of these deceptions was as likely the Stalinist leadership as the Soviet public. Genuine permanence was an official requirement for monuments. Even the most outrageous claims to durability are, at a minimum, indicative of this demand, which architects strove to fulfill within their limited circumstances.

The immortalizing, future-oriented goals of Stalinist monuments and their relationship to historicism can be brought together in the example of the Main Building of Moscow State University (MGU). Unveiled in September 1953, mere months after the dictator's death, the construction was in many ways the epitome of postwar Stalinist historical eclecticism and a go-to example of what was later pejoratively labelled “wedding-cake architecture” (konditerskii stil΄). The largest of the (completed) Moscow high-rises, the tallest building in Europe until 1990, this was the key monumental project of late Stalinism, eclipsing even the Palace of the Soviets (whose Construction Directorate was, tellingly, put in charge of building the University complex).

The project was hailed as “a new monument to our socialist epoch, the epoch of the genius architect of communism—the great Stalin,” a building “fated to stand for centuries, [conveying] to the future the heroic labor of our days, the unparalleled glory of the era of the construction of communism.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In fashioning this monument, designers claimed to have relied particularly upon those traditions of “Russian national art that had achieved fame throughout the centuries.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This resulted in a vertical, tiered composition, patterned coloring of the façade, and other national decorative elements.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the same time, the complex also appealed to classical architectonic and decorative forms, particularly to those of an unequivocally memorial character (for instance, rostral columns fronting the porticoed grand entrance, and numerous rooftop obelisks). These historicist elements were expected to remain understandable and appealing to future generations.

Further, the goal of perdurability was vividly expressed in the building's constructive properties. One example was the use of a new type of ceramic facing, dubbed “diapsidite,” and described in the following way by the head of construction and the lead engineer:

Despite such innovations, “even granite” and marble—time-tested durable materials—were also used extensively in the external facing and interior paneling of the University complex.

Given the University's function “as a beautiful monument…sculpture and art supplement[ed] that which architecture [could] not express on its own,” explained the director of sculptural works, Nikolai Tomskii.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Accordingly, the University complex was richly adorned with durable, “synthetic” decorative and monumental art. The building's four crowning colossal statues were encased in a ceramic cladding; Chief Architect Lev Rudnev claimed this would ensure that they stood “for centuries.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet more commonly, monumentalists gravitated towards time-tested materials and mediums. Throughout the complex, scores of scientists were memorialized in bronze statues and medallions, marble busts, granite herms, and Florentine mosaic, which the chief engineers specifically praised for its historically-documented resistance to fading and warping, “remaining unchanged in its original appearance for decades.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Altogether, these factors—stemming from the University's function as a monument to its era—pushed its composition in a decidedly historicist direction.

To summarize, Stalinist architecture embraced a “timeless” style not to present itself as an already-achieved, perfect utopia, but as an artistic language for communicating with an imagined posterity. Similarly, architects did not focus on fashioning archaic-looking “simulacra of permanence,” but genuinely strove to build durably, turning to time-tested materials, architectonic forms, and decorative mediums, further biasing their creations towards historicism. This logic offers an alternate account of Stalinism's endorsement of historicism in architecture, and signals, paradoxically, the capacity of historicism generally to express a future-oriented cultural impulse.

Intriguingly, it appears that in both totalitarian and democratic contexts, a similar logic may have been at play in parallel, “immortalizing” efforts elsewhere in the interwar period. As William Rhoads recounts, because “the future was important to [the US President Franklin] Roosevelt, [he] was concerned that new buildings which he sponsored be durable—not only in materials and construction but also in taste. He wished to avoid anything which…was a passing fashion,” and promoted the stripped classical style for public buildings in Washington and for others constructed by the New Deal “Public Works Administration.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ One can even see a similar logic in the preference for “time-tested” materials for monuments. For instance, in designing the Senate House of the University of London (1937) with a view to its lasting 500 years, the architect Charles Holden specifically employed stone loadbearing walls (instead of ferroconcrete).Footnote ¹¹¹ Similarly, Adolf Hitler called for executing new monumental constructions in granite, whose qualities were proven by “vestiges of the German past…[remaining] scarcely time-worn. Granite will ensure that our monuments last forever. In ten thousand years they'll be still standing.”Footnote ¹¹²

Seen in this light, the oft-noted dominance of historicism in global interwar monumental architecture (which also often purported to be “immortalizing” its times) is perhaps not coincidental. Indeed, it is possible that this connection may not have developed independently but grew out of transnational dialogue. Thus, for instance, Nazi architecture in many ways looked to developments in Italy, not least for it being, in Hitler's words, “where Fascism immortalizes forces in monumental works.”Footnote ¹¹³ For its part, in the aftermath of the Non-Aggression Treaty, the Soviet side requested a demonstration of German architectural models, which were exhibited in the Kremlin in late 1939. The monumental designs of Albert Speer, Hitler's court architect, evidently found favor with Stalin.Footnote ¹¹⁴ More so than with Germany, Soviet architects were in dialogue with the West; as Irina Azizian writes, “the process by which solemn monumental forms came to dominate…was paralleled by a similar concomitant process in Western architecture. [Soviet] culture was not yet hermetically sealed.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Examining the parallels and mutual entanglements in the process by which interwar monumental and memorial architecture gravitated towards historicism—via the goal of “immortalization”—may be a productive direction for future research.

Sensitivity to the connotations of historicism in architecture can also provide insights into Stalinist temporal culture. As demonstrated, the “immortalization” objective which drove the construction of monuments inhabited an essentially modernist, linear conception of temporality. Stalinist culture's deemphasis of the communist millennium did not abolish the future, because futurity was never entirely contained in utopian strivings. To be sure, the “immortalization” fantasy (an imagined future where the memory of the present would be preserved and revered) was hollow, restricted to such vague labels as an undefined “posterity” and distant “future generations.” These parameters were forced onto the “immortalization” myth by the aforementioned de facto ban on direct and detailed descriptions of the future. Yet the “immortalization” myth, being embodied in the most symbolically-charged objects of the built environment, was central to Stalinist temporal culture. It was not the case that “the future, having become eternity, was so homogeneous and unchanging that it was pointless even to look there.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ To the contrary, as demonstrated, Stalinist culture not only looked into future, in which it hoped to find a grateful posterity, but consciously manipulated the built environment to this effect. Accounting for the functions of this “immortalization” myth and its vicissitudes throughout the period demands further work, and I hope to address these issues in the future.Footnote ¹¹⁷ At this point, however, one can already appreciate certain implications for our understandings of Stalinist culture. Above all, the “immortalization” myth demonstrated a dependence upon posterity's judgment. Far from being spontaneously self-assured and triumphant, Stalinist self-characterizations were contrived and likely compensatory. Indeed, the commissioning of key monumental projects, which would “immortalize” the era, often accompanied particularly severe systemic crises. The competitions for the Palace of the Soviets were conducted against the backdrop of the collectivization debacle. The third line of Moscow subway construction was completed throughout the early, disastrous years of the Second World War (which required, for instance, the airlifting of mosaics (!) from the blockaded and starving city of Leningrad).Footnote ¹¹⁸ The decision to build the eight Stalinist high-rises in Moscow was made at the height of the postwar famine (1947). The enormous efforts expended to consciously cultivate and submit idealized self-representations before the judgment of posterity bespeaks of underlying anxieties emanating from official Stalinist culture and its architectural expressions.