Deyan Sudjić - Stalins Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow

Boris Iofan, in his studio in Moscow, with a study for a representation of Lenin, planned for the top of the Palace of the Soviets, the project that he spent twenty-five years of his life trying to build.

One of Iofans designs for the Palace of the Soviets.

Deyan Sudjic is a writer and broadcaster, and a former architecture critic for the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Guardian. He is director emeritus of the Design Museum, distinguished professor of architecture and design studies at Lancaster University and a contributing editor for Wallpaper*. His previous books include The Language of Cities (2017) and B is for Bauhaus (2014).

Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death.

George Orwell

Stalin, with a model of the MoscowVolga canal, portrayed as the great architect of socialism by Aleksandr Bubnov in 1940. Iofans Soviet pavilion for the Paris Exposition, in the background, had been demolished three years earlier.

For Boris Iofan, the most prominent of Stalins architects, the patronage of a murderous dictator came at serious personal risk as much to his critical reputation as to his life. Rather than not build at all, he was prepared to build what the dictator demanded of him. As a result, Iofan is now remembered not for his considerable talent, but for the way that his buildings came to define Stalinist architecture as it was practised from Warsaw to Beijing.

Ever since the summer of 2008, when I visited his former apartment on the top floor of Moscows famous House on the Embankment, I have been unable to get Boris Iofan out of my mind. The House which is in fact a large complex with more than 500 flats and its own cinema, theatre and department store was one of his most significant projects.

Iofans apartment had hardly been touched since his death thirty years earlier. From its windows I could see the golden domes of the new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a replica of the historic church destroyed by Stalin in 1931 to make room for the Palace of the Soviets. Iofan had watched the demolition of the original cathedral from this same window. In these rooms, surrounded by friends and colleagues many of whom would soon be murdered by Stalin he had celebrated his victory in the competition to design the palace, which he intended to be the worlds tallest building. Later, he watched a perfect circle of giant cranes rise on its construction site like a hollow crown, in a futile struggle to drag his reluctant building up from the mud. When the German army threatened Moscow in 1941, the crown imploded and the site went quiet; it remained so for a decade after the war. All Iofans hopes for the project were finally drowned when Nikita Khrushchev had the palace foundation pit flooded to create a huge open-air swimming pool. Iofan did not live to see the reappearance of the cathedral.

Except perhaps for Minoru Yamasaki and his World Trade Center in Manhattan, no architect of the 20th century has designed a structure that has become more politically charged with meaning, or that has come to play such an important part in a countrys history and culture. But while the Twin Towers were immolated, Iofans House on the Embankment survived, even as so many of its residents fell victim to Stalins violence.

The apartment had the smell of years of neglect. A plastic shower curtain had been slung over boxes of Iofans papers, but it did little to protect them from the dust generated by workmen attempting to modernize the kitchen. Under his desk was a plaster maquette of the Lenin statue he had designed to stand atop the Palace of the Soviets. On a table was another of a worker, right arm raised over his head in a conscious paraphrase of the Statue of Liberty: this had formed the basis for a huge stainless steel figure that topped the Soviet pavilion at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, an incongruous tribute to the proletarian revolution in Queens.

Iofan in his study in Moscow in the early 1950s. An excitable American journalist from Time magazine called Iofan one of USSRs best-loved architects. Dark-eyed, black-haired, his energetic, agile figure is recognized everywhere in Moscow. Married and childless, he lives in a modern four-room apartment for which he pays sixty roubles a month (telephone, radio, gas and light included). He keeps one maid.

I found sheaves of black-edged official envelopes in a box. Among them was a telegram marked SECRET from Vyacheslav Molotov, dispatching Iofan to Stalingrad in a military transport plane immediately after the surrender of the German forces to advise on the reconstruction of a city that had been all but destroyed. Nearby were stacks of photograph albums; in one, an image of Iofan and his aristocratic half-Italian wife Olga, daughter of a Russian princess, taking tea with Frank Lloyd Wright at a conference in Moscow. In this picture Iofan appears a sympathetic, sensitive-featured man in his mid-forties, hair combed back from a high forehead. His wife, with a cigarette in her hand and a briefcase under her arm, looks animated, an equal partner in the conversation with the notoriously egotistical Wright.

After this visit, I began trying to learn as much as I could about what had gone on in Iofans mind as he saw his work turned into a monstrous tribute to Stalin as much as it is ever possible to know about the internal lives of others. I tried to piece together all the disparate elements, the surviving objects and records, in a way that made sense. Mostly I was driven by a desire to understand the part that architecture had played in the state apparatus of one of historys most murderous regimes. But I was also drawn in by Iofan himself and the remarkable life that this stylishly dressed, distinguished figure who looked disarmingly like my own father had lived. I had spent six years studying architecture myself; what would I have done in Iofans place?

In the course of Iofans forty-five years in this apartment, his bookshelves had filled up with volumes devoted to his own work as well as to that of the Renaissance masters he admired. His drawings of interiors for the Palace of the Soviets had been peeled away from his drawing board, to be framed and hung on the walls: no longer working documents, but fading memorials to what might have been. The chaotic mess of books, papers, fraternal greetings, medals and ancient electrical appliances felt like the residue of an entire system which is exactly what it was.

Outside, on that June day, Moscow was booming. A cascade of oil money was floating an armada of Prada stores where the more discreet customers left their bodyguards, dressed in camouflage uniforms, waiting on the pavement while they shopped. There were sushi restaurants with cellars full of Petrus, streets lined with Hummers with blacked-out windows. But the House on the Embankment smelled of sour decay. It was no longer the heart of the city.