The joy of Soviet architecture
(This piece originally appeared in Bournbrook)
The old adage that you should try and see the best in people is tested to breaking point when you bump into some of last century's most horrific dictators.
'Mussolini made the trains run on time' – well, perhaps, but he also invaded Abyssinia. 'Hitler was quite a progressive environmentalist' – again, not enough to turn the historical scales in the man's favour.
How about Stalin? I have to admit I am not a big fan of the chap. Some in Russia still are, though. My father-in-law once cut me down to size quite quickly when I said I wasn't too hot on old Uncle Joe. Nor is he alone: opinion polls show a growing number of Russians holding a favourable opinion towards the mercurial Georgian.
I have, however, grown to like one thing about the man, or at least one of the consequences of his eventful 30-year stint at the control panel of the USSR: the buildings.
Soviet architecture is not famed for its beauty. This is not without good reason. The sprawling, grey – or, if you're lucky, beige or brown – tower blocks that spread across the USSR after in the second half of the last century do not have much going for them. Visit any city in Russia and you'll see them stretching across the landscape like enormous Tetris blocks that have neatly fallen out the sky. Throw in some gopniks and drunk men wearing ushankas (along with a dark Mercedes with tinted windows rolling past for good measure) and you have the classic Westerner's conception of modern Russia.
But, and you'll just have to trust me on this one, it's not all quite so bad. Most of the buildings you are imagining, the ceaseless rows of lookalike, depressalike apartment blocks, are of the post-Stalin era. Nitika Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, Stalin's successors, were largely responsible for a turn away from Stalin's grandiose architectural plans.
After all, when he wasn't busy knocking off rivals (both real and imagined), Stalin had a penchant for buildings of monumental dimensions, featuring columns with elaborate capitals, bay windows arches, porticos and pilasters. He rejected the austere constructivism that dominated USSR architecture in the 1920s and early 1930s, moving towards Russian baroque and Gothic; styles more in keeping with the propagandistic needs of the rapidly industrialising Soviet Union. The nation's power was to be reflected in the vastness of the architectural ambition, with the appeal to older stylistic forms lending the still-new state a sense of historical permanence.
Moscow is the epicentre of Stalinist architecture. The Seven Sisters – a group of skyscrapers built between 1947-53 – are perhaps most representative of the style. Vast, imposing buildings, they were the suitable representation of Uncle Joe's desire to remould the Russian urban landscape and to reflect the nation's burgeoning world-power credentials. One of these, Moscow State University, which dominates a hill in the city's south-west, looks like a cross between the Empire State Building and a Bond villain's lair.
Regrettably, what would have been surely the greatest example of Stalinist architecture, the Palace of the Soviets, was abandoned when several million heavily armed Germans hove rudely into view. More the shame: the giant 416-metre-tall structure was to be topped off with a modest 100-metre-tall statue of Lenin, like an bald angel atop a vast Soviet Christmas tree.
Luckily a wealth of other examples remain, such as the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (later given the very Soviet name of 'Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy'), a giant park littered with Stalinist architectural excesses and more statues of strong Soviet men than you can shake your collectivist stick at. If you are in Moscow it is a must-see. This is alongside the mass of more run-of-the-mill apartment buildings that were built throughout Stalin's rule.
It is these apartment buildings that are in high demand today. I should know: I live in a Stalinka, albeit in Saint Petersburg. Many cities across Russia got the Moscow treatment during this period, with grand boulevards and red-star-topped towers (mandatory statues of blokes holding hammer and sickle included) dotting urban landscapes across the country. They were built to last and with comfort in mind, with high ceilings, decorative plaster work and generously sized rooms.
The problem with all of this, perhaps unsurprisingly, was cost. The buildings were simply too expensive for the Soviet economy to build at pace. With the country's housing stock decimated by the devouring tides of war, together with period's rapid urbanisation, huge proportions of the Soviet population were forced to live in communal flats (kommunalkas) or in former army barracks.
Although some cost-cutting measures were introduced towards the end of the Stalin era – for example, the street-facing side of my late-Stalin era block of flats is clad with large stone, but the courtyard-facing side is bare brick – it was the death of Stalin that finally signalled the demise of the Stalinkas.
Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation included a rapid departure from the architectural norms of Uncle Joe and the rapid proliferation of the ultra-low-cost housing that is now so typical of the Russian landscape. Khrushchevkas and Brezhnevkas are everywhere across the former eastern bloc, with little to recommend them other than the speed with which they could be thrown together.
And it is these buildings which occupy primary position in our image of the Soviet Union. However, at this point, it perhaps wise to remember that these architectural aberrations were not purely a fetish of homo sovieticus. Many a British town has been blighted with grim, tombstone-like tower blocks. Few go to Birmingham or Coventry (to name but a few) to marvel at their post-war developments. Anyone telling you otherwise is to be kept well clear of.
Russia's urban landscape would undoubtedly be far prettier today if Stalin's megalomaniacal construction efforts had been continued by his successors. However, given that the Soviet economy was unable to supply enough kettles to its populace – let alone grand blocks of flats – the designs preferred by Uncle Joe were simply too impractical. After all, for every ounce of steel used in a block of flats there was one less that could be used in a T-34.
Perhaps it is wrong to admire the buildings born of one of the last century's worst dictators. I'm not convinced though; people happily stroll around and marvel at Roman ruins. If unnecessary bloodshed is the yardstick we go by, then surely the Colosseum too is ready for a touch of cancel culture. Somehow, I can't imagine people are itching to bring out the wrecking balls.
I'd still take the architecture of a pleasant English market town over Stalin's imperious designs. Nevertheless, I don't think anyone could walk through a neighbourhood Stalinkas and not find something to admire.