The agenda of the USSR Union of Architects’ meeting of April 22, 1948 contained a single item: a debate (disput) about the book Gradostroitelˊstvo (Urban Planning).Footnote 1 Written during the war and published in 1945, Gradostroitelˊstvo represented the latest in Soviet scholarship on the long history of city building. This was a topic of special concern for Soviet architects and planners facing the enormous tasks of postwar reconstruction. Bricks, steel, and cement were crucial to rebuilding after the conflict, and so too was history. In their postwar plans, Soviet urban experts drew on historical precedents, connecting their designs for the future to a carefully curated past. Gradostroitelˊstvo offered a global set of examples for inspiration in this work. From its early chapters on cities of the ancient world to its final pages on urban development in the USSR, the book introduced readers to a world history of planning, culminating in the latest Soviet contributions to the field. Gradostroitelˊstvo’s authors hoped that their text, with its world historical approach, would influence a new generation of Soviet practitioners. When published in 1945, the book was adopted for pedagogical use in the country’s architectural and technical schools.Footnote 2
Just three years later, however, Soviet urban experts questioned the global narrative of city planning spanning Gradostroitelˊstvo’s twelve chapters. Participants in the disput of April 1948 criticized the book through the lens of the zhdanovshchina, the Soviet Union’s postwar ideological campaign. Gradostroitelˊstvo, its critics declared, lacked a materialist understanding of history and had no foundation in Marxist-Leninist ideology. The book did not clearly distinguish socialist from capitalist cities and failed to take a critical approach to urban planning under capitalism.Footnote 3 Moreover, the authors had not adequately accounted for the development of a Russian national tradition in their history of Soviet architecture. These factors made the book “useless” for teaching, as one critic put it, and unsuitable for a broader audience of Soviet readers.Footnote 4
In this article, I approach the controversy over Gradostroitelˊstvo as a case study opening to larger themes in the history of late Stalinist architecture; namely, the recasting of relations between the state and architects in 1945–48 and the changing politics of internationalism in postwar Soviet architecture. The fate of Gradostroitelˊstvo is illustrative of developments in Soviet culture during the turbulent years of the zhdanovshchina, shedding special light on how architects understood and responded to the ideological campaign. Directed by Communist Party ideologist Andrei Zhdanov and closely overseen by Iosif Stalin, the campaign began in 1946 and continued through the early 1950s, leaving few corners of Soviet cultural and intellectual life unaffected.Footnote 5 With their campaign, Soviet leaders aimed to regain control over intellectuals and society in the wake of the “liberating effect” of the war.Footnote 6 They targeted literature before moving on to other fields, from film and music to philosophy and the natural sciences. Historians have shown how the zhdanovshchina reshaped relations between Soviet intellectuals and the Stalinist state, mandated anti-western sentiment, promoted Russo-centrism, targeted non-Russian “nationalist” cultural experts, and sanctioned antisemitic activity in a related campaign against “cosmopolitanism.”Footnote 7 Those orchestrating the campaign aimed to unite Soviet intellectual and cultural workers in a common battle against “formalism,” “bourgeois western influence,” and “nationalist deviation.”
All these features of the zhdanovshchina affected Soviet architecture, yet the campaign’s influence on the country’s architects and their work is less well known than its impact on other fields, most notably literature and music. In part, this has to do with how the campaign itself proceeded. The best known event of the zhdanovshchina is the Communist Party Central Committee’s attack in 1946 on the literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad for their publication of works by Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other “unSoviet” writers whose “apolitical” and “ideologically harmful works” encouraged “groveling before the modern bourgeois culture of the West.”Footnote 8 Also in 1946, Leonid Lukov’s film A Great Life was faulted for giving “a false, distorted depiction of Soviet people.”Footnote 9 In 1948, party ideologists labeled as “formalist” and “antipopular” Vano Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship, assailing the composer for insufficiently incorporating folk melodies from the Caucasus region where the opera is set. The zhdanovshchina affected all artistic fields, but the campaign’s spokesmen did not target all the arts with equal vigor. Unlike literature, film, and music, architecture was not singled out for special scrutiny. The party’s widely publicized resolutions did not pertain to architecture. The trimonthly journal Kulˊtura i zhiznˊ (Culture and Life), published from June 1946 to February 1951 by the Central Committee’s propaganda department, ran only occasional articles about architectural affairs.Footnote 10 Architects were left to translate dictates aimed at censuring writers and composers into terms applicable to their work.
This process was not new. In the 1930s, Soviet architects worked to internalize socialist realist doctrine first elaborated in other disciplines. Now, in the postwar years, they scrutinized party pronouncements on literature and music through an architectural frame. Professional meetings, like the debate about Gradostroitelˊstvo of April 1948, served as opportunities to collectively revise party dictates having nothing to do with the built environment into prescripts on architectural affairs. At the meeting in April 1948, those discussing the urban planning textbook referred directly to the party’s earlier decrees on literature, film, and opera. Those at the meeting were well prepared to draw these cross-disciplinary analogies. One month earlier, in March 1948, leaders of the Soviet architectural profession held a four-day session in Moscow to study the resolution on Muradeli.Footnote 11 As architect Karo Alabian reported, those at the meeting interpreted the resolution on Muradeli as a “programmatic document on the basis of which, in alignment with the mandates of architecture,” all architectural work would be restructured.Footnote 12
In this article, I explore how the zhdanovshchina restructured Soviet architecture. Focusing on Moscow-based architects’ activities both at home and abroad, I highlight an understudied international dimension of the late Stalinist ideological campaign. In architecture, one of the most significant outcomes of the zhdanovshchina was that it caused Soviet architects to change their global behavior, reshaping the nature of the foreign engagements they fostered during and before the war. The impact of the zhdanovshchina can be seen not only in the Soviet built environment, which underwent large-scale postwar reconstruction while the ideological campaign raged on, but also in Soviet architects’ transformed participation in international architectural networks and affairs. As Steven Harris writes in his study of Soviet-western architectural relations, the postwar period saw a shift “from the cooperative to the confrontational.”Footnote 13 The controversy over Gradostroitelˊstvo—a book with global scope written by authors active in international work—is a useful lens through which to further examine this shift. The history of the book’s censure naturally opens to a discussion of how the zhdanovshchina changed the terms of Soviet architects’ engagement with the world beyond Soviet borders. When viewed alongside the foreign activities of the book’s authors, the controversy over Gradostroitelˊstvo illuminates how the Stalinist ideological campaign reshaped domestic architectural practices while spilling into the international arena, fueling Cold War tensions and rivalries, and stymying opportunities for postwar cooperation with the west. The zhdanovshchina cost Soviet architects close connections, some newly formed during wartime, with their counterparts in countries like Britain and the US.
But this is only part of the story, for when the zhdanovshchina closed the door to continued collaboration with the west, it opened to Soviet architects new forms of international connection. When carried abroad, the campaign supplied frameworks allowing Soviet urban experts to explain what was socialist in their praxis. Importantly, the campaign also set the terms by which Soviet architects built relations with their colleagues in newly communist central and eastern Europe and in the expanding socialist world. Rooted in isolationism and xenophobia though it was, the zhdanovshchina facilitated the emergence of a global socialist urbanism just beginning to form in the postwar moment. As this article shows, the world beyond Soviet borders mattered to Soviet architects, even in the repressive and insular decade that followed 1945. This first postwar decade saw a shift in how these architects imagined and practiced the world.Footnote 14 If during the war they saw themselves as participants in a global planning profession spanning the east-west divide (a vision articulated in Gradostroitelˊstvo), by 1948 Soviet architects began to construct alternative frameworks and solidarities, carving out a separate space for socialist architecture in the now-bipolar world.
In the history of Soviet architecture, the better-studied turning point of the postwar era is 1954, the year of the Builders’ Conference. At this event, the rising Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, famously attacked Stalinist architecture, faulting the country’s leading architects for building overly ornamental and costly structures rife with “excesses.”Footnote 15 This important event ushered in a shift, moving Soviet architecture away from monumental and neoclassical design as industrial and prefabricated methods received official sanction. In 1955, a state campaign against “excesses” solidified the transformation in architectural theory and practice, paving the way for Khrushchev’s mass housing program, which would rehouse half of the country’s population over the next fifteen years, fundamentally reshaping urban life in the Soviet Union for decades to come.Footnote 16
The Khrushchev-era Thaw was a significant turning point in Soviet architecture, but so too was the immediate postwar period. After the war, Soviet architects were called upon to serve their state’s transformed global mission. They traveled internationally, from Beijing to Warsaw to Pyongyang, to support the construction of socialist cities abroad. This new kind of global engagement required a stubborn sense of purpose, as architects articulated in stronger terms than ever before what was “socialist” in their craft. Soviet architecture thus played a unique international role in the postwar years.Footnote 17 As the zhdanovshchina unfolded, the field’s practitioners were busily redesigning and rebuilding their own country, while actively engaging with the world beyond Soviet borders, serving as instructors of socialist realism and conveyors of a distinctly socialist approach to architectural history, design, and construction. Given the field’s importance both domestically and internationally in the late 1940s, it is a wonder that the Communist Party did not make architecture a more central target of the ideological campaign. Regardless of the party’s focus, the zhdanovshchina transformed the work of Soviet architects, both at home and abroad.
Gradostroitelˊstvo: A Wartime Text
In its global scope and content, Gradostroitelˊstvo is a text shaped by world war. The book reflects the spirit of wartime allied cooperation and the heightened interest in internationalism that inspired architects worldwide in an era of global conflict.Footnote 18 Published by the USSR Academy of Architecture press in 1945, Gradostroitelˊstvo is a world history of urban planning, co-written during the war by four members of the Academy of Architecture: Andrei Vladimirovich Bunin, Lev Aleksandrovich Ilˊin, Nikolai Kharlampievich Poliakov, and Viacheslav Alekseevich Shkvarikov.Footnote 19 Shkvarikov was also editor, and he took the brunt of the criticism when the book was targeted in 1948.
Beyond the book’s global framing, the war impacted Gradostroitelˊstvo in other ways. In the preface, composed in May 1944, the book’s authors noted that, while they conducted much of their research prior to Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941, the text itself was painstakingly assembled during the years 1942 and 1943. Working during these years was extremely difficult, they noted. Locating historical documents when archives and libraries had been evacuated to the east was nearly impossible. Documenting cities and urban innovations that were vanishing in real time in the ruination of war presented yet another challenge—one answered by limiting the book’s scope to “describing cities in their prewar condition.”Footnote 20 Beyond these first two obstacles, the shifting frontlines of the conflict meant that the book’s authors, working in different Soviet cities, found themselves cut off one from another. A painful blow was dealt to the group when Lev Ilˊin was killed in Leningrad. As the surviving three authors wrote in their preface, Ilˊin died on December 11, 1942 from bombs unleashed by German pilots onto the besieged city below.Footnote 21
The war, the loss of a co-author, and the siege of Leningrad that Ilˊin endured prior to his death hang over Gradostroitelˊstvo like a pall. The text begins and ends in Leningrad—a city firmly tied to world trends in architecture and urban planning and thus a fitting frame for a Soviet text with global reach. The book’s frontispiece features a quintessential Petersburg view: Palace Square and the Alexander Column viewed through the triumphal arch of the General Staff Building, built by Italian architect Carlo Rossi in 1819–28 to commemorate Russian victory against Napoleon in the Patriotic War. The pedestal of the statue of Nike, goddess of victory, riding in her chariot atop the triumphal arch is just visible at the top of the image, likely chosen in anticipation of the Soviet Union’s coming victory in the Great Patriotic War. This Petersburg scene was surely also a tribute to Ilˊin. Desperate to document his beloved city under siege, Ilˊin had sketched in pencil and India ink the same view onto Palace Square during the early months of the blockade.Footnote 22
Gradostroitelˊstvo returns to Ilˊin’s Leningrad in its final pages. Here, the book’s authors highlight Soviet advances in urban planning by discussing Moskovskoe shosse, built in the northern city just prior to the Nazi invasion. This streetscape ensemble, expanding outward from Leningrad’s House of Soviets, linked Soviet planning to the international trends discussed in earlier chapters. Yet the magistralˊ, or highway, in Leningrad’s southern district also demonstrated that Soviet socialist planning was a unique phenomenon, freed from the constraints of the private ownership and property speculation that vexed capitalist planners. As Gradostroitelˊstvo’s authors wrote in the lead-in to their final chapter on Soviet socialist planning, “only in Russia after the Great October Bolshevik Revolution did it become possible to radically resolve the entire complex of … urban planning tasks.”Footnote 23 Only under socialism could urban planning be taken up as a citywide project directed by the state.
Leningrad, the city opening and closing Gradostroitelˊstvo, captured well a central tension of the text: Soviet cities stood to inherit a global tradition while also representing a new and unique path in planning. The book’s authors had composed a world history of urban planning in which the Soviet Union fit comfortably. Yet, there were hints in the text of a change occurring in Soviet architects’ global imaginary. How these architects understood their place and the place of their profession in global terms was shifting: the seeds of the zhdanovshchina germinated in the heightened patriotism and nationalism of wartime. Still, in setting their sights beyond Soviet borders, assigning value to western architecture, and asserting that there existed important connections between their own work and world historical practices, the authors of Gradostroitelˊstvo showed a commitment to internationalism that was typical for the wartime era.
The war was an internationalizing force for Soviet architecture. As Richard Anderson writes, during the war Soviet architects and planners were “participants in an international field of architectural ideas.” “They believed,” Anderson argues, “that the path of postwar modernization in the USSR would run parallel to that of the United States, and they attentively studied American developments.”Footnote 24 The war fostered an international, west-oriented mindset among Soviet architects and architectural historians, who worked alongside their foreign colleagues in search of solutions to common problems, from how to camouflage buildings and rapidly construct housing for workers in the defense industry to how best to preserve and reconstruct cities after the violence ceased.Footnote 25 Soviet architectural journals published special wartime issues featuring discussions about urban advances in the US, the UK, France, and elsewhere.Footnote 26 Soviet architects, architectural historians, and theorists contacted colleagues in these countries to solidify networks for the “regular exchange of opinions and knowledge gained by experience,” as one put it in 1943 in his letter to the Royal Institute of British Architects.Footnote 27
Cooperation between the allied powers facilitated these international ties, which revived earlier networks of the First Five-Year Plan era, now directing them toward the all-consuming tasks of wartime defense and postwar rebuilding. As the war came to an end, international meetings built on the momentum of wartime cooperation. At about the same time that Gradostroitelˊstvo was published in Moscow, an American-Soviet Building Conference was underway in New York City. This event, held in May 1945 by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, brought Soviet and American urban experts together to discuss the latest advances in prefabrication.Footnote 28 Soviet interest in American architecture and urban planning is seen clearly on the pages of Gradostroitelˊstvo. American urban greening received special attention from the book’s authors, who highlighted Boston, New York City, and Chicago as prime examples of this “most favorable point in American urban planning.”Footnote 29
Gradostroitelˊstvo’s authors expressed pride in Soviet city building, while also acknowledging positive advances elsewhere, ultimately framing urban planning not as a Soviet but a worldwide, and especially western, pursuit. It was in writing their world history of planning that the authors saw themselves as pioneers. “The thing is,” they explained, “that a synthetic work on the history of urban planning of the whole world (or, at least, of leading countries) still does not exist.”Footnote 30 French, German, and English-language texts had attempted global coverage, they wrote, but ultimately covered limited time periods in truncated form. By contrast, the Soviet book aimed to present a total world history of urban planning. It positioned the Soviet Union as a modest contributor to, but mainly a beneficiary of global developments. Writing during the war, the authors saw their world historical text as a much-needed guide for Soviet experts moving into the postwar years. Their global approach, however, would make the book an easy target during the zhdanovshchina.
The authors of Gradostroitelˊstvo avoided the topic of wartime destruction in the bulk of their text, committing themselves to describing cities “in their prewar condition.” Each writer was nonetheless keenly aware of the devastating effects of the war on cities in the Soviet Union and worldwide. All four authors partook in the new wartime responsibilities of their profession. In Moscow in 1942, Andrei Bunin was organizing the design competition for a new monument to heroes of the Great Patriotic War.Footnote 31 In Leningrad, Lev Ilˊin was on the USSR Union of Architects commission for the protection of architectural monuments and monumental art.Footnote 32 Ilˊin also worked tirelessly in the months before his death to document Leningrad’s historical buildings; his drawings of the besieged city were exhibited posthumously in Moscow in 1943.Footnote 33 For his part, Nikolai Poliakov was camouflaging and defending the Soviet capital during the Battle of Moscow in 1941–42.Footnote 34 By 1944, Poliakov worked alongside Viacheslav Shkvarikov at the RSFSR-level commission, preparing to rebuild and restore Soviet cities damaged and destroyed by the war.Footnote 35 Shkvarikov, as head of the Council on Architectural Affairs of the Sovnarkom RSFSR, coordinated the urban reconstruction effort across the USSR’s Russian republic.
In overseeing Russia’s urban planners after the war, Shkvarikov stressed the value of history and precedent. Historical knowledge was for him essential to the success of reconstruction. Speaking at a conference held in Moscow in July 1945 for experts rebuilding Russian cities, Shkvarikov stated that “certain of our comrades look on post-war architecture as a definitely new period in the development of Soviet building having nothing in common with our history. This is wrong. The development of post-war architecture should organically continue the best national architecture of pre-war years.”Footnote 36 Yet, in addition to using Russian history as their guide, Shkvarikov encouraged his colleagues working in the Russian republic to incorporate lessons from world sources. As head of the RSFSR Committee on Architecture, Shkvarikov had worked since 1944 to import foreign literature on planning, architectural legislation, and zoning regulations.Footnote 37 While he believed that Soviet architects should “avoid the mistakes of constructivists who ignored the socialist nature of our country,” Shkvarikov also recommended in his speech of July 1945 that “wide use should be made of the technical achievements in our country and in the leading countries of West Europe and America.”Footnote 38 Shkvarikov’s own recently published Gradostroitelˊstvo contributed to this larger effort to synthesize foreign and domestic advances in city building.
The war itself proved difficult to discuss in the text and the authors of Gradostroitelˊstvo confronted the topic directly only in the final pages. There, they addressed the erasure of the built environment, acknowledging in a distinct tonal shift the challenges Soviet architects and planners would face as they began to rebuild. Here, the book’s global tenor yielded to patriotic tones: “the German vandals in their black malice against the nations of the Soviet Union destroyed thousands of population centers and hundreds of distinguished structures.”Footnote 39 Soviet architects and planners would respond to this unprecedented scale of destruction by following the model of “old Russian cities,” including Tverˊ and Suzdalˊ and the “great centers of the Russian state—Novgorod, Vladimir, Moscow, and Leningrad.”Footnote 40 What role would international plans and ideas play in this process? Struggling to reconcile the worldwide scope of their survey with the nationalist spirit of wartime—in anticipation, perhaps, of the postwar ideological campaign—they added that “the Russian nation has never renounced its organic connection to world art, yet the essence of [the nation’s] art was always a Russian, completely deep and fervent patriotism.”Footnote 41 Undermining the global framework of their text, the authors raised new questions on their final page about Russia and its relationship to world history.
In the short period between the publication of Gradostroitelˊstvo in 1945 and the dismantling of the book’s main tenets in 1948, the official line on what constituted acceptable historical narrative shifted considerably. Gradostroitelˊstvo presented a vision of the Soviet Union’s, and Russia’s, place in the world that was rooted firmly in its authors’ wartime concerns and experiences. The book was no screed against “bourgeois” city building. Rather, it narrated the history of urban planning from ancient Egypt to Soviet Leningrad by placing Russian and Soviet cities in world historical context. Yet already in 1946, with the onset of the zhdanovshchina, readers anticipated in such a text a discussion of the internal contradictions of capitalist urbanism and evidence of socialism’s superiority over capitalism. The Soviet Union’s position in the world was changing, and how Soviet architects imagined and practiced the world was swiftly evolving in response.
The “False Framework” of Gradostroitelˊstvo
In January 1948, Gradostroitelˊstvo was censured in the Soviet press. An anonymous review published in the journal Sovetskoe iskusstvo fired the first salvo.Footnote 42 The review began by praising the hard work and perseverance needed to write not just a Soviet, but a world history of urban planning. This was a topic of undeniable importance after 1945, yet the book left its reviewer with “a feeling of deep dissatisfaction.”Footnote 43 Especially irksome were the sweeping generalities made by authors who stressed continuity from antiquity to the present. In their preface, Gradostroitelˊstvo’s authors argued that “urban planning has always taken as its goal the construction of not only comfortable, but beautiful cities …” Always? demanded the incredulous reviewer. Even in the slave society of ancient Egypt? In smoothing out differences across space and time, the book’s authors had elevated the general over the particular. Yet, any reader attuned to the new frequencies of the zhdanovshchina expected instead a discussion of socialist specificity and Soviet superiority over the west. Soviet specialist readers also knew that “comfort” and “beauty” were not general or neutral terms. Rather, these were key values of Soviet socialist realist architecture, as elaborated in debates and discussions of the 1930s.Footnote 44
Approved in 1945 for use in educating a new generation of Soviet urban planners, Gradostroitelˊstvo was by 1948 incompatible with postwar developments in Soviet culture and politics. As the reviewer in Sovetskoe iskusstvo saw it, the book’s authors had built their text on a “false framework.” They narrated the history of urban planning from a position “outside [class] conflict, outside politics,” as though urban planning was “immanently progressing in a constant striving for the comfort and beauty of emerging cities.”Footnote 45 The temporal, social, and political pillars that ought to have supported the text were absent: “No kind of serious attempt is made to show the development of urban planning ideas and their connection and independence from concrete socio-historical [conditions] of this or that epoch,” the reviewer complained.Footnote 46 Moreover, the book was thin on socialist content. In framing their history in global terms, Gradostroitelˊstvo’s authors had failed to chart the unique and superior evolution of Soviet socialist urban planning. “In a book of over 300 pages, Soviet [urban planning] is allotted … 7 pages of text,” the reviewer bristled.Footnote 47
Two weeks after Sovetskoe iskusstvo printed this review, the Presidium of the Academy of Architecture responded. The Academy’s press had published Gradostroitelˊstvo in 1945, but the institution’s higher-ups now conceded that the book was flawed.Footnote 48 On February 25, members of the Academy met in a special session jointly organized by the Academy’s Institute of Urban Planning and Institute of Architectural Theory and History. So many people gathered to take part in this discussion of Gradostroitelˊstvo that “one evening of work could not exhaust the list of those wishing to speak.”Footnote 49 The session continued on March 1. Those in attendance discussed the need to view the history of urban planning not simply through the lens of aesthetics, but in terms of the political and social relations that shaped the built environment. They listened “with great interest” as a select group stepped forward, ready to build a case against the text.Footnote 50
Armed with evidence contradicting Gradostroitelˊstvo’s central narratives, the vanguard group at the Academy’s meeting spoke at length about the “degradation of capitalist urban planning and its class character”—a theme left unexplored in Gradostroitelˊstvo.Footnote 51 In its coverage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book highlighted the development in Europe and the US of boulevards, ensembles, and greening efforts while omitting urban features evincing the failures in capitalist planning. In discussing London’s “Regent Street, Waterloo Square, and other select well-appointed [blagoustroennye] districts,” the book’s authors had neglected “more representative” areas of the city.Footnote 52 London’s urban terrain was best seen not in the West End, argued architect M. Khauke, but in the “proletarian quarters of the East End, the slummy regions of the docks.”Footnote 53 Similarly, in discussing Washington DC, the book highlighted the tree-lined grand avenues and circles of the L’Enfant Plan, ignoring the American capital’s larger system of “150 streets—the worst slums in the USA,” some of which lay “even in the shadow of the Capitol.”Footnote 54 Gradostroitelˊstvo’s critics further noted that the book’s coverage of cities outside Euro-American metropoles obscured empire from view. The “deep colonial character of British urban planning” was nowhere to be seen in the section on Delhi.Footnote 55
While all three living authors of Gradostroitelˊstvo—Shkvarikov, Bunin, and Poliakov—were held to account for the deficiencies of their text, special blame fell on Viacheslav Shkvarikov, chief editor as well as coauthor of the book. While he attended the first evening of the Academy of Architecture’s discussion of Gradostroitelˊstvo, Shkvarikov did not attend the second, claiming on March 1 to be ill.Footnote 56 He was no stranger to zhdanovshchina proceedings. Before finding himself ensnared in controversy in spring 1948, Shkvarikov served, in late 1947, as chairman of the honor court that “tried” the art historian and critic David Arkin and architects Nikolai Bylinkin and Andrei Bunin (the last of whom was a coauthor of Gradostroitelˊstvo).Footnote 57 Honor courts were held in the late 1940s in various artistic and scientific fields. As chairman, Shkvarikov oversaw the work of a jury of seven architects who deliberated on the missteps of their peers. In this case, the three experts, who had published about Soviet postwar reconstruction in a British planning journal, were found guilty of “self-promotion, subservience to the West, and denigrating Soviet architectural achievements.”Footnote 58 Now, within months of that trial, Shkvarikov faced similar accusations himself. The scrutiny of Gradostroitelˊstvo did not go as far as honor court proceedings, but it did move swiftly through Moscow’s central architectural institutions.
Readers of the journal Sovetskoe iskusstvo could follow the controversy as it unfolded week by week. Having initiated the affair with the publication of the book review in January, the journal now printed summaries of meetings held on the topic in the following months.Footnote 59 The Council of Ministers Committee on the Affairs of Architecture, an oversight body created during the war, held its meeting to discuss the book on February 11. Those in attendance saw in the book major errors symptomatic of larger issues in Soviet architecture. There were “serious deficiencies on the theoretical front of architecture,” Boris R. Rubanenko, the Committee’s deputy head, stated.Footnote 60 Rubanenko would repeat this comment two months later at the Union of Architects meeting about Gradostroitelˊstvo.Footnote 61
While the Academy of Architecture and the Committee on the Affairs of Architecture both met in February 1948 to discuss Gradostroitelˊstvo, the USSR Union of Architects met in April to discuss the text. Between these events, in March 1948, a separate and more significant architectural discussion took place in Moscow—one that would shift the ongoing controversy over Gradostroitelˊstvo toward Russian national concerns. In March, over the course of four evenings at Moscow’s Central House of Architects, 600 architects gathered from across the USSR to debate the significance for architectural theory and practice of the Central Committee’s latest resolution targeting composer Vano Muradeli’s opera, The Great Friendship. The resolution, published in Pravda in February 1948, criticized Muradeli for his “formalistic” and “antipopular” music. Muradeli “disdained the best traditions and experience of the classical opera as a whole, and of Russian classical opera in particular” and he had “not availed himself of the wealth of folk melodies, songs, and refrains, and of the dance motifs … of the peoples who inhabit the north Caucasus, where the opera’s action takes place.”Footnote 62 The attack on Muradeli brought national questions to the fore in the ongoing ideological campaign. As Leah Goldman notes, while the party’s resolutions of 1946 on literature and film were anti-western and shaped by new Cold War frictions, the attack on Muradeli “brought the zhdanovshchina firmly into the sphere of Soviet nationalities policy.”Footnote 63 For architects in Moscow, the resolution encouraged continued vigilance against “formalism” while stressing the need to elevate Russian influences, styles, and historical narratives.
Grigorii A. Simonov, head of the Committee on the Affairs of Architecture, opened the March 1948 meeting in Moscow with a speech on “The Primary Tasks of Soviet Architects.” Twenty-nine members of the Union of Architects then took to the podium with their own remarks, among them Viacheslav Shkvarikov.Footnote 64 Most comments centered on the “Zholtovskii School,” accused by Simonov and others of formalism and uncritical borrowing of bourgeois architectural forms.Footnote 65 But Shkvarikov had other issues front of mind.Footnote 66 Turning the lessons of the ongoing discussion inward, he reflected publicly on Gradostroitelˊstvo. In the spirit of “self-criticism,” he conceded that the book focused too narrowly on questions of aesthetics and composition and on the “simple empirical description of historical facts.”Footnote 67 It “did not give a Marxist-Leninist analysis and explanation of these facts,” Shkvarikov confessed, “and it thereby, embarked on a false, nefarious path [lozhnyi, porochnyi putˊ], which as a rule in the practice of urban planning leads to formalism.”Footnote 68 The book “lacked a Marxist analysis of capitalist urban planning,” the architect continued, “and completely insufficiently showed the achievements of urban planning in the USSR.”Footnote 69 With these remarks, Shkvarikov publicly bore the criticism first published in Sovetskoe iskusstvo in January 1948. In addition to this confession, Shkvarikov also contributed to the larger discussion on Muradeli and the resolution’s relevance to architects. Theirs was a “fight for party discipline [partiinostˊ],” he stated, “for socialist realism, and for nationality [narodnostˊ] in Soviet architecture.”Footnote 70
The party resolution on Muradeli’s opera introduced yet new frameworks to Soviet artists’ ongoing debates of the postwar years. When members of the Union of Architects met on April 22, 1948 for their debate about Gradostroitelˊstvo, they were equipped with an expanded arsenal of criticism.Footnote 71 They stood firm against “formalism” and “bourgeois influence.” They condemned uncritical discussions of capitalist cities. They decried historical narratives that did not foreground the greatness of Soviet—and Russian—planning, and its supremacy in the history of world architecture. By 1948, a resurgent Russian nationalism had joined Soviet communism in its competition with the “West.” Scrutinizing Gradostroitelˊstvo through the zhdanovshchina’s ever-widening scope, those at the April meeting faulted the book for neglecting to discuss socialist, Soviet, and Russian precedents in design—precedents badly needed in this era of postwar reconstruction.
At the April meeting, architects rehashed earlier arguments while introducing new patriotic and nationalist lines of critique. In his opening remarks, architect Aleksandr M. Gorbachev argued that Gradostroitelˊstvo’s section on Chicago focused too much on skyscrapers and parks and too little on unplanned areas of the city, where, as Gorbachev put it, “the children of workers play in cesspools and garbage pits … in districts of the city that even bourgeois writers like Upton Sinclair have called the ‘jungles’ of Chicago.”Footnote 72 In addition to the authors’ overly rosy coverage of capitalist urbanism, the book was insufficient in its discussion of socialism. Viktor V. Baburov commented that it “leads to a distortion of the concept of socialist urban planning.” “We entered the urban planning period starting in 1928–29,” Baburov argued. The Soviet Union had thus already undergone its foundational era. Yet no discussion of the origins or underlying principles of Soviet socialist planning featured in Gradostroitelˊstvo. The book ought to have included commentary, Baburov believed, on the social goals of Soviet planning and on the country’s recent technological developments in this sphere. It should have contained a discussion of both ideal plans and realities achieved in practice. “Take housing, at least,” Baburov suggested. “Very little has been said about this,” he complained.Footnote 73
In addition to calls for a more ideologically charged textbook that criticized planning under capitalism and celebrated the first two decades of Soviet socialist planning, those gathered at the meeting of April 1948 also carried the patriotic and nationalist currents of the recent party resolution on Muradeli’s opera into the discussion. Gradostroitelˊstvo’s deficient coverage of pre-revolutionary Russia was a central theme of the April disput.Footnote 74 The book’s authors “underestimated the importance of Russian urban development,” G. E. Mishchenko argued.Footnote 75 They gave the impression “that planning appeared only when Peter brought it from abroad and that before this there was nothing.”Footnote 76 “This is completely false,” Mishchenko cried. “Before the Petrine period, we already had all this,” he exclaimed, “and we have the documents to prove it.”Footnote 77 Moreover, Mishchenko added, “we have historical monuments that highlight the exceptional quality of [our] architecture.”Footnote 78 Mishchenko was not alone in calling for a reframed narrative—one that positioned Russia, not the west, as the ur-source of Soviet urban planning.Footnote 79
Gradostroitelˊstvo’s underlying assumption—that Soviet architects could generate new ideas by studying foreign, especially western, design—was untenable by 1948. Using phrases popularized in the 1930s and now reworked for the new Cold War era, architects at the April 1948 meeting suggested that the west had fallen off track in its development, leaving the Soviet Union as the sole inheritor to the mantle of urban planning.Footnote 80 Not only were western models no longer relevant, but friendly relations with the west were now impossible. As Vasilii M. Kusakov put it, “there is no longer any room for peaceful relations in the cultural sphere with the bourgeois west.”Footnote 81 In the face of slander published abroad about socialist architecture, Kusakov added, “the Soviet architect must be on the offensive.”Footnote 82 This departed from the longer pattern of Russian and Soviet anti-westernism, which coincided in earlier decades with continued interest in and veneration of western technology and developments. As Rósa Magnúsdóttir notes, “in the postwar years, Soviet patriotism could not coexist with any form of sympathy for the West.”Footnote 83 Instead, the zhdanovshchina introduced new frameworks prompting Soviet architects to change their global behavior as they reimagined and reestablished their place in the world.
Foreign Encounters Reshaped
In summer 1948, Viacheslav Shkvarikov traveled abroad. From late June to early July, Shkvarikov was one of three Soviet architects dispatched to Lausanne, Switzerland for the inaugural Assembly and Congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA).Footnote 84 Still in existence today, the UIA was established after the Second World War by architects based in western Europe who wished to foster global cooperation and exchange in their profession. The inaugural event in 1948 was Shkvarikov’s first engagement with the new organization, but other Soviet architects had been involved in the UIA’s creation in the months leading up to the first Assembly and Congress.Footnote 85 Taking the United Nations as their model, the UIA’s founders reached out internationally, inviting the American Institute of Architects, the USSR Union of Architects, and other national bodies to select delegates from among their membership to attend meetings and congresses and to join the organization’s leadership. Securing Soviet involvement was especially important to the UIA’s first General Secretary, Pierre Vago. Born in Budapest in 1910 and residing for many years in Paris, Vago saw Soviet participation as essential to making the UIA inclusive and international. In his efforts to include the USSR, Vago faced resistance from his American and Swiss colleagues, who openly expressed their opposition and who, by May 1948, privately accused the UIA General Secretary of having “engaged himself too much with the Russians.”Footnote 86 But Vago stood firm, determined that the UIA should nurture east-west ties, giving no justification, as he put it in a January 1948 letter to Moscow, “to those who spread the Churchillian theory of the ‘iron curtain.’”Footnote 87 In late 1947, Vago selected Soviet architect Karo Alabian as one of the UIA’s three Vice-Presidents.Footnote 88 In early 1948, Alabian passed this responsibility to Leningrad-based architect Nikolai Baranov, who Shkvarikov accompanied on his voyage to Lausanne in June.Footnote 89 Swiss and American architects filled the other two Vice-Presidential positions in the UIA leadership.
From its creation, the UIA resisted Cold War disunion. Yet the organization also served as a space for open confrontation between architects from the communist and capitalist worlds—a space where differences between the two camps, and the implications of those differences for architecture and planning, were articulated and accentuated. The theme of the first UIA Congress, “Architecture Before Its New Tasks,” was carefully selected with an eye to the UIA’s international mandate. As it turned out, however, even this highly relevant topic, chosen to channel discussion toward common problems faced by all in postwar reconstruction, was not enough to stifle disagreements and debates among congress delegates representing twenty-two countries, from Australia to the USSR. Arriving in Lausanne in late June 1948, Shkvarikov quickly got up to speed on the key issues dividing UIA members. A central question was whether the UIA should exist “beyond politics,” as many of its American and west European founders hoped, or whether the new organization should be a “truly democratic union of progressive intellectuals,” as the Soviet contingent argued.Footnote 90 This debate had carried on from 1947 to 1948 in discussions about the wording of the UIA’s governing statutes, to be adopted at the first assembly in June 1948. Soviet efforts to include clauses characterizing the UIA as progressive and democratic were countered by the French, Americans, Swiss, and others who determined that the UIA should “pursue no political aims,” lest any “political tendency in the new international organisation … prevent a free exchange of opinion and thoughts.”Footnote 91
Attendees at the UIA’s inaugural congress were absorbed for some time in this debate about whether architects were apolitical practitioners or state actors—an especially thorny issue in a postwar time of increased state involvement in the west in urban planning. Seeing just how far their western colleagues would go to avoid including words like “democracy” in the UIA’s governing documents, the Soviet delegation dug in, alienating some while attracting others. Lines of attack deployed in Moscow as part of the Communist Party’s ideological campaign were now mobilized for an international audience. The zhdanovshchina provided Soviet architects abroad with a sharpened vocabulary and heightened sense of purpose in debates with western colleagues. Shkvarikov, who in recent weeks had conceded the harmful impact of his own apolitical thinking, now watched as these ideas took new form internationally. Once deployed abroad, the zhdanovshchina did useful work for the Soviet delegation. As Shkvarikov and the other Soviet delegates put it after their return to the USSR, the debate about politics at the UIA resulted in bringing on side architects from the “new democracies” of central and eastern Europe, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.Footnote 92 The Soviet delegation now saw in the UIA an opportunity to “popularize the achievements of Soviet architecture, socialist urban planning, and the broad creative opportunities and rights of architects in the USSR.”Footnote 93 The UIA allowed Soviet architects to continue engaging with foreign ideas, while carrying out a new global mission. Shkvarikov and his colleagues took the lessons of the zhdanovshchina abroad, using them to project communist supremacy in architecture and to secure Soviet leadership over the expanding communist sphere.
Shortly after returning to Moscow, Shkvarikov published an article criticizing his foreign colleagues and their “bourgeois” urban planning. Printed on August 4, 1948 in the New Times, a Soviet foreign-language weekly, Shkvarikov’s article gave an account of the first UIA Assembly and Congress through Soviet eyes. The architect detailed the debates over the wording of the UIA statutes. He summarized the papers delivered at the Congress by Nikolai Baranov, one on “The Architect and Town Planning” and another on “The Architect, The State, and Society.” “Our delegation,” Shkvarikov wrote, “subjected town planning in capitalist countries to exhaustive criticism.”Footnote 94 Decrying the “crisis of formalism” in urban planning in the west, Shkvarikov noted that “the glaring contrast between the fashionable residential districts and the slums inhabited by the working people is a common phenomenon and an unavoidable evil in any capitalist city.”Footnote 95 Congress attendees displayed “definite envy,” Shkvarikov claimed, while listening to the Soviet presentations, which “gave food for serious thought to many of the delegates, as we learned from private conversations from some of them.”Footnote 96 The Soviet delegation was “bombarded with questions.”Footnote 97 The gospel of socialist urbanism was decidedly spreading.
In his article, Shkvarikov drew a firm line between socialist and capitalist urban planning. He railed against formalism, opposed “anti-popular tendencies” in architecture, and criticized the situation in the west, where “the architect is completely subordinated to the capitalist profit system.”Footnote 98 Shkvarikov, then, demonstrated his rejection of the vision articulated in Gradostroitelˊstvo and his adherence to the main tenets of the zhdanovshchina. He also elicited confusion and shock from Pierre Vago, who wrote to Baranov in September 1948 to express dismay. For Vago, who was in regular correspondence with Baranov in the weeks after the Congress, Shkvarikov’s article came as a blow. As Vago saw it, Lausanne had been a great success. Goodwill prevailed in the delegates’ conversations and debates, with real cooperation achieved and real results gained for the Soviet side. These included, Vago noted, the decision approved by vote that the next Congress be held in Warsaw. “All I can say,” wrote Vago, “is that the article by Shkvarikov has thrilled all your adversaries and saddened all your friends. In effect, there are falsehoods so flagrant [in the article] that your adversaries triumph: ‘You see how they disfigure reality!’ …”Footnote 99 Vago hoped that this would be an isolated incident. The rhetoric of the zhdanovshchina threatened to undo the inclusivity and internationalism he had achieved.
The UIA meeting in Lausanne may not have strengthened east-west relations in architecture, but it did allow Soviet architects to connect with their counterparts in the newly communist and communizing world. This led in the following months to still more international engagement. Shkvarikov traveled abroad again in late September 1948, leading a group of Soviet architects on a trip to Poland.Footnote 100 Reconnecting with Polish architects he met in Lausanne, Shkvarikov and his group visited Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, and Szczecin.Footnote 101 While they saw promise in the studio work of Polish architecture students, they also observed, Shkvarikov later reported, that “the influence of western European culture (constructivism, formalism, etc.) is so strong that it seems to me that for the architects of Warsaw, escaping this influence is a creative problem”—one that would require fundamental reorientation.Footnote 102 Struck by how little the Polish architects knew about Soviet architecture, Shkvarikov was convinced of the need to organize more exchanges, including study tours to the USSR, where Polish architects could “familiarize themselves and closely communicate and cooperate” with their Soviet colleagues.Footnote 103 By 1948, Soviet architecture’s global mandate had transformed, becoming increasingly evangelistic and imperial as the socialist world now took the place of the west as the USSR’s chief foreign interlocutor.Footnote 104
In the final years of the Stalin era, as communism continued its global spread, Soviet architects worked to solidify their authority over socialist architecture. Shkvarikov’s call for more cooperation and exchange among socialist architects was taken up and in June 1950, the USSR Union of Architects hosted a delegation of fifteen architects and engineers from Poland—a visit that would serve as a model for future efforts to showcase Soviet socialist realism to foreigners from the socialist world. The Poles toured Moscow before visiting Leningrad, Stalingrad, Tbilisi, and Sochi.Footnote 105 In Moscow, they attended Q&A sessions with Soviet architects and were lectured on the differences between Soviet and “bourgeois” architecture. They toured the Moscow metro and the construction sites of Moscow State University and the high rise on Smolensk Square, two of the eight skyscrapers then being built in the Soviet capital.Footnote 106 Although they did not yet know it, within two years, Poland’s own Stalinist skyscraper, the Palace of Culture and Science, would be under construction in Warsaw. Deeming this visit a success, Soviet architects wrote to the Communist Party Central Committee. Hosting more delegations from the socialist world would enable them, they argued, to “actively strengthen the influence of Soviet architecture on the architecture of the people’s democracies.”Footnote 107 By September 1950, the USSR Union of Architects was making plans to invite Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, and Chinese architects to the USSR.Footnote 108
During late Stalinism, the world beyond Soviet borders mattered to Soviet architects. As they worked to rebuild their country, the wider world served as a source for ideas, technologies, and inspiration. Yet Soviet state and party officials scrutinized urban experts’ international interests and engagements with growing suspicion in the first postwar decade. As Rósa Magnúsdóttir notes, the Communist Party’s anti-western campaign of the postwar period “dramatically limited possibilities for contact with the former allies.”Footnote 109 Still, Soviet architects were not prevented from engaging their western counterparts. Rather, the zhdanovshchina changed the rules of engagement, mandating that architects embed in their every practice and pronouncement a set of ideological commitments: anti-westernism, anti-capitalism, anti-formalism. When articulated in an international setting, like the UIA’s meetings, these commitments caused consternation among western colleagues, but they also allowed Soviet architects to distinguish their practice from that of the west, drawing a firm line between socialist and capitalist urban planning.
Soviet architects stood to gain a great deal from this reformed international engagement. They became self-proclaimed leaders of the communist world; urban experts at the vanguard of a “democratic” and “progressive” approach to planning and construction. In leading the charge toward global communism on the architectural front, Soviet architects cast off the subordinate status that characterized their earlier interactions with foreign colleagues.Footnote 110 Now, at the start of the Cold War, they were the leaders and the teachers; the long history of architecture and urban planning culminated not in the latest western advances, but in their very own Soviet socialist design. Gradostroitelˊstvo, a book charting a unified global pursuit of architecture and urban planning, no longer served the moment. Ultimately, during the zhdanovshchina, Soviet architects changed how they experienced and understood their place in the world, with lasting consequences both at home and abroad.
Katherine Zubovich is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her recent publications include Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 2021) and Making Cities Socialist (part of the Elements in Global Urban History series of Cambridge University Press, 2024).
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