Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic

The first biography to trace the remarkable life and career of Ukrainian-born Boris Iofan, beautifully illustrated with many of Iofan's previously unseen sketchbooks and photographs from private collections. Stalin’s Architect is a history of architecture, politics and power. Boris Iofan (1891-1976) made his mark as Stalin's architect, both in the grand projects he achieved, such as the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite, and through his unbuilt designs, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose iconic image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union.

Iofan's life and designs offer a unique perspective into the politics of twentieth-century architecture and the history of the Soviet Union.

FIVE MINUTES WITH Deyan Sudjic

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

What is your connection to Russia?

My family is from ex-Yugoslavia and I’ve always seen the parallel between the two countries. The first time I went to Moscow, I was very interested in what that culture was like and what the countries had in common: the Cyrillic alphabet, the Orthodox church.

What inspired you to write the book?

What got me going was a lifelong fascination with architecture – as much about what buildings mean as how they look. I found myself in Moscow in 2008. I had previously written The Edifice Complex exploring the many relationships between the powerful and architects. Iofan’s family were aware of that and invited me to see the apartment in which he lived and worked, in the House on the Embankment he designed. In those rooms, hardly touched since his death in 1976, I saw papers, telegrams from the Soviet leadership, orders to go to Stalingrad to look at reconstruction, fragments of plaster buildings. It was all decayed and sad, and felt like the end of an era.

How did you do your research?

It’s amazing how much now is online. Trying to read editions of Pravda from the 1930s was fascinating. The human rights group Memorial’s website was extraordinarily helpful: it has traced so many unhappy histories. I was also very fortunate to work with two fascinating collectors: a Russian architect based in Berlin who had acquired a lot of his papers, and another Russian émigré in Germany who works in London who had a lot of his notebooks.

What is your assessment of Iofan’s relationship with the Soviet regime?

He obviously believed in what he was saying. He was a loyal communist to the end even though many of his contemporaries were liquidated. I don’t think he betrayed anyone personally. He tried his best for the exiled daughter of Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s titular successor. He made an attempt to find and help her. But the book is not trying to make a judgement about his behaviour. It’s trying to show the tension and the stress and difficulty of life in that extraordinary building, the House on the Embankment, often called “the house of preliminary detention”. I draw a comparison with Wallace Harrison, the architect who designed the Rockefeller and Lincoln centres and helped rebuild Albany for Nelson Rockefeller, and who met Iofan in New York and Moscow. Harrison was lucky enough to work for a different kind of despot. It was deeply disturbing to understand just how many unpleasant people in the USSR were fascinated by architecture – Kaganovich, Dzerzhinsky, Beria.

How do you judge his work?

Most startling is the divide before and after 1931. Iofan was a gifted architect who sacrificed his talent to stay alive. The tragedy is that the first iteration of his biggest project – the Palace of the Soviets – was monumental but not mad. Stalin said he had won the competition but he had to make it the world’s tallest building. He could never go back. The idea that Stalin would find places on refugee trains and money for this mad scheme while the country was on the edge of an eclipse is extraordinary. It became the symbol of Soviet colonial might. But the Soviet Union didn’t have the means. Iofan was asked to design the world’s tallest building In the Palace of the Soviets, but had no idea how to do it. Architects can’t hide in their drawings. You get a sense of a person almost in the way a building is drawn. He never finished things. Maybe he lived in his drawings. He was thinking about same thing for 25 years. It became a rock he was trying to carry uphill.

What was his most successful work?

The Pavilion in Paris – confronting the Nazi one of Albert Speer. That was where he made a monument which was powerful without being absurd. His Barvikha sanatorium looks as good as anything from that period in Finland. The House on the Embankment is also an amazing project: a slice of a city, a mega structure with a cinema, theatre, department store, shooting gallery, gymnasium and hairdresser. Many architects have tried to do that since but this was probably the first realisation of a city in a building. Yet despite the democratic rhetoric, it was a city only for the elite, like the Imperial forbidden city in Beijing.

Do you see any connection between Iofan and Russia’s war in Ukraine today?

His home town was Odessa, which was the Shanghai of the Russian administration: very international with street signs in Italian for non-Cyrillic readers. [Just as Russia is confiscating objects in Ukraine] Iofan was an architectural adviser to the ‘trophy commission’ set up to seize German and Austrian works of art as reparations. He designed a township in Donbass for the Shterovskaya power plant, which is in the middle of the fighting right now. It brings home the courage of the people of Ukraine and those in Moscow with the bravery to say ‘this is wrong’. It makes one realise just what’s at stake.

Do you have plans for another book?

I’m very interested in the work of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. He was the only person to have won the Pritzker Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize. He was a lifelong communist, who also designed the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris.