9 minute read
Stalin's pet architect
from Booklaunch Issue 15
by Booklaunch
STALIN’S ARCHITECT
POWER AND SURVIVAL IN MOSCOW
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DEYAN SUDJIC
Thames and Hudson, Hardcover, 320 pages, April 2022, 9780500343555, RRP £30.00
For discount, check our website: www.booklaunch.london
EDITOR’S NOTE
Ukrainian Boris Iofan spent ten years studying architecture in Rome because access to Russian universities was restricted for Jewish students. After marrying a half-Russian, half-Italian aristocrat, he joined the Italian Communist party, returned to Moscow and designed many of Stalin’s most iconic buildings such as the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite, and the unbuilt Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist fantasy. Did Iofan have any commitments? Yes, says Deyan Sudjic: staying alive.
For Boris Iofan, the most prominent of Stalin’s 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 Moscow’s 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.
I began trying to learn as much as I could about what had gone on in Iofan’s mind as he saw his work turned into a monstrous tribute to Stalin. 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 history’s 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 Iofan’s place?
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.
Things were very different in 1937, when Thomas Sgovio, a young and idealistic Italian American communist from upstate New York living in Moscow, visited Iofan in his apartment: number 426 on the sought-after top floor, facing the river. Sgovio was hoping for Iofan’s help in securing a place at one of Moscow’s art schools. They had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance who knew Iofan from his own time as a student in Rome. Sgovio was baffled by the process of finding his way to the Iofans’ apartment in such an enormous building with so many entrances. He had to produce a special permit, leave his passport at the guard post and follow an official escort to the lift. From there, an attendant took him up to the eleventh floor. A maid let him into the apartment and he was welcomed by Olga, a stately-looking woman who spoke in perfect English and offered him tea. Then Iofan himself appeared, the streaks of white in his dark hair adding a distinguished touch to his appearance.
Sgovio had been horrified by his experiences of everyday life in Moscow. When he ate in a workers’ canteen, the scraps of food he left on his plate were grabbed from him by hungry neighbours. It was not what he had expected from the world’s first socialist country. The Iofans’ home felt like an entirely different world, and he was charmed by their kindness. He also remembered noticing that Iofan’s clothes ‘were foreign-made—grey tweed slacks, black sleeveless sweater, white shirt, brown Oxfords with thick sponge soles—which gave him a youthful appearance’.
After tea, Iofan invited Sgovio into the studio and settled down to examine his portfolio of drawings. He looked at them carefully and commented politely, handing them to Olga for her to see the work for herself. Standing in the centre of the room was a model of the Palace of the Soviets. Was this the actual model chosen by Stalin, Sgovio asked? Iofan laughed. ‘No, that one is even larger. This is my personal working model.’ 9CONTINUED FATER THE BREAK)
READERS’ COMMENTS
Edwin Heathcote:
Anthony Paletta:
They talked about New York, a city Iofan had recently visited. He told Sgovio that he did not think much of modern American architecture: ‘It represents an ugly expression of capitalism. The skyscrapers are tall, rectangular boxes, made of shiny steel and stone, made to hide the ghettos of the poor beneath them. This is the architecture of the rich, eh? There is no spaciousness, no room to breathe.’
As Iofan showed him the model of the palace, Sgovio recalls him saying: ‘You see what I mean about spaciousness. The Palace of the Soviets will be the tallest building in the world. The radius of the base is more than its height. Can you imagine the capitalists building something like this in New York? The land on which it would stand costs millions, perhaps billions. It would take centuries for them to capitalize on the cost of the land alone. Here the land belongs to the people, and the Palace of the Soviets will belong to the people.’
Sgovio never did go to art school; he was arrested by the secret police at the gates of the American Embassy shortly after his meeting with Iofan. Convicted of being ‘a socially dangerous element’, he was sentenced to sixteen years of forced labour. He survived a series of prison camps by using his artistic skills to draw tattoos for the criminals who were incarcerated alongside him. Many years later, back in America, he wrote an account of his disillusionment with communism—Iofan never had the chance to read it, but it might have prompted him to see some parallels with his own life story. Both men had joined the Communist Party out of conviction; both had chosen to move with their families to the Soviet Union; and both had used their talents as a means of staying alive.
Boris Mikhailovich Iofan died in 1976, the same year that The House on the Embankment, a bestselling novella by the Moscow writer Yuri Trifonov, was published. Iofan was eighty-four—a long life by any standards, but particularly impressive for the Soviet Union—and being cared for at Barvikha, a sanatorium he had built for the Communist Party elite nearly fifty years earlier.
The House on the Embankment is a lightly fictionalized account of the experiences of people living in Iofan’s austere complex of apartment blocks, located just across the river from the Kremlin. At the time he designed it, in the late 1920s—when the revolution was still a recent memory and an inspiration to many communists—it was known as Government House, and it would be home to most of the Soviet elite during the 1930s. Trifonov’s novella made such an impact that its title immediately became the building’s popular name, and today the House on the Embankment remains one of Moscow’s most prominent landmarks.
Iofan, his wife, two stepchildren and his younger sister Anna were among the first to take up residence in the House, moving in at the start of 1931.
Yuri Trifonov also lived in the House on the Embankment during the 1930s. He was present on the night that his father, who had been a hero of the Bolshevik revolution, was marched away to his death. Shortly afterwards, his mother was sent to a labour camp. Trifonov was just twelve years old at the time; she did not return until he was twenty. Like many other victims of Stalin, the Trifonovs’ truncated lives are commemorated today in the line of wall plaques mounted near the entrances to the House. As many as 800 of their fellow residents – one-third of the people living there in 1932—were eventually arrested by Stalin’s secret policemen, and more than 300 of them were shot.
The House on the Embankment captures the paranoiac mixture of privilege and fear felt by all those, including the Iofans, who lived in this ‘huge grey apartment house with its 1,000 windows giving it the look of a whole town’. Trifonov depicts a building patrolled by white-gloved militiamen, with all-seeing lift operators employed by the Ministry of the Interior guarding access to its apartments, on corridors that smelled of cooking. He portrays the anxiety of lives spent in the unspoken knowledge of secret listening rooms where policemen laboured day and night, transcribing conversations relayed by microphones embedded in walls and listening in on telephone calls. Even as late as the 1970s, these things could not be discussed openly.
The novella examines the awkward relationship between the residents of the House, living in claustrophobic luxury, and those in its shadow who lacked everything. It illuminates the moral squalor of the endless compromises Stalin demanded of the Soviet elite, from admirals to philosophers to schoolchildren, politicians and architects. It exposes the jockeying for position and the emptiness of a society in which the ideology of the state is a weapon to be deployed in settling personal scores. It explores the political uses of privilege in a supposedly classless society.
It is impossible to know whether Boris Iofan read Trifonov’s book before he died. But he might well have encountered Trifonov as a child, decades earlier, playing around the fountain (CONTINUED IN THE BOOK)
