Author Deyan Sudjic's groundbreaking history is shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize.
Iofan is perhaps the only architect who is most famous for what he did not build. In Chapter Four, Sudjic traces the rise and fall of the architect’s dreams for the Palace of the Soviets, a monumental structure — part seat of government, part forum for mass public spectacles — that was meant to be the tallest building in the world. This chapter includes some of the book’s most striking images, including the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior — which Stalin had decided should make way for this Soviet fantasy in stone — and a selection of Iofan’s sketches showing the various iterations of his design. After World War II halted its construction and claimed the lives of most of his team, the project “slipped away from him as he worked through six ever more dispiriting new versions.”
Anyone who has strolled along the banks of the Moscow River in the center of Russia’s capital will likely be familiar with the stolid and rather intimidating Soviet edifice sitting on the western tip of Bolotny island across a stretch of river from the Kremlin. This is the House on the Embankment — Dom na Naberezhnoi — one-time home, or rather fortress, of the Soviet elite.
What is likely to be less familiar is the life of the man who created it: Boris Mikhailovich Iofan. It is his story that Deyan Sudjic recounts in "Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow." In just under 300 pages, Sudjic takes the reader from Iofan’s birth in the Silver Age of the Russian Empire to his death in the midst of Brezhnev-era stagnation, charting the architect’s tumultuous — and, more often than not, uncomfortably close — relationship with the highest echelons of Soviet power.
The book is chronological, with the first two chapters covering Iofan’s early life from his childhood in Odesa to his stint in the Italian Communist Party. From the very beginning, Sudjic shows, Iofan was willing to make compromises in order to survive. Born Borukh Solomonovich Iofan, the son of “respectable middle [class]” Jews changed his name to the Slavic-sounding “Boris Mikhailovich” in response to “Russia’s vicious anti-Semitism [...] as well as a reflection of his embrace of militant secularism.”
The next three chapters take us through Iofan’s return from Italy to Moscow, charting his ascendance from talented but relatively unknown young architect to the Generalissimo’s architect of choice, tasked with designing and building the “Vatican of Socialism.” In the final two chapters, Sudjic illustrates Iofan’s rather ignoble decline from the go-to architect of the Soviet elite to a relic of Stalinist excess who “put most of his energy into making increasingly forlorn submissions for competitions that he never won.”
....