Architectes soviétiques, ou le socialisme à façade presque humaine

Abstract

Visionaries convinced that they were inventing the world of the Revolution, prerevolutionary specialists adapting themselves to the new Soviet standards, courtiers surviving every political shift in the tide, professionals crushed by the fights between rival spheres of influence : if this description could apply to the members of the Politburo or the Writers Union, it also fits to the architects who defined the monumental appearance of the USSR. So, although he designed the Lenin Mausoleum, Alekseï Chtchoussev was accused of being a "bourgeois exploiter». A respected teacher, Ivan Zholtovski experienced many personal attacks because of his apolitical stance. Virulent opponents of the constructivists whom they pushed aside mercilessly, Arkadi Mordvinov and Karo Alabian seemed triumphant Macbeths of the Stalinist era - before they too were ostracized during the period of destalinization. Having worshipped Le Corbusier, modernists such as Andrei' Burov and Nikolai Kolli tried to erase their past, painfully preserving a place in the Soviet architectural world. After 1945, architects such as Evgueni Rozanov or Mikhail Posokhine seemed the perfect homo sovieticus : born at the same time as the Revolution, but raised with the Soviet bureaucracy, they were skilled in the art of political survival and the use of an increasingly artificial communist rhetoric - giving to the regime the illusion of imperial greatness. Through these typical personalities, we can see how these professionals evolved, how they invented a Soviet way of being an architect - and how their ideological or aesthetic strategies had an impact on the architecture of the Soviet Union.