Zubovich , Katherine Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 784 of the Vodlozero National Park in Karelia. Working heroically through the catastrophe of the 1990s, Cherviakov imbued his park with a messianic mission of spiritual renewal for all of humanity. Even though Vodlozero has failed to meet those grandiose goals, the man’s clarity of vision (or illusion) emanates from the text, reminiscent of medieval Russian monks’ transfiguration of Solovki described by Alexei Kraikovskii and Julia Lajus. In another chapter, Mark Sokolsky grapples forthrightly with the fact that the most progressive conservation measures in the Russian Far East were undertaken in conjunction with classist and racist exclusion. Even more troublingly, the Soviet Union’s signalsuccessinconservingtheAmur(Siberian)Tiger,oncethoughthopelessly on the road to extinction, resulted largely from the state’s increasing violence and repression. Similarly, Robert Dale pinpoints Soviet authoritarianism as a signature strength in its reaction to a 1924 Leningrad flood. In one of the book’s photo essays, dealing with the industrial history of the northern Urals, Catherine Evtuhov reports returning to St Petersburg ‘somewhat crumpled […] but thrilled by the intensity of our experiences and encounters’ (p. 183). Readers of Place and Nature will feel a similar thrill and intensity from the sense of material immediacy and unresolved contradiction the book provides, while — hopefully — avoiding the crumpling. Department of History Ryan Tucker Jones University of Oregon Zubovich, Katherine. Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2021. xii + 274 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. $39.95: £34.00. Moscow Monumental focuses on the plan announced in 1947 to design nine imposing neo-Gothic skyscrapers to be distributed across the Soviet capital like grandiose, ornate charms on a commanding chain — eight buildings intended primarily for residential use by different constituencies, plus the long-delayed Palace of Soviets — and describes the bureaucratic efforts and urban ramifications as seven of the nine buildings were constructed over the course of the ensuing five years. Supported by an array of original material from Moscow archives, the book attends especially to such topics as the interest on the part of Soviet architects and engineers in selected precedents in the United States, the influx of workers into Moscow to carry out the necessary construction labour, the urban displacement the overall process entailed, and Muscovites’ efforts to obtain homes within the new, magisterial structures. Katherine Zubovich builds her story, as it were, from the ground up, exploring REVIEWS 785 the experiences and perspectives of those most immediately engaged in and affected by the planning and construction of these extraordinary edifices. Intended as towering symbols of Stalinist power and achievement and easily the best-known Soviet buildings (at least to those outside the discipline of architecture history), Moscow’s ‘seven sisters’ served from the start as midcentury modern havens for members of the Soviet elite. In 1952, one juicy archival morsel reveals, Lily Brik entreated Lavrentii Beria — without success — for a home for herself and her second husband, the critic Vasilii Katanian, noting:‘Thedoctorsaysthatafifth-floorapartmentwithnoelevatorwillkillme. Comrades who are already living in the tall building on the Kotel´nicheskaya embankment have told me that there are some 3-room apartments there still unoccupied’ (p. 172). The towers’ construction tore Moscow apart and proved equally tumultuous for the city’s inhabitants, many of whom were dislodged to the urban outskirts, as Zubovich details in the four strongest of the book’s eight carefully circumscribed chapters (‘Moscow of the Plan’, ‘Moscow of the Shadows’, ‘The Vysotniki’ and ‘The View from the Top’). While centred on the five-year span from 1947 to the buildings’ completion, Moscow Monumental begins its tale two decades earlier, with an engaging chapter entitled ‘Red Moscow’ structured around seven images from an album of photographs of Moscow published in Berlin in 1928. Questions of architectural representation (visual or discursive) otherwise play little role in the book, which addresses process more than product, although Zubovich tantalizingly notes that the Palace of the Soviets, while never built, nevertheless existed ‘in text and images, not to mention candy wrappers and stationery’ (p. 28). Chapter two, ‘The Palace’, presents the history of the ongoing competitions for the Palace of Soviets from 1931 to 1934 — all overseen...