The Soviets were imperialists. Stalin’s architecture proves it

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a Soviet-era architect rather more resonant. Boris Iofan was born to a Russian-speaking Jewish family in Odessa in 1891. After initial studies in his home city and a brief period working with his older brother Dimitri in St Petersburg, he fled the war engulfing Tsarist Russia for Italy, where he trained at the Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Rome. During his ten years abroad he married a half-Russian, half-Italian aristocratic divorcée, became a communist, palled up with the future Soviet premier Aleksei Rykov (who was to act as his political patron before being purged), and saturated himself in the odd melange of classicism, monumentalism and quasi-modernism which was to become his architectural style.

On his return to the recently consolidated Soviet Union, Iofan soon became an influential figure, one of his first commissions being to build a new town to house the families of power-station workers in the Donbas region of his native Ukraine.