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. Most notably, he went on to design the House on the Embankment in Moscow, a proto-gated community for the Communist party’s nomenklatura; the Barvikha sanatorium (where they went for rest cures, voluntary or mandatory); and the Soviet Union’s two pavilions at the 1937 Exposition in Paris and the 1939 one in New York. These structures were all actually built; but the one with which Iofan became most closely associated was barely started, let alone completed. It is this building that preoccupied him for decades and which Deyan Sudjic places at the centre of his measured, unflashy account of the architect’s life and works.

While the House on the Embankment became a sort of pre-stressed concretisation of tyranny, as throughout Stalin’s successive purges its notionally privileged tenants informed on one another to his secret police, the Palace of the Soviets remained at best a model or graphic abstraction.