Moscow's First Urban Revolution
“After the revolution, art was to create in socialist culture a complicated binding of the new and the conservative. No one had previously determined what sort of architecture should exist” (Ryabushin and Smolina 9).
These opening words to Ryabushin and Smolina overview of all Soviet architecture from 1917-1991 could be equally well suited to the start of an overview of Russian architecture from 1991 to the present if one were to only change “revolution” to “dissolution” and “socialist” to “Russian.” Far from a coincidence, the impact on Moscow's architecture and cityscape that resulted from 1991’s fall of the Soviet Union has a spiritual ancestor in that of 1917’s Russian revolution. At the heart of these two periods of immense upheaval was a tension created between the new national identity and the physical structures of the urban landscape left-over from the old nation, the transformation of which could never match the pace of Russian politics in either era. Looking to the 1920’s as a useful foil for the 1990’s, it becomes possible to see the ways in which this secondary “revolution” of urban form is exponentially more complicated and even unsettling than the comparative simplicity of the first.
In the 1920’s, the architectural avant-garde emerged with sets of designs that spoke to a futurism befitting a socialist utopia. A work from one of the notable architects of the day, Vladamir Taltin’s Monument to the Third International reveals an almost cathartic desire beneath this style with the “spiral form, the planetary incline and the dynamism of the three graduated units convey[ing] the idea of world reconstruction” (Ryabushin and Smolina 9). This immense creative outburst quickly came to a close in the 1930’s in a return more traditional forms, a metamorphoses which slowly had “ripened from the inside [of Russia], secretly, and for a long time was actively maintained by a strengthening cult of Stalin” (Ryabushin and Smolina 28). The climax, perhaps, of the avant-garde narrative in Moscow (or the beginning signs of its corruption), was possibly when Le Corbusier was solicited for his opinion on a set of set of thirty questions posed by Soviet government officials on their new plans for Moscow’s urban expansion, the second to last question of which was:
Question “29. Which elements of the city and which architectural monuments of historic or revolutionary significance should be preserved on the future site of Moscow?” (Cohen 137)
Le Corbusier’s “Response,” which aimed to turn “Moscow into a ‘great modern city’ left standing only the Kremlin, the church of St. Basil, the Bolshoi theater, the Lenin Mausoleum, and occasional religious edifices” (Cohen 141). What makes this exchange so unsettling is not that so few monuments were spared, but that the question could even be posed in the first place. To have one question on a list determine the fate of enormous historical sites both trivializes their value in addition to revealing how radical changes to the urban environment can be executed (even hypothetically so) in a fairly casual manner when central authority is involved. While the 1990's would porport to have no such entity behind urban development, the situation is not the clean break that Ryabushin and Smolina describe in the beginning of their account of the post-revolution avant-garde.