Stalinist Classicism

Stalinist Classicism, also called Socialist Classicism, was the official architecture of the Soviet Union from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s. It used the columns, cornices and symmetrical plans of classical architecture at very large scale, usually on granite or heavy stone bases. Facades carry statues of workers, soldiers and farmers and Soviet emblems such as the hammer and sickle, wreaths and five-pointed stars. Tall buildings rise in setbacks, each tier narrower than the one below, and end in a spire.

Moscow's Seven Sisters (1947-1957) are the best-known examples. The tallest, the main building of Moscow State University (1949-1953) by Lev Rudnev, is 240 meters high. Rudnev also designed the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw (1952-1955), and Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee is lined with eight-story apartment blocks faced in ceramic tiles. Moscow Metro stations such as Mayakovskaya (1938) and Komsomolskaya (1952) have marble columns and ceiling mosaics. Rudnev drew on American Art Deco skyscrapers for the Warsaw tower, which shares their setbacks but adds classical columns and sculpture.

The style replaced the Soviet avant-garde in the early 1930s. In the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931-1933), Stalin chose Boris Iofan's classical design, publicly approved in May 1933. In September 1933 Moscow's architects were assigned to twenty city workshops, most led by traditionalists. The palace was never built, but the first Moscow Metro line, opened in 1935, and the 1938 stations Mayakovskaya and Ploshchad Revolyutsii, with its bronze statues, followed the new approach.

After World War II, a decree of January 1947 launched Moscow's high-rise program, and the style spread across the Eastern Bloc. The Palace of Culture and Science was a gift from the Soviet Union to Poland, the Latvian Academy of Sciences in Riga was built in 1951-1961, and East Berlin's Stalinallee, renamed Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961, was built with towers by Hermann Henselmann at Strausberger Platz and Frankfurter Tor. After Stalin's death in 1953, a decree of November 1955 on eliminating excess in design and construction ended the style. Projects already under way were finished in simplified form, and the last late Stalinist metro stations opened in 1958.