Stairway to Heaven

“Every architect’s career,” writes Deyan Sudjic, “is based to a greater or lesser extent on the skill with which they perform the survival dance with the rich, the powerful, and the famous.” An instructive example: David Chipperfield, recipient of the 2023 Pritzker Prize, was one of several prominent Western European architects to suspend business ties with Russia after it launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine the previous year. The protestation, which ended up costing Chipperfield’s office upwards of $1.5 million in Moscow billings, belied a prior willingness to cozy up to a de facto police state that had already displayed a belligerent attitude toward its southern neighbor in 2014. To wit: Chipperfield’s accountants admitted in a February 2023 losses report that before the invasion they had eyed Putin’s Russia as a source for revenue growth. Scratch an architect and you’ll find a petty proprietor.

A thin skin being a congenital trait among the draughtsman class, even an epidermal breach can be psychically wounding. Better to insulate oneself in the steel wool of power, suggests the author of The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World (2005). In Stalin’s Architect (2022), he recounts the life of Soviet designer Boris Iofan, who inveigled himself among the dictator’s inner circle. What could have been a declensionist parable of humanist principles all too easily relinquished—Iofan was a committed Communist and not without a utopian streak—is instead a biography that glides by on secondhand aperçus and sometimes tawdry metaphor. It mostly presents a limit case of the proverbial “survival dance,” where a wrong foot or superfluous toe-tap might be met with disapproval in the form of a death sentence. Those who managed to keep in step with the ever-changing party line endured a thousand private ignominies, held at bay through a sociopathic process of hardening (a slightly gentler analogue for which might be careerism). From this might follow disassociation: In candid photographs of Iofan, he appears withdrawn and remote, the stress of living through turbulent times boring into him. Yet he was proud of the station he secured for himself and wasn’t averse to showing off. In a culled snapshot, Iofan and his wife, the Russo-Italian aristocrat Olga Sasso-Ruffo, pose in front of a Buick convertible he had shipped from the United States after a visit there—an acute mark of status. Likewise, the sun-kissed Moscow penthouse Iofan and Sasso-Ruffo shared with her two children from a previous marriage, as well as a maid, was a stark contrast to the city’s ramshackle communal apartments in which working-class families were packed four to a room. Hypocrisies great and small come in for Sudjic’s censure; his book is also filled with devilish ironies. Not long after the USSR fell, a giant, spinning Mercedes-Benz star was installed on a tower of Iofan’s House of Government, the massive modern domicile in which the architect and approximately 2,700 others—members of nomenklatura and their families—had lived. The emblem, signifying prestige in Nazi Germany and then luxury throughout the world, eventually came down, but the apartment remains in the family.

Born in 1891 in Odesa, Iofan was a lifelong party man who outlived nearly all his comrades, dying in a suburban Moscow sanatorium of his own design in 1976. Good social connections had impelled his rise, but they couldn’t always be counted upon for success or safety. According to the grim calculus of suspicion that underwrote the Great Purges, party affiliations could be exploited as inculpatory evidence, expressions of faith slandered as deathly subterfuge. Spotless records were deemed untrustworthy, so the many criticisms colleagues hurled Iofan’s way may have burnished his reputation in the eyes of his minders. The question of what Iofan was—rather than who he was—vexes Sudjic. Without the benefit of a diary or elucidating personal correspondence (Iofan appears to have left neither), he is chary about taking up the typical biographical mode, sliding, as it can, between vicarious soul-searching and ventriloquism. (Though early on, in a wincing aside, he admits to feeling a connection with Iofan, who “looked disarmingly like my own father.”) Sudjic’s caution is commendable, but it also produces a limp characterization. The inner life remains elusive as ever, with Sudjic filling in the blanks through informed guesswork. Skeptical of the architect’s official self-representations and unmoved by his stiff speechifying, he fastens onto Iofan’s sketchbooks as an interpretive ballast. The drawings, he writes, “especially seemed to offer a way into his mind: for an architect, it is much harder to conceal feelings in a drawing than in a safely typed sentence.” This is pat and closely recalls an old gobbet of Le Corbusier’s—“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster and leaves less room for lies”—that has given cover for a great number of architects. Sudjic is partial to chestnuts, as when he twice invokes Orwell’s musing about the tainted ministrations provided to architecture and the other “half-arts” by “totalitarian” regimes, which otherwise drain literature and the visual arts of their potency. He surmises that Iofan “seems to have been driven by the eternal instinct of an architect to build at any cost.” If only that instinct alone had sufficed: Iofan maintained a design practice for at least fifty years, enjoyed a public profile for two decades, and still built little of lasting consequence.

The commemorative lacquer box the architect received as a recipient of a Stalin Prize in 1941 offers a guileless accounting of his slim achievements. Iofan’s likeness, fuller faced than he was in life, peers out from a crepuscular sky, his hawkish gaze directed away from the architectonic shards marshaled in the remaining three-quarters of the picture plane. Of the three buildings depicted, two are temporary pavilions he designed for consecutive World’s Fairs. Some attempt has been made to imbue the 1939 New York folly and its 1937 Paris antecedent—in effect, podia for sculptures of brawny Soviet archetypes—with granitic permanence and symbolic thrust. The aforementioned House of Government, which Iofan saw to completion in 1932, appears sublunary, irresolute, small; the lumpen pile seems to have given the unnamed box painter some real trouble.

Omitted from this pictorial ledger was the Palace of the Soviets, whose realization Iofan quixotically pursued for half his life. In 1932, he was tasked with organizing the competition for the design and, after four rounds, emerged as the winner. Stalin ordered the demolition of an imperial-era cathedral in central Moscow to ready the ground for the immense undertaking. A meeting place for party congresses and delegations from the Communist International, it was also intended to be a towering monument to Lenin and—why not?—the tallest building in the world. Chapbooks and broadsheets hymned the heroic efforts of the council overseeing the construction—a would-be triumph of geology, engineering, and sculpture. Various species of stone were to be procured from quarries all over the USSR to line the interiors of the voluminous palace, estimated to be 230 million cubic feet. (Moving walkways were to expedite the journey from one end to the other, while innumerable methods of conveyance would ferry visitors up the palace’s bulk and Lenin’s exaggeratedly stocky frame.) A special impermeable bitumen lining was developed to prevent river water from seeping into the gaping foundation pit. Factories were erected on the outskirts of the capital for the express purpose of churning out the steel required to piece together the building’s skeleton. From his aerie in the House of Government, Iofan could clock the progress of the steel-framers; they had gotten a few stories off the ground when the Wehrmacht crossed onto the Great Steppe.

Iofan never renounced the project, which was to remain a vast penumbra on the Moscow skyline throughout the Stalin years. The tower was pure confection; its likeness appeared on wrapped morsels produced by the Red October Chocolate Factory. In Aleksandr Deineka’s Stakhanovites (1937), a socialist-realist grande machine exhibited at Iofan’s Paris Pavilion, it bears down on a parade of model workers like sunshine. Indeed, the palace carried within its design the seeds of a new Moscow, whose “majestic and simple” architecture, a trade journal foretold, “would give birth to new joyful feelings between the individual and the collective.” The reality was neither joyful nor simple. There existed no definitive plan for the Palace of the Soviets, only accumulating plans, each “definitive” in their turn yet destined for the same fate: the trash heap. (As in a scenario straight out of Platonov, it was likely the builders did not know the full ends of their labor.) Luring Frank Lloyd Wright to speak at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937, Iofan escorted the elder man around the changing capital. A flattered Wright held off for as long as he could before gently chiding his host about the profane “Work Palace” he had seen propagandized everywhere. Espousing a distinctly Bolshevik optimism, Iofan is said to have shrugged off the reproval: “Never mind, Mr. Wright. It will improve as we go along. We are studying it continually.” In another version of the story, his retort is almost swaggering. “Never mind,” he says to Wright, “we will tear it down in ten years.”

The historian Katherine Zubovich has noted how in its architectural and urban planning prescriptions Bolshevism cycled between iconoclasm and iconophilia. Thus did Iofan. His emergence on the Moscow scene in 1925 was as a participant in a public competition for a temporary Lenin mausoleum in Red Square; his (losing) scheme for a square tomb supporting an engorged Doric column clumsily assimilated classical signifiers as well as the sardonic comportment of Adolf Loos’s unbuilt tower for the Chicago Tribune of a few years earlier. Iofan then tried to pass as a “Constructivist” (the label Sudjic adopts for a wide and varied camp of Soviet modernists), but by all indications, his talent and temperament were not suited to the vituperative atmosphere in which the avant-gardes thrived. Iofan was not disposed to the choleric mood of negation. Finding consolation in antiquity, he aimed to distinguish himself from a crowded field of squabbling abstractionists, whose degree-zero ambitions presupposed a clearing away of history. Drama. Verticality. Monumentality. These, too, he argued, were qualities in need of modern—indeed, Socialist—expression. Counterintuitively, he took as his models the sepulchral architecture of Hadrian’s Rome and the latest American skyscrapers. The search for a synthesis would lead him in some strange directions.

“Wherever I might travel, whatever I might see,” Iofan wrote in an article for Pravda, “I approach everything from a particular point of view—what of all this has to be taken home to the Soviet Union.” Unusual for an apparatchik, he was well-traveled and openly reveled at the architectural innovation he witnessed abroad, particularly in the United States. This worldliness did not go unnoticed. Following an antisemitic turn in Soviet cultural policy in the 1940s, after which “cosmopolitanism” came to be seen as a threat to national prestige, the career to which Stalin’s Architect attends was hamstrung, in the end, by state-sanctioned bigotry. Iofan was Jewish. Solomon Iofan made his living as a hotelier, but in his son’s later telling of his childhood, revised and partly concocted with Soviet mores in mind, he was demoted to the position of bellhop. The four Solomonovich children assumed the patronymic Mikhailovich, or Mikailovicha in the case of the two girls. Unlike his brother Dmitry, who met fast success as an architect in St. Petersburg, Boris (a Russified variation of Borukh, his birth name) failed to gain admission to the Imperial Academy. This setback proved to be fateful to his development, however. As Sudjic notes, “gifted Jewish students were accustomed to being compelled to leave Russia and study abroad because of the discriminatory quota system.” With war imminent in the Germanophone countries that were the typical destinations of study, Iofan instead elected to travel to Italy in early 1914.

In Rome, he attended the Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti, apprenticed in the studio of Armando Brasini (an operatic eminence who won the approbation of Mussolini), and consorted with Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, and other leading Italian Communists. On his repatriation to Russia in 1924, Iofan presented himself as a foreign-trained technical specialist of the sort that the young, war-ravaged country hoped to recruit in its breakneck campaign of industrialization. Mindful that he had missed the revolution, he set up his atelier near the Kremlin and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, whose politburo had begun to develop an antipathy toward architects with designs on a socialist empyrean in which the Central Executive Committee was accorded no role. In Iofan, party leaders such as Soviet premier Aleksei Rykov, who became a confidant toward the end of his Roman sojourn, found someone they could use.

Yet the attention party heads paid him was hardly undivided, a fact that Sudjic downplays. Throughout the 1930s, the period of his greatest influence, Iofan faced stiff competition from those to his “right” as well as his “left.” (This distorted polarity was uniquely distorted and capricious in the political context of Stalinism, during which principled positions, forged over years of revolutionary struggle, were devoured by the maw of expediency.) He was prepared to conform on a moment’s notice to the unfolding dialectic as “revealed” by the all-knowing autarch, but so were many others. Alexey Shchusev, Ivan Zholtovsky, and Ivan Fomin—the grizzled poputchiki, or fellow travelers, who came up in the prerevolutionary period and were to Iofan’s right—more seamlessly transitioned from neoclassicism to Constructivism and back. Andrei Burov, Iofan’s junior by nine years, came eventually to disown “Corbusianry”—a clunky epithet marking the left (and ultra-left) functionalists under the sway of the French purist—and applied his considerable intelligence to the problem of historicism. The engineer and reluctant architect Ivan Rerberg spurned purism and was rewarded with major commissions such as the Central Telegraph building, which Chipperfield was busy renovating when Putin moved on Ukraine. Then there was Miron Merzhanov, who had been chosen in 1933 to design Stalin’s personal dacha outside of Moscow, plus other getaways, including the dictator’s summer house in Sochi. The centerpiece of this Caucasian resort town, the Marine Station, was the work of the sanguinary Karo Alabyan, Iofan’s chief rival within the architect’s cell of the Communist Party. Both competed for the same commissions and were equally capable of putting the classical orders to unseemly ends. But where Iofan was circumspect, Alabyan was pugnacious and openly jockeyed for influence. When the Great Terror arrived in 1936, he greased the wheels of the tumbrel, siccing the secret police on his associates.

In Sudjic’s densely populated book, these figures are summoned and just as quickly scattered to the winds. But each was alive to the challenge posed to them by Lazar Kaganovich, a remarkably effective factotum who enforced the Leader’s will in the areas of urban planning, railway administration, heavy industry, petroleum production, and grain procurement, resulting, in the last case, in the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. Seeking to discipline architects said to have been driven wild by utopian fervor, he restructured the profession into a single union, where well-placed informants could more easily monitor their starry-eyed colleagues. He continued to carp about “Marxist science in architecture [being] less rich than in other areas.” That architects were on the whole unwilling to join the party stratum invited suspicion, so Kaganovich brought them to heel: Either relinquish their prior commitments to avant-gardism or be marginalized. The reformed were then charged with transposing the diktat of socialist realism from its basis in literature to the building arts. But there was a problem: Neither Kaganovich nor Vyacheslav Molotov, who replaced the luckless Rykov (abducted from his apartment in the House of Government, he was imprisoned for treason and later shot) as premier and chaired the Palace of the Soviets’ construction council, had provided a theory from which to work. Apart from some casuistry about the superiority of classical referents and an almost libidinal desire for monumentality, a basic criterion was not forthcoming.

Commencing with the First Five-Year Plan of 1928, Stalin’s revolution from above was designed to liquidate private enterprise and jump-start modernization. This bureaucratical crusade was abetted by the creation of a cultural imagination that counterposed traditional Russian “backwardness” to a “radiant future” of plenty guaranteed through adherence to Marxist orthodoxy and the laws of history it disclosed. Architecture was drafted into the role of scenography, with Stalin acting as réalisateur. Even in the years of the Thaw, semiapocryphal tales of Stalin’s design prowess persisted. He was rumored, for instance, to have played a determinative role in Shchusev’s scheme for the Hotel Moskva, built in 1935 as a gateway to Red Square. His unique powers of judgment naturally compelled him to adjudicate the finer points of composition, as when he instructed Kaganovich to substitute red stars, extant to this day, for the Romanov eagles at the tips of the Kremlin’s spires. Reportage from the period gave the impression that Stalin had personally directed the design of the Palace of the Soviets, leaving the details to be worked out by Iofan and his team. The historian Dmitry Khmelnitsky felt justified in reassigning authorship entirely in the favor of the potentate.

It’s a bizarre claim, but one with explanatory power: Only an untutored hand with the might of a demiurge could have produced something so objectionable. The record shows that Stalin cajoled Iofan into doubling the height of the palace and placing a gigantic statue of Lenin at the summit. Panic struck the committee men in charge of the construction. Skyscraper technology in the USSR had scarcely progressed beyond a dozen stories, yet the council was being asked to deliver a feat greater than the Empire State Building. (And sillier: Imagine Shreve, Lamb & Harmon electing to terminate their strapping sky-climber not with a spire but with the Statue of Liberty.) Sudjic recounts an episode in which Molotov chastens Iofan, demanding to know “How could you, as the main architect, approve this project?” We gather that Iofan was far from the safe bet suggested by his party rank. The fiasco of the House of Government’s construction—it burned a crater-sized hole in the budget and had to be restarted after a spectacular conflagration, not before the worksite became a haven for sex workers—should have shaken his backers more than it did. And with each new draft—one more improvident than the last—he allowed the Palace of the Soviets to float higher into an illusory realm. For Sudjic, this tendency toward phantasmatic accretion corresponded to a totalizing social unreality, one that would ultimately spiral into murderous chaos.

His dark, Conquestian subtitle, “Power and Survival in Moscow,” clues readers into the dramatic stakes of the Stalinist purges. It also serves a simple marketing purpose. In 2022, Sudjic was one of two authors to release a book about Iofan called Stalin’s Architect, the other being Vladimir Sedov, a professor at Moscow State University. If Sudjic’s historical analysis can at times feel secondhand, Sedov’s bears the mark of a first-rate researcher. But the draw of The Rise and Fall of Boris Iofan, the subtitle of his volume, isn’t the writing, which is by turns stilted and overblown. Essentially a critical portfolio, the study vividly traces the development of Iofan’s architectural ideas over time. It gives a constellating coherence to the motifs, figurations, and syntheses Iofan would return to again and again—and in this way, it affords an insight into the anxiety of influence that for architects assumes the form and weight of “precedent.” Of course, the expectation that an analysis of past conventions—and of the slyest subversions of those conventions—will illuminate the path forward misunderstands the purpose of analysis. As Iofan’s life experiences suggest, you don’t choose precedent; precedent chooses you.

The architect’s drawings contain flashes of intelligence as well as a quicksilver impulse. The young Iofan adopted many moods—neoclassicism then eclecticism, modernism then a wily composite that indulged in Renaissance bigness and art deco merriment. He encountered deco’s American strain on a 1934 delegation to New York. The purpose of the trip, which also covered Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, had been to gain technical insights that could be implemented in the building of the Palace of the Soviets. With his colleagues Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh in tow, Iofan inspected Rockefeller Center and the interiors of the RCA Building; a few months after Diego Rivera’s unsubtle Leninalia had been hastily purged from the lobby, a brigade of “reds” idled on the premises. The raked profiles and pinstripe lines of New York’s newest skyscrapers, especially those of the RCA Building, began to sneak into Iofan’s sketches for the palace. He studied its silhouette, assaying its potency while refining the interrelationship of the sphinxlike base to the telescoping trunk. He deliberated over the necessity of cornices and ventured different intensities of sculpture, the content of which was to redeem the martyred revolutionaries of the past and at the same time affirm the masses of the socialist destiny that awaited them. Meanwhile, the present vanished under a veil of sacrifice and recrimination.

Had they been realized, the decorative bas-relief friezes devised by Iofan and his workshop would have spanned roughly two miles lengthwise. Projective effigies of Marx and Engels have a lumbering pensiveness that is reminiscent of Michelangelo. The figure of Lenin undergoes many metamorphoses: In one treatment, he exudes the equanimity of a Caesar; in another, the brusque demeanor of a trade-union heavy (“Len”). If conjecture is an accepted peccadillo of the biographical genre, so is aggrandizement. In Iofan’s sketchy strokes of graphite Sedov intuits the creative cogito of a genius. But none of the material supports this view; Iofan was neither a helpless bystander nor the empowered adjutant, à la Speer, that a reader might infer from Sudjic and Sedov’s shared title. Unwilling or unable to query the impossible demands of his minders, he seems simply to have lost himself in his work. This was particularly true with the Palace of the Soviets, whose mongrel parti had, and hadn’t, been masterminded by the steely man with the snow-shovel mustache. Stalin’s imperatives to “go high,” to affect a “powerful” posture, and to establish a “union” between building and heroic adornment were taken up by Iofan with the greatest seriousness. Nearly all his major projects, including a commission for Moscow State University that was taken from him in the late 1940s following his fall from favor, restate the same defeated formula. Architecture became the pretext for a sculpture obscene in its proportions, as if to elide the “duck/decorated shed” distinction posed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown a generation later. And to what conceivable end? Precisely as the chances of world revolution were being dashed, Stalinism demanded worshipful prostration before the “accomplished fact” of socialism. Like the church orthodoxy it displaced, the Stalinist cult was reliant on the sort of “sedative generalizations” Trotsky derided in his 1937 book The Revolution Betrayed. As Muscovites would have known from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty (1889)—a favorite ballet throughout the Soviet period—the soporific can easily be mistaken for the dead. In one black-and-white artist’s impression Iofan prepared for the Palace of the Soviets, a mortuary chill permeates the scene of a mass rally in which orderly regiments of workers file past the tower. The banners they carry say nothing; the flags they hoist overhead sag. They themselves are faceless, as is the sky-splitting colossus meant to spur them on. Shadows and liturgy: The storming of heaven, this isn’t.

In the period of de-Stalinization, Iofan was ostracized as a living reminder of a regrettable past; Nikita Khrushchev had the cheek to fill in the foundation pit of the Palace of the Soviets with a public pool, and Iofan quietly followed his fellow architects into a wan modernism with aspirations of material economy and little else. And yet, the incurious restraint of this mode made it amenable to Khrushchev’s highly effective mass housing campaign, whose legacy Putin was determined to expurgate before becoming bogged down in Ukraine. When Odesa was subjected to rocket attacks early in the war—which now looks to be caught in prolonged stalemate—sandbags were piled high around historical landmarks. These included an opera house with rococo furbelows that Iofan scorned as “the disastrous architecture of the 1880s.” A stone’s throw away lie a monument to a French duke and the so-called Potemkin Stairs. The latter’s steeply pitched treads, separated by ten broad landings, lead down to the harbor. From the water’s edge, they appear as a single flight of steps; implacable in their rise, they drive a gleaming granite polygon through the natural topography, pointing beyond the aged, coppered aristocrat toward that thing called modernity. As much was suggested by Sergei Eisenstein in his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, whose pivotal action unfolds on the stairway. The Bolsheviks, inheritors of the 1905 mutineers enshrined in Soviet memory, had opened a portal, and who at the time knew where it might lead? Now we know.