Alexey Shchusev Architect of Stalin's Empire Style

Alexey Shchusev (1873?–?1949) was one of the very few architects who managed to rise to the top of the architectural hierarchy under the tsars and then to repeat this success under Soviet rule. Already before the Revolution of 1917, Shchusev was an acclaimed Revivalist architect, well-known for his church designs and Moscow’s Kazan Station. In the 1920s, he became a renowned Constructivist. Following the official renunciation of Avant-Garde architecture ordered by Stalin, Shchusev swiftly became an advocate of Socialist Classicism, designing many projects in the dictator’s favoured Empire Style in order to satisfy the Stalinist state’s needs for monumental representation. This monograph offers a critical view on Alexey Shchusev’s work. The architectural historian Dmitrij Chmelnizki pursues the mysteries of one of the most famous Soviet architects whose name and work has remained a marginal note outside the Russian-speaking academic world to this day. But the book also shows that Shchusev’s planning assignments in the twilight Soviet society require more intensive research. A future generation of architectural historians may be better able to answer the question of how independent such research will be possible in today’s Russia.