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Broadly, Soviet architecture falls into three phases: a futuristic modernism until about the mid-thirties; a period of historicist reference during the Stalin years from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties; then, after Khrushchev’s intervention at the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 at which he condemned monumentalism, a return to modernism but this time of a mass-functionalist kind. On the Moscow State campus, the last two are palpably in play.

Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev was the lead architect on the main building, the largest of “seven sisters” constructed from the late forties to the mid-fifties and still defining the Moscow horizon. Some dimensions: 240 meters tall, 36 floors, 30,000 tons of reinforcing steel, able to house 30,000 students as well as offices and lecture halls. The structure is clad in ceramics, the spires are steel, topped with wreaths encircling red stars of the 1917 revolution.

It took 14,290 construction workers four years to build. Some of the workers were prisoners from the Soviet gulag and German prisoners of war, housed during the last phases of construction in the upper floors of the structure where they could easily be guarded. It was the tallest building in Europe from 1953 to 1990, only to be beaten then by corporate structures. It is still the tallest educational building in the world.⁹⁷

This is a building in its singularity, its instantiation on one place on the Lenin Hills, no other building quite the same, though its sisters are insistently related, of a type. Yet it has its own layering of concepts, of “generalized images”: the red star of communism, hammers and sickles for the workers and peasants. And there are other, more obtuse references. It is somewhat like the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, idealized in Hugh Ferriss' book Metropolis of Tomorrow, which had been translated into Russian in the 1930s.⁹⁸ But it is also quite unlike the American skyscraper, confined as it was by the grid of the city, the cost of real estate, and the impossibility of planning on a large scale in a city divided into small rectangles of private property.

To make the point, the Soviets insisted the seven sisters were “tall buildings,” not “skyscrapers.”⁹⁹ There were references to classicism in the columns, to Babylonian ziggurats in the layers, to the spires and transepts of Gothic cathedrals. If modernism rejected history, one form of its transcendence was a historicism of the kind that “closed its circle,”¹⁰⁰ so taking another path to historical transcendence. Later, in another abstraction, the building becomes a symbol for Moscow, as well as the things that the building itself conceptualizes.

As we got closer, the building loomed larger, then larger, then the intricate conceptual details of its façade came into clearer view and the height of the red star reached closer to the heavens. Rigorous symmetry drew us to the middle door, even though it was not particularly large. From here, we entered a dark labyrinth of corridors, marble clad walls, students scurrying past, seemingly not many of them for spaces so vast.

Somehow, we were pulled to the center, then up some marble stairs into an inner sanctum deep below the tallest of the spires. There we reached a darkened shrine with statues of Marx and Lenin, at once objects of reference to their singular personhood, and representatives of concepts of historical materialism as a system: labor, property, class, and revolution. The lights were off – turned off, we mused, on that day in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved.

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⁹⁷ Owen Hatherley, 2015, Landscapes of Communism, London, UK: Allen Lane, p. 204; Gabriele Basilico, 2009, Vertiginous Moscow, London, UK: Thames and Hudson, p. 8.

⁹⁸ Owen Hatherley, 2015, Landscapes of Communism, London, UK: Allen Lane, p. 209.

⁹⁹ Gabriele Basilico, 2009, Vertiginous Moscow, London, UK: Thames and Hudson, pp. 4, 7; Hugh Ferriss, 1929 [2005], The Metropolis of Tomorrow, New York, NY: Dover Publications.

¹⁰⁰ Vladimir Paperny, 2002, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, translated by J. Hill and R. Barris, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 19.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 112-114. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Lev Rudinev’s Moscow State University §MS1.1.3g