Leningrad: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955–1991

Anna Bronovitskaya, Nikolay Malinin, Yuri Palmin

Leningrad: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955–1991

Authors

Anna Bronovitskaya

Nikolay Malinin

Photographer

Yuri Palmin

Consultant

Vadim Bass

Project Manager

Olga Dubitskaya

Translators

Tobin Auber

Alastair Gill

Editor

Ruth Addison

Proofreader

Alfred Salisbury

DesignABCdesignDesign and layout

Dmitry Mordvintsev

Svetlana Danilyuk

Narine Faramazyan

Maps

Darya Goryacheva

Architectural Drafter

Elizaveta Mordvintseva

Prepress

Anastasia Ageeva

Tatyana Borisova

Svetlana Danilyuk

Darya Goryacheva

Ekaterina Pankratova

www.garagemca.org/en

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or otherwise transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

© Anna Bronovitskaya, Nikolay Malinin, texts, 2021

© Yuri Palmin, photographs, 2021

© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2025

© IRIS Foundation, 2025

© ABCdesign, layout, 2025

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

From the Authors

Every book in this series begins with apologies. This time, they are particularly apposite. After all, how can children of the south (and Muscovites at that) write a book about St. Petersburg?

There is competition between major cities in many countries (New York and Washington, D.C., Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Montreal and Toronto), but in Russia, the struggle (let’s face it, the enmity) between St. Petersburg and Moscow has long since become a cultural and political phenomenon.

And, of course, any Petersburger will tell you that Muscovites not only use the wrong words for curbstone and entrance but that they are, in general, ruder and more vulgar. In the “cultural capital,” every drunk knows that “the delicatessen on Rakova Street was built by an architect from Krakow,”[1] and every schoolchild can tell the difference between “empire style and baroque, like you could distinguish firs from pines at that age.”[2]

The jealousy and envy Petersburgers feel for Muscovites (because the capital moved and because “all the money’s in Moscow”) are not blunted by the fact that St. Petersburg was preserved thanks to Moscow. Not only in the 1930s, when Moscow was transformed into the “capital of communism,” but in the 1960s, when Moscow was straightened out and warped again on a wave of impulses generated by the “thaw.”

Accordingly, the choice of Leningrad as the subject of a book in this series is a little strange. Here Soviet modernist architecture is not so striking as in Moscow (or Alma-Ata,[3] the subject of the second book in the series). This architecture does not define the face of the city, and in the center of St. Petersburg there is very little of it. When it is there, the architecture is a distinct compromise.

A common characteristic of Soviet modernism is its constant circumspectness, its timidity and even fear, which distinguish it from international modernism. This is not difficult to explain when looking at the historical context. Despite having dumped Stalin, the country did not reject Lenin, and in the same way that its attempts at renovation were half-baked, so was its architecture. Sergei Dovlatov hit the nail on the head: “We ended up in a newly constructed district. Glass, concrete, identical buildings. I said to Naiman, ‘I’m sure Pushkin would not have agreed to live in this horrible place.’ Naiman answered, ‘I’m sure Pushkin would not have agreed to live in this year!’”[4]

But it would be St. Petersburg that would develop this theme on the ontological level, as a struggle not only between the thaw and Stalinism but also as a conflict of place and time, progress and culture, the old and the new, which define architecture everywhere and always. And if from the point of view of progress we see the insufficiency, timidity, and listlessness of Leningrad buildings of the 1960s–1980s, from the point of view of culture, memory, and tradition we have, conversely, the phenomenon of respectfulness, reserve, and nobility.

For example, the Yubileiny Palace of Sports[18][5] was the first building in the USSR with a cable-stayed roof. But this does not affect the external appearance of the building, which is reminiscent of a classicist rotunda, and the technology was only used (rather than the usual, tried and tested dome) to make the structure as low as possible, thus reducing the damage to the historical fabric.

This does not mean that St. Petersburg was not demolished. In this book there are two buildings constructed in place of freshly demolished churches. And as St. Petersburg literary historian Samuil Lurie wrote, “German bombs destroyed fewer architectural treasures than did the ordinary decrees of Leningrad City Council’s Executive Committee.”[6] But the real “catastrophe for the city was mass reconstruction,” noted historian of St. Petersburg Natalia Tsendrovskaya. “Almost none of the buildings that underwent reconstruction retained the decoration of their facades in its entirety. And as for the interiors…” However, here there were no catastrophes comparable to that of Arbat in Moscow, and “the only place in the city which was wiped from the face of the earth was the Gospitalnaya Sloboda district. They began with the Pirogov Museum in order to build the Leningrad Hotel[25] and then they demolished almost everything up to Sakharny Pereulok.”[7]

Typically, the hotel is not blamed for these losses and not even for the fact that it did not “fit in” to the location, but for its diffidence. Appearing at as important a point as the Stock Exchange, it did not offer any real competition. This is what dispirits city residents. Because bold gestures were a tradition in the city, starting with its foundation (which was in itself a modernist gesture). Looking at St. Petersburg through the prism of modernism, we were amazed at the radical nature of the Admiralty, the Alexandrinsky Theater, the Engineer’s Castle, and the Kunstkamera, and even Peter the Great’s cabin, which is a wooden building that has nothing in common with the Russian izba (log hut). We saw St. Petersburg as a city of permanent modernism, and even thought about including these buildings in the book as separate texts, but we decided this would make it too much like an ordinary guidebook. And we may even have been worried that the modernism of Rossi and Voronikhin would overshadow that of Zhuk and Speransky.

Leningrad turned out to be a poor springboard for the affirmation of Soviet architecture. Two centuries as the capital had provided the city with the highest quality of construction and carefully considered urban planning. Accordingly, despite its proclaimed status as “the cradle of the revolution,” Leningrad did not receive the necessary ideological appearance in terms of architecture and urban planning. No truly revolutionary design was constructed after 1917: no skyscrapers were built, the Novy Obvodny (“New Bypass”) Canal was not dug, the Central City Park was not laid out, the new center around Moskovsky Prospekt was never formed, and the main new building of the city (the House of Soviets) was never properly utilized. This sequence of non-achievements continued in the period from the 1960s through the 1980s: the Sea Facade did not appear, the “trident” thoroughfares were not extended, and not a single complete square was constructed. But to state that the modernist fuse fizzled out in the age of modernism would be incorrect.

“In the topography of Leningrad, there is a colossal difference between the center and the outskirts,” wrote Joseph Brodsky. “And I suddenly realized that the outskirts are the beginning of the world, not the end. They are the end of the familiar world, but the beginning of the unfamiliar world, which, of course, is much bigger; it’s huge, right? And the idea was as follows: in leaving for the outskirts, you separate yourself from everything on earth and enter the real world.”[8] In the same way, Leningrad architecture left for the outskirts in order to activate the genuine drivers of development. They were not so much in new forms (which in any case were still borrowed) as in new functions, structures, and materials.

Many new engineering techniques were employed in Leningrad for the first time: the first cable-stayed roof[18], the first arches made of reinforced cement[6], the first building made of plastic[RESIDENTIAL II], the first building to use lift slab construction[RESIDENTIAL II], the first 22-story apartment block made of monolithic reinforced concrete[31]. In Leningrad, the block-sectional method[RESIDENTIAL III] was developed and first used, and it was here that the idea for the great and terrible panel construction factory was born. The city was also the location for the first multilevel pedestrian space in the USSR[26], and the square by the Volodarsky Bridge[33] was the first experience of creating a grand ensemble from standard panels.

In this book there are not only individual buildings but also urban forms such as squares, highways, quarters, and embankments. In this respect, Leningrad was also at the forefront. An integrated approach was dreamed about across the entire Soviet Union, but in Leningrad it was already a tradition and was solicitously applied to the outskirts of the city. When we first made a list of buildings for potential inclusion in this book, we observed that it was dominated not by representational public buildings as in Moscow but by typologies: the kindergarten, the school, the vocational technical college, the dormitory, the institute, the registry office, the market, the automobile service station, the library, the service center, the shopping mall. Normal human life, which they romantically attempted to improve through architecture.

Yes, it did not work out everywhere, but they made a sincere effort. And this idealism, which is imprinted in the buildings, makes the architecture of the 1960s–1980s unique. The ideals of modesty, equality, and fraternity are particularly apparent in residential architecture. There was little of it in our previous books. It seemed to us that residential buildings did not have a strong link to a particular place and should be covered in a history of architecture, not a guide. But in Leningrad (where all residential buildings, even standard ones, were constructed using individual designs and formed the ensembles of the new squares and embankments) this was not the case. Otherwise, the city would be “the guide, the museum crowd, the bus, the hotel, a view of the Thermae, the Colosseum.”[9]

Of course, tourists don’t travel to St. Petersburg (or to Rome) to look at this architecture. And we acknowledged that we were slightly mad to include Avtovo, Kupchino, Grazhdansky Prospekt, and Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony on the map. But these mass residential districts are the best possible reflection of a surprising time that did not happen anywhere else (and probably will not now), with all of its contradictions. This architecture was not bad at all, it was simply poorly constructed and there was too much of it. For that reason, we compromised: there are separate texts about the most interesting residential buildings and the others are grouped into four thematic chapters (marked on the map with Roman numerals referring to the chapters).

Rome (meaning EUR, the new district begun under Mussolini and completed in the 1950s) will appear more than once on the pages of this book. It is one of the places where architects of the twentieth century attempted to define a local “code,” to build something new based not on the letter of the city but the spirit. Leningrad architects visited EUR, so this is not just an analogy. But that is the source of the unexpected touch of totalitarianism that can be found in buildings of the late 1950s, such as the Theater for Young Audiences[9] and the Telecenter[7]. Of course, it’s not quite right to assign them to modernism, but here it is often like that: “modernized classic” or “classicized modern.” The city appears to constantly even out time, not allowing a single trend to take off at full tilt. “This beast never rushes anywhere,” as Yuri Shevchuk sang.

In this book there are fewer references to Western examples than in previous guides, and this is not accidental. Leningrad depended much more on St. Petersburg than on Le Corbusier and Mies. And it is not just about concrete places with which the new “blends” or “does not blend” (a subject often discussed in Moscow), but about the city as a whole, its architectural traditions. In creating the Theater for Young Audiences, the architects were thinking not so much about Pionerskaya Ploshchad as about the Alexandrinsky Theater; when building the Finland Station[5], not about Lenin but the Admiralty; in constructing the Telecenter, not about Ulitsa Chapygina but about the German Embassy.

This constant, tense dialogue with tradition is the main peculiarity of Leningrad modernism, the fundamental reason for its originality and beauty. And it is the reason for its reservedness, which does not make the architecture any less interesting. On the contrary, accepting its weaknesses allows us to evaluate the true worth of its wisdom. This is probably a unique case in the history of Soviet architecture, when the ethical element prevails so clearly over the aesthetic.

To be honest, this approach is dangerous from the tactical point of view. A critical word from us is grist to the developers’ mill. In Leningrad, the Sports and Concert Complex, the River Station, and several cinemas and shopping malls have already been demolished, and the Leningradsky Palace of Youth[34] has been pulled down in 2024, after the Russian edition of this book saw the light. Not to mention the “reconstructions,” the saddest of which is the Moscow Hotel[36]. Nevertheless, we decided not to remove the Leningradsky Palace of Youth from the book: may the building haunt the dreams of the architects designing its replacement. Like the construction worker killed during the demolition of the Sports and Concert Complex.

When reading discussions of these demolitions on social media (in this book we finally admit that the internet is now a valid source), we see that they do not provoke a great deal of grief. But here it is not architecture that is to blame. “Today, we are learning to look at Leningrad buildings of the 1970s through the eyes of foreign tourists, with a certain admiration for the idealism of the architects, but from the safe distance that the current political course affords us.”[10] These words were written by Vladimir Frolov, curator of the exhibition Leningrad Modernism. A View from the 21st Century, in the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition took place in the St. Petersburg House of Architects in 2006.[11] Alas, the visual images (modernist buildings through the lens of contemporary photographic artists) were weaker than the texts. As well as Frolov, authors included the main specialists: Vladimir Lisovsky, Yuri Kurbatov, and Alexey Levchuk. But the exhibition was not successful in rediscovering modernism in the way that the World of Art group rediscovered classicism in the early twentieth century. It is important to note that this attempt took place against the background of the 15-year-old “political course.” Today Alexey Levchuk’s words from the same catalogue seem more appropriate, with their focus on the perception of Soviet architecture by its contemporaries: “The judgment of a person in a prison cell regarding the architectural merits of the prison is unlikely to be objective.”[12]

But 30 years later, many people are beginning to see the merits, albeit the architectural ones, of the Soviet “prison.” “Today, compared to the garishness and gigantism of new construction, a reality which once appeared gray and boring seems an oasis of humanity,” wrote Vladimir Frolov in the catalogue of another exhibition, Leningrad Modernism and Postmodernism. A View from the 21st Century (in which one of the authors of this book, Yuri Palmin, participated), that took place in 2020 at the SHKAF Library and Art Residency at 31 Ulitsa Marshala Tukhachevskogo. The building did not make it into the book, in the same way that, for various reasons, a number of other important buildings did not: the Russian National Library on Moskovsky Prospekt and the archive complex on Shpalernaya Ulitsa, the sports schools on Prospekt Koroleva and Maly Prospekt, the swimming pools on Sredny Prospekt and Konny Pereulok, Lenelektronmash on Grazhdansky Prospekt and the Forestry Scientific Research Institute on Institutsky Prospekt, the dormitories on Sadovaya Ulitsa and Ulitsa Rentgena, the former party school building on Ulitsa Fuchika, and the Shipbuilding Institute on Leninsky Prospekt.

Of course, Petersburgers will curse us for that, and for the book as a whole, but that was predictable and unavoidable no matter how hard we tried. Even so, we hope that reading this guide will be as interesting as wandering through the strangest and most beautiful city in the world.

Acknowledgments

We thank the architects, the heroes of our book, and their family members, who shared with us memories and valuable materials: Alexander Feshin, Ekaterina Golynkina, Evgeny Lobanov, Igor Noakh, Stanislav Savin, Sergei Shmakov, Varvara Speranskaya, Ludmila Travina and Vera Reikhet, Vladimir and Yasia Tserbuk, and Yuri Zemtsov.

We are very grateful to the people who work in the buildings of interest to us. They helped us to see them from the inside and located the documents we needed in their archives: Tatyana Kornevaya (School No. 345), Natalia Safonova and Zoya Stepanova (Museum of St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University), Natalya Subbotina (Karnaval Theater and Concert Complex), and Eleonora Tudoran (Central Scientific Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics).

We are happy to thank those Petersburgers who showed us the city in a way that we would not have been able to see it ourselves: Maxim Atayants, Maria Bernshtein, Alexander Florensky, Pavel Gerasimenko, Alla Knyazkina, Dmitry Kozlov, Steve Kuddins, Sergei Kuznetsov, Ludmila Likhacheva, Lev Lurie, Ksenia Malich, Anna Matveeva, Sergei Padalko, Sergei Tchoban, and Nikita Yavein.

Huge thanks to those who took on the task of reading individual texts (and finding in them individual, and sometimes huge, errors): Polina Barskova, Kira Dolinina, Vladimir Frolov, Dmitry Gusarov, Nastasya Ivanova, Mikhail Krainov, Irina Kurdina, Yan Levchenko, Alexey Levchuk, Sergei Mishin, Dmitry Pilikin, Olga Ryabukhina, Alexander Strugach, and Natalia Tsendrovskaya.

We thank our colleagues for their priceless prompts and advice: Sergei Ageev, Vasily Baburov, Alexander Borovsky, Boris Bocharnikov, Boris Chukhovich, Maria Fadeeva, Irina Finskaya, Efim Freidin, Anna Gnedovskaya, Dmitry Goncharuk, Elena Gonzalez, Evgenia Gubkina, Grigory Guryanov, Mark Hakobyan, Dmitry Khmelnitsky, Svetlana Lipgart, Elena Markus, Maxim Matyashov, Andrey Mushta, Nadia Nilina, Serguei Oushakine, Lev Rassadnikov, Grigory Rezvin, Denis Romodin, Lev Shevchenko, Natalia Solopova, Mikhail Tubli, Yulia Tulovskaya, Anna Vyazemtseva, Dmitry Zadorin, and also Lev Eidinov, who helped us with the illustrations.

The St. Petersburg architectural historian Vadim Bass made an invaluable contribution to the work on this book, selflessly taking on the role of research consultant. He became our guide to the archives of St. Petersburg, our advisor in the choice of buildings for the guide, and, at the final stage, a keen reader of our texts.

We are happy to have produced this book with the wonderful designers from ABCdesign, Dmitry Mordvintsev and Svetlana Danilyuk. And we thank the director of Garage, Anton Belov, for the fact that he supported our project, and of course Olga Dubitskaya, the editor of the original Russian edition of this book, for her angelic patience, which we tested mercilessly once again.

Historical Overview

The architectural development of Leningrad, the second city of the USSR in terms of size and importance, was inevitably subordinated to countrywide rules. The third major stage in the history of Soviet architecture began after the All-Union Conference of Builders in December 1954, at which First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Nikita Khrushchev blamed architects for wasting the people’s money on extravagant and unfunctional buildings, and the publication of the decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of November 4, 1955 entitled “On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction.” It ended with the collapse of the USSR. The main aim of the reforms of the mid-1950s was a rapid resolution to the housing crisis, but symbolically it was part of the strategy of de-Stalinization, a demonstration of a significant rupture from the previous epoch. As a result, Soviet architecture, which, during the first postwar decade, had provided a stylistic contrast between the socialist and capitalist camps, once again began to follow the course of global development. Formally the doctrine of socialist realism was not cancelled, but de facto the architecture of postwar modernism came to the USSR, as did postmodernism, with some delay compared to Western countries.

Andrei Ikonnikov and G. Keller, Design for a standard large-panel residential building. Part of the facade, 1956

Over a period of 35 years there was significant evolution, which largely followed global processes but also reacted to economic and political factors within the country. There were four main phases, which coincided approximately with individual decades.

In the transition period of 1955–1961, there was an intensive assimilation of international experience, accompanied by attempts to find a new style. In a situation where the party and the government had made it clear that they required cheaper, standardized, and industrialized construction but had only vague requirements in terms of aesthetics, an understandable confusion arose. The reforms of the thaw period took place using tried and tested command economy methods. Architecture was subordinated to construction and, as a result, became a technical discipline. Whereas the Stalin Prize, which was abolished in 1954, included the category “architecture,” the Lenin Prize, which was reestablished in 1956, was awarded to architects of buildings and structures for achievements in the field of technology. The decree of August 23, 1955 entitled “On Measures for the Further Industrialization, Improvement of Quality, and Lowering of Costs of Construction” and the establishment soon after of the professional holiday Builders’ Day raised the prestige of this profession, and the role of the architect began to be secondary. The liquidated Academy of Architecture was replaced by the newly created Academy of Construction and Architecture, of which construction engineer Nikolai Bekhtin (1896–1983) was appointed president.[13] By 1960 the journals Architecture and Construction of Moscow and Architecture and Construction of Leningrad had symbolically changed their titles to Construction and Architecture of Moscow and Construction and Architecture of Leningrad.