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When the first Russian edition of Architecture
in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Kul'tura Dva) appeared
in 1985, the USSR was alive and well. Who could have imagined
then that within just a few years the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union would be banned-a gesture no less ferocious and
final than the dynamiting of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
in 1929? Twenty years ago the subject of Vladimir Paperny's
book was still tangible and actual and, for many Soviet citizens,
still part of a single, organic way of life. Yet precisely
because Stalin's architecture was a manifest component of everyday
Soviet reality, few considered it to be an authentic culture
and those who did think about such things tended to identify
cultural achievement not with the eclecticism of the Stalin
style, but with the legacy of the avant-garde and Constructivist
design, i.e. with Culture One. If, say, in the 1970s-80s the
Hotel Moscow had been threatened with demolition, few liberal
thinkers would have protested, whereas today its uncertain
fate has historians, preservationists, and urban planners up
in arms, alarmed that a major esthetic artifact will be lost
to mankind.
The new, Russian edition of Culture Two, therefore,
assumes a special significance now that the leviathan that it
describes is vanishing into the mythology of history. Paperny's
study helps to resharpen our focus on this architectural and
social legacy, now remote, by identifying its abrupt differences
from Culture One and the distinctive features that imbue it with
artistic worth. Paperny also makes us realize that, like all
totalitarian cultures, Stalin's architecture is losing not only
the material body of its mortar, paint, and florid ornament,
but also the diabolical context that created it: as the political
and social context recedes, so the Socialist Realism transforms
into an esthetic unit, sought by curators, enjoyed by cognoscenti,
and praised by scholars. Paperny is largely responsible for this
volte face: in documenting and describing the Stalin style a
quarter of a century ago, when it was still beyond the pale of
academic respectability, Paperny manifested an amazing perspicacity
and prescience and today we should be doubly grateful to him
for his book-memorable feat of restoration and refurbishment. |
