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Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow
The story of Boris Iofan—designer of the iconic but unbuilt Palace of the Soviets—whose buildings came to define the language of Soviet architecture.
What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst of Stalin’s murderous purges?
This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan (1891–1976), state architect to Joseph Stalin. Iofan’s story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power. A gifted designer and a committed Communist, Iofan became the Soviet Union’s most celebrated architect after Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor, persuaded him to return to Moscow from Rome with his aristocratic wife, Olga Sasso-Ruffo. Iofan was at the heart of political life in the Soviet Union and his work is key to understanding its official culture.
When Stalin’s henchmen crushed the architectural avant-garde, it was Iofan who created the new national style, from the grand projects he realized—including the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite—to even more ambitious unbuilt projects, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. His career took him to New York and Paris, and to the destroyed city of Stalingrad. He was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright; a rival of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn; and an enemy of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, whose Nazi pavilion faced Iofan’s Soviet one at the Paris Expo in 1937. He kept silent when Stalin executed his friends, including Rykov; he also sacrificed his own talent by following the dictator’s instructions to the letter in creating the regime’s landmarks.
Generously illustrated, with a wide range of previously unpublished material, this book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft. It is an insight into the key moments of 20th-century politics and culture from a unique perspective, and the personal story of a remarkable individual who witnessed many of the most dramatic turning points of modern history.
What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst of Stalin’s murderous purges?
This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan (1891–1976), state architect to Joseph Stalin. Iofan’s story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power. A gifted designer and a committed Communist, Iofan became the Soviet Union’s most celebrated architect after Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor, persuaded him to return to Moscow from Rome with his aristocratic wife, Olga Sasso-Ruffo. Iofan was at the heart of political life in the Soviet Union and his work is key to understanding its official culture.
When Stalin’s henchmen crushed the architectural avant-garde, it was Iofan who created the new national style, from the grand projects he realized—including the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite—to even more ambitious unbuilt projects, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. His career took him to New York and Paris, and to the destroyed city of Stalingrad. He was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright; a rival of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn; and an enemy of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, whose Nazi pavilion faced Iofan’s Soviet one at the Paris Expo in 1937. He kept silent when Stalin executed his friends, including Rykov; he also sacrificed his own talent by following the dictator’s instructions to the letter in creating the regime’s landmarks.
Generously illustrated, with a wide range of previously unpublished material, this book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft. It is an insight into the key moments of 20th-century politics and culture from a unique perspective, and the personal story of a remarkable individual who witnessed many of the most dramatic turning points of modern history.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published June 14, 2022
About the author
Deyan Sudjic
113 books96 followersDeyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum. He was born in London, and studied architecture in Edinburgh. He has worked as a critic for The Observer and The Sunday Times, as the editor of Domus in Milan, as the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale, and as a curator in Glasgow, Istanbul and Copenhagen. He is the author of B is for Bauhaus, The Language of Things and The Edifice Complex.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 31, 2026
[edited but opinion absolutely not altered in July 2026]
This book begins with the following words:
"What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst od Stalin's murderous purges?"
and then goes on to say:
"This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan(1891-1976), state architect to Joseph Stalin...(whose) story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power..."
Deyan Sudjic promises a book that is more then conventional biography or architectural thesis, but a journey into, and examination of, the well springs of the compromises of men (and all these people in the past were almost always men) who attach themselves to power (think of Klaus Mann in 'Mephisto' or George Andrzeyevski in 'The Inquisitors') to accomplish 'great' things.
The result is nothing of the kind - it is the first 'popular' account of Boris Isofan's life and work and is splendidly illustrated - but it is wildly mendacious as a portrait of Isofan. As a successful party apparatchik operating under Stalin the vast amount of very public and oleaginous praise Isofan poured out to Stalin would have been regarded as de trop by Saint Simon at the court of Louis XIV. I have no doubt that Isofan's colleagues in capitalist lands had to provide equal amounts of flattery to their millionaire patrons but they never worried that sounding the wrong note would send them, never mind their families into a gulag.
I find fact pales when trying to explain the bloated lies and obscenities of mid-twentieth century life under dictators like Stalin or Hitler. It is only fiction, imagination, the reconstruction of the dark nights of the soul in works like 'Darkness at Noon' by Arthur Koestler, that shed light on idiotic gigantism of people like Isofan or Albert Speer. Can anyone regret that Isofan's Palace of the Soviets topped by a 300 foot statue of Lenin was never built? It was as absurd, ugly and basically as evil as Speer's silly Congress Hall with its mini climate.
There is much to be learnt from the vacuous architectural nullities of bullying mediocrities with too much power (see Franco's Valley of the Fallen or Trump's proposed White House 'ballroom') but you won't understand it from books like this. Wanting to build is like wanting to be heard - do you have anything worth building or saying? and if you don't how dare you foist your inadequacies on the rest of us.
This is not a bad book only a very disappointing one.
This book begins with the following words:
"What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst od Stalin's murderous purges?"
and then goes on to say:
"This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan(1891-1976), state architect to Joseph Stalin...(whose) story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power..."
Deyan Sudjic promises a book that is more then conventional biography or architectural thesis, but a journey into, and examination of, the well springs of the compromises of men (and all these people in the past were almost always men) who attach themselves to power (think of Klaus Mann in 'Mephisto' or George Andrzeyevski in 'The Inquisitors') to accomplish 'great' things.
The result is nothing of the kind - it is the first 'popular' account of Boris Isofan's life and work and is splendidly illustrated - but it is wildly mendacious as a portrait of Isofan. As a successful party apparatchik operating under Stalin the vast amount of very public and oleaginous praise Isofan poured out to Stalin would have been regarded as de trop by Saint Simon at the court of Louis XIV. I have no doubt that Isofan's colleagues in capitalist lands had to provide equal amounts of flattery to their millionaire patrons but they never worried that sounding the wrong note would send them, never mind their families into a gulag.
I find fact pales when trying to explain the bloated lies and obscenities of mid-twentieth century life under dictators like Stalin or Hitler. It is only fiction, imagination, the reconstruction of the dark nights of the soul in works like 'Darkness at Noon' by Arthur Koestler, that shed light on idiotic gigantism of people like Isofan or Albert Speer. Can anyone regret that Isofan's Palace of the Soviets topped by a 300 foot statue of Lenin was never built? It was as absurd, ugly and basically as evil as Speer's silly Congress Hall with its mini climate.
There is much to be learnt from the vacuous architectural nullities of bullying mediocrities with too much power (see Franco's Valley of the Fallen or Trump's proposed White House 'ballroom') but you won't understand it from books like this. Wanting to build is like wanting to be heard - do you have anything worth building or saying? and if you don't how dare you foist your inadequacies on the rest of us.
This is not a bad book only a very disappointing one.
March 25, 2023
Interesting perspective on the architectural themes. Viewed it as a companion to Moscow Monumental by Katherine Zubovich and House of Government by Slezkine, though not near the scale of those.
Let down at the end a little by author's error in thinking the Soviet Union fell in 1989 and not 1991
Let down at the end a little by author's error in thinking the Soviet Union fell in 1989 and not 1991
October 25, 2022
A very readable work that studies Boris Iofan, noted architect of Stalin, and examines how built work is and is not connected to ideologies underpinning its construction. A rather tragic tale - he may have escaped the purges, but he was left behind by both government and history.
May 2, 2025
Boris Iofan’s rise to success and subsequent failures that prevented the realisation of his ideas paint a tragic picture of the life of an architect. His life serves as a cautionary tale for creatives working under the patronage of the powerful; how it can both elevate and collapse a career.
It also questions whether we can truly disentangle architecture from politics. Since its conception as a discipline it has forever been used as a mechanism of authoritarian rulers. Can architecture be apolitical, or is ‘architecture’ always inherently political?
Overall, this was an intriguing read, particularly in reference to Iofan’s work on the 1937 Soviet pavilion in Paris, and his appointment to camouflage Moscow against German siege. The selected images throughout are excellent, with some interesting prints of Iofan’s drawings.
However, at times I found the swathes of context excessive for a reader less familiar with the intricate history of the USSR - this book was unfortunately less about architecture than I’d hoped, as at points it was much a history of the USSR as opposed to a biography of Iofan.
It also questions whether we can truly disentangle architecture from politics. Since its conception as a discipline it has forever been used as a mechanism of authoritarian rulers. Can architecture be apolitical, or is ‘architecture’ always inherently political?
Overall, this was an intriguing read, particularly in reference to Iofan’s work on the 1937 Soviet pavilion in Paris, and his appointment to camouflage Moscow against German siege. The selected images throughout are excellent, with some interesting prints of Iofan’s drawings.
However, at times I found the swathes of context excessive for a reader less familiar with the intricate history of the USSR - this book was unfortunately less about architecture than I’d hoped, as at points it was much a history of the USSR as opposed to a biography of Iofan.
August 20, 2024
Beautiful photos, fairly concise.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews