Introduction: Red Square

“…Moscow is not an ordinary city like thousands of others; Moscow is no silent immensity of cold stones piled one upon other to form symmetrical patterns… no indeed! It has its own soul, its own life.”

-       Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1821), “A Panorama of Moscow” [1].

We begin in Red Square. The vast plaza feels vacant in wintertime, rendered blank by layers of white snow. To the west, the Kremlin’s long battlements are poorly defined against the shifting gray horizon. In these conditions, Moscow can feel divorced from its own long past, homogenized under layers of snow and concrete.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin would have approved of this historical blindness. During the 1930s, Soviet urban planners conducted a series of drastic urban renovations, clearing out old elements of the city in accordance with a new urban master plan. Their agenda was largely political: historian Katerina Clark argues that “Moscow was remodeled less in the interests of modernization, efficiency, and public health than in order to realize a new conception of the capital as a template for the Soviet cultural order” [2]. Stalinist reforms, in other words, sought to appropriate and reinvent Moscow’s symbolism as Russia’s capital and “central” city, in order to promote their own agenda. Soviet Moscow was to be an ahistorical, utopian space, defined by the party’s ideology rather than the city’s heritage.

Our tour will gauge the success of this project. By examining five sites of Soviet erasure, we will assess the rationale and methodology behind Stalin’s renovations. Soviet authorities often targeted sites for their religious significance, as well as their obstruction of civic improvements. As we will see, their battle against Moscow’s cultural and historical heritage was neither a clear success nor a clear failure. While some sites have been all but forgotten, others have left indelible imprints that continue to shape the city’s cultural and physical landscape.

  1. Lermontov, Mikhail. “A Panorama of Moscow.” Web: Ivan the Great Bell Tower, 22 October 2016.
  2. Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2011. Web: Google Books, 23 October 2016. p. 95.