On the Active Citizen website, there was recently a public vote regarding the projects to be built on the site of the former Comecon building. Is the fight against modernism still going on?
Grigory Revzin:
It’s more that uncertainty continues about what to do with it. The story with the Comecon building is once again hanging in the air. They planned to demolish it, then they hesitated, now it seems they’ve decided again, but Muscovites voted in favor of keeping it intact. Though right next to it some large “bone” of investment attractiveness appeared. I’m not sure it will stay as it is – the whole thing looks hastily sketched. A kind of Hamlet-like vacillation around the shadow of Posokhin Sr.: “to tear down or not to tear down”.
And what do you think – “to tear down or not to tear down”?
I don’t see aesthetic value in this architecture, so it’s hard for me to fight for its preservation. I don’t want to call for its demolition, but I won’t defend it either.
Do you really refuse to see a single aesthetically appealing building from the 1970s?
Don’t get me wrong – such buildings do exist. But to me it feels like each time they appeared almost illegally, surreptitiously, with apologies of sorts: “we built this, please excuse us”. We’re used to thinking that the architecture of socialist modernism was unified and monolithic. In reality, there were two different architectures. Or rather, I would say one was architecture, and the other – some other kind of “building activity”.
Sounds like complex epithets for what is simply “bad” and “good” architecture.
I agree, but this is not quite the point I was trying to make. Along with the scandal around the Comecon building – and before that, the circus on Lenin Hills – another question surfaced: the “Rossiya” cinema. Artemy Lebedev came out saying it should be demolished, and Ksenia Sobchak supported him. Debate started, for and against. But you know, there are different kinds of “Rossiya”.
What do you mean?
Basically this: in 1974, a “Rossiya” cinema was also built in Yerevan. And if you compare the two buildings, the comparison will not be in Moscow’s favor. The Yerevan “Rossiya” is unique architecture, and it’s very, very good. It looks like a massive rock split open, forming two parts, two cinema halls, like two mountains. They rhyme with the landscape, with the mountains around Yerevan and everything. And they create a powerful but also tragic sense of architectural plastique. That’s what all Armenian architecture is all about, and all Armenian culture, for that matter – marked both by national pride and by national grief, by the theme of genocide. Architecture merges with this landscape, and these mountains; it becomes history, turns almost into a geological phenomenon. Historical time turns into eternity. It’s a very powerful work.
The former “Rossiya” cinema in Yerevan
Copyright: Авторство: Armineaghayan. Собственная работа, CC BY-SA 3.0 / 2013
The former “Rossia” cinema in Yerevan, view from the major hall side
Copyright: Авторство: Алексей Веллог. Собственная работа, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2024
Now compare that to the Moscow “Rossiya” cinema. It’s a fairly standard building, essentially based on a prototype. The same design was used for “Pervomaisky”, “Vityaz”, “Kirgizia”, “Warsaw”, “Elbrus” – all of which have already been demolished or drastically rebuilt. “Rossiya” on Pushkinskaya was given a few unique touches connected to the square and garden: a canopy, grand staircases, and galleries. But in terms of status, and in terms of formal principles – it’s just a souped-up Ford Pinto.
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The “Rossiya” cinema in MoscowCopyright: Photograph © Julia Tarabarina, Archi.ru / 2025
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The “Rossiya” cinema in MoscowCopyright: Photograph © Julia Tarabarina, Archi.ru / 2025
But it was a standard design, for a fact…
Well, it was the first in the series anyway. It was built in 1961, and then the design was reused. Fine, let’s not call it a standard project; let’s call it a prototype model, which later went into mass production. That doesn’t make the least bit of difference anyway. I’d even say it was a special project, because the prototype came with options for later tuning. Each of those cinemas had different canopies and different staircases. But the base was always the same. It was always the same rank-and-file cinematic box.
A project designed with standardization in mind is optimized from the start so it can be repeated many times with minimal changes. Everything is done for maximum efficiency in terms of standardization. If you look at the location plan of this cinema, you’ll see how crudely it was inserted into the city. The width of Maly Putinkovsky Lane behind it, from the Dmitrovka side, is 13-14 meters, while on the opposite side it’s 19–20 meters. That means the building didn’t fit. So they shoved it in at an angle. Like a fridge squeezed into a tiny kitchen when there’s not enough space, standing slightly crooked.
You’ll agree this is something fundamentally different from what we see in Yerevan. Quality architecture could be expected in Tbilisi, in the Baltics, or even in Crimea. At that time, the USSR was courting its republics and allowed them to do unique things. And there is something there to be proud of. The historian of modernist architecture Jean-Louis Cohen once even curated a special exhibition and, in a way, made Soviet modernism fashionable. But closer to the center, especially in Moscow, this was, in my view, not architecture at all. Again, just “building activity”.
Why so?
One can only speculate. Perhaps it was indeed politics – the need to demonstrate that all the republics and faraway peripheries of the USSR were getting the same treatment and were flourishing. Perhaps there were other reasons. But I think we need, above all, to look at the very ethos of that building activity and try to understand its values.
What did the builders take pride in? First of all, the sheer volume! Recall any Communist Party report or any front-page article for Builder’s Day. “Ten million square meters of cultural facilities have been built. The amount of cultural space has reached 45 square centimeters per citizen of the USSR. One hundred million cubic meters of concrete poured. Two hundred million tons of steel structures assembled!” The sheer volume mattered far more than what was actually built. It was the triumph of raw, formless construction mass.
Second – deadlines. It was always emphasized that the plan had been fulfilled and over-fulfilled, that construction was proceeding at an accelerated pace. The speed of transforming space was more important than what came out of it.
And third – the deficit factor. The use of scarce materials. The very term “quality” was not about architecture, but about what the architect had managed to “get hold of”. I was once struck by a phrase in a Suzdal guidebook describing the Suzdal Hotel Complex: the authors rapturously listed the rare materials used – “the floors are made of genuine Zhytomyr labradorite”. As if there was such a thing as fake Zhytomyr labradorite! A prestigious building was one that contained scarce materials. Where there weren’t any – it was just an ordinary building.
These are the values of industrial production. The very point of this construction activity was to churn out massive building volumes in the name of advanced industrial progress.
And against this backdrop, the creation of a unique piece of architecture — say, the “Rossiya” cinema in Yerevan, done from an original design, with models, carefully considered details, proportions, and image – looks like some kind of backyard tinkering. Small-scale, expensive, non-technological. Not the Soviet way! Out there, in the republics, it was tolerated. They hadn’t yet “developed” enough to get to space exploration, to rockets, to the pathos of a great engineering state. But here, in the center, the only path was the path of grand industrial construction. And that value had to be reaffirmed by every single product of the construction machine.
But surely you can’t deny that there were architects, genuine architectural quests, creativity…
You know what? I can. These so-called architects declared themselves modernists, avant-gardists even, but in reality there were no architectural explorations whatsoever. If anything, Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp was, in their eyes, the work of a lone “craftsman” – a quaint oddity. Their true value lay in participating in the system of large-scale construction, in the very organization of the design process. They were Party bosses with an architectural hobby. And the design process itself was nothing but collective “creativity by committee”: endless meetings and sessions that became arenas of ambition, where any trace of individuality was promptly crushed.
What’s more, they smothered each other’s initiatives. Any original concept had no chance of survival. If someone dared suggest something new, the reaction was instant: “Where are you dragging us, comrade? Into handicraft production? We have entirely different tasks here!” For this architecture, the “standard collective decision” was sacrosanct. Aesthetic unity, a single ideal, and its endless affirmation. The dullest solutions always won out, which is why the standard project was the surest bet. As for “creativity”, it expressed itself in doodling during weekend retreats at the Sukhanovo guesthouse.
So how does this tie back to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or the “Rossiya” cinema? Can you explain where there were actual searches for architectural form, and where it was just building activity?
I think it’s fairly obvious. And the very fact that such a question can even be asked only proves the devaluation of architectural creativity and its transformation into mere building activity.
There are three main differences. First, genuine architecture – like any true art form – is a kind of magic. It has a spellbinding effect. That may sound poetic or abstract, but take Alexander Pushkin’s poetry as an example: “The frost and sunshine; day of wonder!” – you can’t swap it out for “Earth and sky, a good day”. The meaning would remain, but the magic would vanish.
Architecture works the same way: you can’t simply alter window shapes, proportions, or materials. But the architecture of the 1970s – if you look at the project histories – was nothing but “Earth and sky, a good day”. Take the TASS building: lop off the top floors and, apart from the authors, no one cares. The building is just stacked blocks – what difference does it make how many rows of containers you pile on top of each other? And I suspect the authors were more concerned with the loss of volume than with any violation of form.
Materials? They changed them as they pleased. The Lukoil building on Turgenevskaya Square was once faced with Armenian tuff; then someone painted it over. The architect, Felix Novikov, withdrew his authorship – but no one noticed the paint job, nor his protest, for that matter. Everything can be swapped out – because in this kind of construction, form itself doesn’t matter.
The second difference: a washing machine doesn’t care where you put it. Architecture, however, responds to place, resonates with context, harmonizes with it. The “Rossiya” cinema in Yerevan, without Yerevan – without the landscape, without the mountains – would have been meaningless. Form follows context.
And the third difference is how you react to loss. Ours wasn’t the only country with such architecture. Take the World Trade Center in New York. Its value lay in the fact that there were two of them, hence the “twins”. The point was standardization, repetition. Bin Laden destroyed them. Competitions were held to decide what should be built in their place. I published the results, and what struck me was this: not a single entrant – out of more than a hundred, from all over the world – suggested simply rebuilding them.
Now, think about Notre-Dame de Paris. The cathedral was still burning, and already the French had begun planning its reconstruction. And yet the WTC, an American sacred icon destroyed in a terrorist attack – its form meant nothing. Gone was gone, win a few, lose a few.
I can’t say you’ve convinced me. But let’s suppose right. What, then, are we to do with all these buildings? Demolish them? That’s what your logic suggests.
Once again, I wouldn’t mourn its demolition. But that’s just me. In my view, good architecture defends itself – it’s not that easy to demolish.
That sounds like idealism…
Call it idealism if you will. But fame protects just as well. You see, it’s not only the architecture itself that was industrially produced – the very people’s reaction to it was, too. Soviet art historian David Arkin, swooning over Versailles, is just as much a lone backyard tinkerer as Le Corbusier making the Ronchamp Chapel against the might of Glavmosstroy – when set against Ogonyok magazine, endlessly replicating images of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance building. The architecture of Soviet modernism is incomparably more famous. Just think about those millions of photographs. I’d even say that in this case its fame and its worth as an architectural creation have split apart completely. No one cares how refined or unrefined the architectural form of the Comecon building might be – if it even has one. What matters is that it’s a building that pretty much everyone recognizes.
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The Comecon building in the panorama of the Moscow RiverCopyright: Photograph © Julia Tarabarina, Archi.ru / 2025
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Pins displaying the image of the Comecon buildingCopyright: from Alexander Zmeul′s collection / photo by Alexander Zmeul
The same goes for the “Rossiya” cinema. Everyone knows it. Which means that tearing it down would inflict a profound trauma on the city’s residents. They would see it as violence against reality, carried out by the authorities. A destruction of public consensus out of thin air. And for what? A few thousand square meters to be gained? I fear that no one will find that price even remotely acceptable.
All right. You’ve now drawn a line within the modernism of the 1970s: on the one hand, the author-driven architecture “out on the periphery”; on the other, the standardized non-architecture of the party bosses – statist, aesthetically uninteresting, neither unique nor beautiful, yet recognizable, mediated, dear to many as memory. And therefore “not to be demolished”. So, the climax of our conversation: what should we actually do with it?
We have to bring architecture into it. That is, assume there is still no architectural resolution there. The form has not yet been found. If you like, it’s zero form: a charged site devoid of meaning. It has to be reinterpreted, given architectural sense.
An example would be what Rem Koolhaas did with the Vremena Goda café when he converted it into the Garage Museum. The mosaic with the young pioneers is hardly a masterpiece, though technically it’s Byzantine – it just so happened that in the 1970s we were still making “Byzantine mosaics”. But when you extract it, frame it, make it the center of the composition, and invest it with artistic labor – then yes, it acquires meaning.
This, if not a key, is at least a kind of lockpick for how we might approach the whole issue: radical rethinking. It matters not only for the site itself – which of course is most important – but also for the profession. The obsession with repeatability, with substituting notoriety for quality, has devalued architecture as such. To counter that devaluation, we must rehabilitate the very idea of architectural inquiry.
What we need is creative freedom in dealing with these buildings, so that uniqueness can be recreated. You don’t demolish them – but at the same time, you don’t lock them into the rigid preservation protocols you’d apply to monuments. And yet let’s be honest: the buildings we’re talking about don’t have a protected status anyway. The principle here is not “maximum preservation”, but “maximum preservation through complete rethinking”. In other words, treat them not as monuments but as part of the townscape – a landscape still waiting for an architect. That is the essence of the program. I realize it sounds unusual, but otherwise we’re condemned to eternally preserve monuments to the devaluation of our own profession.
And what about the so-called “backyard tinkering” (as we agreed to call them) examples of 1970s architecture?
For now – leave them be. Once they’re designated as heritage sites, restore them.
