Concept
Stalinist architecture, mostly known in the former Eastern Bloc as Stalinist style (Сталинский стиль) or Socialist Classicism, is the architecture of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, between 1933 (when Boris Iofan's draft for the Palace of the Soviets was officially approved) and 1955 (when Nikita Khrushchev condemned "excesses" of the past decades and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture). Stalinist architecture is associated with the Socialist realism school of art and architecture. As part of the Soviet policy of rationalization of the country, all cities were built to a general development plan. Each was divided into districts, with allotments based on the city's geography. Projects would be designed for whole districts, visibly transforming a city's architectural image. The interaction of the state with the architects would prove to be one of the features of this time. The same building could be declared a formalist blasphemy and then receive the greatest praise the next year, as happened to Ivan Zholtovsky and his Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya in 1949–50. Authentic styles like Zholtovsky's Renaissance Revival, Ivan Fomin's St. Petersburg Neoclassical architecture and Art Deco adaptation by Alexey Dushkin and Vladimir Shchuko coexisted with imitations and eclecticism that became characteristic of that era. Seven Sisters (Moscow) The Vysotki or Stalinskie Vysotki (Сталинские высотки) are a group of skyscrapers in Moscow designed in the Stalinist style. Their English-language nickname is the "Seven Sisters". They were built officially from 1947 to 1953 (some work extended years past official completion dates) in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles and the technology used in building American skyscrapers. The seven skyscrapers are the Hotel Ukraina, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, the Kudrinskaya Square Building, the Leningradskaya Hotel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia main building, the main building of Moscow State University, and the Red Gate Building.
