In late August, Russian state media announced that architects were developing a Russian “grand style” that would strengthen the nation. [Translator’s note: in Russian, the phrase “grand style” (bol’shoi stil’) is most often associated with architecture built under Louis XIV and Stalin.] News simultaneously broke about plans to erect “lighthouses of the Russian world” in the occupied Ukrainian territories and, eventually, in Kyiv. We decided to find out who was behind Putin’s style in architecture and analyze “Russian civilization’s” new aesthetic.
Totalitarian and even authoritarian states are usually obsessed with architecture. Striving to convey your presence, importance, and power on a grand scale, or at least “mark” vast territories with your monuments, is an idée fixe for governments whose sanity is going. It’s practically in the dictator starter pack: build a new Rome, try erecting the Tower of Babel again, give every city its own little Acropolis, put up a couple thousand small obelisks or monuments to yourself, and, of course, found a new style. Speer, who captured Hitler’s theatrical dreams in models and yards-long blueprints; the hundreds of Soviet architects who tried and failed to pin down Stalin’s and Kaganovich’s visions of beauty; Terragni and Piacentini, who built Mussolini forums and palazzos from Rome to Italy’s colonies in Africa; the anonymous architects behind Cyclopean memorials in North Korea and the People’s Republic of China: all are recent examples of this well-known affliction. Little distinguishes the obelisks marking the miles of Catherine the Great’s path from Petersburg to Crimea, Lenin’s failed plan for “monumental propaganda,” and the concrete World War II memorials typical of any town in the USSR. They are all signs of power’s presence, not of memory’s, as is commonly believed. That is why new rulers almost always begin by demolishing (or camouflaging) monuments of the previous era. This is not a battle with memory; it is a battle with the symbols of the previous regime, and the more violent, frightening, and painful the regime, the more eager people are to destroy all trace of it. That may be tragic from the point of view of history museums, but it is quite understandable from a human perspective.
So where is this style, this “Putinist Classicism”? The groundwork for it has long been laid, the spiritual and moral values imposed, broadcast, and even legally codified. (The final amendments to Russia’s cultural legislation outlined in Putin’s November 9, 2022 decree are expected this fall.) We have already written about manifestations of censorship and war propaganda in today’s culture (rus):
▪️ Cultural “Intergration”
▪️ On the Cultural Front Lines
▪️ Fighters on the Homeland Spiritual Security Front, Old and New
Visually, all these exhibitions (whether at the Victory Museum or in multimedia at the Russia: My History parks) and macabre concert backdrops (the most vivid example being the recent grand opening of the Battle of Kursk Memorial) seem like late–Brezhnev-era stage décor, dusted off and polished. It’s revamped Soviet brutalism, with tile instead of real granite, plasma screens instead of light boxes, and a bit of ultramarine to complement the obligatory dark red.
However, the current worn, plodding iteration of the style incorporates a fresh hint of “Nazi movie cabaret,” drawing on everything from Mephisto to Nazisploitation. Any war-media personality worth their salt has at some point delivered a song/message/speech in a leather overcoat, latex pants/jodhpurs, and a black shirt/frock coat, with slicked-back hair, against a backdrop of spotlights, smoke, and blood-red shimmer.
Of course, LARPing the cunning [Soviet spy movie hero] Stierlitz, plus a subconscious attraction to the tough, sexy Nazis portrayed by Visconti, Cavani, and Spielberg? That’s a classic kink for the 70s and 80s generation, the one that grew up to populate Putin’s cabinet. Both the stage managers and the performers of this style are a vanishing breed—something that can’t be said of the next generation, questers after “the Russian code” and “the Russian project.”
There is a whole layer of very active pro-war (they would say “patriotic”) artists and architectors who are displeased with the necrophiliac vibe at today’s official festivities and the Grekov Studio and Glazunov Academy teams building new Brezhnev-style memorials and monuments. Raised in the world of Dugin’s Eurasianism, as well as the right-wing postmodernism of the 1990s, and believing in the continuity of Stalinist style with the Soviet avant-garde (following Boris Groys), they are convinced that a made-great-again [podyniavshaiasia s kolen] Russia must have its own unified aesthetic and artistic program. And, since the government has not yet commissioned a new grand style, they are ready to take the matter into their own hands.
Artist Alexey Beliaev (Guintovt) has been waiting for this moment for a long time, lamenting in his interviews before the war, “Right now, neither I, nor my fellow travelers, nor my opponents see any signs of a grand style. But the mere fact that we are able to talk about metanarratives is a sign that a grand style is possible, and we are taking the first step towards establishing it… [by] drawing on a great past and a striving towards a great future. Spirit and Soil. It is Eurasianism that articulates a Continental Civilization. I’m not convinced by the pathetic state that the great Russian project is in now—the utter bewilderment, the helplessness, the civilizational defeat. Things won’t always be this way.” In addition to being friends with Dugin and visiting Tskhinvali (in 2008) and the Donbas on “sensitive assignments,” Guintovt has long stated that he is “agitating and propagandizing for a grand Eurasian style, even if it does not exist today. I see that as my calling.”
Yet, speaking about the future, Guintovt and his fellow-thinkers propose a concept that is not new at all: the right-wing idea of “conservative revolution” well-known in 1920s Germany, plus the 1990s postmodern Slavophile ideas of an “imperial avant-garde” and, most infamously, “nuclear Orthodoxy.” In the 1990s, it was the New Academy, Timur Novikov’s artistic circle in St. Petersburg, that played at nostalgia for the Russian Empire, for those sunny white colonnades from Alexander Deineka paintings and Grigori Alexandrov films. By the 2010s, this nostalgia had become stale, then been gilded over with gold leaf by Guintovt. But Guintovt and the New Academy of the 1990s have as little in common as did Alexander Dugin and Sergey Kuryokhin, who dallied with Eurasianism right before his death. (For more detail, we suggest reading about the history of the New Academy.)
Another attempt to cultivate a new Russian style—similar in its echoes of imperial kitsch, but with a more Orthodox bent—has come from artist, curator, and philosopher Alexey Belikov, who launched the project After the Icon a few years ago. Following a similar trajectory to Guintovt (including the obligatory trips to the Donbas), he has sought to bring together artists engaged in contemporary Russian religious art, as contradictory as that may sound.
However, this path can also be termed a “conservative revolution.” Belikov is also trying to construct a comprehensive new style. To that end, he is organizing a festival bringing together truly Russian young talents:
“I am interested in conducting an inventory of something that is, in fact, not institutional: this truly serious, deeply rooted Russian culture that has been brewing under the surface for the last 30 years.”
Belikov’s opposition to Anglo-Saxon influence clearly does not extend to the category names he curated for the festival:
“Pattern and abstraction. The Cyrillic alphabet. Fonts and lettering. Visual art. Multimedia and video art. Fashion. Product design. Architecture and urban studies.”
Trendy lettering and design, multimedia and video art, urban studies: you can grow them all in a hermetically sealed, ethnic Russian capsule with the life-giving light of tradition and Orthodoxy. How? Well, from Belikov’s perspective, Russian imperial culture is the only game in town on one-sixth of the world’s dry land. “Russians are the only Slavic people in part of Eurasia who managed to create high culture,” he says. Although, as we will learn from other cases, the developers of the Russian style are convinced of its universality at the planetary scale. “A significant part of the world sees us as the only alternative to the globalist model; we are the only ones who can culturally offer something to the entire world.”
The project was supposed to launch this summer or fall but has likely been postponed. Belikov is currently fighting as a regular volunteer somewhere near Marinka, while the artists from After the Icon and the club Nice Russian People are collaborating on charitable auctions in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The exhibitions are titled A Clean Sky—Belikov is using the proceeds to purchase “heavenly eyes in the sky,” i.e., drones.
To continue our work, we need your support!
In 2024, the Russian authorities declared us an «undesirable organization.» This means that people in Russia are now prohibited from sharing our materials and donating to us. If what we do matters to you and you want to support us, you can subscribe to our Patreon.
But back to architecture. On August 25, the news broke that “a new architectural style is being created in Russia.” Everyone familiar with the history of architecture flinched. Forcing architects (or artists, or composers, or writers) into the confines of a state-approved style or artistic method feels all too familiar. Not long ago, that was the job of socialist realism: starting in 1932, it sifted out “us” from “them,” allocated commissions, ensured career growth, or, conversely, shut people out of the profession. The list of geniuses who “didn’t fit in,” who were executed, tortured, or barred from working, is long; it includes writers, poets, artists, directors, and architects accused of “formalism,” bowing down to the West, and (sounds familiar, right?) wasting taxpayer money on elitist art. It includes the same avant-garde architects whose names are now being paraded by Culture Ministry officials as part of Russia’s heritage: Melnikov, Leonidov, Golosov, Ginzburg.
But there’s a catch.
In the 1930s, this whole apparatus was launched from above. The state wanted familiar, easy-to-understand art; fancy-looking monumental architecture to the tastes of the nomenklatura; and to provide “a clear and definitive creative line that is destined to put an end to the ideological vacillations that have […] until recently been present in our community,” as the magazine Stroitel’stvo Moskvy [The Building of Moscow]wrote in 1936. And the elite’s tastes called for colonnades, pediments, sculptures, fountains and gazebos, gold leaf and marble. Constructivism’s radical experiments in form and function were declared perversions, gimmicks, and monstrosities. A pivotal moment was the competition to design the country’s most important building, the never-realized 400-meter-tall Palace of Soviets in Moscow.
Stalin was personally involved in discussing the architectural designs for the Palace submitted and oversaw the writing of the competition guidelines, which would define Soviet architecture for years to come:
“Although we do not prescribe a specific style, the Construction Council believes that designs should explore architectural forms both new and classical while drawing on contemporary achievements in architectural engineering.”
The bigger question—why create this building and this grand style, anyway?—had already been answered by Sergei Kirov a decade earlier: to show people, “our friends or not, that the ‘half-Asians’ they still look down upon are capable of blessing their sinful land with a work of grand architecture that our enemies could never even dream of.”
For comparison:
“Our time confronts the country’s architects with the fundamental question of who is responsible for the future of Russian architecture (without which there can be no Russia). A new Russian architecture is demanding to be fully expressed and manifested, here and now. We have begun developing an architectural doctrine that will combine the depth of tradition with modern architectural technology.”
This is in 2023.
Nearly 100 years later, we once again need to “manifest” something, to prove our worth to our enemies, and to do so through state-sponsored architecture, mixing together nebulous “traditions” and “modern technology”.
But this new proposal was not formulated by Putin, or the propaganda-spewing Pyotr Tolstoy, or even Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova—it came from a humble architect. Alexey Komov, an extremely active and patriotically minded member of the board of the Union of Architects of Russia, the former Chief Architect of Yalta (in 2015), and, since 2019, the Chief Architect of the city of Kaluga, is perfectly suited for this role.
Like many of his generation, Komov is nostalgic for the fictional USSR of the movies, with its sunshine, amateur athletes in white unitards, and jazz soundtrack by Leonid Utyosov. For him, the 1930s were a time of enthusiasm and ambitious construction projects, and nothing more.
Art historian Arseny Steiner earned a dubious reputation as the pro-Putin curator of the exhibition series Russia Today [Aktual’naia Rossiia], tasked by the Ministry of Culture with showcasing “the right kind” of contemporary art, work like Guintovt’s. Steiner’s 2016 interview with Komov tells you all you need to know about the worldview behind this Russian style:
AS: Do you think that we’re going to see a time of similar enthusiasm?
AK: The thing is, even before we reunified with Crimea, I could smell these new ‘30s coming.
AS: You’re not the only one.
AK: People ask, “Well, but what about [the purges in] 1937?” Who cares about the purges? I’m here for the rest of the 30s.
AS: It was a time of great victories, yeah.
AK: …And not long ago, we got a taste of the new ‘30, with their uplifting spirit, maybe even a little of their militarism…
Komov actively supported the takeover of Crimea in 2014 (“Crimea has always been a joyful source of renewal for me. Some people say ‘Crimea is ours,’ some people say ‘Crimea is theirs’—I say, ‘Crimea is mine’”) and benefitted financially from the annexation, gaining large commissions in Yevpatoria and Sevastopol. He belongs to the post-Soviet “golden youth,” the privileged children of Soviet cultural elites. Komov’s father, a successful sculptor in the Brezhnev era, won the State Prize of the USSR and served on the committees for the Lenin-and State Awards, the board of the Artists’ Union, and the presidium of the USSR Academy of Arts. (We have written elsewhere about the significance of the artists’ unions and their descendant organizations in the current revival of propaganda structures in the arts.) The key themes of the following brain dump by Komov echo, almost word for word, the rhetoric of his friend Guintovt and of Belikov.
“…Russian civilization, the quintessential Russian, the [ethnic] Russian individual we’re fighting for. And Russia should not just present a certain zone of meaning; it should present a zone of victory, a zone of success… If the West is making tradition a dirty word, unifying everything… doing transhumanism, canceling writers, even nullifying biological sex, then we’re the ones, Russian culture, Russian civilization above all, need to be the ones to take a scientific approach… And architects aren’t the only people who agree… We’re talking a big conglomerate of architects, professionals, patriots…”
(For the sake of accuracy, we have quoted Komov’s statement, which came during an appearance on the channel Crimea24, verbatim.)
Komov has teamed up with Yuri Belousov, CEO of the news aggregator SMI-2 and founder of the marketing agency E-Generator, the aforementioned Alexey Guintovt, architects Alexey Levchuk (St. Petersburg), Evgeny Spirin (Saratov), and many other pro-war architects and artists to try out the new style—in the field. In the coming months, they plan to break ground in occupied Ukraine on a series of symbolic obelisks, Lighthouses of the Russian World. Belousov has dubbed the obelisks “Putin’s mile markers” [putinskaia milia], after Catherine the Great’s mile markers [ekaterininskaia milia], proclaiming, “They will symbolize a Russian cultural presence and union with Russia.” Refusing to be confined to Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, the architects have planned their main “lighthouse” for Kyiv’s central Maidan:
“We have one design for Kiev’s main square, which will be called Russian Square, and have a Russian lighthouse. ‘Independence Square’ should be named Russian Square. It will contain this symbol of our lands’ unity and reunification.”
Komov plans to debut the new style of “Russian civilization” and present all the designs for lighthouses of the “Russian World” in a special exhibition at the architectural festival Zodchestvo, which he will curate, as he did last year, this October in Moscow. His 2023 curatorial manifesto is dedicated to the theme “Tomorrow.” “We are talking about a future that has suddenly arrived.” Komov suggests that we go on to “roll up our sleeves, like our great Soviet architects once did” and create Russian code and “shared firmware” for the country: “Not only is it time for us to rise up [vstat’ s kolen]—it’s time for us to go do it, to go forth and implement our principles. Because our principles are the principles of truth and tradition, the principles of historical justice. This is what we stand for. That’s why we are ready to keep broadcasting [our values] to the whole country, and ready to go beyond our borders. As Alexey Guintovt says, ‘Russia’s goals are clear, though our borders…’” Here in his Crimea24 appearance, Komov smiles coyly, as if to say, “Not so much.”
A “Russian Square” with a lighthouse in the center of Kyiv; nuclear Orthodoxy and “heavenly eyes in the sky”; an imperial avant-garde and Soil; an ethnic Russian civilization with its own codes, secret passwords, and values; canvases covered with gold leaf, Church Slavonic lettering, and biblical street art; “good Russian people” raising money for weapons; medieval battle cries and earnest acoustic singles about honoring Russia’s war dead with more war: this style already exists. Seemingly born from a Vladimir Sorokin novel or late interview with Sergey Kuryokhin, the style has been spreading and flashing its many colors like an oil patch in water—but until the state appropriates it and claims it as its own, it will remain a phantom. At least until this autumn.
