Antony Kalashnikov's well-written monograph sets out to argue, based on a myriad of diverse sources, that the Stalinist program of monument construction harnessed a widely shared and collective striving toward self-commemoration by architects, artists, and the public alike. He critiques the more “neo-totalitarian” school that argues that this cultural phenomenon was more part of a political process of official state propaganda from above. He also argues that monuments from the Stalin era were constructed as prospective objects; namely, created to endure throughout the ages for future generations. Lastly, he believes this was part of a larger social process where the nation's collective identity would be preserved in an intergenerational chain of memory.
In Ch. 1, he discusses how Soviet monuments were fundamentally imbued with a self-commemorative function, and in the Stalin era therefore unparalleled resources (even in times of privation) were channeled into their construction. These Stalin era monuments, such as the Moscow-Volga Canal, became monuments (synthetically produced) to the era and would commemorate the glorious Stalinist present. In Ch. 2, he shifts to analyzing the historicist turn in Stalinist architecture, which he argues was particularly well-suited to prospective monument design and was even echoed in the broader traditionalist turn in inter-architectural practices outside the Soviet Union. In chapter three, he adds an interesting element to his narrative by arguing that the process of self-commemoration combined a type of synergistic method integrating sculpture and decorative art in addition to architecture. Epigraphic inscriptions on monuments also imparted distinctive content to the individuals and events they memorialized. Stalinist monuments, according to Kalashnikov, were uniquely suffused with words to further reinforce, to future generations, the heroic struggles of the Stalinist public.
In Ch. 4, Kalashnikov begins the second half of his book by arguing for a new synthetic model articulating that the Stalinist monument building program was situated on a terrain of shared cultural value—the need to be remembered. By referencing, for instance, visitor books at the unveiling of Metro stations, or commemorative publications, he noted a collective identification with national monument building. Most interesting were the open competitions for amateurs that supplemented the closed professional architectural competitions. In Ch. 5, he elaborates on the cultural foundations of Stalinist monument building by further discussing how Stalinist self-commemoration projects were progressively inserted into the historic preservation movement. Kalashnikov argues it was the trauma, induced by rapid modernization, social dislocation, and the destructive Second World War, that favored an altered culture of time: one that marginalized utopia and embraced the national imagination. He ends, in Ch. 6, by widening his comparative scope of analysis to the broader global interwar context, and convincingly shows how amidst worldwide economic depression, monumental constructions spoke of issues of stability, continuity, and of course nationalism. In three iterative examples, US, German, and Soviet, self-commemoration stabilized the modern temporal order as well.
In his epilogue, Kalashnikov ruminates over the contemporary significance of surviving Stalinist monuments, and their potential meta-meaning for the Russian public of different generations. He argues that these Stalinist monuments, both in subject matter and execution, can play important roles in supporting a triumphalist memory of the Great Patriotic War. Furthermore, while young Russians recognize the tragedy of Stalinist repressions, imbibed in these monuments to some extent, at the same time they could potentially resist resignification, according to Kalashnikov, and retain a fundamental productivity in contemporary Russia.
At times, Kalashnikov's critique of the “neo-totalitarian model” is repetitive and can obscure his own synthetic and complex understanding of the production of monuments in the Stalin era. While he presents the perspective of architects and citizens from below, he too intersperses, within various chapters, the dominant perspective of the political authorities from above. Furthermore, while he presents the architectural turn toward eclecticism and historicism as critical, he seems to suggest this was the method of the broader architectural community from below. Yet witness the work of Danilo Udovicki-Selb's equally compelling arguments, in Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes, for the competitive zeal and surviving productions of the modernists well into the Stalinist 1930s that provides us with an alternative understanding of those many architects who resisted the prescribed trend toward historicism.
Yet with those criticisms aside, this erudite, inter-disciplinary study is not only very well-written, and persuasively argued, but is based on an impressive evidential base of diverse Russian archives. This excellent academic work will be of great interest to a wide array of scholars, including art historians, architectural historians, as well as Soviet cultural and political historians alike.
