This is a collection of architectural paintings, plans, drawings and photographs from the Stalinist period in Russia. The architectural competitions which were characteristic of the era were important tools in the propagandistic mass culture which served as a form of control, and this book uses these to chart developments and changes in architectural style. The text is supplemented with contemporary quotations, anecdotes and jokes, and aims to combine a sense of the comic as well as the tragic elements that produced some of the most startling artistic achievements of the 20th century. It provides an inside view of the period combined with an objective perspective and is illustrated with a wide a range of material, much of which has remained unseen in Soviet archives since the 1930s.
