The Fredösphere

Let's have a contest, shall we? Let's vote on what is history's greatest single act of vulgarity.

My nominee is the Palace of the Soviets. This building was intended to be the tallest building in the world, and largest by volume, with a primary auditorium to seat 15,000 (a secondary auditorium would have been cramped by comparison, with room for only 6,000; one wonders what the capacity of the phone booths would have been). The design called for a statue of Lenin to stand on its top, a statue three times larger than the Statue of Liberty, with an index finger 20 feet long.

This video gets to the Palace of the Soviets at the end; in the meantime, we're treated to an amusing, yet melancholy, pipe dream of Moscow as the new Rome (they don't call it the Third Rome for nothing):



Construction work on the Palace began in the 1930s but was interrupted by World War II, and it never came even close to completion. The excavation hole was converted into an indoor public pool for a time. In the 1990s, Moscow mayor Yuriy Luzhkov oversaw the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer on that site, which had been demolished in 1931 in the most visible repudiation of the past by the Soviet government.

I think that extended index finger, pointing the way to the glorious socialist future, that puts my nominee over the top. The shear hugeness of the thing would test the good taste of even the finest architect, but the statue with the extended finger—well, what can I say? Nothing says totalitarian kitsch like a giant statue of a bloodthirsty dictator making a bold, impatient gesture with his hand.

(And what is it with giant statues that brings out the urge to make ethnically inappropriate pointing gestures?)

Russian monumentalism is not inherently doomed. The Mamayev Monument, was the tallest statue in the world at the time of its completion. The expression of horror on the statue's face is extreme, and risky for so public a work of art (especially considering this was the USSR) and its builders deserve praise for the risk they took.

Labels: Architecture, BigDumbObject, Marxists--I Hate These Guys