Tower Records
Last time Moscow dreamed this big, all it got was a hole in the ground
By Andrew Biliter

Late last year, Moscow had that moment—the one that comes, with dull predictability, for any major city in the throes of a construction boom. It approved a proposal to create the world’s largest building. British architect Norman Foster’s transparent, volcano-shaped complex will occupy 27 million square feet, four times the floor space of the Pentagon. Crystal Island, as it is aptly dubbed, will be a world unto itself. In addition to its 900 apartments and 3,000 hotel rooms, it will house a mall, an international school, and an underground parking lot with space for 16,500 cars (which is more staggering when one considers that most Muscovites park on the sidewalk).

The obvious symbolism that attaches itself to a volcano-shaped building is unintended and goes unheeded: even Russia’s most fervent dissidents would agree that Moscow is in no danger of erupting any time soon. That said, if the slumbering masses ever do recover their sovereignty from the oil business that virtually co-runs the country these days, you can bet someone will point to the big volcano building and say, “See? They were asking for it.”

This hypothetical revolution is, of course, built on another hypothetical, which is that Crystal Island will be built in the first place. Knowing Russia’s track record for making things that are “the biggest” or “the best,” there is a good chance that it won’t—or that it will, but in a grotesquely compromised form. Looking to past follies, there’s the enormous Tsar Bell, which was cast improperly and broke before it ever had a chance to ring; the BTA-6, the world’s largest mirror telescope, which had a tiny crack in it that made stars look like fuzzy blobs; and, of course, Vladimir Tatlin’s Tower, a leaning steel corkscrew that would have put Eiffel to shame if it had advanced beyond the model phase.

For those Muscovites who can still remember the Stalin years, the hype around Crystal Island will bring to mind one architectural failure in particular: the Palace of Soviets. Had it ever made it past the preliminary stages of construction, the congress hall would have edged out the Empire State Building as the world’s tallest structure and supplanted the Kremlin as the city’s focal point. Its final plan, authored by three architects with a lot of firsthand input and feedback from the Boss, was a cacophony of hammers, sickles and classical motifs tapering to a 300-foot statue of Lenin hailing a cab.

The first step toward realizing this monstrous vision, naturally, involved razing a church. In 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the tallest Eastern Orthodox edifice in the world, was dynamited into nothing.

For Stalin, blowing up an idol of the old regime to build one to his own was the ultimate twofer. But the first design contest ended with no winner, so a second, international contest was announced. Renowned avant-garde architects from around the world naïvely submitted proposals. Constructivist Moisei Ginsburg sketched the palace as a futuristic snow globe. Controversial urban planner Le Corbusier proposed a long, meandering complex not unlike an airplane hangar. And in the most esoteric design, Mikhail Olenev imagined the entire building as a giant figure 8. But what had seemed like an invitation for cutting-edge architects to showcase groundbreaking designs was actually a trap. Stalin had courted their input in order to publicly spurn them. Russia’s diehard formalists didn’t know it yet, but their careers were effectively over.

Now it was time to show them their mistakes. Stalin turned to three Neoclassicist submissions, Boris Iofan’s “Free Proletariat” tower foremost among them, and had them workshop the design in two more closed contests held from 1932 to 1933.  The result, shaped by his subtle hints—“Remember, this is a monument to Lenin [so please add a 300-foot statue of him]”—served as the handbook for what was now expected. Where the Constructivists of the 1920s had used abstract forms to celebrate the anonymity of communal life, the multi-tiered Palace of Soviets was a staircase no one could climb. The message is unambiguous: my hierarchy is fixed and here to stay. You are not on top, Lenin is, and in case you haven’t heard, I am the new Lenin.

Ironically, what doomed the palace to failure was its carefully selected location. Even as workers broke ground on the project, engineers observed that the spongy riverbank was too unstable to support a skyscraper. Flooding halted construction for a decade. Had Stalin urged them ahead undaunted, Muscovites might have one day been treated to the image of the world’s tallest building sliding into the river, Lenin’s waving gesture transforming into a desperate S.O.S. But Hitler’s invasion in 1941 put off construction indefinitely, and the steel foundations that had been laid were eventually scrapped to make tank barriers and bridges.

For years, only a concrete cavity remained. It was the most logical outcome of Stalin’s farcical contests. Architecture, and indeed all Soviet art, had become less about what to create, and more about what not to create. When terrified writers begged Stalin to tell them what they should write, he famously responded, “Write the truth.” But truth was no longer subjective, and expressing it meant divining Stalin’s will. Architects like Ginsburg felt squeezed: “We are asked to give up imitating Classical architecture, to give up Constructivist Modernist architecture, and to fight with their eclectic combination. But what is architecture under these conditions at all?”

Strangely enough, the unrealized palace became the key to answering that question. The seven skyscrapers that now dominate Moscow’s skyline, known to Westerners as the “Seven Sisters” or the “Wedding-cake buildings,” were all built to complement Iofan’s tower. Though they vary slightly in form, all are essentially Frankenstein monsters of Soviet crests, Classical arches and Gothic spires. The only thing left out, mercifully, was Big Lenin.

As for the empty pit, in a final touch of cruel slapstick, the government decided to dress it up as the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool: one is hard-pressed to find a more succinct symbol of the regime’s ability to turn tower into hole, presence into lack. (After 1991, the cathedral was pain-stakingly, if somewhat cheesily, rebuilt).

Since then, Moscow hasn’t lost a taste for megaprojects. The current mayor, Yury Luzhkov, has at various times proposed civic projects that included beehives in city parks, traffic-monitoring zeppelins, a monorail, whole streets encased in glass, heated sidewalks along the Arbat, and underwater parking garages. None brings to mind the Palace of Soviets fiasco,  however, as vividly as all the superlatives swarming around Crystal Island do. To the planners’ credit, it features solar panels, wind turbines, and lots of other forward-thinking, energy-saving mechanisms. But these are a foreign architect’s concerns, bells and whistles indulged but not highly valued by Russia’s elites, many of whom still view “environmentalism” as a scam and global warming as a Western conspiracy. Instead, Crystal Island appears to be merely another altar to money, a haven for visiting businesspeople and well-heeled Muscovites in a city that strives to gratify their every whim. The rest of us can watch them through the glass.