Art: Art for Marx’s Sake

Soviet architects, like all their comrades in art, are expected to toe the line. Last week they stubbed their toes—as the painters and composers had before them. Their difficulty was a familiar one: the line had changed.

A Pravda editorial denounced the official Academy of Architecture for “slavishly toadying to the rotten bourgeois ideology.” It appeared that architects had made the mistake of designing buildings that looked nonCommunist. Pravda struck equally hard at the architects who went in for many-columned neo-classical facades (like those in Washington, D.C.), and the functionalists whose housing projects looked like “military barracks.” Just what, then, should a proper Soviet structure look like? Pravda didn’t seem to know much about architecture, but it knew what it didn’t like. Western architecture, said Pravda, “has reached a dead end of formalist sophistication and box-style, soulless construction [but] Soviet art is always going forward along the road indicated by the party and the government.”

Even the two architects who had designed Moscow’s Red Army Theater, in the patriotic shape of a five-pointed star, came in for trouble. The star-shaped theater had proved “both expensive in construction and seriously inconvenient in use.”