Tatiana Prudnikova
State Marine Technical University of Saint Petersburg, Russia
In 1950 Mejdunarodniy Prospect in Leningrad was renamed in honor of Joseph Stalin, which triggered its massive reconstruction. The best architects were involved in this work. The project of reconstruction of the prospect was a certain “watershed” as it completed “the symbolic era of the Middle Ages — Stalinism” and opened “the pragmatics of the Modern History — the era N. Khrushchev”.
Soviet architects managed to achieve in a five-year period (1950–1955) what people of the Italian Renaissance attained in two centuries. This report considers cultural parallels between such geographically and chronologically remote phenomena as Renaissance and Soviet mentality on the example of the works on the Prospect of Joseph Stalin (the apotheosis of Stalinist culture) and culture of the Renaissance of the 14th–16th centuries. It offers an attempt to to identify similar features (the convergence of art and ideology; the combination of the real and the ideal, the individual and the typical; heroic spirit; the relationship of art and science, etc.). Despite the fact that after the death of Stalin renovation project (as originally planned) was ceased, it remained a monument to the creative surge comparable in importance with the projects of the Renaissance. The report will be accompanied with a presentation of pictures from St. Petersburg archives.