The Soviet Architecture Key Problems in the Second Half of the 1930s: on Materials of Plenums the Board of the Soviet Architects Union of the USSR

Abstract

The article focuses on the materials of nine Plenums of the Board of the Union of Soviet Architects of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which took place in the second half of the 1930s in the period between the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937 and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of the USSR. The published materials of the Plenums are very rarely used by specialists as sources for the study of Soviet architecture and have never been the subject of special research before. Meanwhile, the focus of each Plenum of the Board always turned out to be the most relevant problems of Soviet architecture at the current time. Therefore, they are important documents for understanding and comprehending the global processes that took place in the Soviet architecture of that time. In addition, the correlation of the materials of the Board Plenums with the materials of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937 allowed us to see the congress not only as the final point in the Soviet architecture development in the 1930s, but also as the beginning of a new stage. The materials considered in the article show that at this moment starts the struggle against "excesses" ("izlishestva") in Soviet architecture.