Palace of The Soviets - History of The Concept

History of The Concept

The Soviet Union was officially formed at the first Soviet Convention in December 1922. Sergey Kirov, speaking at the Congress, proposed building the congress palace "on the sites of palaces once owned by bankers, landlords, and tsars." Very soon, Kirov said, existing halls would be too small to fit the delegates from new republics of the Union. The palace "will be just another push for the European proletariat, still dormant...to realize that we came for good and forever, that the ideas... of communism are as deeply rooted here as the wells drilled by Baku oilers."

In 1924, Vladimir Lenin's death and the construction of the temporary Lenin's Mausoleum initiated a national campaign to build Lenin memorials across the country. Victor Balikhin, a graduate student at VKhUTEMAS, proposed to install Lenin's memorial on top of a Comintern building, on the site of Christ the Savior Cathedral. "Arc lamps will flood the villages, towns, parks and squares, calling everyone to honor Lenin even at night..." Balikhin's concept, forgotten for a while, emerged later in Boris Iofan's design.

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