Stalin’s Metropolitan: Iconographic Narrative, Visual Culture, and the Politics of Soviet Public Space

• In Event: Visual Rhetoric in the United States and Eurasia: The Interplay of History, Memory and Place

Abstract

By the Stalinist 1930s, the need for better transportation had become very urgent in Moscow as the population of the city had almost doubled since the two preceding decades to accommodate the demands of rapid socialist industrialization. Two prominent young Communist figures, Nikita Khrushchev and Lazar Kaganovich, were entrusted with organizing the building of the first Russian metro that would serve two purposes: the practical one of moving the new urban masses underground since the streets above were overcrowded, and the more symbolic, yet equally important, gesture of a metro that would serve as a visual and iconographic showcase for socialism and the achievements of workers and peasants. Thus the case study of the Metro can provide an interesting window into the ideological, visual and rhetorical power of “Stalinist showcase” technological projects, as well as a look at how labor, life and public architecture intersected well into the post-WWII era. There is a visual cultural, as well as communicative/spatial, dimension to this project that involves an understanding of the many fine artists and architects who were employed to decorate the metro as a museum to the Russian Revolution. Though they worked within the confines of socialist realist art paradigms, the artists constructed multi-faceted themes for each station which dealt with the 1917 Revolution, defense of the motherland, Soviet life, youth culture, futurist poetics, and many others. The rhetorical catchphrase of the project in the 1930s was “Comrades, we are building a metro, therefore we are building socialism”; this paper will re-write the paradigmatic axiom as “we are building a metro, and therefore narrating visually the story of socialism.”

Author

• James Thomas Andrews, Iowa State University