Socialist classicism

Stalinist architecture, also referred to as Stalinist Empire style or Socialist Classicism, is a term given to architecture of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, between 1933, when Boris Iofan's draft for Palace of the Soviets was officially approved, and 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev condemned "excesses" of the past decades and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture. Stalinist architecture is associated with the socialist realism school of art and architecture.

As part of the Soviet policy of rationalization of the country, all cities were built to a general development plan. Each was divided into districts, with allotments based on the city's geography. Projects would be designed for whole districts, visibly transforming a city's architectural image.

The interaction of the state with the architects would prove to be one of the features of this time. The same building could be declared a formalist blasphemy and then receive the greatest praise the next year, as happened to Ivan Zholtovsky and his Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya in 1949–1950. Authentic styles like Zholtovsky's Renaissance Revival, Ivan Fomin's St. Petersburg Neoclassical Revival and Art Deco adaptation by Alexey Dushkin and Vladimir Shchuko coexisted with imitations and eclectics that became characteristic of that era.

The Vysotki or Stalinskie Vysotki (Russian: Сталинские высотки), "(Stalin's) high-rises" are a group of skyscrapers in Moscow designed in the Stalinist style. The English-language nickname for them is the "Seven Sisters". They were built officially from 1947 to 1953 (some work extended years past official completion dates) in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles and the technology used in building American skyscrapers.

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