As recently as ten years ago, it seemed likely that the avant-garde legacy of Moscow would crumble into dust. The government that seized control after the failed experiment of communism wanted to highlight its wealth, and few Russians remembered the utopian dreams of the 1920s. More vivid were memories of the Great Terror, the privations of war, the long lines and empty shelves of the stagnant decades. In The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922-1932 photographer Richard Pare chronicled the terminal decay of factories and housing, workers’ clubs and palaces of culture that expressed the revolutionary aspirations of the first decade of Bolshevism. His survey appeared in 2007, when every old building was at risk.
See full text here:
