page_title: Stalinist architecture
section_title: Underground Metro (1938–1958)
hierarchical_section_title: Stalinist architecture / Post-War (1944–1950) / Underground Metro (1938–1958)
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Интерьер станции метро Нарвская в Санкт-Петербурге с бронзовым изображением серпа и молота (1955)
context_page_description: Stalinist architecture, mostly known in the former Eastern Bloc as Stalinist style or Socialist Classicism, is a term given to the architecture of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, between 1933 and 1955. Stalinist architecture is associated with the Socialist realism school of art and architecture.
context_section_description: The first stage of Moscow Metro (1931–1935) began as an ordinary city utility. There was much propaganda about building it, but the subway itself wasn't perceived as propaganda. "Unlike other projects, Moscow Metro was never named Stalin's metro". Old architects avoided Metro commissions. Attitudes changed when the second stage work started in 1935. This time, the subway was a political statement and enjoyed much better funding. The second stage produced such different examples of Stalinist style as Mayakovskaya (1938), Elektrozavodskaya and Partizanskaya (1944).
  It required six years to complete the first post-war metro line (a 6.4 km section of the Ring Line). These stations were dedicated to "Victory". No more Comintern (the Comintern metro station was renamed Kalininskaya in December 1946), no more World revolution, but a statement of victorious, nationalist Stalinism. Oktyabrskaya station by Leonid Polyakov was built like a Classicist temple, with a shiny white-blue altar behind iron gates – a complete departure from prewar atheism. To see this altar, a rider had to pass a long row of plaster banners, bronze candlesticks and assorted military imagery. Park Kultury featured true Gothic chandeliers, another departure. Metrostroy operated its own marble and carpentry factories, producing 150 solid, whole block marble columns for this short section. The second section of Ring line was a tribute to "Heroic Labor" (with the exception of Shchusev's Komsomolskaya, set up as a retelling of Stalin's speech of November 7, 1941).
  April 4, 1953, the public learn that a 1935 stretch from Alexandrovsky Sad, then Kalininskaya, to Kievskaya is closed for good and replaced with a brand-new, deep-alignment line. No official explanation of this expensive change exists; all speculations concern a bomb shelter function. One of the stations, Arbatskaya (2) by Leonid Polyakov, became the longest station in the system, 250 meters instead of the standard 160, and probably the most extravagant. "To some extent, it is Moscow Petrine baroque, yet despite citations from historical legacy, this station is hyperbolic, ethereal and unreal". 
  Stalinist canon was officially condemned when two more sections, to Luzhniki and VDNKh, were being built. These stations, completed in 1957 and 1958, were mostly stripped of excesses, but architecturally they still belong to Stalin's lineage. The date of May 1, 1958 when the last of these stations opened, marks the end of all late Stalinist construction.
caption: Stalinist symbols in St.Petersburg Metro (1955)
exif: {}