Short Synopsis
This book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft. It is an insight into the key moments of twentieth-century politics and culture from a unique perspective, and the personal story of a remarkable individual who witnessed many of the most dramatic turning points of modern history.

Full Synopsis
This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan, state architect to Joseph Stalin. Iofan's story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power. A gifted designer and a committed Communist, Iofan became the Soviet Union's most celebrated architect after Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor, persuaded him to return to Moscow from Rome with his aristocratic wife, Olga Sasso-Ruffo. Iofan was at the heart of political life in the Soviet Union and his work is key to understanding its official culture.

When Stalin's henchmen crushed the architectural avant-garde, it was Iofan who created the new national style, from the grand projects he realized—including the House on the Embankment—to even more ambitious unbuilt projects, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. He was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright; a rival of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn; and an enemy of Hitler's architect Albert Speer, whose Nazi pavilion faced Iofan's Soviet one at the Paris Expo in 1937. He kept silent when Stalin executed his friends, including Rykov; he also sacrificed his own talent by following the dictator's instructions to the letter in creating the regime's landmarks.

"Derek Perkins is a favored narrator for serious nonfiction, and rightly so. Expressive but unintrusive, his voice is familiar on first hearing it yet still fresh after 500 performances. Here he narrates the first full biography of Boris Iofan, state architect under Stalin, whose career exemplifies the uneasy relationship between architecture and power. The narrative is an example of the type at which Perkins excels: well researched, vividly detailed, built on a series of striking dramatic sequences." —AudioFile