ABSTRACT
Out of the ashes of the destruction wreaked by the Second World War, the Soviet Union inaugurated a monumental period of new construction. In the late 1940s and 1950s, cities such as Stalingrad, Smolensk, Minsk and Kiev were rebuilt almost from afresh. It was Moscow, though, that emerged as the prime focus of reconstruction efforts and, under the ‘Master Plan for the Reconstruction of the City of Moscow’ which had been released in 1935, it was transformed by a histrionic programme of building intended to proclaim to the world the victory of Soviet power.
