A photography reportage carried out in Moscow in 1980 documents in detail the “design and construction of the ideal city”, i.e. the construction of the new districts of the “Capital of the world proletariat and of the Empire of victorious socialism” during the period from 1935 to 1954. The idea of Moscow as “Capital of the Empire of victorious socialism” came to a peak at the same time as the decisive centralisation of power in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, and it materialised in the transformation of Moscow into one big artistic and monumental project. The “master plan for the reconstruction of Moscow”, adopted in 1935, provided for the city to more than double in size and for a considerable increase in the number of its inhabitants. The plan was based on the idea of “correcting” the original layout of the city, transforming it into an idealised radial/ring structure. The Stalinist redesigning of the city did not reject the Moscow cityscape that actually existed at the time but endowed it with a series of buildings and specific monumental projects, all of which sharing the new “grand style”.
