Guest Post: What Tucker Doesn’t Understand About Russian Architecture

"Our own romantic dupe falls for the propaganda," writes Steven Volynets, of Tucker Carlson's recent bedazzlement during a carefully curated tour of Moscow delights

Steven Volynets, who grew up in a Soviet-era "cookie cutter high-rise" in 1980's Kharkiv, Ukraine, says Tucker Carlson would've seen a city far less dazzling than its subway system had he “ventured past Moscow's first-ring.” Not that the city is without its beauty! But to what purpose, and at what cost? And who benefits from the American broadcaster claiming that Moscow is “so much nicer than any city in my country”?

“What moves Tucker Carlson isn’t architecture or beauty. It’s that ‘Vladimir Putin never called me a racist,’” writes Volynets, recalling Carlson saying as much on FOX News, shortly before being fired from his own show. “As for the Moscow Metro, its mission to inspire Socialist Realism in Tucker Carlson’s audience now fulfilled, serves to distract its riders, if only briefly, from unfreedom, hopelessness, and grumbling stomachs.”

What Tucker Doesn’t Understand About Russian Architecture, by Steven Volynets

Tucker Carlson’s awestruck ride on the Moscow Metro sent social media and podcasters on a soul search about culture and beauty and whether the West is lagging behind Putin’s autocracy.   

I’ve been to Moscow twice as a child. It’s an astounding city. Indeed its subway is an architectural marvel. If you ride the Sokolnicheskaya line after rattling along the rusting industrial metalwork of Manhattan’s A-train, it will seem like a vast underground museum.

By the time its first thirteen stations opened in the mid-1930s, often built by slave labor, it became a canvas for the communist propaganda. Bathed in intense electric light – the light of the “bright socialist future” – the vaulted platforms were adorned with mosaic walls and marble statues hailing the glory of farmers, factory workers, and heroes of the October Revolution.

This Stalinist architecture – an odd mix of neoclassical style, constructivism, and American art deco— took shape in the 1920s, before Stalin took the reigns as General Secretary. There was a brief exchange of people and ideas between the Soviet Union and the West, when architects like Le Corbusier and American Albert Kahn were welcomed in the USSR, when John Dos Passos and Hemingway took notice of the new nation, and the great Soviet modernist poet Vladmir Mayakovsky got to visit New York City.

During WWII, the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi land army, but squandered the post-war peacetime. The rigid state-run economy couldn’t compete with the American building boom. Still, the influence of American skyscrapers was unmistakable. Moscow’s ‘Seven Sisters’ – the seven ornate Stalinist-style high-rises – never reached as high as the New York skyline, but they look eerily like Bank of New York, Woolworth, and the Empire State buildings.

In the decades to come, Moscow Metro, set deeply beneath the city streets, doubled as a nuclear bunker for Stalin and his VIPs in case the cold war went hot. After Stalin’s death, as the city grew so did its subway system. The coming of Khruschev and the denunciation of Stalin’s mass murders and purges brought a cleaner, more stripped-down style to the newly build stops.

As the city expanded, Soviet resources dwindled. Unpayable debts to the West mounted. If Tucker Carlson ventured beyond Moscow’s first ring, he would see a city less dazzling than its subway system. Khruschev and other high-placed communist got to travel to the West, places like the US, Italy, and Japan. They brought back construction techniques for building cheap low-rise housing – 5-floor barrack-style units still referred to as Khrushchevkas.

When Brezhnev came to power, Khrushchevkas grew a few stories taller to become Brezhnevkas, eventually giving way to a massive nationwide building spurt of prefabricated concrete structures that look completely identical. From Central Asia all the way to the Arctic East, in far-flung cities across the country’s eleven time zones, there they were, 16-story cookie cutter high-rises. I know: I spent my childhood in one of those buildings, in 1980s Kharkiv, Ukraine [that’s the actual building below].

Released in 1976, The Irony of Fate, the most watched Soviet romcom, lampoons this architectural uniformity. Its hero, a hapless lovable nerd Zhenya Lukashin, gets drunk on a New Year’s night, gets on the wrong flight, and mistakenly stumbles into the wrong apartment in a different city.

Later in the film, Lukashin falls in love with the woman who lives in the apartment he accidentally staggered into. Our own romantic dupe, Tucker Carlson, falls for the propaganda of what, in his own words to Lex Fridman, is “a white Christian nation.” In some ways, it is. It is also one of the largest Muslim nations, thanks to centuries of colonial conquest which folded Tatars, Uzbeks and other ethnic people into its sphere of influence. St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, its colorful cupola shaped like Eastern confections, was built to celebrate the capture of the Kazan Khanate in the mid-1550s.

Kremlin itself is a fortress, to protect the city against various ethnic invaders. But its centerpiece structure, the Spasskaya Tower – the crowning jewel of Moscow pictured on all the greeting cards and travel ads – was designed by an Italian architect Pietro Antonio Solari.  

In fact, if Tucker Carlson sought real beauty instead of deals on smoked meat at a Moscow supermarket, he would have traveled to Russia’s other great city, Saint Petersburg – a site of some of Europe’s most prized art and urban architecture. It too was modeled on European cities like Rome, London, and Vienna. The Winter Palace at Hermitage Museum, home to the Russian tsars, was built by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the Elizabethan Baroque style. Its collection is a truly global trove of the most exquisite art and antiquities.

Catherine the Great, founder of the Hermitage, was inspired by her predecessor, Peter the Great, who traveled to those European capitals. He brought back new styles in fashion, architecture, art and literature. From the British he learned modern engineering and how to build a better navy.

To mark his achievements, Catherine erected an elegant equestrian statute to Peter, commissioned from French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet in 1792. The statute, called The Bronze Horsemen, in turn inspired Alexander Pushkin’s most famous poem of the same name. It sill stands in Saint Petersburg’s Senate Square – a symbol of the city.

In 1997, not to be outdone, the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov, commissioned his own statute of Peter. Towering over Moscow River at 322 feet, the bleak, garish monstrosity inspires little more than a gagging reflex.

Maybe that’s why Tucker Carlson chose not to visit Stain Petersburg. It looks too Western, a thing he resents. His paragon of an ideal society, “a white, Christian country,” conceals that Russia’s true pride is not its native beauty or some imponderable soul but it's ability to emulate, pirate, and occasionally improve on what the West has to offer. What Peter the Great failed to bring back from Europe was European enlightenment – that single most important virtue – a way to create a freer, more open society.  

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Kremlin stands as a macabre tribute to the Soviet cult of the personality: old Bolshevik leaders are entombed in its walls and Lenin’s mummified corpse, pallid and soaked in chloroform, is still on public display in the mausoleum.

The city beyond its walls is a sprawling cluster of housing projects – same as Brezhnevkas only much taller now and less drab. Private real estate developers under state control have learned to throw splashes cheery colors on their facades.

As for the Moscow Metro, its mission to inspire Socialist Realism in Tucker Carlson’s audience now fulfilled, serves to distract its riders, if only briefly, from unfreedom, hopelessness, and grumbling stomachs. In that way, its beauty is no different from vodka and patriotic ballads. But what moves Tucker Carlson isn’t architecture or beauty. It’s that “Vladimir Putin never called me a racist,” as he once proclaimed on FOX News shortly before being fired from his own show for journalistic malfeasance. But maybe I’m wrong and Carlson is a real culture hound, in which case I await his adoring reports from Tehran.

Born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, Steven Volynets is a writer living in New York City. His father is a retired NYC Transit worker.