An opulent relic, Hotel Ukraine is one of Moscow’s Seven Sisters, seven massive buildings constructed in a similar style during the 1950s. The other Seven-Sister buildings house institutions such as Moscow University and Russian’s Foreign Ministry. 

Armed guards and impossibly expensive cars surround the Hotel Ukraine, whose lobby I visited during a trip to Moscow to see an impressive, 1:75 scale diorama of the city. 

Joseph Stalin and his government intended for the Seven Sisters, and their grand, ornamental style, to boost Soviet morale following a hard-fought but devastating victory in the Great Patriotic War, known elsewhere as World War II.

The war ended in Russians’ favor, but it cost the Soviet Union approximately 25 million lives. Millions died on the war’s many fronts; millions more died of starvation and exposure during sieges of major cities. The dead amounted to around 15 percent of the country’s population. 

It’s easy to see why the Soviet government felt the war’s demoralizing effect could jeopardize the still-new U.S.S.R’s stability. This worry manifested itself to a large extent in the purges, forced exiles and show trials Stalin used to scare would-be dissenters into meek subordination. Perhaps we can count the Seven Sisters as the sole favorable effect of Stalin’s paranoia. 

Perhaps. The Hotel Ukrania and its counterparts impressed me as relics from a regime that voiced its ideology, repressive as it was, through architecture. Today’s most impressive buildings, in Russia and elsewhere, are monuments to commerce or personal wealth. I’m intrigued by structures that purport to serve - or even elevate - a nation.

Some see the sisters in a less favorable light. The acclaimed journalist John Hersey snubbed them in a 1987 New Yorker article that recounted his recent return to Moscow, a city he’d last seen 40 years prior.

He wrote:

“Dictators have a sinister habit of defacing their capital…Stalin with seven huge buildings in an identical style of megalomaniacal grandeur…”

“These buildings — [Moscow University] was one, and from our hotel room we stared at another, the Hotel Ukraine, across the river — struck me as the most harmful change that forty years had brought to this city of so many haunting architectural treasures.”

I would count the Hotel Ukraine among Moscow’s haunting architectural treasures. Stay tuned to hear about more of these treasures in future posts.