Socialist Classicism — also called Stalinist architecture or Socialist Realism in architecture — is the monumental style imposed across the Soviet Union and its satellite states from the 1930s through the mid-1950s. These buildings combine classical symmetry, columns, and ornamental richness with an overwhelming scale designed to project state power.
The style rejected Modernist abstraction as "bourgeois formalism" in favour of wedding-cake towers, triumphal arches, and palatial facades clad in stone. Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin (originally Stalinallee) remains the most intact ensemble outside the former Soviet Union — a kilometre-long boulevard of eight-storey residential palaces with shops, restaurants, and cinemas at street level.
