MGIMO, Conference Hall

Vernadsky Avenue, 76

Unknown author

Above the central entrance to the MGIMO building complex, designed by the city’s chief architect Mikhail Posokhin (in collaboration with M. V. Pershin and B. N. Kolotov), three metal reliefs depicting the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlinand two allegorical figures are set into the stone cladding. In one of the buildings housing the conference hall, above the entrance doors — now in the interior — there are also full-length sculptural figures: a cosmonaut, a construction worker, an artist, and two additional female figures: one with a wreath above her head, the other holding a laurel branch and a scarlet banner. The original plastic composition, executed in an overall blue tonality with gilded smalt on the framework, the banner pole, and the laurel leaves, highlights allegories of construction, space exploration, art, glory, and statehood. The aesthetics of late modernist monumental decoration is marked by a subtle melancholy in the figures’ expressions and, despite the virtuosity of the masonry and design, softens the propagandistic pathos.