in Architecture, Art, History | July 13th, 2026 Leave a Comment

It’s no small project to found a new soci­ety, espe­cial­ly when you’re doing it on the scale of a place like Rus­sia. Apart from the con­sid­er­able prac­ti­cal chal­lenges it entails, there’s also the need for sym­bols bold enough to rep­re­sent the under­ly­ing ide­al. The avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin took it upon him­self to cre­ate just such a sym­bol in the years after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. The result is offi­cial­ly known as the Mon­u­ment to the Third Inter­na­tion­al, named for the orga­ni­za­tion tasked with the pro­mo­tion of world com­mu­nism (often abbre­vi­at­ed to Com­intern). But it’s more com­mon­ly referred to as Tatlin’s Tow­er, per­haps in trib­ute to the artist’s par­tic­u­lar vision — one too ambi­tious for its real-life con­struc­tion even to begin.

“As part of a large-scale pro­gram to replace old czarist mon­u­ments with mon­u­ments to the rev­o­lu­tion, the huge struc­ture was both a sym­bol­ic sculp­ture and func­tion­al archi­tec­ture,” write Smarthis­to­ry’s Charles Cramer and Kim Grant. “Designed to strad­dle the Neva riv­er in St. Peters­burg, the 1300 foot (400 meter) iron and glass Mon­u­ment would sur­pass Paris’s Eif­fel Tow­er in both scale and com­plex­i­ty.”