SovArch.ru

» see sovarch.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In February 2007 the address answered with one sentence saying the site was being built, a link to a LiveJournal community, an email address and three names: Nikolai Kalashnikov, Denis Romodin and Alexander Strugach. By the end of January 2008 the real thing was up, and the Russian property press noticed it, which is how the launch has a date at all. Soviet architecture had arrived on the internet, said a trade site on 31 January, which was closer to true than it sounds. There were photo blogs and there were books, and there was no catalog.

SovArch.ru described itself as the first non-commercial electronic resource devoted to the architecture of the USSR and to socialist architecture in other countries. That second clause is the ambitious part. A catalog of Soviet buildings inside Soviet borders is a big job. One that follows the same design ideas into Warsaw and Bucharest and the rest of the bloc is a much bigger one, and the site was built by two or three people on their own time.

Romodin was in his twenties when it launched. He is an architectural historian who came out of the Moscow Aviation Institute, and he went on to become a senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow, running its Sadovoye Koltso branch, writing documentary scripts and leading architecture walks around the city. The website was the early public version of that career, and it is the thing his biography still lists first.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was in it ~

The structure was a catalog of buildings arranged by country, then region, then settlement, with a search over the top and a short text on each entry. Around it sat a directory of architects and engineers and a library of source material covering 1917 to 1991. The library reached further than you would expect: one archived page is a shelf of conference papers and scholarly articles filed under Poland, holding a piece on the six-year reconstruction plan for Warsaw from 1950 to 1955. The front page carried a permanent admission that the catalog was incomplete and covered only parts of some regions.

I live in a city that could use exactly this and does not have it. Ankara is full of republican-era and postwar public modernism, ministries and housing blocks from the same decades and often the same instincts, and if you want to know who designed one of them you are going to a library or a Facebook group. A searchable catalog of that, free and entry by entry, is still the sort of thing somebody has to do as a hobby, which is why a Russian one running for eleven years deserves to be counted as a real project rather than a fan page.

~ the prizes ~

In 2009 SovArch.ru won the Runet Prize in the artistic site of the year category, which in Russia is a state-adjacent award with a ceremony and a statuette, not a webring badge. It followed that with a win in the Golden Site competition announced in 2010, in a category that bundled history and culture together with creative projects. Two national awards is a lot for a site with no revenue and no institution behind it.

Neither prize came with hosting money, and that turned out to be the only thing it needed.

~ the block page ~

There is no closing post to find, so the crawler does the dating. The homepage was serving normally on 31 May 2019, 3329 bytes of it, with the front feature explaining that the original design for the Foreign Ministry high-rise in Moscow had no spire on it and that the spire is supposed to have been Stalin's idea. On 18 July the same address returned a Russian hosting provider's error page instead: the requested resource is temporarily unavailable, the virtual web server has been stopped, and if you are the owner of this resource, check your control panel.

Nobody checked the control panel. The provider's template calls it temporary and it has now been seven years. In August 2025 the domain surfaced again under REG.RU with a fresh placeholder announcing that hosting had been set up and that files had yet to be uploaded, and today it does not resolve at all. The catalog exists in the Internet Archive, several hundred numbered pages of it, crawled mostly in the spring of 2008 when it was new.

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