About the book: 2015 / During his lifetime, Alexei Shchusev was called a poet, a philosopher, an artist, and he was, above all, a talented architect. Hereditary Cossack, nobleman, gold medalist of the Academy of Arts, architect of the Holy Synod, holder of the royal orders and laureate of the Stalin Prizes, author of three dozen churches, the Lenin Mausoleum, the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, the Moscow Hotel, the Kazansky railway station, the Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya metro station - all this is Shchusev, who characterized his creative path as “a struggle for the embodiment of his own ideas.” No other figure of Russian culture causes as much controversy to this day as Shchusev, who is called Stalin’s favorite, forgetting that in 1937 he almost ended up in the dungeons of the Lubyanka, which, by the way, he rebuilt himself. He was unfairly accused of opportunism, although there was no other master who felt like a fish in water in different historical eras and styles. But Shchusev was also a talented restorer, a defender of Russian antiquity, for which he received a slap in the hat more than once. About this and much more - a new book by the famous writer and historian Alexander Vaskin.