Alexei Șciusev

Șciusev was born on 8 October 1873 in the house that his parents, Victor and Maria Șciusev, had built in the 1850s in the historic part of Chișinău for their five children. From 1883 to 1891 he attended the city's Second Gymnasium. He lived in the family home until 1897.

His career unfolded in Russia and later in the Soviet Union. His best-known works include the Kazansky railway station and Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow, the memorial church on the Kulikovo Field, the iconostasis of the Dormition Cathedral in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and the opera and ballet theatre in Tashkent. He was a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts and of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and he received the Stalin Prize four times as well as the Order of Lenin.

The link with Moldova

After the devastation of the Second World War, Chișinău was among the cities for which Șciusev helped draw up a reconstruction plan. Between 1947 and 1949 he laid down the main lines of post-war Chișinău, with broad streets and prestigious buildings in the style of the time. He died in Moscow in 1949 and is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.

Where you will find him

Since 1990 the house where he was born has been a branch of the National Museum of History of Moldova. As early as 1947 it housed the republic's first architecture museum; in 1973 an exhibition on his life and work opened there. After a renovation in 2013 and 2014, the memorial house shows the family drawing room, a living room, the nursery and the architect's study, furnished in the spirit of the period. A street in Chișinău also bears his name.