Lev Rudnev (1885–1956) was a Soviet architect and a leading practitioner of Stalinist architecture. Born in Novgorod, the son of a schoolteacher, he studied painting and architecture at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Leon Benois and Ivan Fomin. In 1917 he designed the avant-garde Monument to the Fighters of the Revolution in Petrograd. He taught at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad from 1922 to 1948 and then at the Moscow Architectural Institute, and after the Second World War helped rebuild Voronezh, Stalingrad, Riga and Moscow.
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The Government House, Baku (1952), built from 1936 after a competition he won, houses ministries of Azerbaijan and was designed for 5,500 people. The Moscow State University Main Building (1953) on the Sparrow Hills, designed with a team and awarded the Stalin Prize, is the tallest of Moscow's "Seven Sisters" and was Europe's tallest building from 1953 to 1990. In the same spirit he designed Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science (1955), offered as a gift to the people of Poland; 237 metres high with its spire, it was dedicated to Stalin on completion.
