Concrete Wastelands logoConcrete Wastelands
Back to Digest
Key Insight
  • In May 2022, Chisinau’s State Circus became the first socialist modernist building on the state monuments register, thereby receiving protected status.
  • Chișinău’s tallest building was officially a dormitory until 1997, and nobody agrees on what it was meant to be: a sanatorium, a hotel, dorms, social housing, or simply a residential flat.
2026-11-11

One Office, One City: Architects of Modern Chișinău

The architects behind Soviet-era Moldova, 1944–1991: who designed the landmarks that continue to share the urban environment of the capital.

Chisinau’s massive, 18-story Ministry of Agriculture, Regional Development, and Environment represents the importance of the agri-food industry of Soviet-era Moldova.

Soviet-era Chișinău was designed by a small group of architects who mostly worked in one office: the state design institute Moldgiprostroy. Semyon Shoikhet's name is on nine buildings in the archive; Anatoly Kolotovkin ran the city's architecture and then the institute for most of three decades.

They also wrote the standard account of their own work. Architecture of Soviet Moldavia (Архитектура Советской Молдавии, Stroyizdat, 1987) is by Kolotovkin, Shoikhet and Iosif Eltman. It divides the period in three: reconstruction from 1944, mass building by microdistrict from 1955, and a search for new solutions in the city center from 1970. This article follows the same order.

Rebuilding the capital: 1944 to 1960

The plan came from Moscow but its author was local. Aleksey Shchusev, born in Chișinău in 1873 and by then the architect of Lenin's Mausoleum, drew up the reconstruction plan for the city in 1947–49. His birth house is now a museum, on the street named after him. He built Pobeda Park in Tiraspol (1947); the city also names him, with Leonid Chuprin, for the railway station of 1948.

The tracks and platforms of the Chisinau Railway Station, 1948.

Robert Kurtz

Robert Kurtz turned much of the plan into buildings. Born in Vladikavkaz on December 17, 1911, he graduated from the Institute of Architecture in Bucharest in 1940, was chief architect of the city from 1944 to 1951, and then chief architect of Moldgiprostroy until 1971. He worked on the general plan under Shchusev and built more than 25 projects. He died in Chișinău on April 24, 1980.

His main work is the central park, now Valea Morilor (1954, with David Palatnik), and its Cascade Stairway, with Stella Stalinskaya. His Hotel Chișinău was begun in 1952 as a Stalinist design with non-functional ornament and finished in 1963 as a modern building with Moldovan folk details.

Waterfall Stairway (Cascade) - Chisinau, 1954.

Mednek, Voitekhovsky and the first public buildings

Valentin Mednek was born in Comrat in 1910 and studied at the Brno polytechnic until he was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1932 for communist ties. He worked in Shchusev's group on the plan, then became chief architect of Bender (Bendery) in 1950. In Chișinău he designed the Academy of Sciences (1955) with Aleksandr Vedenkin. His Bender work is covered below.

Born in Soroca, Valentin Voitekhovsky (1909–1977) helped design over 100 buildings in Chisinau, including the Patria cinema (1952, with M. Berber) and the 1962 rebuilding of the National Philharmonic. The National Library, by Agasi Ambartsumyan with Sergei Vasiliev, was completed in 1961.

Moldgiprostroy: 1960s and 1970s

Moldgiprostroy was already older than its name. It began on August 13, 1944, as the design office of the republic’s Moldavstroyproekt trust, was renamed Moldgiprogorselstroy in 1954, and in 1957 became the state construction design institute Moldgiprostroy. Design ran on internal competitions: the entry that best met the brief was chosen and handed to a brigade to draw up for construction. Kurtz, Kolotovkin and Cherdantsev all held senior posts there. In 1998 it became Urbanproiect, the national institute for urban planning and architecture, which still exists.

Anatoly Kolotovkin

Anatoly Kolotovkin (1928–2003) held the city's main architecture posts for three decades. Born in Konotop and trained at the Lviv Polytechnic, he was deputy chief architect of Chișinău from 1958 and chief architect from 1964 to 1970. He chaired the Union of Architects of Moldova from 1963 to 1990 and directed Moldgiprostroy from 1974 to 1992. With Tatiana Lomova he designed the Green Theater in Valea Morilor (1967) and ACVAPROJECT (1980). He is also on the experimental 16-storey 143-series house on Dacia Avenue, with A. Gordeyev, A. Kireev and Shoikhet.

Shoikhet and Vaysbeyn

Semyon Mikhailovich Shoikhet (Семён Михайлович Шойхет) has more buildings in the archive than anyone else. Most of his work was done with Abram Vaysbeyn, known as Boris, born in Chișinău in 1927 and trained in Odessa.

Central Bank of Moldova (former State Bank Building), 1973. The modernist building continues in its annex.

Albina Kirichenko and the circus

Albina Kirichenko is the best-documented of the city's postwar women architects. She won the MSSR State Prize as a co-author of the 2,000-seat circus, and was later made an honorary citizen of Chișinău. She and Shoikhet reworked the standard circus design they were given into one for Chișinău's earthquake rules, with trapezoid panels and balcony lines taken from Moldovan carpets. In May 2022 the circus became the first socialist modernist building on the state monuments register, after a campaign by the BACU association.

State Circus - Chisinau, 1981

Fridlin and Minaev

Semyon Fridlin (1909–1992) arrived with a career in Ukraine behind him: theaters in Zaporizhzhia and Chernihiv, and the Kyiv Central Market Hall. In Chișinău he designed the Government House (1960–65) and the Octombrie Palace, now the National Palace (1974), and was the first to be named Distinguished Architect of the MSSR.

Aleksandr Minaev (1935–2017) came from Moscow in 1964 as deputy chief architect. In twelve years he designed the Komsomol monument in Cahul (1968) and the Eternity Memorial Complex (1975), then left in 1976, later becoming chief architect of Kaluga) in Western Russia.

The late Soviet center: 1975 to 1987

The buildings that still define central Chișinău went up in about twelve years, most of them on Ștefan cel Mare Boulevard.

Cherdantsev headed the general plans section at Moldgiprostroy. His Central Committee building, with Bosenko, reads from the boulevard as an open book, its spine four full-height pylons. Bosenko went on to Moldexpo and the Floricica film studio.

Parliament of the Republic of Moldova, 1976.

Yuri Tumanyan designed the Supreme Soviet in 1980–85 with Zaltsman and Yavorsky. The City Gates on the airport road were his idea; his wife and colleague Yulia Skvortsova designed them and won the MSSR State Prize.

Chisinau City Gates, 1987.

The Hotel Intourist, then Hotel National - and now abandoned - has conflicting completion dates. BACU indicates it was completed in 1974, official sources, including the 1984 Kishinev encyclopedia, give 1978, while Shalaginov's widow, Natalia Shalaginova, says it was built in 1973, citing family photographs and a book by the former chief architect V. F. Smirnov.

Hotel National (former Inturist Hotel), 1978.

Oleg Vronsky's Romanița tower, 73 meters and 22 floors, is the tallest building in the city. It is variously said to have been commissioned as a sanatorium for the USSR Ministry of Construction, as a hotel, or as housing from the start; it was registered as a dormitory until 1997. Vronsky himself dismissed the story of a revolving roof restaurant. His team was A. Marian, O. Blogu, S. Krani, N. Rebenko and P. Feldman.

Housing Complex Romanita - Chisinau, 1986.

The Guguță café was built in 1967–69 as the Noroc restaurant by V. Kudinov and Viktor Zakharov, and rebuilt in 1979 by Sergei Lebedev and Nicon Zaporojan, who hung a metal frame on the old facade. Its planned demolition started the Occupy Guguță movement, which successfully prevented its demolition.

Cafe Guguta (former Noroc Restaurant), 1967 (redesigned in 1976).

Outside Chișinău

Valentin Mednek ran Bender (Bendery, Tighina) as its chief architect from 1950, and several of its Soviet landmarks are his: the Lenin in Komsomol Park (1951, with the sculptor Sergey Merkulov), the Tkachenko House of Culture (1963), the bus station with A. P. Moghilevski, and the 1969 monument to the Fighters for Soviet Power, the last three with mosaics by Mikhail Burya. Outside Bender he designed the Memorial of Military Glory in Rîbnița (1975). He became an honorary citizen of Bender in 2003 and died in 2008.

In Bălți, the Vasile Alecsandri Theater was designed by Ianina Galperina of Moscow and built in 1990. In Tiraspol, A. V. Norolsky is credited with the government building (1983) and, as Narolsky, with the 1969 monument to the victims of fascism. The Memorial of Glory (1972) is by Garry Faif, a Moscow-trained architect who also worked as a sculptor; his story is in the sculptors article.

Women architects

Kirichenko, Lomova, Skvortsova and Stalinskaya are the women credited in the archive. Mariana Șlapac's 2022 study names around twenty more who worked in Soviet Chișinău, among them Elena Zabunova, Galina Penbek, Ludmila Gofman (credited in the archive on the Fashion House), Tatiana Dorofeeva and Ludmila Klevenskaia. Dorofeeva and Klevenskaia share surnames with N. Dorofeev and Vadim Klevensky, both in the archive; whether they are related is not known.

Sources