Deaths on May 24

Alexey Shchusev, Russian architect, designed Lenin's Mausoleum and Moscow Kazanskaya railway station (b. 1873)

Alexey Victorovich Shchusev (Russian: Алексе́й Ви́кторович Щу́сев; 8 October [O.S. 26 September] 1873 – 24 May 1949) was a Russian and Soviet architect who successfully performed during three consecutive epochs of Russian architecture - Art Nouveau (broadly construed), Constructivism, and Stalinist architecture. He was one of very few architects who managed to rise to the top of Russian architectural community under the Romanovs, and then did the same under the communist Soviet regime, becoming the highest decorated architect in terms of Stalin prizes awarded.

In the 1900s Shchusev established himself as a church architect, and developed his personal free-flowing proto-modernist style that blended Art Nouveau with Russian Revival. Immediately before and during World War I he designed and built railway stations for the von Meck family, notably the Kazansky Rail Terminal in Moscow. After the October Revolution Shchusev pragmatically supported the Bolsheviks, and was rewarded with the contract for the Lenin Mausoleum. He consecutively designed and built two temporary and one permanent Mausoleum, and supervised its further expansion in the 1940s. In the 1920s and the early 1930s he successfully embraced Constructivist architecture, but quickly reverted to historicism when the government deemed modernism inappropriate for the Communist state. His career proceeded smoothly until September 1937. After a brief public smear campaign Shchusev lost all his executive positions and design contracts and was effectively banished from architecture. Modern Russian historians of art agree that the charges of professional dishonesty, plagiarism and exploitation raised against Shchusev were, for the most part, justified. In the following years he gradually returned to architectural practice, and restored his public image of the patriarch of Stalinist architecture. The causes of his downfall and the powers behind his subsequent recovery remain unknown.