‘Two Romes have fallen, Moscow is the third, and there will be no fourth!’ The title of Katerina Clark’s cultural history of the Soviet 1930s is taken from the resonant prophecy of the sixteenth-century Russian monk, Filofei of Pskov, who proclaimed Moscow the final centre of Christendom. Sergei Eisenstein invoked the monk’s words in a 1933 article about his (never realised) film Moscow: ‘this pronouncement by Filofei comes across to us from medieval times … Moscow as a concept is the concentration of the socialist future of the entire world.’

As Clark explains in Moscow, The Fourth Rome, in the messianic Soviet culture of the 1930s Moscow was a mighty guiding concept, the ‘model and center’ of a new universal ‘belief system’, the beautiful city to which all historical roads led, the last ‘Rome’. The book’s cover features the image