His career proceeded smoothly until September 1937, when, after a brief public smear campaign, Shchusev lost all his executive positions and design contracts, and was effectively banished from architectural practice.

[5] With the help of older siblings and a scholarship from the Chișinău city council, Alexey and his younger brother Pavel (1880–1957) graduated from the local gymnasium and continued their educations at the university level.

[27] Shchusev's contracts with the Kharitonenko [ru] and von Meck families and the charity of Grand Duchess Elisabeth were, to varying degrees, the result of Nesterov's recommendations.

[35] According to Dmitry Chmelnizki [de], the best example of this style is the Saint Basil Monastery in Ovruch, designed in 1907–1909 and completed in 1910: "the strictly functional floorplan, nearly absolute absence of direct borrowings, and the freedom in the treatment of form foreshadow Shchusev's constructivist buildings... thoroughly modern, in spite of clear allusions to Old Russian architecture".

[28] According to biographer Kirill Afanasyev [de], the most visually striking is the small church on the Natalievka estate [ru], conceived as a private museum of Russian icons.

[37][38] Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Shchusev also designed and built churches in Bari and Sanremo, in Italy; in Cuhureshti in Moldova; and on the Kulikovo Field in Southern Russia.

[42] Late Soviet theory, as outlined by Ikonnikov, placed Shchusev at the evolutionary end of the Neorussian style that emerged around 1880 in the works of Victor Vasnetsov and the Abramtsevo art colony [ru].

[43] The style, very different from the "official" Russian Revival, was further developed by Fyodor Schechtel, who introduced the ideas of Finnish Art Nouveau,[44] and ultimately peaked in the works of Shchusev and Vladimir Pokrovsky [ru].

[45] According to Ikonnikov, Shchusev stood above Pokrovsky, due to a combination of his natural intuitive talent, first-hand knowledge of world architecture, and experience in archaeological research.

Shchusev's firm also designed adjacent service buildings and the elevated viaduct of the nearby Alekseevskaya railway line [ru] that serves as a picture frame for the terminal.

[57][58][59] His tangible projects of the early 1920s—the 1922–1923 propylaea on Tverskaya Square, the pavilions of the 1923 All-Russian Exhibition of Agriculture and Domestic Industry, and the two temporary Lenin mausoleums of 1924—were not meant to last, and were demolished by the end of the decade.

[67] The resulting makeshift hut was too small for its intended role as a communist shrine; thus in March 1924 Shchusev was commanded to design and build a larger temporary structure that could also function as a tribune for the use of government officials.

[77] A single 1930 publication revealed that the as-built internal volume of the third Mausoleum encompassed 2,400 cubic metres (85,000 cu ft), suggesting that there already was a spacious underground compound.

[98] In the case of the Moscow Hotel, Shchusev's takeover was publicly explained as being necessary due to the inexperience of Savelyev and Stapran, who had allegedly made too many design errors and failed to correct them.

[98] According to Chmelnizki, Savelyev and Stapran were sufficiently competent to complete their original design;[98] but, like most graduates of the Vkhutemas, they lacked the classical visual arts education that was a prerequisite to "stylistic improvements".

[96] In 1934–1936, Shchusev's workshop proposed a large number of lavish, eclectic, and sometimes utterly improbable buildings for Moscow, foreshadowing the late Stalinist style of the post-war years.

[106] On 30 August 1937, at the peak of the Great Purge, Pravda published an exposé by Savelyev and Stapran accusing Shchusev of plagiarism, dishonesty, "counter-revolutionary mindset", and "harbouring the enemies of the state".

[117] According to Hugh Hudson and Karl Schlögel, the attack on Shchusev was orchestrated by Alabyan in an attempt to subdue independent professionals who stood in the way of the Union of Soviet Architects.

[110][118] The campaign killed lesser known urbanists Solomon Lisagor [ru] and Mikhail Okhitovich; but, according to Schlögel, its true target was the older generation of established architects, such as Shchusev.

[127] After World War II, Beria left the NKVD to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project, and the Akademproekt concentrated on top-secret research facilities such as the future Kurchatov Institute.

[125] In 1947, when the government announced plans to construct a series of skyscrapers in Moscow, Shchusev applied for the contract to design the future Hotel Ukraina, but lost to the team of Arkady Mordvinov and Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky.

[125] Later, foreign and Soviet authors alike criticized the "floridly overdone"[140] design for its excessive and obtrusive historicism, which, according to Ikonnikov, was inappropriate for a busy transport hub.

However, in the same period he amassed an exceptional number of state awards, including four Stalin Prizes: for the IMEL building (1940), the expansion of the Lenin Mausoleum (1946), the Navoi Theater in Tashkent (1948),[144] and the Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya station (1952, posthumously).

[151] Nikifor Tamonkin (1881–1951), one of his closest associates for almost forty years, and a competent architect in his own right,[m] described Shchusev as an unforgiving, disrespectful, ruthless exploiter of "lesser people".

"[152] According to Tamonkin, Shchusev treated his wife, children, and his junior brother Pavel just as harshly: in his bipolar world of "important" and "unimportant" people, the family belonged to the second class.

[157] In 1943, Shchusev, Igor Grabar, Boris Asafyev, and Victor Vesnin jointly appealed to Beria for the release of painter Pyotr Neradovsky [ru] and managed to extricate him from exile.

[161] Shchusev's conservative views on city planning and redevelopment were influenced by his experiences in Ukraine, Bessarabia, and Italy, where he had learnt the art of adaptation to historical environments.

[59][163] Although his staff was composed of modernist architects, from the Vesnin brothers to the Vkhutemas freshmen, the result was thoroughly conservative, with large territorial expansion into moderately dense suburbs and little intrusion into the old city.

He liked the idea of standalone high-rise buildings, as advocated by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, but considered them too expensive for the Soviet economy and too hazardous for the existing level of technology.

Frequent but fruitless competitions that led to infrequent tangible jobs left Shchusev enough free time to, in 1926, accept an offer to manage the nationalized Tretyakov Gallery.