Shchuko and Gelfreikh succeeded through the prewar period of Stalinist architecture with high-profile projects like the Lenin Library, Moscow Metro stations and co-authored the unrealized Palace of Soviets.

Born in Tambov in a military family, Vladimir Schuko joined Leon Benois's class of architecture at the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1896 and graduated in 1904.

His academic mentors included Vladimir Mate and Ilya Repin, and his classmates were Nikolay Lanceray, Ivan Rylsky, Alexander Tamanian and Nikolai Vasilyev; the class of 1904 was by far the strongest the Academy ever had.

[6] His first real project, executed upon his return from Italy in 1907, was the facades of two adjacent apartment blocks on Saint Petersburg's Kamenny Island (Markov Buildings, 1908–1910), which became instantly popular and were copied by fellow architects and included in textbooks on Russian architecture.

His other notable pre-revolutionary projects, the empire style Russian Pavilions, were built in Rome and Turin for the 1911 International Exhibition of Art and were soon dismantled.

[10] In 1918 Shchuko and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky collaborated with the Theatre of Artistic Drama as stage designers; the company collapsed after producing Tirso de Molina's El Burlador.

[9] The company, leaning towards classical works, earned cash through "lightweight" melodramas like Alexey Tolstoy's 1925 Conspiring Empress, also designed by Shchuko, that became a long-running hit.

[13] Shchuko productions of the Civil War period (1919 Don Carlos, 1920 Othello and Arvid Järnefelt's Destruction of Jerusalem) preceded the monumental stereotypes of social realism of 1930s-1940s, however, starting with the 1921 Twelfth Night he reduced the apparent size and grandeur of his stage sets.

[17] In 1925 Shchuko designed the pedestal and architectural setting for Sergey Evseyev's iconic "Lenin on Top of an Armored Car" monument on the Finland Station square.

The initial draft[21] comprised a complex network of low-rise buildings facing Mokhovaya Street and a π-shaped high-rise tower of the main depository at the back of the block.

Modern authors consider the Library, along with the Mayakovskaya station, to be Moscow's nearest approximations of Art Deco style and compare it to the 1937 Palais de Chaillot in Paris.

Despite its award-winning exterior and plans, the theatre was never used for its intended purpose: poor acoustics rendered it useless for music, and it has not produced a single opera show.

[26] Four weeks later (June 4), Iofan was "supplied" with two "assistants" - Shchuko and Gelfreikh,[26] both his seniors, and having a longer track of successful construction management practice dating from the 1900s.

According to mainstream history accounts, Shchuko and Gelfreikh were appointed because the immense project had to be completed quickly, and the establishment feared that Iofan was not experienced enough to handle it alone.

[29] In 1934 the trio departed for the United States to study American skyscraper technology, meeting Frank Lloyd Wright, who was well aware of Iofan's work and disliked it.