Rudnev trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under the painter Léon Benois and the architect Ivan Fomin, and spent the 1920s teaching in Leningrad while Soviet architecture experimented with Constructivism, a movement he never joined. His own practice turned instead to a load-bearing classicism dressed in the vocabulary of a very different Rome: colonnades, attics, tiered set-backs and sculpted reliefs applied to steel-framed towers, the manner later named Stalinist architecture. His major commissions came directly from the state — the Frunze Military Academy, the Council of Ministers building on the Moscow River embankment, the central tower of Moscow State University, for which he won the Stalin Prize in 1949 — and culminated, in the year before his death, in the tower Stalin sent him to Warsaw to build as a gift.
