It is a curious detail of the Soviet intellectual life of the Stalin era that in the period 1932-1940 almost the entire corpus of Renaissance architectural treatises was translated into Russian and published together with a substantial body of related scholarship. The project directly originated from a decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This work was done by some of the most prominent Soviet historians of the era and the translations and commentaries they published are generally of a very high quality. The paper analyses the project, the approach of the participants and the results of their work–with a particular emphasis on the work of two main protagonists of the project, Aleksander Georgievich Gabrichevsky (1891-1968) and Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov (1900-1963).