 After relocating to Saint Petersburg in 1905, he became an established master of the Neoclassical Revival movement.Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Fomin developed a Soviet adaptation of Neoclassicism and became one of the key contributors to an early phase of Stalinist architecture known as postconstructivism.Born in Oryol, Fomin received a "classical"  education at a high school in Riga, and studied mathematics at the Moscow University.