Stalinist City Planning: Professionals Performance, and Power by Heather D. DeHaan (review)

Heather DeHaan shows that “socialist” city planning at the time of Stalin was the art of the impossible. This is the overriding theme of her innovative study of Gorky (as the pre-Revolution city of Nizhnii Novgorod was renamed in 1932), a city with nearly 100,000 inhabitants and the home of the famous Nizhnii Novgorod Fair in the days of the czars. The city had been a major pre-Revolution commercial centre, where traders from east and west met, bartered, and offered their goods. It occupied two banks of the Oka River where it flows from the Moscow region into the mighty Volga, making it an obvious place to build factories, launch the collective life, and stimulate further industrial development in the interior of Russia.

Large, dramatic industrial activity was to be the centrepiece of Soviet economic development and the platform where the great socialist drama would unfold. Communist planners loved the assembly line because it massed workers in collective labour. A huge Ford automobile plant was established in Gorky in the early 1930s in agreement with one of the United States’ leading capitalists. The city was ideally located to showcase socialism.

Enter Soviet civic planners, who had the unachievable task of inspiring socialist dreams and laying out a convenient and attractive city. One obstacle was insurmountable: socialist architectural grandiosity ran well ahead of the prospects for financing.

Planning in Gorky first fell to the supervision of a genuine expert, urban engineer and architect Alexander P. Ivanitskii. His ideas were practical, based on science, and possibly within reach providing that a myriad of problems could be solved and financed. But Ivanitskii was disinclined to follow the example of Moscow, already designated the paradigm for socialist cities. He therefore resigned and gave way to Nikolai S. Solofnenko, whose great talent was to parrot everything that came out of Moscow. He lacked the capacity to solve numerous technical and financial problems specific to Gorky.

A principal one at the confluence of the two great rivers was unpredictable water levels. Ivanitskii had argued that because of the high groundwater levels under Gorky, the priority was “melioration,” DeHaan’s short-cut term for improvement of the drainage in an area where structures were to be erected. Well after he left his position as city planner in Gorky, he was proved right when an enormous section of the right bank – a designated building area – was carried away in 1974 by the waters of the Oka.

DeHaan also explores how planning and architecture “went wild” in Moscow after the mid-1930s. Moscow was to provide the model for socialist urban planning. Before the Revolution the old city boasted convenient neighbourhoods and services. The new revolutionary leaders wanted wide, straight streets and huge new apartment houses, and they ripped old neighbourhoods apart to make way for them. Soviet “monumentalism” was to project Soviet power and herald the arrival of the new order.

DeHaan’s discussion of city planners under Stalin has produced innovative work based on archival documents. She weaves an engaging tale of the interaction of impossible visions, planning, design, politics, and the realities of a cityscape. Her insistent use of jargon only mildly detracts from a well-written book.