Кладбище соцгородов: Градо-строительная политика в СССР 1928–1932 гг

This book examines one of the most fascinating periods in the history of Soviet city construction, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, when dozens of new cities appeared on the map of the USSR, and a time marked by vigorous professional debates on the design of the future socialist city, known in historiography as the discussion on the socialist city (sotsgorod) or the debate on the socialist settlement (sotsrasselenie).¹ For two years architects, engineers, economists, hygienists, and politicians disputed what future socialist settlements should look like and what type of housing could better embody the principles of the new byt and new life. Despite the fact that the content of this debate is well-studied by numerous historians of architecture, the authors of the book under review correctly point out that many questions regarding the repercussions of this debate have not been approached.² For instance, there is little known on how the ideas of the socialist city were translated into urban policy and who the authors of the new legislation were. Scholars have often avoided tackling the question of the fate of these ideas and the impact they had on policymakers and practitioners. Recently, a number of case studies have been devoted to different towns constructed during the First Five-Year Plan.³ However, an overview of Soviet city construction theory and practice of that period is still missing.⁴

The new book by Meerovich, Konysheva and Khmel’nitskii seeks to fill this lacuna. It aims at reconstructing the history of the “birth, flourishing, and dying of an Idea, – the idea of a ‘new type’ of settlement absolutely different from the capitalist city” (P. 9) vis-à-vis the history of the construction of new towns (goroda-novostroiki). The authors contend that the debate on socialist city design should be studied in the larger context of the transformation of urban policy in the late 1920s and in relation to city-building practice. To meet this goal, they utilize a variety of sources that have not been widely used before. They examine not only projects and publications in the professional press but also a range of official documents from major decrees to minutes of the meetings of state committees, along with some personal archives of architects and bureaucrats who participated in the debate and evidence from design and building practice (P. 14). As a result, the book expands the discussion to other areas and topics ranging from the population settlement and migration policy of the epoch to a typology of mass housing in the newly built cities, and from the principles of planning new settlements to the legislative framework of city construction. Several chapters open up a discussion of hitherto barely studied subjects. For example, chapter 3 investigates the question of how the design formula for the population size of new towns changed over time. In chapter 5, the authors explore the guidelines for choosing the territory for city construction and the legislative framework for city planning. These chapters, in particular, as well as chapter 6 on planning the structure of new cities and chapter 7 on the typology of mass housing, present highly original research and are rich in detail. All of these new subjects are essential for understanding the challenges of urban construction during the first Five-Year Plan. The authors succeed in portraying the multiple difficulties of real construction that had to be in tune with the priorities of rapid industrialization and the gap between visionary planning and building practice of the time.

While the source base and variety of topics researched for the book are truly astonishing, the conceptual framework employed in it prevents the authors from generating a more nuanced argument. For readers acquainted with previous books by Meerovich and Khmel’nitskii, the approach and central arguments of this book will not be new. The authors argue that the projects and theoretical proposals of the architects “turned out to be useless for power.” They depict all the efforts of Soviet architects as obstacles to achieving the major political goal of rapid industrialization. One of the authors’ underlying assumptions, thus, is that Soviet leadership had a detailed clear plan of how to achieve this goal. In general, it is mainly “power” that preoccupies the authors.⁵ The words verkhi, Soviet power, Soviet leadership, Party are all used interchangeably and refer to the Leviathan state with its totalitarian intentions.⁶ The authors fail to problematize this notion of power and ignore dialogue with the rich scholarship on the nature of Soviet power.⁷ Instead, they seek to grasp what the “real” intentions of the authorities were and what “unwritten rules” or “hints from above” (polunameki svyshe) (P. 14) guided the process of city construction. One of the authors’ central assumptions is that the major priority of Soviet power was to create a defense establishment at any cost. They conclude that it did not even intend to solve the housing shortage and implement the principles of new life in practice, as proclaimed in decrees and slogans of the time (P. 35). According to the authors, urban policy was tightly linked to the plan of forced industrialization and was envisioned as the means of manipulating the population and managing manpower resources (P. 10).⁸ Hence, “what was tragic about Soviet urbanists and de-urbanists at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s was that, disregarding how highly professional and logically complete their conceptions were, they were not interesting and necessary for power” (P. 227). Moreover, as Khmel’nitskii has also sought to show in his previous books, the central authorities forced the architectural community into accepting a new urban policy and a new role as state servants. The authors maintain that urban policy was drafted at the top and disregarded the opinion of experts. As a result, it lacked “architectural and city-planning content” (P. 229) and the newly built towns of the first Five-Year Plan did not implement any of the ideas debated by professionals in the late 1920s. While the ideas of communal living and de-urbanization remained on paper, goroda-novostroiki happened to represent the totalitarian intentions of the state and were reminiscent of the GULAG camp system (lagernaia sistema) in their design and approach to population management.

However, the material of the book hints at the more complex dynamics within both the professional and power structures and less straightforward interaction between them. For instance, the authors admit that NKVD instruction no. 184 on city planning contained a set of regulations informed by the garden-city approach that was widely popular in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century and was propagated in the 1920s by the professionals trained before the revolution (Pp. 108–109). As Catherine Cooke has convincingly shown, at the turn of the 1920s, at least three alternatives were debated, and along with the urbanists and de-urbanists discussed in the book under review, there were garden-city apologists. According to Cooke, in the early 1930s, the authorities embraced the modification of the garden-city scheme strengthened by the “Marxist-Leninist” principle that a settlement automatically locates where industry takes it.”⁹ Similarly, Elam Day argued that Vladimir Semenov, one of the major propagators of Sir Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model in prerevolutionary Russia, played an important role in working out the principles for the Moscow plan of 1935, which turned out to be a model city plan widely replicated in the USSR in the 1930s–1950s. Therefore, one can argue that some people in the profession were more successful, at least at times, than urbanists and de-urbanists in translating and adjusting their ideas to new state policies, which were often formulated in very vague terms and left a lot of room for elaboration. The authors also mention that conflicts occurred between central authorities, local party officials, and factory directorates in managing the city-construction process, as in the case of Magnitogorsk (Pp. 136–137). Paul Stronski, in his illuminating study on the construction of Tashkent, presented evidence that the conflicts between central and local authorities, central planning bureaus and local architects, and the public accompanied the process of city construction throughout the 1930s–1950s. Therefore, one can argue that the process of city building was neither strictly top-down nor bottom-up, but rather a series of negotiations between different groups of professionals with various institutions at both the central and local levels.

Overall, the book reads as a tale of powerless genius professionals and overpowerful and rude verkhi. Commenting on a similar recurring discourse on the suffering of the intelligentsia and a coercive totalitarian state in a brilliant study of Russian talk during the perestroika years, Nancy Ries writes: “To put it bluntly, this national story of victims, villains, and saviors, performed through litanies, has been a discursive mechanism that facilitated authoritarian interrelations. It did this by essentializing these categories and their interrelations... By essentializing powerlessness, the iteration of litanies had the reflexive, unintended consequence of reproducing powerlessness.”¹⁰ Denying agency to architects and exaggerating the degree of power the authorities had over regulating city construction, the authors leave no space for questioning the degree to which the professionals were responsible for Soviet city design and investigating the more complicated process of negotiating norms and rules. But instead of lamenting the totalitarian intentions of the state, it seems more productive to examine more closely the questions of how and why the architects failed to translate certain ideas into policies and how far they succeeded. Instead of reproducing the myth of powerlessness of Soviet architects, it may be rewarding to show what was within their power and what the limits of that power were.

Another problematic aspect of this book worth mentioning is that it presents urban policy of the late 1920s and early 1930s as a fait accompli. The authors believe it was exactly then that the professionals lost the battle with the state and that afterward they had little authority in shaping the cityscape. In the conclusion they write: “This policy of the 1920s–1930s had long-term consequences and, unfortunately, it largely predetermined the practice of city management and the nature of today’s architectural and city-planning problems of Russian cities” (P. 231). However, recent scholarship demonstrates that architects not only participated in policymaking in the 1930s but also propagated important shifts in urban policy after World War II.¹¹ Moreover, some of the bureaucrats, including Khrushchev, who would launch a mass housing campaign in the 1950s, shared similar views on city design. It is well-known that it was not until Khrushchev that more substantial funding was directed at housing and infrastructure projects. Therefore, the authors would have benefited from looking at the issues of city construction legislation and practice from a long-term perspective. In that respect Khrushchev’s reforms seem to be crucial for understanding “the evolution of Soviet housing and the ‘biography’ of any Soviet city” (P. 17). It would be particularly rewarding to trace whether the approach to city construction from the 1930s to the 1950s had continuity or Khrushchev’s housing policy signified a radical break with Stalinist practice, as is conventionally argued.¹²

To sum up, although the new book by Meerovich, Konysheva, and Khmel’nitskii seems to represent a pessimistic take on Soviet history by the Russian intelligentsia, it is a valuable contribution to the discussion on the history of urban policy. It raises a number of important questions on issues such as city construction legislation, norms and regulations for city planning, and city building practice during the First Five-Year Plan. Even more important, it encourages readers to question what the role of the professionals was in making Soviet history.