Soviet History as a History of Urbanization

Recent research on the Stalinist Soviet Union has moved away from the narrower political framework of Stalinism to the study of the broader theme of urbanization. As a reference point, scholars use the model of the “European city” that was developed primarily by urban historians in Germany during the last decade.¹ The European city was marked by the development of civil society and the spread of an urban way of life in the countryside. The socialist city can rather be seen as its antipode, distinguished by a postponed and forced process of urbanization and a uniform paradigm of city landscape.²

The classics of Marxism-Leninism did not develop a utopia of urban life and therefore the “socialist city” remained mainly a catchphrase. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared the large cities of their time to be trouble spots, and later debates among socialists displayed a certain phobia toward the urban world.³ Although the Soviet Union experienced rapid urban growth that was inseparable from and driven by forced industrialization, until after World War II discussions of urbanization were a taboo in the Soviet Union. The term “urbanization” was reserved for the capitalist city.⁴ In Soviet academic discourse, a “socialist city” was defined by its own attributes. It was supposed to help overcome the antagonism between the city and the countryside (which symbolized capitalism and feudalism, respectively). This, in turn, would be achieved by the restriction of city growth and the mechanization of agriculture. In addition, the popular slogan of “social hygiene” in city construction implied a break with the principle “urbanity through density” typical of West European cities.⁵

The practical development of the socialist city in the Soviet Union was defined by two sets of ideas. The first one was rooted in the debate that took place at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s between urbanists, the supporters of a compact way of settlement, and desurbanists—the admirers of linear settlements, who also advocated the dissolution of the family and the introduction of collective forms of everyday life.⁶ The second complex of ideas defining the socialist city was based on the 1935 Moscow City Plan, with its mix of O-radial and concentric structure, which came to be offered as a template for city development in Eastern Europe after World War II. Quite paradoxically, its main ideas such as “greenery, air, light” and a zonal arrangement of the city into “work, dwelling, [and] leisure” areas did not originate in The Communist Manifesto or the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but derived from the Charta of Athens, adopted by the Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in 1933.⁷ Thus the socialist city of the 1930s had little connection to the Marxist-Leninist utopia and should be primarily understood as a project of modernity.

Several recent local studies have offered an overview of urbanization outside the centers of Moscow and Leningrad.⁸ The books under review, focusing on the automobile city Gor´kii and the tank city Cheliabinsk, represent further instructive examples that provide new perspectives on urban history at the Soviet periphery. Nizhnii Novgorod—named Gor´kii from 1932 to 1991—is today the fifth largest city in Russia, with 1.2 million inhabitants. Founded in 1221 at the Oka’s confluence with the Volga, the city turned into a center of brisk business and commerce in the 19th century, when it started to host a yearly fair. In the Soviet period, the city accommodated the automobile factory (GAZ) that opened production in 1932, as well as an aircraft factory. Both factories were founded with the technological support of the American industrialist Henry Ford. World War II transformed Gor´kii into a center for the defense industry, and the city was closed...