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

Rather than the short course in Stalin-era Soviet city building the reader might expect from the title, Heather DeHaan’s monograph tells the localized story of planners charged with transforming “merchant Nizhnii [Novgorod] to a socialist Gorky” (35). In fewer than 200 pages, this study offers insights to scholars of Soviet politics and institutions, science and technical expertise, culture and aesthetics, urban development as well as the predicaments of planning more broadly. As the subtitle indicates, it is a history of planning professionals, in particular of the performance that was increasingly required for them to access any power in the Stalinist 1930s.

DeHaan starts with a targeted tour of tsarist-era Nizhnii, emphasizing how political and religious tradition were embedded in a soterioscape—a literal pathway or pilgrimage that helped craft premodern city life and identity. This first chapter also argues for multiple strands of continuity into the Soviet era. Engineering expertise and industrialization cultivated by 19th-century rulers would impact the cityscape and launch careers lasting beyond 1917. Tension between a technocratic impulse and the desire to display power in urban space has roots in Petrine visions of an altered soterioscape. Soviet authorities were neither the first to recraft Nizhnii nor the first to encounter its material or cultural resistance.

The first phase of the city’s revolutionary reimagination showcases the widely covered avant-garde in localized action. Chapter 2 contrasts their radical vision and reliance on a Party more interested in management and increased production. In planning for the imported Ford factory and model town at Nizhnii’s edge, the two approaches coincided briefly. The design competition for the workers’ combine showcased great ambition, but clashes with American experts’ understanding and insufficient supplies, skills, and manpower quickly exhausted the Party’s patience.

This is the context for DeHaan’s primary protagonist, Alexander P. Ivanitskii, to enter focus. Summoned from Moscow in 1928 as a professional in his late forties, Ivanitskii’s résumé included plans for Arkhangelsk and Baku. Part of a union-wide effort to establish viable procedures, Ivanitskii encountered a cash-strapped municipal administration dependent on defiant industry. His efforts to force a general “star-city” framework for Nizhnii development were blocked by the higher Scientific-Technical Council in the capital. DeHaan adeptly takes this opportunity to demonstrate the Soviet state encouraging such internal conflict. Represented on both levels, technical professionals contribute to the demise of their own scientific authority by allowing deadlock that only the state can arbitrate (here via Gosplan’s intervention to ensure auto plant expansion). Beyond the simple dichotomy of purist resistance or complicity, here is an important contribution to the historiographical debate regarding the relationship of scientists and technical experts to Soviet power.

This also helps DeHaan argue that urban planners facilitated the Stalinization of their field even before definitive pronouncements on Socialist Realism. Ivanitskii’s attempts to adapt to this climate ran aground as the obsessive personalization of leadership piled on unacceptable responsibility without any improved mandate to implement a plan. DeHaan casts his replacement by the Leningrad design bureau Lengiprogor as indicative of industrialization extended even to technical professions, and his 32-year-old successor as that team’s head, Nikolai A. Solofnenko, as the ultimate Soviet-trained vydvizhenets. Solofnenko and others more happily accommodate the increased focus on the monumental revolving around the 1935 Moscow City Plan and the capital itself as an icon of the radiant future, one that accepted a notable hierarchy both within and among Soviet cities. In practice, Solofenko was skilled at dazzling smoke-and-mirror displays: drawings that dealt in abstract images more than realizable plans, but that nevertheless won praise for his “drama of achievement” (102).

In one of the book’s most intriguing sections, Solofnenko and Lengiprogor take that performance to the newspapers, neighborhoods, and factory floors of Gorky (as the city had been renamed in 1932). This ritualized, quasidemocratic consultation is said to be “real, but not controlled” (118), an effort...