Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-16T23:37:22.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Framing the Socialist City as Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2022

Heather D. DeHaan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The publication of Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain in the mid-1990s transformed the field of Soviet studies. He presented Soviet socialism as a civilisation born of the Enlightenment, inspired by science's ability to sculpt society, and driven by the pursuit of an alternative to capitalism. His phrase ‘speaking Bolshevik’ spawned productive debate, as did his use of the Foucauldian paradigm. In something akin to a clarion call for urbanists, he proposed the socialist city as a metonym for this new Soviet world: Soviet socialism, he noted, was inherently industrial. Authorities regarded the city as a hallmark of socialist modernity, an endpoint and changing ideal toward which to strive, all of which makes the city a fruitful centre of investigation.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 469 - 477
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Kotkin, Stephen, ‘Discovering the Socialist City’, Russian History/Histoire Russe 23, 1–4 (1996), 231–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Barenberg, Alan, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeHaan, Heather D., Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Manley, Rebecca, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Qualls, Karl D., From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Obertreis, Julia, Tränen des Sozialismus. Wohnen in Leningrad zwischen Alltag und Utopie 1917–1937 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag Köln, 2004)Google Scholar; Blackwell, Martin, Kyiv as Regime City: The Return of Soviet Power after Nazi Occupation (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Jones, Jeffrey W., Everyday Life and the ‘Reconstruction’ of Soviet Russia During and After the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2008)Google Scholar; Stronski, Paul, Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Bater, James H., The Soviet City: Ideal and Reality (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980)Google Scholar; French, R. Antony, Plans, Pragmatism, and People: The Legacy of Soviet Planning for Today's Cities (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995)Google Scholar; French, R. Anthony and Hamilton, F. E. Ian, eds., The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy (New York: Wiley, 1979)Google Scholar; Hamm, Michael F., The City in Russian History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976)Google Scholar; Engel, Barbara Alpern, Between the Fields and the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Hoffmann, David, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Lebina, N. B., Povsednevnaia zhizn’ Sovetskogo goroda 1920/1930 gody (St. Petersburg: Letnii Sad, 1999)Google Scholar.

4 Buchli, Victor, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999)Google Scholar; Reid, Susan, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste’, Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 211–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

5 Massey, Doreen, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–6Google Scholar.

6 Varga-Harris, Christine, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life During the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Stephen Emmett, Communism on Tomorrow Street (Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Crowley, David and Reid, Susan Emily, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (New York: Berg, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For other models of communal living see Orlov, Igor B., Kommunal'naia strana: stanovlenie sovetskogo zhilishchno-kommunal'nogo khoziaistva (1917–1941) (Moscow: HSE Publishing House, 2015)Google Scholar.

9 Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 8.

10 Willimott, Andy, Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917–1932 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 74Google Scholar.

11 Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

12 Bokov, Anna, Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)Google Scholar.

13 The concept of an ‘instaurational text’ comes from Françoise Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 6.

14 On features of Eastern European socialist design, see Zarecor, Kimberly Elman, ‘What Was So Socialist About the Socialist City? Second World Urbanity in Europe’, Journal of Urban History 44, 1 (2018), 95, 99–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Bittner, Stephen, Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 143–6Google Scholar.

16 Hatherly, Owen, Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings (New York: The New Press, 2015), 12, 20Google Scholar.

17 Castillo, Greg, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

18 See Smith, Property of Communists, 108–12; Filtzer, Donald A., The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Colton, Timothy J. called this ‘disjointed monism’ in Colton, Timothy J., Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1995), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Daria Bocharnikova, ‘Inventing Socialist Modern: A History of the Architectural Profession in the USSR, 1954–1971’, PhD dissertation, European University Institute Florence, 2014, 57; DeHaan, Stalinist City Planning, 136.

21 American inspiration for Soviet design into the Stalin period is discussed in Cohen, Jean-Louis, Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (New Haven: Canadian Centre for Architecture/Yale University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.

22 Clark, Katerina, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Katerina, ‘Socialist Realism and Sacralizing of Space’, in Dobrenko, E. A. and Naiman, Eric, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 3–18Google Scholar.

23 On the evolution of its design, see Hoisington, Sona Stephan, ‘“Ever Higher”: The Evolution of the Project for the Palace of Soviets’, Slavic Review 62, 1 (2003), 41–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the evolution of Soviet design to this point, see Harald Bodenschatz and Christiane Post, eds., Städtebau im Schatten Stalins: Die internationale Suche nach der sozialistischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1929–1934 (Berlin: Braun, 2003); Mark Meerovich, Evgeniia Konysheva and Dmitrii Khmel'niktskii, eds., Kladbishche sotsgorodov: Grado-stroitel'naia politika v SSSR 1928–1932 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011).

24 For further work on Russian architecture in a global context, see Anderson, Richard, Russia: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015)Google Scholar.

25 For theorisation of this, see Schlögel, Karl, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (2003), translated by Gerrit Jackson (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016), 17–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Clark, Moscow: The Fourth Rome, 280–1, as cited in Ruder, Building Stalinism, 160.

27 Ruder, Cynthia A., Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space (London: IB Tauris, 2018), 71–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Kelly, Catriona, St. Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

29 Maddox, Steven, Saving Stalin's Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

30 Ong, Aihwa, ‘Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global’, in Roy, Ananya and Ong, Aihwa, eds., Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell: 2011), 1–26Google Scholar.

31 Laszczkowski, Mateusz, ‘City of the Future’: Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Sahadeo, Jeff, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.