Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union

CONCLUSION

The truth is that the economic and cultural reconstruction of all life in the USSR has no parallel in the history of mankind. It is equally true that this reconstruction is being accomplished by a sober evaluation of all the realities, and it should be obvious to any observer that in each successive stage, matters recognized as desirable and ideal are being consciously subordinated to matters that are feasible and possible within the limitations of the present.

—ERNST MAY (1931)

A YEAR INTO HIS DESIGN CONSULTANCY WITH THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT, THE German architect Ernst May tempered his expectations of what he might accomplish in the USSR. May asserted that the first Five-Year Plan was a development project unparalleled “in the history of mankind,” but he also understood that it was beset by severe limitations. Although the fiscal, material, and labor shortages that plagued Soviet construction projects were still in the future for May and his German brigade, they encountered stubborn topographies and client inconstancy within weeks of arrival. May concluded that desires and ideals became subordinate to reality under such difficult conditions.

The process of subordination that May described supports two readings of early Soviet architecture and planning, one negative and one positive. In the first—the failure narrative—the idealized vision of egalitarian socialist space was gradually erased by sober conditions in the here and now. This negative reading aligns with Manfredo Tafuri’s assessment that once realism killed vision, avant-garde designers like Moisei Ginzburg simply disappeared into the “black fog” of anonymous state planning offices.1 In the second, positive reading that has been forwarded here—the praxis narrative—improbable fantasy was vanquished by material fact. Iterative problem solving informed by interdisciplinary research, close observation, and haptic experience permitted the first Soviet architectural and urban plans to be built under extraordinarily difficult political and economic conditions. Design practitioners will read in May’s assessment of the Soviet situation circa 1931 the evaluation of a seasoned pragmatist. He may have been blinded at the start of his work by the “magnitude of the task, and also the fact that nothing like it [had] ever been attempted before,” but faced with facts on the ground, he and his team settled down to accomplish what was possible under the circumstances.2 Under a Leninist definition of praxis, the success of a plan is gauged by its ability to engage the present as a means to effect change. For Aleksandr Ivanitskii, Ernst May, and Pavel Aleshin—the designer protagonists in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv—practical work prevailed over utopian dreaming. These practitioners approached the problem of the socialist environment and, most important, they intervened.

This book about three critical industrial sites distant from Moscow seeks to debunk the myth that Soviet planning was a centralized and totalized activity from the onset. Early Soviet spatial interventions were diverse and contingent on the particular geography, industry, and actors in play at specific sites. The designs for these sites spanned two distinct economic periods, each of which differently engaged the construction of socialist space. During NEP in Baku, the locally based oil company, Azneft, played a strong role in shaping the built environment because funding and direction from Moscow were not forthcoming. It took Azneft and the Baksovet some time and many false starts to recognize the importance of planning forward, but eventually they did, through a combination of imported, and increasingly local, expertise. During the start of the first Five-Year Plan, socialist spatial theory caught fire. The shift to a full command economy during the plan made large capital construction projects possible and imperative, and Magnitogorsk was held up as the site on which burgeoning theories of socialist space could be tested. The remoteness, difficulty of the site, and primacy of the industrial construction project limited the scope of experimental built housing and services in Magnitogorsk, but the ideas written into its design competition brief nonetheless circulated and in turn positively impacted the fates of other sites in the Union. By Kharkiv, a later first Five-Year Plan project, the socialist settlement debate took a backseat to frantic on-the-ground efforts to meet the plan’s construction goals. The architectural strategy of standardization was harnessed to construct an integral, replicable model that bundled industrial, residential, and social spheres.

The standard history of early Soviet city planning holds that the experimental phase ended summarily with the “Resolution on the work to restructure byt ” in May 1930, which denounced “utopian” spatial theories in favor of muted interventions into the domestic realm and replanning existing cities.3 Just weeks after the resolution was published in Pravda, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s right hand, was appointed first secretary of the Moscow Committee. In a mid-1931 speech, later published as Socialist Reconstruction in Moscow and Other Cities in the USSR, Kaganovich held up Moscow as the sole model for all future Soviet spatial design.4 To do so, he had to elide the issue of urban form and assert that means of production alone made a context socialist: “There are at present many who decline in every possible declension the formula, ‘we must build a socialist city.’ They forget one little trifle: that the cities of the USSR are already socialist cities. Our cities became socialist from the very moment of the October Revolution.”5 The 1935 Moscow General Plan, conducted under Kaganovich, organized, modernized, and radically transformed the capital city. Urban movement was smoothed and quickened in Moscow through monumental boulevards widened for cars, waterways widened for boats, a new metro, and expanded surface transportation.6

The monumental Socialist Realist ensemble city of Kaganovich’s Moscow did become a prevailing Soviet urban model. But the well-organized zhilkombinat (planned standardized residential block) tested at various scales in Baku’s Armenikend neighborhood, Magnitogorsk’s Kirov District, and at New Kharkiv, also persisted, rising again to prominence after World War II as the renamed mikroraion (microdistrict).7 These two models for socialist urbanism coexisted. While monumental ensembles marked the central, representational spaces in Soviet cities from the mid-1930s and beyond, Soviet outskirts were ringed with dense quarters composed of freestanding housing and sociocultural support buildings sitting in common open space.

Living the Socialist City

How were these socialist settlement projects received in their day and lived in once completed? A conclusion begs at least glimpses, no matter how fleeting, after the last bricks were set.

No firsthand accounts of Baku’s Stepan Razin or Armenikend settlements in the years immediately after their completion have surfaced, but issues of the multilingual journal USSR in Construction do provide a selective view of the lived condition.8 Armenikend anchors a double-paged spread from a 1931 issue that employs the neighborhood’s distinctively modern architectural language to draw a sharp distinction between pre- and postrevolutionary Baku (plate 23).9 The issue, devoted to the Soviet petroleum industry, introduces English-language readers to “Baku, the pearl of Soviet Caucasia, the city of sunlight and oil, [that] has recently become a sunny place for the proletarians working on the oil fields.” The text claims that the proletarian housing problem has been solved in Baku. “Before they lived in shattered dark huts. The Soviet power led the workers out of their filthy huts and built palace-like homes for them.”10 Running along the top of the pages is a wide panorama of icheri sheher with its historic granular buildings crowded against one another. The middle of the spread is dominated by a photo of ramshackle lean-tos constructed of stone and wood, sitting on the edge of the oilfields, remnants of the capitalist past. The bottom of the spread features two images of the Soviet solution: Armenikend, with its “palace-like” homes built for Baku’s proletarian workers. Grinning strong limbed children run toward the photographer, with clean, rational three-story buildings—presumably their homes and schools—in the background. A cropped perspective of a typical Armenikend facade, to the right, highlights, as the eye moves up the building, greenery at the block’s base, deep horizontal shaded balconies, open windows that invite fresh air into the units, and a lively profile against the sky created by the block’s crenelated plan. These highly curated images give little sense of Baku’s day-to-day byt at the start of the 1930s, however, and the voices of the thousands of worker-tenants are sorely missing. An interview with two families who coinhabited a Type B unit in Armenikend, on how and in what ways the design of the apartment and the socialized block impacted their daily lives, would be a treasure, indeed.

Magnitogorsk and Kharkiv, by contrast, are the settings for multiple firsthand accounts that abound in descriptions of everyday life in the 1930s.11 The US writer John Scott lived in Magnitogorsk from 1933 through 1938 and published a memoir upon return. Scott’s description of his neighborhood, the Kirov District (which he also refers to as the Socialist City), provides one view on how the May Brigade’s sole built project in Magnitogorsk was perceived and occupied in the years immediately after its completion (figure C.1). The chapter opens with a shot across the bow, followed by a detailed illustration of the neighborhood:

The Socialist City, renamed the Kirov District, because it was not really a very good example of a Socialist city to put before the population, was composed of some fifty large apartment houses, three, four, and five stories high, containing seventy-five to two hundred rooms each. The houses were of brick and stone, stuccoed and painted various colors, which looked very well against the white background in winter. They were arranged in long rows, like military barracks, and were all of the same matchbox-on-edge shape. The metal roofs were painted red and blue. There were balconies in all the houses. Between the rows of houses there were wide streets, with sidewalks, along which many trees had been planted. In the center of the development were two open squares, with fountains, benches, children’s playground apparatus, flower gardens surrounded by neat green iron fences, and what would be shade trees in ten years . . .

Particularly in the summer the Kirov District had definite charm; the fountains played, and innumerable little children, in bathing suits which left most of their sunburnt bodies open to the fresh air, splashed and splattered about. The walks were crowded with workers of all ages taking the air. Benches were occupied by men and women, young and old, reading and talking.12

Except for the note about the “military barracks” arrangement of the houses—a description that would have resonated with the vast majority of Magnitogorsk’s residents, who were still living in the temporary wooden structures—the remainder of Scott’s portrayal conjures a neighborhood of neat, simple housing surrounded by green spaces that serve as magnets for communal conviviality. Scott did complain that the “one tremendous shortcoming was the fact that it was so crowded.” Four to five people lived in each small room, at an average of 3.34 square meters of floor space per person—and these were the privileged few. The Kirov District was “inhabited principally by foremen, brigadiers, and skilled workers, as well as a scattering of teachers, doctors, and various city employees.” The only residents of Magnitogorsk granted better accommodations were the high administrative technical and political personnel who took possession of a compound of single-family houses known as Berezki that had been built for departed foreign specialists. There, a young Russian architect had emulated designs from US architectural catalogs, with a result “very much approaching Mount Vernon, New York, or Germantown, Pennsylvania.”13 The Kirov District, while no ersatz US suburb, was nonetheless a significant improvement on flimsy temporary housing.

Figure C.1. Kirov District, Magnitogorsk, 1930s. Magnitogorskii kraevedcheskii muzei.

Daily life for the vast majority of Magnitogorsk’s population living in barracks, tents, dugouts, and yurts was distinctly grimmer. In November 1932, a delegation of scientific-technical experts from Moscow visited Magnitogorsk to assess construction progress on the socialist city.14 The architect I. M. Murev′ev, chief of the Residential Sector at the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom), jotted notes on the back of a topographical blueprint while his delegation toured the site. His raw shock comes through in these immediate recordings that communicate incredulity with frequent underlining.15 The true population of Magnitogorsk stood at 230,000—a number already well in excess of the projected maximum population of 200,000—and these residents were allocated just 2 square meters of living space on average. Over half of the population lived in “temporary” settlements of wooden barracks and dugouts in the immediate vicinity of the industrial complex “that were constructed by 48 organizations,” Murev′ev wrote. Without one organization keeping track of the siting and quality of these makeshift structures they were built haphazardly, close together, and often on unsuitable soil. Obvious problems arose from the lack of oversight and planning of the settlements. First, “open fires, the constant, strong wind, and the absence of water together fail to protect against a continuous threat of complete destruction by fire.” Second, the random placement of buildings and settlements precluded the installation of a rational road network so that “automobiles, trucks, and pedestrians move in a completely disorderly fashion.” Finally, and most critically from the standpoint of labor reproduction, basic hygienic services were lacking, as Murev′ev scribbled with intensity:

The population of the socialist city is without drinking water. . . it was put too shallowly in the ground, and is not filtered . . . The sewage system is completely absent (with the exception of Berezki), and the large-scale buildings of the industrial site and the community buildings of the settlement have cesspools in the place of internal plumbing . . . None of the other residential buildings in the settlement have any kind of municipal improvements and the residential sites with remote latrines are completely anti-sanitary—muddy in the spring and summer which leads to a high degree of epidemics.16

Even before the scientific-technical experts toured the worker settlements, a local newspaper reported a fact that all residents of Magnitogorsk already knew: “the growth of the [typhus] epidemic is due to the anti-sanitary conditions in the barracks and the generally poor living provisions.”17 In 1931 alone, there were 1,989 reports of typhoid fever in Magnitogorsk.18

Murev′ev’s field notes from 1932 illuminate the uncomfortable and even dangerous environment that early settlers in Magnitogorsk tolerated each day. In Magnetic Mountain, Stephen Kotkin also enumerates the many challenges faced by the typical resident to accomplish even the simplest tasks. Both of these texts act as important correctives to the selective narrative of the model steel city crafted by Soviet media outlets. Publications like USSR in Construction, designed for foreign audiences, presented the tribulations of the site’s workers only insofar as they pushed forward a story about strength of will, perseverance, and ultimately victory over adversity (plate 24). The protagonist of the journal’s Magnitogorsk narrative, Viktor Kalmykov, enters wearing the homemade bark and rope shoes of a peasant (lapti) and is sent to live in a tent with other new arrivals. By the end of the issue Kalmykov has proven his worth as a shock-worker on and in the steel mill, and exits the tale wearing the jacket, white button-up shirt, and tie of a bureaucrat.19

In between these two poles of representation—complete dysfunction and triumph of socialist resolve—was a Magnitogorsk that slowly moved in the direction of quiescent normalcy. “Speaking Bolshevik” is the term Kotkin coined to explain popular support for the Soviet status quo that emerged at Magnitogorsk. Through “little tactics of the habitat,” workers learned to situate themselves within the system that they were building.20 Miscellaneous candid photographs from the local history museum provide views of this shift to regularity in the 1930s (figure C.2). In the maternity ward of the hospital, tightly wrapped first-generation Magnitogorskans sleep in makeshift baby cots created by sheets stretched along the sides of steel frame beds. A wooden kiosk selling “sanitary and hygienic” goods sits on the bare steppe. Men dressed in work clothes and caps—some barefoot, akin to a Repin painting—crowd the left side of the shop while out of the nineteenth-century scrum strides a pair of modern young women in white, one carrying books, the other her own coat. A crowd gathers around the water station to watch a swimmer arcing backward from the rickety high dive into the pool below. A black bear and suited man stand at the entrance to a circus tent that advertises a “Soviet Attraction: Motorcycle racers on vertical walls.” These are all unremarkable snapshots of prosaic events that took place in a context of material provisionality. The structures are temporary, like the barracks, but their transient nature does not preclude the construction of social life inside, outside, and around them.

Kharkiv is, in many ways, the architectural and urban success story among these three sites. The tractor factory and its sotsgorod were built quickly, largely according to plan, utilizing new iterations of standardization—priviazka at the urban and architectural scale—that drove Soviet design practice for the next sixty years. Photos taken soon after construction completion at the New Kharkiv sotsgorod feature the six-story dormitory-type buildings and the shared open spaces between them (figures C.3–C.4). Newly planted trees register as light-colored wisps against dark swaths of grass and garden. Solid wooden benches for community socializing are in place, facing the center of the open space. Well-bundled children shuffle through the eerily still landscape, and a cyclist in a worker’s jumpsuit glides by. These carefully posed images register Euclidean order and architectonic firmness that contrast mightily with “before” photos of the relentlessly horizontal farmland. This city of repeated housing blocks and supporting social infrastructure stands at the ready to receive the tractor factory population.

There is an ethics of architecture that shifts and adjusts as society does.21 But what is architectural history’s ethical responsibility? Recent scholarship insists that we cannot study architecture, contemporary or historical, without addressing labor.22 In that spirit, this book has attempted to widen the field of view to include not only the intellectual labor of the architects and spatial planners designing socialist spaces, but also that of experts from other disciplines, and the physical labor of workers who mixed the concrete and carried the bricks. How and in what ways did projects like the Kharkiv Tractor Factory become implicated in campaigns of political terror in the years immediately after the project’s completion? Fred Beal’s horrific firsthand account of the 1932–34 Holodomor in the Ukrainian countryside has nothing, ostensibly, to do with the 1929–30 design for a tractor factory some two-hour train ride from the starved village. But, if a history of early Soviet architectural process and product widens to include the economic, political, and social milieu, it would be irresponsible, if not unethical, to elide the fatal effects of those political forces that conspired to build the factory.

Figure C.2. Miscellaneous candid photographs provide views of a shift to normalcy in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. Read clockwise from the upper left: children’s and maternity section, Magnitogorsk hospital; sanitary and hygienic goods kiosk; diving platform at the water station; “Soviet Attraction: Motorcycle racers on vertical walls.” Magnitogorskii kraevedcheskii muzei.

Figure C.3. First-phase zhilkombinat, with houses for singles in the background, New Kharkiv sotsgorod, Kharkiv, Ukraine, c. 1931. Architects: Giprograd (Pavel Aleshin et al.). RGAKFD, 0-59662a.

Figure C.4. Phase I zhilkombinat, with houses for singles in the background, New Kharkiv sotsgorod, Kharkiv, Ukraine, c. 1931. Architects: Giprograd (Pavel Aleshin et al.). RGAKFD, 0-55676a, MUAR, 11-5407.

These projects were designed and built with transformation as the signal goal: transformation of rural landscapes into industrial landscapes and transformation of peasants into socialist workers. Individual Soviet citizens, both the designers chronicled here and young Communists like Lev Kopelev, became embroiled and ultimately implicated in effecting these changes. Kopelev wrote:

I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better offfor it; that their distress and suffering were a result of their own ignorance or the machinations of the class enemy; that those who sent me—and I myself—knew better than the peasants how they should live . . . In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheep-skin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov . . . I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide.23

Creating socialist spaces required destroying the preexisting built environment and its occupants to accomplish the “great and necessary transformation” of which Kopelev wrote. The first Five-Year Plan was a spatial revolution, to be sure, accompanied by all of the violence that revolution entails.

If architecture’s ethical dimension lies in understanding, channeling, and providing for dwelling, as Martin Heidegger—and Karsten Harries after him—claims, then the minimal living cells of New Kharkiv are also problematic, as is the practice of removing children from their parents in the name of freedom from filial ties and labor efficiency. This mother, for one, cannot imagine handing over her children to be raised by the state. Incidentally, neither could Kharkiv’s mothers. The present principal of the school in the New Kharkiv district (now simply referred to as KhTZ, shorthand for the Kharkiv Tractor Factory district) shared anecdotally that the school originally designed in 1930 as a dormitory for older children had almost immediately to be adapted as a normative day school when not a single mother offered up a single child to live in separate quarters.

Postwar Soviet Architectural Theory and Practice

Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a new chapter in the Soviet pursuit of socialist spatial models and specifically socialist housing. Cities like Leningrad and Kyiv suffered massive destruction during World War II that only compounded the systemic housing shortage, which is to say that housing experiments in the 1920s and 1950s shared an unenviable backlog of need. In a 1954 speech to the National Conference of Builders and Architects, Nikita Khrushchev demanded industrial standardization for housing to “significantly speed up, improve the quality of, and reduce the cost of construction,” with a goal to supply each Soviet family with its own, separate apartment in the course of three Five-Year Plans.24 Soviet architects of the 1950s dusted offarchitectural and urban models from the 1920s. Natan Osterman, the lead architect of the experimental Moscow mikroraion Novye Cheremushki (completed in 1958), collaborated both as a student and young practitioner with architects active in the 1920s, like Mikhail Barshch and Andrei Burov, forging a link between avant-garde and postwar Soviet housing efforts.25

On Khrushchev’s command, designers worked on interdisciplinary teams to devise new standardized residential buildings filled with minimized apartments. In the 1960s, the architect A. Gegello described the typical process by which a standard design (tipovoi proekt) was developed, codified, and then adjusted through the practice of priviazka:

Mass construction is carried out mainly according to standard designs (po typovym proektam). This, today, is the only sure way to meet the needs of a socialist society quickly. . .

First of all, the architect-author of a standard design, and the team participating in its development, must take an active part in the implementation of initial buildings built from this type. This is the stage of experimental construction, on the basis of which all necessary improvements must be made to the standard design. Close involvement by the architect at the experimental stage should be mandatory for all typical designs.

In further implementation of the type-project in various locations throughout the country, the creative authorship of the project should be taken up by that architect on site who enacts the “priviazka” of the project to the local conditions. No one would claim that the work done by an actor or musician is uncreative, or that creative expression is absent in the work of the symphony conductor or theater director who brings to life the creative output of the composer or playwright. It is equally obvious that the process of priviazka, while slightly different in nature, is also a creative process.26

Gegello was at pains to explain that priviazka was an act of design, not mere copying, because it entailed interpretation and improvisation. Using this process, Soviet architects designed and adjusted components at expanding scales from concrete panels to plug-in kitchen and bath modules; from apartments to buildings; from discrete block plans to sprawling neighborhoods.27 As the architectural and planning professions matured in the Soviet Union, state design offices intensely researched the various climatic zones in the country, articulating more fully local differentiation. Priviazka became a more sophisticated and creative process as more variables entered the equation.

Two decades after the completion of New Kharkiv, and upon the rediscovery of earlier models in the wake of Khrushchev’s housing campaign, a group of young Moscow-based architects who came to be known as the NER Group developed an articulate socialist spatial theory that connected the early works chronicled in this book and postwar Soviet design practices.28 A diagram in The Ideal Communist City, the English translation of the NER Group’s manifesto, shows the system of relationships in communism (figure C.5). Read from left to right, the diagram introduces man connected first to forms of social relations, including familial, educational, productive (work), recreational, and consumer realms. A web of lines connects these social realms to spatial forms. Individual housing, for instance, is linked to infancy, family, leisure, consumer activities, and solitude. Spatial forms are then gathered into forms of settlement in a “unified structure.”29

Figure C.5. “The system of relationships in communism determines the functional structure of the environment. Each type of construction is imagined as an element of the unified structure.” Diagram by the author based on A. Baburov and A. Gutnov, The Ideal Communist City, I Press Series on the Human Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1971), 27.

What is at stake in this diagram? The authors explain that “a total unified space must be designed by using a system in which single buildings make up a variable spatial field and form a total community.”30 According to the NER Group, architects traditionally design stand-alone buildings because under capitalism the private parcel is the physical limit of the architect’s purview. The architect’s task is completely transformed under the socialist property regime. Because all space is collective, the designer may consider social, spatial, and settlement forms to be codependent in a “variable spatial field,” more commonly referred to in the book as a “unified space.” The authors define the New Unit of Settlement (NUS) thus: “the unified space of the NUS is a gigantic room under the open sky. You feel your own presence in the NUS, whether looking out the window of your apartment, leaving a residential unit, going to work, or traveling to the sociocultural center.”31 The mental image summoned here is a powerful one that recalls the complete territorial freedom promised by Okhitovich’s disurbanism. But instead of individual structures being strung together along transportation lines as Okhitovich imagined, The NER Group proposes that the socialist settlement is no longer composed of a collection of object-buildings at all; it is a single shared living room in which all human activities occur under the dome of the sky.

The theory presented in The Ideal Communist City proposes that under socialism the built and unbuilt are mutually constitutive and wrapped together in common space. Interior and exterior spaces can engage in a complex and fluid game of give and take, as they exist within the same sociospatial bubble. When designing a standardized residential unit, the architect can, and should, consider it to be a node in a complex web of relations that extends far beyond the vertical walls that enclose it.

The New Unit of Settlement, and its actual built sibling, the mikroraion, are riffs on the zhilkombinat, but without tethering to the factory. The mikroraion accommodates just two spheres of everyday life—the residential and sociocultural—and the productive sphere is accessible only by commute. Nevertheless, the equitable provision of social and cultural programming for residents, robust transportation, and abiding faith in architectural and planning standardization are distinct through lines in the Soviet spatial experience.

Living the Postsocialist City

While nearly a century has passed, and the system under which they were designed and constructed has been superseded, the built environments at the heart of this book persist. Armenikend, the socialist settlement at the edge of Baku, is nearly subsumed by the oil boom city of the present. A handful of the original Constructivist buildings remain, but they are under constant threat of demolition to make way for new high-rises that mimic their dynamic volumetric massing in metal panels and reflective glass. The Kirov District in Magnitogorsk ceased to play an important role in the city once residential construction moved definitively to the right bank of the Ural River in the late 1930s. Some of the May Brigade’s housing has been left to ruin, and the green spaces described by John Scott are overgrown, but much of the neighborhood is still, improbably, occupied. The New Kharkiv sotsgorod also remains populated, but it is no longer a celebrated site in the former Ukrainian Soviet capital. In spring 2011, a future resident of Kharkiv posted a question on a local web forum: “Which region of Kharkov would you recommend for someone relocating to the city?” The first respondent replied definitively: “tol′ko ne KhTZ”—anywhere but KhTZ.32 The reciprocal relationship between the tractor factory and the residential community is broken. A local architectural historian, well versed in spatial politics, has noted that “KhTZ is completely its own world. [The residents there] are somehow mentally, and even arrogantly, isolated. They have their own special psychological complexes, mixed with bravado. Psychologists and reform are what is needed there.”33

Negative local perceptions of this experimental site of socialist space-making are difficult to disentangle from pervasive disappointment with the collapse of Soviet socialism. A visit to the former tractor factory settlement on a beautiful summer day refutes these blanket claims of dysfunctionality. The open green spaces between residential buildings are filled with tended flowerbeds. Newly painted wooden play structures see heavy use by the children of the neighborhood, whose parents and grandparents sit on nearby benches under the shade of now mature trees. Pedestrians moving through the residential precinct, though now joined by vehicles, still enjoy the spatial liberation planned into the settlement by architects and planners at the start of the 1930s. A cyclist glides by—in jeans rather than jumpsuit—on his way, perhaps, to the coffee roasting company that has set up shop in a disused wing of the old tractor factory.

Contemporary visits to these heroic industrial installations of the early Soviet period are deeply affecting; it is difficult to “unsee” the sites’ current conditions. A scholar’s struggle with presentism is compounded by local presentism. In the post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine, the material legacy of socialism is viewed as detritus of a failed experiment. In attempting to permit the past its due, the archival meeting minutes, memos, briefs, and drawings produced in the months leading up to the planning and construction of these sites help immeasurably. The settlements’ import in their time, and the designers’ and administrators’ seriousness of purpose to create new environments for a new way of life, emerges from the bound sheaves of typing paper and stiff blueprints.

Lessons from the Socialist Spatial Experiment

Soviet architectural and urban experiments were well known outside of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The Soviets published and distributed information about Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv internationally.34 Foreign architects and engineers working on these sites also directed public attention from the capitalist world in the direction of the Soviet Union. Although Soviet theorists like Sabsovich and Okhitovich took pains to conceptualize socialist spatial difference, US housing specialists, for instance, seriously interrogated the Soviet case for architectural forms and programs that could be utilized to solve the housing problem in the Depression-stricken United States.

In 1934, after spearheading a successful federal grant for slum clearance and low-cost housing construction in Atlanta, Georgia, the US real estate developer Charles F. Palmer took a European housing grand tour to visit projects worthy of possible emulation.35 The sites he visited were interwar nodes of social housing experimentation that spanned economic and political regimes. Palmer visited first recently constructed case populari (people’s houses) in Fascist Naples and Rome; he swung through Red Vienna to tour the gemeindbauten (communal housing blocks) built by the municipal socialist government; he made a quick stop in Warsaw, and then spent a number of days in Moscow. Palmer presented his Soviet hosts with a questionnaire that revealed the for-profit real estate magnate’s curiosity about development in a socialist context. He asked about land costs (none, his Soviet respondent explained), construction costs per square meter (250 rubles), and interest and amortization rates for the housing cooperatives (1 percent per annum for both). Palmer also, however, wished to know about the inclusion of common laundries, kitchens, and childcare in the housing complexes, like the ones he had seen in Rome and Vienna, and about the “average percent of land covered by structure, [with the] balance left for parks and playgrounds.”36 The first federally-funded public housing projects completed in the US—Techwood Homes for white families (1936) and University Homes for Black families (1937), both in Atlanta—were superblock projects of freestanding mid-rise housing bars set in shared green space with common laundries, playgrounds, and tenant meeting spaces. Were they socialist? Well, in many ways, yes, or at least the policies enacted to install them were socialist in spirit. The large amount of land cleared for the Techwood and University Homes sites in the center of a capitalist city was only possible through strong central governmental actions. The supplemental social programming for the residents was, for all intents and purposes, inspired by what Palmer saw in Rome, Vienna, and Moscow. But these projects sat in the heart of a business-focused, capitalist US city. This closing example confirms that the socialist spatial project had influence that well exceeded political borders and that snippets of socialist space are embedded worldwide.

The elements universally agreed-on to compose the “good city” were in the 1930s, and remain today, largely the same in socialist and capitalist contexts. They include housing (ideally close to the workplace), reliable transportation, convenient social and commercial services, educational and cultural infrastructure, green space, and recreational opportunities. What differs in socialist and capitalist city making efforts are the funding and delivery methods. Under socialism, the state is responsible for providing all elements—an expensive and logistically complex undertaking. Many socialist and postsocialist cities do have extraordinary public transportation, ample green space, and excellent cultural amenities; but inadequate housing is also a significant legacy of socialism. Architectural standardization and mass production did not fully solve the Soviet housing delivery problem. Post-Soviet cities are plagued by repetitive and disintegrating mikroraiony in dire need of maintenance.

Yet in staging interventions in either the postsocialist or the neoliberal condition, contemporary planners will benefit from looking back to the intense debates, experiments, foundational theories, and projects of the early Soviet period. Seeds of solutions for how to plan and build with equity as a principal concern remain in these spatial experiments that still stand, waiting to be discovered again.