DEVELOPMENT OF THE SETTLEMENT NETWORK IN THE TIMBER INDUSTRY OF THE SOVIET UNION IN THE 1930s

Abstract

The period of "socialist industrialization" of the late 1920s - early 1940s in the Soviet Union was associated with active construction of a settlement network, including in the forest industry. Active development of resources in the northern and eastern regions and in the European part of the country and construction and reconstruction of enterprises gave rise to a large number of working villages, some of which were given the status of town. Extensive operations across forestry areas and crisis in the industry in the last decades of the 20th and early 21st century led to the shrinking of the settlement network, especially in the timber harvesting sector, and the cities and towns for which timber enterprises were or still are a mono-employer have slipped into depression. This calls for turning attention to the experience of locating, planning and building worker villages in the timber industry in the late 1920s and early 1940s. This study of the settlement network revealed that settlements were set up close to timber production sites, worker villages tended to grow into towns, and several attempts were made to construct "socialist cities". Settlements near medium and large timber enterprises and those lying close to transport routes formed the framework of the settlement network of the industry, while the number of timber-logging villages began to decline since the late 1930s.