Heather D. DeHaan. Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power.

Abstract

The leaders of the Soviet Union had as their avowed goal the construction of a socialist society. But never before in history had there been a socialist state, and there was no blueprint for building socialism. A consensus existed among Communist Party members that socialist construction required industrialization and urbanization, but what would Soviet cities look like? How would they differ from urban centers in capitalist countries? Stalinist city planners had a crucial role to play in shaping the new Soviet society. They were responsible for the layout of new and expanding cities, and they also allocated space to competing urban interests, thereby determining the prominence of industrial, educational, medical, and retail facilities and institutions. These city planners are the subject of Heather D. DeHaan's excellent monograph. DeHaan focuses on professional planners in Nizhny Novgorod, an important industrial center east of Moscow on the Volga River. The head planner, Alexander Platonovich Ivanitskii, arrived in Nizhny Novgorod in 1928 to oversee the city's rapid expansion during the First Five-Year Plan. Though not a Communist Party member, he embraced Soviet power for the opportunity it afforded him to fashion a more rational and productive society. Like many other non-party professionals, both in urban planning and in other fields, he shared a number of goals with party leaders and even accepted their assault upon private property, given that it expanded officials' control of urban space. In DeHaan's nuanced reading, Ivanitskii and other planners were neither collaborators with nor victims of the Stalinist regime. Unable to realize the Western ideal of autonomous professionalism, they worked within the Soviet system to pursue their seldom-achieved agenda of scientific and aesthetic urban design.