Review: Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union

Abstract

Christina Crawford’s richly illustrated Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union provides a fascinating view into the distinctive, experimental, often ad hoc, yet globally connected development of Soviet planning and housing strategies in the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on the serial construction practices in the Soviet Union prior to World War II, Crawford explains why and how global knowledge and international professionals entered and dominated the early-Soviet planning and construction scene. The uniform Soviet housing blocks created using serial construction methods have become symbolic of the late USSR and still remain among the most characteristic visuals of Soviet cityscapes. Crawford shows that, contrary to the usual assumption that these methods arose in the post–World War II decades, the roots of serial construction can be traced to the 1920s.Of course, the scale of such construction in interwar Soviet Union could not compare to the later midcentury mass housing campaign attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, but the antecedents and the fundamental principles (and problems) of the primary Soviet construction method appeared during the interwar period. In recent years, many excellent studies have considered Stalin- and Khrushchev-era mass housing construction, but in the United States very few authors have focused on the earlier origins of serial design and construction as a method in the USSR.1 This nuance, endemic to many books on Soviet historic subjects, is perhaps the only noteworthy drawback of Spatial Revolution. To place early Soviet planning into its global context, the author must retell the entire story of early Soviet planning, despite the fact that recent post-Soviet publications in languages other than English have also covered this territory. Yet this necessary redundancy makes Crawford’s book an invaluable comprehensive resource for English-language readers interested in Soviet planning.Even prior to the 1920s, housing posed a critical problem in places planned for rapid industrialization, but in the 1920s the situation became dire. In the germinal years of the Soviet Union, mass housing was still the subject of local rather than centralized experimentation. Crawford describes heated debates among planners, theorists, architects, sociologists, and engineers regarding the form of a sotsgorod, or socialist town. Proposed models ranged from dense urbanized developments to complete regional dispersal or “disurbanization” based on hopes of widespread access to private vehicles. Yet following the unrealistic expectations and intense pressure for fast economic growth imposed by the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), local experiments and theoretical discussions ceased. Instead, Soviet decision makers deferred to Western specialists with extensive experience in realized projects. These individuals brought with them the pragmatic know-how they gained from factory and housing projects in German and American industrial centers. Needless to say, the futuristic models of housing development based on personal transportation never came to be in the Soviet Union.In her inquiry, Crawford focuses on three cities: Baku (in present-day Azerbaijan), Magnitogorsk (in present-day Russia), and Kharkiv (in present-day Ukraine). In Baku, she tracks the early Soviet history of the city through its oil industry, which was of critical importance for the early USSR to meet its economic goals. By following two central figures in 1920s Baku development—the mining engineer Aleksandr Serebrovskii and the administrator and planner Aleksandr Ivanitskii—and their efforts to import planning and housing principles from England and the United States, Crawford connects the development of Baku, an oil capital of the USSR, to the global planning and architectural context. Like other industrial Soviet cities, Baku needed housing, and like other historic cities, it needed significant infrastructure extensions to make this housing possible. Soviet planners, seeking to support the development of the oil industry with adequate residential structures, navigated through the demands of emergency housing needs, the international principles of the garden city movement, and the local realities of landscape, infrastructure, and transportation.At the same time, as Crawford clearly demonstrates, the practical emergency in Baku did not overshadow the theoretical debate regarding what it meant to construct a socialist city. According to influential early-Soviet planners, the socialist city had to have “streets, squares, and public buildings” that “worked together across the breadth of the city, and yet each neighborhood should also be provided with its own center to ensure equal distribution of civic institutions and places of leisure” (103). Eventually, some of the early theoretical discussions of the elements of a sotsgorod—such as the provision of childcare services to lighten women’s domestic labor and enable them to enter the workforce—came to fruition in the classic of Soviet planning, the microraion, a residential district equipped with public services.Baku’s plan corresponded with the New Economic Policy, which awarded more decision-making and construction authority to local organizations. Planning in Magnitogorsk, in contrast, occurred during a shift to “full command economy,” with planning debates and decision making strictly centralized in Moscow (123). To reconstruct the Magnitogorsk narrative, Crawford follows two figures: an economist, Leonid Sabsovich, inventor and proponent of the sotsgorod, and a sociologist, Mikhail Okhitovich, a proponent of radical disurbanization. Disurbanists, sustained by the dream of consumer access to electricity and automobiles, proposed settlements that would be spread thin over large areas; their ideas were not unlike those of Western designers who envisioned such car-driven developments as Broadacre City.Unlike Baku, Magnitogorsk was in large part a new settlement, and the planners’ revolutionary ideas were free to unfold unrestricted. In the winter of 1930, a competition took place for the master plan and the design type for housing communes intended to realize the most radical aspect of early Soviet architectural thought: the dismantling of the traditional nuclear family. All domestic practices, other than sleep, were to take place in communal spaces; children and parents would be separated, and each communal housing complex would provide access to services and recreational activities. But later that year, the Communist Party elites clearly communicated “that the socialist urbanism debate” regarding dispersed settlements versus concentrated settlements “was over,” along with the radical theories for the redesign of residential spaces and the dismantling of family structures (187). Ernst May, a German planner who had previously worked on New Frankfurt, was invited to resolve Magnitogorsk’s issues. What followed was more in line with the stereotypical view of early Soviet construction: while more resources poured into Magnitogorsk’s industry, fewer resources were allocated for housing and its supplemental infrastructure. Yet some early socialist traits also appeared in these districts. Many units were designed without kitchens, just as in the most progressive examples of the house-communes where designers strove to promote a new form of everyday life—the new byt—in St. Petersburg and Moscow.In the book’s last example, Kharkiv, Crawford examines the internal Soviet reasons and mechanisms that led to standardization and serial construction, and continues looking at the genealogical connection between serial construction in the West and that in the Soviet Union. Kharkiv of the early 1930s was a metropolitan center of an agricultural region dealing with two characteristic Soviet problems: a state-induced famine in Ukrainian villages (caused by the state’s extraction of as much grain as possible and the forcing of the populace into collective farms) and a lack of farming technology (specifically, tractors) that could increase the output of grain that the USSR desperately needed. Not surprisingly, in the case of Kharkiv, planning and architectural innovation centered on the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. In many ways, the tractor symbolized socialism, but the reaction of peasants to this new technology was famously skeptical, just like their response to collective farming.2 The state hoped to use both the tractor and the tractor factory to convince them of the benefits not only of mechanized agriculture but also of socialism itself. However, in her examination of Kharkiv, Crawford goes far beyond a discussion of the significance of early Soviet symbolism: she describes the circumstances that led to serial construction becoming the normative architectural and planning principle in the USSR. This was the result of two factors: the extremely ambitious and unrealistic goals set for the first Five-Year Plan, and the unrestricted circulation of imported know-how free of capitalist copyrights. These factors made the replication of already built designs an extremely advantageous solution, if not the only feasible option. At the same time, despite the official decision to replicate the Stalingrad Tractor Factory in Kharkiv, the process of construction involved many deviations, experiments, makeshift solutions, and contextual innovations that distanced the design from the original.In many studies of midcentury Soviet urban developments, authors introduce specialized terms such as section (sektsiia) or site adjustment (priviazka) without further explanation, simply presenting them as Soviet planning lingo. But Crawford crucially traces the origins of such terms, which often emerged during the earliest Soviet attempts at standardized construction in the 1920s and 1930s. Her book also succeeds in another important respect: rather than centering disproportionately on Soviet Russia, it offers as two out of three example cases cities located beyond the boundaries of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Crawford is also sensitive to the crimes of the Soviet regime, including the orchestration of famines, which together with industrialization and urbanization shaped early twentieth-century Soviet cities. Spatial Revolution is a well-rounded and timely account, not only placing Soviet planning and urbanization within a global context but also demonstrating the complex and composite nature of the twentieth-century communist empire.