Modernist architecture transformed the modern city in the 20th century, for good and ill. Nowhere is this transformation more evident than the former Soviet Union and its former republics. There, we find truth in the western stereotypes of the Soviet city as cold, faceless, and soul-crushingly nondescript — so much so that the plot of a 1975 Russian TV film called The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!, hinges on a man drunkenly traveling to Leningrad by mistake and falling asleep in a stranger’s apartment, thinking it’s his own place in Moscow. Russians found the joke so relatable, they began a tradition of watching the film each year on Christmas, as the City Beautiful above video on Soviet urban architecture points out.
Once it had eliminated private property, the experiment of the Soviet Union began with good intentions, architecturally-speaking. Constructivism, the first form of distinctly Soviet architecture, was developed first as an art movement by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Constructivists sought to balance the nation’s need to build tons of new housing under harsh economic conditions with “ambition for using the built environment to engineer societal changes and instill the avant-garde in everyday life,” points out the Designing Buildings Wiki. Drawing from Bauhaus and Futurism, the movement only lasted into the 1930s. Many of its finest designs went unrealized, but it left a significant mark on subsequent architectural movements like Brutalism.
The synthesis of beauty and utility would fall apart, however, under the massive collectivizing drives of Stalin. When his reign ended, public housing blocks known as “Krushchyovkas” sprang up, named after the premier “who initiated their mass production in the late 1950s,” writes Mark Byrnes at Bloomberg CityLab. This was “a distinctly banal architectural type” built quickly and cheaply when Moscow “had twice the population its housing stock could accommodate. Five-story Krushchoyvkas popped up in newly planned microdistricts.” These, as you’ll see in the explainer video, could be added on to existing cities indefinitely for maximal urban sprawl “in hopes of alleviating the severe housing crisis exacerbated under Joseph Stalin.”
As the popularity of The Irony of Fate demonstrates, Krushchoyvkas introduced serious problems of their own, including their grimly comic sameness. The film begins with an animated history lesson on Soviet urban planning. “The urban design was not flexible,” author Philipp Meuser tells Byrnes. “This was the first critique of them dating back to the early ‘60s.” Later versions built under Brezhnev and called “Brezhnevkis” introduced different shapes and sizes to break up the monotony. All of the housing blocks were built to last 20 to 25 years and were not well-maintained, if they were maintained at all. The earliest began deteriorating in the ‘70s.
At their height, however, Krushchoyvkas “were popular because it was revolutionary for housing politics.” One U.S. official put it in 1967: “What the Russians have done is to develop the only technology in the world to produce acceptable, low-cost housing on a large scale.” Cities around the world followed suit in buildings like the Japanese danchi, for example, and the infamously awful American public housing projects of the 60s and 70s, built along similar lines as the Krushchyovkas and the misguided urban design theories of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, another modernist who, like the Constructivists, reimagined city space according to a model of mass production.
The original Constructivist manifesto, published in 1923, promised art and building “of no discernible ‘style’ but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like.” The reality of Constructivist designs — like the designs of cars and aeroplanes — involved a great deal of imagination and creativity. But the architectural legacy of what Constructivists touted as “technical mastery and organization of materials” — under the massively centralized bureaucracy of the fully realized one-party Communist state — created something entirely different than the idealistic avant-gardists had once intended for the modern city.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
And yet, despite all it’s failures, there are millions of people in this country that want the same for us. It boggles the mind.
The planning may look utopian in hindsight (but probably more a practical product of a lagging, unproductive economy), and was certainly socialist, but that doesn’t make it “Utopian socialist.” That phrase has a historical meaning that this article seems unaware of. The author might want to take a look at Friedrich Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” and Charles Fourier’s designs for phalanstères.
We’re well aware of what Utopian Socialism is. But it doesn’t mean that the term can’t be used somewhat differently in this context.
Best,
OC
Yes JC, and those millions of people must be real estate developers judging by all the crappy buildings sprouting up like ugly, cheap mushrooms in my once lovely city. Honestly, I’d prefer Plattenbau.
One important thing the article leaves out is the fact that the USSR had a large amount of quick rebuilding required in the aftermath of World War 2, and collectivization combined with economic planning were utilized to construct this. The difference in design philosophy where something is produced for people and not for profit is difficult to understand to western people. America has never seen anything on its lands compared to the tragedy of WW2 and could not even begin to understand.
At the beginning the bolsheviks did not even need to build anything. They just killed all the reach and middle class people- engineers, doctors, priests, policemens of the previous government…they all were claimed an “enemies of the working class”. After that their apartments were splitted into several rooms where the new people get their places to live. So all the people who left alive, start living in their own new room inside the big apartment (like a hostel for students). So noone built anything new until the end of WW 2.
To be honest, with the constraints the designers/architects had at the time, what they achieved is unparalleled in the western world, still the UK struggles with housing and can barely reach a third of the 300k target every year, yet the soviets house twice the entire population. Im actually writing an article about this very topic myself, and propose a way to modernise these apartments, as they don’t need much renovation to bring them to the modern era. Great article and video btw!
Funniest thing is that those flats were given for free. No rent, no mortgage, no property taxes just nominal fees for electricity, gas, etc. Those crazy commies. Capitalism is obviously better.
Absolutely right point, comrade.
Well, they did solve homelessness. Would you rather have all your American amenities and treats knowing millions of your countrymen are starving and dying outside, or live in a gray identical building like everyone else. The question isn’t a very hard one to answer if there’s an ounce of blood running through your veins.