The New Socialist City: Building Utopia in the USSR, 1917–1934

ABSTRACT

Architecture and utopia have long been allies—not least in the history of imagining and building the new Soviet socialist city, an obsessive idea and project from before the 1917 revolution to the early 1930s. This essay explores these efforts as a determination to obliterate the poisonous cities of old and transcend the suffering cities of the present—as practiced utopia against the dystopia of the status quo. “Utopia” here is defined, drawing on Ernst Bloch, as perception, orientation, and critical method: the human impulse to “venture beyond” the “darkness of the lived moment” to discover the emerging “not-yet.” This essay examines Russian Marxist responses (including among workers) to the “hell” as well as the dynamism of the capitalist city, and examines, through the concept of “utopia,” visionary architectural projects and arguments, including Vladimir Tatlin’s monumental tower for the Third International (1919–20), “disurbanist” and “green city” plans in the 1920s and early 1930s, Georgy Krutikov’s flying “City of the Future” in 1928, the work of Moisei Ginzburg, and Boris Iofan’s “Palace of Soviets” in the early 1930s.

KEYWORDS:

• Cities
• utopia
• socialism
• architecture
• Russia/USSR

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See http://corbusier.totalarch.com/palace_soviets.

2 For an influential examination of the complex relationship between Soviet architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, and of the competing political cultures fueling these, see Paperny (2002).

3 The most influential theorists of the sublime are Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. In architecture, discussions of the sublime are also influenced by Jean-Francois Lyotard. For useful discussions of the sublime in Soviet cultural history, especially architecture, see Susan Buck-Morss (2000, 180–181), Clark (2011, 276–306), Schlögel (2004, 72), and Vaingurt (2013, 129).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark D. Steinberg

Mark Steinberg is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He previously taught at Harvard University and Yale University. His scholarly research and writing have focused on urban history, popular culture, revolution, religion, emotions, and Russian history broadly. His major research fellowships over the years have included SSRC, NEH, IREX, Carnegie, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His books include Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Cornell, 2002), Petersburg Fin-de-Siècle (Yale, 2011), the seventh through ninth editions of A History of Russia with Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford, 2018), The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford, 2017), and Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities in the book series Russian Shorts (Bloomsbury, 2021). His current project is “The Crooked and the Straight in the City: Street, Night, and Morality in New York, Odessa, and Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s.”