Plans, Plants, and Sense of Place: Urban Greening Across the USSR, 1932-1964

Abstract

An iconic feature of Soviet cities was their abundance of greenspace, proving resilient across political and aesthetic rifts that otherwise transformed Soviet built environments. In histories of socialist urbanism, these outdoor spaces are often treated as context rather than content, or their aspired-to functions dismantled and assessed separately within studies of Soviet communal hygiene, recreation and sport, or political-aesthetic culture. The blind spot thus produced distorts understanding of Soviet urbanism's holistic aspirations, and impoverishes our sense of twentieth-century society-nature relations. How did Soviet specialists envision the quintessentially modern nexus between urbanism, industry, and changing environmental attitudes? How did the theory and practice of urban greening and beautification develop in relation to other iconic elements of Soviet urbanism, from factories to civic ensembles to mass housing districts? Finally, how did specialists in greening engage with the socialist realist doctrine of ‘socialist in content, national in form’ when developing norms and models to be realized in cities across the USSR, particularly in Siberia? To address these questions, this research focuses on the history of the Soviet design-planning subfield known as the “greening of cities” (ozelenenie gorodov), drawing deeply on a broad range of professional literature, archival sources and site-specific evidence. It examines the evolving theory and reception of greening during the two most formative periods of Soviet built urbanism: the Stalinist period of “empire” style ensembles, 1932–1953, and the “laconic” industrially-produced modernism dominant following Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the 1954 Builders’ Conference. The specialist handbooks, textbooks, and published conference proceedings though which Soviet urbanists communicated with each other across regions provide evidence of how urban greening was conceptualized, standardized and circulated. Chapters focus in turn on the greening of industrial territories and enterprises in the 1930s, of postwar civic ensembles and spaces of national display, and post-Stalinist mass housing districts or mikroraiony. Interwoven with these typically Soviet phenomena is the specific history of city-nature relations as they developed in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, both public portrayals and professional ‘backstage’ involvement in shaping the form and reception of city-nature relations. The final chapter considers the agency of urban trees in relation to the emergence in the Cold War-era of a Soviet mass environmental movement. I find that urban greenspace was envisioned as an infrastructure of socialist modernity. By rotating the bundle of functions associated with urban greenspace, and linking greening to larger political-national projects, practitioners weathered shifts that disrupted other aspects of Soviet architecture and urban planning. Ultimately, it was Soviet urbanists’ over-estimation of urban greenery’s agency, rather than their reputed disregard for nature, that contributed to the Soviet city’s iconic spatiality. These spaces were not “open” but over-full with expectations. Lacking effective agency to constrain urban hazards more directly, Soviet architect-planners turned to spatial- and phyto-mitigation measures. They placed trees—the “green friends” and Russian soul-double of patriotic propaganda—in harm’s way, in hopes of protecting cities’ human residents from those same harms. I contend, moreover, that the Soviet investiture of urban greenery with political-cultural agency produced unexpected consequences beyond the sphere of architecture and planning. When urban trees succumbed to the environmental pollution they were meant to mitigate, Soviet authorities could do little to de-link plants, politics and patriotism, even as a mass nature protection movement threatened the stability of the regime.