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"Architecture and society Soviet Union History."
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Architecture of Oblivion
Despite attempts to promote the aesthetics of ruins in Russia—from Catherine the Great's construction of fake ruins in imperial parks to Josef Brodsky's elegiac meditations—ruins have never achieved the status they enjoy in Western Europe. While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia's historical consciousness from the eighteenth century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood. An interdisciplinary study of Russia's response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.
eBook
Modernism and the making of the Soviet new man
The creation of Soviet culture in the 1920s and the 1930s was the most radical of modernist projects, both in aesthetic and in political terms. \"Modernism and the Making of the New Man\" explores the architecture of this period as the nexus between aesthetics and politics. The design of the material environment, according to the author, was the social effort that most clearly articulated the dynamic of the socialist project as a negotiation between utopia and reality, the will for progress and the will for tyranny. It was a comprehensive effort that brought together professional architects and statisticians, theatre directors, managers, housewives, pilots, construction workers. What they had in common was the enthusiasm for defining the \"new man\", the ideal citizen of the radiant future, and the settings in which he or she lives.
Book
Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room
Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by
Room investigates what happens to domestic
spaces, architecture, and the lives of urbanites during a
socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes how
Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of
inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late
1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries
transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in
their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet
citizens.
The two decades after the collapse of the USSR witnessed a major
urban apartment remodeling boom. Malaia shows how, in the context
of limited residential mobility, those remodeling and modifying
their homes formed new lifestyles defined by increased spatial
privacy. Remodeled interiors served as a material expression of a
social identity above the poverty line, in place of the outdated
Soviet signifiers of well-being. Connecting home improvement,
self-reinvention, the end of state socialism, and the lived
experience of change, Malaia puts together a comprehensive portrait
of the era.
Malaia shows both the stubborn continuities and the dramatic
changes that accompanied the collapse of the USSR. Making the case
for similarities throughout the former Soviet empire, this study is
based on interviews and fieldwork done primarily in Kyiv and Lviv,
Ukraine. Many of the buildings described are similar to those
damaged or destroyed by Russian bombings or artillery fire
following the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A book
about major historic events written through the lens of everyday
life, Taking Soviet Union Apart is also about the meaning
of home in a dramatically changing world.
eBook
Queer(ing) Russian Art
Standing at the intersection of Visual Studies and Queer Studies, the volume Queer(ing) Russian Art: Realism, Revolution, Performance exposes and explores the queer imagery and sensibilities in works of visual art in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet contexts and beneath the surface of conventional histories of Russian art.
eBook
A public empire
\"Property rights\" and \"Russia\" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership.A Public Empirerefutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly,A Public Empireshows the emergence of the new practices of owning \"public things\" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.
The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects-rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics-should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation.
Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property,A Public Empirelooks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing \"the public\" through the reform of property rights.
eBook
Blagoustroistvo: Infrastructure, Determinism, (Re-)coloniality, and Social Engineering in Moscow, 1917–2022
Blagoustroistvo is an archaic Russian word used today primarily to refer to urban public works. This article, a collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian, focuses on aesthetics, rhetorics, and concrete practices of blagoustroistvo in Moscow during two temporal junctures: the first decade following the October Revolution (ca. 1917–1930), and the decade of Sergey Sobyanin’s Moscow Mayoralty (2010–). Our juxtaposition reveals striking continuities and contrasts. Both in the 1920s and 2010s, we show, blagoustroistvo was characterized by a semiotically-intense presence in the city; associated with an emphasis on deterministic socio-psychological “engineering”; ideologically framed by a “vernacularized” form of Marxism-Leninism; and invested with a powerful role in reconfiguring society’s spatial hierarchies, political geometry, and class consciousness. In the former period, social transformation referred to the inversion of class hierarchies and a partly illusory reconfiguration of power between center and periphery. In the 2010s, however, blagoustroistvo became a project that sought a reversion to class categories and the re-colonial reconstitution of the center’s coercive domination of the fringes. Our analysis proffers blagoustroistvo—a high-modernist, deterministic “infrastructural ideology” that has endured into and flourished in the twenty-first century—as a uniquely illustrative concept for understanding the shifting ideologies of Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructural modernity and its winding but stubborn colonial logics. Moreover, our explication of blagoustroistvo’s trans-epochal meanderings brings comparative nuance to current global debates around the alleged “return” of “social engineering” to urban governance and design in the guise of artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and “surveillance capitalism.”
Journal Article
Uprooted
With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland.Uprootedexamines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants.
In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's \"amputated memory.\" Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II.
Uprootedtraces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.
eBook
Architecture of Oblivion
Despite attempts to promote the aesthetics of ruins in Russia—from Catherine the Great’s construction of fake ruins in imperial parks to Josef Brodsky’s elegiac meditations—ruins have never achieved the status they enjoy in Western Europe. While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia’s historical consciousness from the 18th century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood.
An interdisciplinary study of Russia’s response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.
eBook
Urbanism and dictatorship: a European perspective
Das Buch diskutiert den Stand der Forschung zum Städtebau von fünf Diktaturen der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts und präsentiert exemplarisch neue Forschungsergebnisse. Der übergreifende Blick trägt nicht nur dazu bei, die Besonderheiten der jeweiligen Diktatur zu klären, er weist auch manch vereinfachtes Verständnis von deren Städtebau zurück. Das ist keineswegs nur von historischem Interesse!
eBook