Abstract
This article explores the relationship between urban planning and social order in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. From the mid-1930s, urban planners sought to shape the social order by reducing urban population density, limiting urban growth, and controlling mobility. The article explores how urban planners translated the ideal of less densely populated cities into designed built environments, through a study of how they theorized urban green space. This study ties the history of urban planning to the history of urban policing, mass operations, and the social repressions of the Stalinist 1930s through the lens of territoriality. It treats the rise of urban planning and urban policing as part of a single, state project to establish social order in cities, through establishing control over territory, implicating Soviet urban planners in the violent processes of social engineering of Stalinism.
Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, rapid urbanization threatened the standard of living in cities and towns in the Soviet Union. 1 Between 1926 and 1939, the population of Soviet cities expanded by about thirty million people, mostly peasants from the countryside. 2 The urban standard of living had stabilized in the late years of the New Economic Policy; however, the influx of new urbanites during the Stalinist industrialization campaign strained limited urban resources. While attacking and dismantling the private sector, the state struggled with the question of how to distribute and redistribute resources, particularly housing and food, to the new urban settlers and established urban population. 3 The state quickly, if nominally temporarily, abandoned its egalitarian impulses in order to serve the imperatives of rapid industrialization, introducing a highly hierarchical system of rationing in 1931, which quickly stabilized living standards for strategically important social groups. 4 However, throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, the party and state faced the ongoing question of how to conceptualize, accommodate, control, and redirect the ongoing population flow from the countryside to the city, and from city to city. 5
As the historians David R. Shearer and Paul Hagenloh have argued, the influx of new urban residents contributed to what the party and state understood to be a surge in social disorder in the cities from the early 1930s. 6 This disorder was particularly acute during and after the forced collectivization drive of 1929-1931 and subsequent famine, when populations fled the starving countryside for the better provisioned cities. As Shearer argued, the Soviet political and civil police, newly integrated into a single agency, the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU), turned their attention from collectivizing the countryside to establishing order in the towns and cities. This project relied on the exclusion and violent expulsion of urban residents. “Mass operations” began in 1932 and served to cleanse cities and strategic areas of so-called “socially harmful elements,” such as prostitutes, beggars, petty thieves, speculators, homosexuals, and other populations deemed by the state to be undesirable. 7 A passport and residence registration (propiska) system, begun in Moscow and Leningrad in 1932 and introduced more broadly in 1933, provided a mechanism for limiting the out-migration of rural populations and formal expansion of cities and for the expulsion of unregistered or improperly registered migrants. 8 And the Politburo ordered famine-afflicted regions to be cordoned off, to prevent peasants from leaving their homes in search of grain. 9 Restricting mobility and migration through policing became a strategy of governance under Stalin.
At the same time, the party and state sought not only to crush opposition and guard the regime by controlling and preventing crime and disorder, but also to create a healthy, orderly socialist society. The party and state combined repressive measures with positive measures to raise urban standards of living through investments in urban infrastructure and food supply, reserved for registered urban residents. As police repression increased in the cities, the Soviet party and state invested in the institutionalization of urban planning and urban construction. The state project to establish social order in the cities following collectivization through policing coincided with large state investments in urban planning and construction and the creation of a highly statist form of urban planning. Yet, as explored in this study, urban planners sought not only to improve urban standards of living by improving infrastructure. They also engaged with broader questions of social engineering. As the party and state unleashed mass operations, many urban planners sought to contribute to the state project of establishing social order in the cities through urban planning. A review of the writings of urban planners reveals that they aimed to shape the social order by reducing urban population density, limiting urban growth, and controlling population flows from the countryside to the cities, between cities, and within cities during and following collectivization.
This study explores how urban planners theorized the relationship between urban planning and social order in cities in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, through an analysis of writings on urban green space between 1931 and 1941. It explores how urban planners translated the ideal of less densely populated and contained cities into envisioned built environments, with the instrument of green space. Green space was a lever of controlling urban density and controlling the expansion of urban populations overall. By cultivating green spaces where in the Soviet urban planning context new industrial and residential construction was forbidden, urban planners envisioned contributing to the state project of distributing new urbanites into new satellite cities, cities, and construction sites throughout the Soviet Union. By limiting the growth of central urban spaces, urban planners aimed to contribute to a shift in the movements and settlement patterns of the entire population of the Soviet Union in the entire Soviet territory, away from the “two capitals” of Moscow and Leningrad and into new industrial areas and border regions deep in the Soviet interior. The scale of Soviet urbanism extended to the entire territory of the Soviet state. Moreover, by reducing population density and by introducing curative rest areas within parks, urban planners argued that green space would not only make the body social more orderly, but also improve public health. Indeed, urban planners could and did reasonably argue that by reducing urban density and limiting urban growth, that is, by eliminating slums and replacing them with green Stalinist neighborhoods (kvartaly), they contributed to the project of building socialism. 10 As spaces, moreover, they proved powerful tools of acculturation. 11
Examining how Soviet urban planners theorized green space study contributes to a deepening understanding of the relationship between urban planning and social engineering in recent histories of Soviet urbanism, rethinking the role of Soviet urban planners, many of whom alongside architects still enjoy a certain aura in the popular and scholarly imagination as radical, humanist visionaries who became victims of Stalinism. 12 The historian Heather DeHaan argued that urban planners were engaged with driving social change. Their approach differed fundamentally from party organs, however, as they developed “engineering systems that might regulate and moderate human behaviour,” but that were distinct from the kind of direct, coercive control engaged by the party, although these systems could be complementary. 13 DeHaan focused on the role of infrastructure, drawing on technology and science, in regulating society. The case of urban green space presented here extends this discussion, highlighting for the first time the role of green spaces in processes of social engineering. Moreover, this study reconceptualizes the relationship of urban planning to social engineering and direct coercion through the lens of territoriality, which allows for a broader reinterpretation of the history of urban planning in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The historical geographer Robert David Sack defined territoriality as “the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.” 14 As Sack argued, “Territoriality for humans is a powerful strategy to control people and things by controlling area.” 15 An area became a territory only when its boundaries were used to affect behavior, by controlling access. 16 Territories were bounded spaces that could be emptied of populations. The geographer David Storey argued that territorial strategies, the apportioning of space or specified territory, were the result of the interplay of social and political forces, employed to attain or to maintain control of territory. Territoriality was a strategy to assert power through controlling area. 17
This study treats the rise of urban planning and urban policing as part of a single, state project to establish social order in cities through territorialization, that is, through the processes of establishing control over society by controlling urban space. Urban planning and questions of policing and population control have largely evolved in two different historiographies that have generally not intersected in Soviet history. The connection between these two topics may be obvious to some historians. Students of the Haussmann reforms in nineteenth-century France or of public housing and highway development in post-war American cities are familiar with the often very close link between urban planners and architects and local and national governmental efforts to control, segregate, or exclude parts of the urban population. 18 This study brings these two debates into discussion for the first time in the Soviet historiography.
Through the lens of territoriality, the rise of urban policing, mass operations, and passportization, as well as the rise of a highly statist form of urban planning, can be seen as strategies of establishing control over access to urban territory in order to establish control over society. The rise of policing and a highly statist form of urban planning were interrelated processes of territorialization promoted by the party and state in 1931/1932. This allows for a broader reinterpretation of existing historiography. By viewing both urban planning and urban policing through the lens of territoriality, the well-established turning point in the historiography of urban planning of 1931/1932, known as the moment when the party ended debates about the “socialist city” and consolidated the many avant-garde architectural movements into a single Union of Soviet Architects, ending their independence, can be re-conceptualized as constituting part of a territorial turn in urban governance, from a period of open migration to a period where the state attempted to assert its power over society, over migration, and settlement patterns, by asserting its power over urban space. This suggests that we see the creation of a highly statist form of urban planning and the creation of the Commissariat of Communal Economy in 1931 as signaling a shift in Soviet approaches to urban territoriality. The rise of policing and a highly statist form of urban planning suggest a territorial turn in the governance of cities in the Soviet Union in 1931/1932.
In his classic study Magnetic Mountain, the historian Stephen Kotkin elaborated a spatial component and orientation at the local level to such topics as industrialization, mass population movements, and the terror, which historians still too often only study through texts with no attention to space. Building on the work of Kotkin, this study shows how urban planners contributed to the construction of what he called the “urban geography” of Stalinist repression. 19 It examines in greater detail how urban planners, with their carefully articulated population politics and illiberal disregard for freedom of movement and private property, conceptualized a mode of urban design that depended, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, on the territorial strategies of urban policing, including surveillance, violent expulsion and expropriation, and control of migration, for realization. Here we see urban planners advocating for social control and surveillance even before the Stalinist takeover and consolidation of urban planning in 1931/1932, and benefiting from that takeover. 20 Soviet urban planners participated in the Stalinist project of building socialism, rather than being victims of that process. 21 Soviet urban planners, at least those who continued to publish after 1931, were not as fully divorced from coercive mechanisms of control over society as has been suggested by historians.
This study contributes to our understanding of Soviet territoriality by analyzing how urban planners theorized green space after 1931. The study explores the relationship between urban planning and social order in the Soviet Union through an analysis of the writings of urban planners between 1931 and 1941 on green space. The first section explores the context in which green space was theorized in Russia, analyzing the history of the garden city movement in Russia and the Soviet Union and of urban planning more broadly before and after 1931, and outlines the rapid expansion of green spaces after 1931. The main part of the article then examines how urban planners theorized green space after 1931, with an emphasis on questions of territorial governance. It examines how urban planners sought to shape the social order by controlling urban population density and controlling (and in many cases limiting) the size of urban populations and the rate of urban growth. It explores how the state project to establish social order in the cities coincided with and was reinforced by large state investments in urban planning and reconstruction. It further examines what urban planners saw as the emerging social and economic problem of labor migration (tekuchest’), tied to the unexpected end of unemployment in 1931, in the context of a rapidly expanding planned economy. 22 Finally, the scale of enquiry extends to the entire territory of the Soviet Union, exploring how the relationship between population and territory manifested itself in the work of Soviet urban planners. Urban planners, whose visions extended to the scale of the entire territory of the Soviet Union, advocated for the territorialization of power under Stalin, redistributing the population into settlements by delimiting and asserting control over Soviet urban territory.
The Garden City after 1931
In 1931, the cultural revolutionary debates about the socialist city were brought abruptly to an end. At the June 1931 plenum of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Lazar Kaganovich, in a three-hour speech “On the Organization of Urban Economy,” ended discussions of the “socialist city.” 23 These settlement debates had probed the idea of what form a city should take in a socialist state, with proposals in the area of so-called disurbanism ranging from the idea of eliminating historic cities entirely through demolition, to the proposal to create linear cities that stretched out along railway lines, only a few streets in depth, eliminating the distinction between city and countryside. As the historian of architecture Christina Crawford outlined in a comprehensive discussion of the debates, its main fault lines fell between those who embraced large cities, the urbanists, and those who rejected these, the disurbanists. 24 Kaganovich concluded these debates by arguing that the socialist city was, quite simply, a city in a socialist country. The state and party brought the attacks by young proletarians on bourgeois specialists, including architects and engineers, which had taken place during the Cultural Revolution (1928-1931), a dynamic period at the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan when independent factions in science and the arts competed for state support, to a close. The state and party provided more stable conditions in which professionals could work and consolidated all architectural groups into a single Union of Soviet Architects in 1932. 25 The state established the Commissariat of Communal Economy on July 30, 1931, raising the profile of urban planning to the level of a state agency. 26 The years 1931 and 1932 marked a major turning point in Soviet urban planning. 27
In this evolving Stalinist context, urban planning became increasingly integrated into the broader project of national economic planning. Urban planning under Stalin became characterized by a close connection with the economic planning of the country as a whole, extending in scale to the planning of the entire economy of the USSR in its entire territory. From that point forward, urban planners were occupied with the project of creating a more standardized urban environment, consolidating the achievements of what had been a highly experimental and productive but largely uncoordinated period of urban construction during the early years of the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932). 28 Urban planners rejected both radical disurbanism and hyper-urbanism. Concentrated, high-density cities brought a political advantage for the Bolsheviks: The party had already indicated in 1930 that the concentration of the proletariat in a confined space made it easier to rally them to socialism. 29 At the same time, the party sought to limit the growth of established cities and instead support the development of new cities. Indeed, building new cities in largely unsettled areas near raw materials was integral to the Soviet approach to industrialization. 30
However, the planned economy faced a variety of social obstacles in these years. The population was growing in the cities, but it was also becoming more difficult to govern. The state needed a steady supply of laborers to work in the cities, but it also needed to ensure their discipline and orderliness. An unexpected outcome of state investment in the economy during the crash industrialization program of the First Five-Year Plan was the strengthening of the hand of workers in their relation to the state, even as the reorganization of trade unions radically circumscribed their formal role in shaping industrial development. The years 1930 and 1931 transformed state control over the work force as mass unemployment ended abruptly and unexpectedly, and full employment and labor shortages emerged. In high demand, workers moved spontaneously from enterprise to enterprise and region to region in search of better living and working conditions. 31 The state plan to develop industries in remote regions of the Soviet territory, far from established urban settlements or population centers, posed a particular challenge in the new context of labor shortages. In these remote regions, conditions of work and life were far worse than in established cities, with newly arrived workers often living in tent cities, without basic infrastructure such as water supply, heating supply, or roads. 32 The problem of moving working populations into those newly developing regions and away from the overcrowded European cities of the Soviet Union was ongoing, with origins in the Tsarist period, but the ability of workers to leave their positions in search of better conditions and easily find work elsewhere exacerbated the difficulty of establishing stable working populations there.
The existing state mechanisms of the planned economy turned out to have no good method for supplying enterprises with a steady and fixed supply of workers in the context of labor shortages. The Commissariat of Labor had not been established to deal with supplying labor to industry but rather for caring for the unemployed. The Commissariat, unable to deal with what the historian Hiroko Kuromiya called the “spontaneity of the labor market” that emerged, was soon abolished, in 1933. 33 Labor mobility became an ongoing problem for Soviet economic planners in the 1930s, contributing to the alarming collapse in labor productivity of the same years. 34 Establishing control over the movement of population was key to fulfilling the economic plans around which the state was building the industrial economy.
Enterprise directors, the management group held by the party and state most responsible for fulfilling economic plans, quickly recognized that raising living standards was key to establishing social order, reducing labor migration, and raising labor productivity, and led the way in building housing for workers. 35 The centralizing state soon embraced a related strategy. In the midst of the catastrophic social chaos that state-led collectivization, industrialization, and famine unleashed, the state turned to the neglected task of improving urban environments. Labor shortages made improving conditions for workers newly relevant for the state, beginning with the highest priority industrial enterprises. The state sought to raise the standard of living in Soviet cities and towns both by increasing supply and by limiting demand for state provisions, by limiting spontaneous population growth and restricting access to state provisions and poor relief, which became privileges of registered inhabitants of cities. 36 At the same time, no new central state apparatus for managing labor recruitment replaced the Commissariat of Labor. The role was instead filled by the police and the gulag system, which enforced the central planning of labor in practice, on one hand, and a free, self-organized flow of workers from enterprise to enterprise, and region to region, in a process call samotek, on the other. 37
The state also called upon urban planners to help overcome these social problems, while also facilitating the development of industrial enterprises. The newly established Commissariat of Communal Economy invested in improving the living conditions of populations in established and new Soviet cities. In the years from 1931 until priorities shifted radically under Khrushchev (with his famous 1959 mass housing campaign), the Commissariat of Communal Economy did not focus on housing construction, however. 38 Rather, it focused largely on improving public services in cities: water supply, canalization, electrification and gas supply, transportation, laundries, and bathhouses, all of which together fit under the rubric of urban improvement (blagoustroistvo).
What has been less recognized in the historiography of Soviet urbanism in this period is the role of green space in the sanitary infrastructure of the Soviet city. In 1932, the Commissariat of Communal Economy RSFSR established a trust for what it called “green construction,” the State Green Construction Trust (Goszelenstroi). 39 Making cities green thus became a task of a branch of the urban economy and, as urban planner N.P. Kabranov wrote, a branch of “socialist construction” under Stalin, and was an area of construction which far outpaced housing construction. 40 Urban planners referred to trees as “green bricks.” 41 The establishment of the State Green Construction Trust in 1932 was a turning point in state attention to the greening of cities. In 1932, the state invested more in green construction than had been invested during the entire Five-Year Plan until then. And this expanded role for green space in Soviet cities was written into the Second Five-Year Plan. 42 Between 1928 and 1941, the area of green space in the cities of the Russian republic of the Soviet Union expanded from 9,247 hectares in 1928 to 24,655 hectares in 1941, or, as Soviet planners conceptualized it, to 6.8 square meters of green space per urban resident. 43
The State Green Construction Trust was the highest organ of green construction in the country and served the highest priority construction projects of the state. Its work was focused on the “leading new constructions and a number of large cities in the RSFSR.” 44 In the 1930s, the State Green Construction Trust conducted greening work in the most elite central cities of Moscow and Leningrad; however, their work also extended to new and rapidly developing regional settlements and cities, including Magnitogorsk, Stalinogorsk, Sverdlovsk, Nizhnii-Tagil, Stalingrad, Gor’kii, Cheliabinsk, Perm, Berezniki, Saratov, and Kemerovo (Figures 1 and 2). Among the works that Goszelenstroi led were the design and construction of Parks of Culture and Rest in Minsk, Samara, Saratov, Cheliabinsk, and Rybinsk. 45 Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Stalingrad, Rostov-na Donu, and other larger cities also maintained their own municipal trusts of green construction, which conducted their own work. 46 In addition, industries supported greening in new construction, factory territories, and mines, spending fifteen million rubles on greening in 1935 alone. 47 Voluntary labor, particularly of children and of members of the Komsomol, but also organized in voluntary “garden weeks” and “tree planting weeks,” was part of the plan for the cultivation and maintenance of urban green space, having also acculturation functions, contributing to the development of a mass environmental consciousness in the Stalinist years. 48
A central square in Stalingrad, before the German Occupation. Note the absence of walls and fences. L.O. Mashinskii, Ozelenenie gorodov (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1951).
Green space in a new worker neighborhood in Sverdlovsk, 1934. M.G. Tsifereov, V.P. Kniazev, “Goszelenstroi,” Planirovka i stroitel’stvo gorodov, no. 1 (1934): 28.
The project to create green cities in the Soviet Union drew on the heritage of the garden city movement and socialist landscape architecture projects in Central Europe. That heritage had a profound influence on reform planners in the Russian empire among both liberal and socialist reformers. 49 Before the revolution, lawyers, architects, and reformist politicians formed Garden City Associations, and Russians formed the second largest foreign delegation to the meeting of the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association in London in 1914, after the Germans. However, the ability of would-be reformers to transform urban landscapes in practice was limited. Before the revolution, developed parks and green spaces were overwhelmingly located in palaces and estates. Although the independent professional garden city associations were dissolved in the mid-1920s, the Garden City movement continued to shape the perspective of the Soviet disurbanists in the planning debates of the late 1920s, including Moisei Ginzburg, who famously designed a Green City in the outskirts of Moscow. 50
Historical debates about the place of greenery in Stalinist urbanism usually end in 1931. Yet as the above shows, green space continued to be a relevant category of analysis and construction for urban planners after 1931, in a transformed theoretical context. From 1931, the official line on international socialist heritage, including shared garden city heritage, changed. Experts, emphasizing the expansion of green spaces in Soviet cities, claimed the use of the term “garden city,” but simply to denote a city filled with gardens. Urban planners argued that Soviet cities were becoming garden cities. However, they were careful to differentiate Soviet garden cities from their international predecessors. As urban planner A. Zelenko argued, “The expression of the garden city is used, but obviously what is implied by the term is not the English garden city, with its principles of settlement, but simply the city, with an abundance of green spaces.” 51 Soviet urban planners particularly rejected the individual family homes proposed by the British garden city movement, espousing mass housing in apartment blocks instead during the Cultural Revolution. 52 Just as the socialist city was a city in a socialist country, a garden city was a city filled with gardens. Urban planners denied continuities and shared heritage with the international socialist garden city movement, associated as it was with reform socialism. 53 At the same time, they rejected the new garden settlements that were being developed in Central Europe by fascist governments. As one study noted, fascist regimes were building settlements in urban outskirts in order to “disurbanize” the unemployed, pointing to examples in Berlin, Vienna, and Zagreb. The authors saw these settlements as an effort to destroy the working class. Keeping the unemployed and pensioners out of cities would prevent revolution. 54 How did urban planners theorize green space, in this new ideological context? What would the principles, measures, and norms of green space for the post-1931 Soviet city be? How did urban planners theorize the relationship between green space and urban governance?
Controlling Land, Controlling Populations
The function of urban green space within Soviet urbanism was a heatedly debated topic among urban and economic planners after 1931. By 1935, there were about 2,000 architects, engineers, and economists working in urban planning design trusts and bureaus simultaneously in more than 100 cities of the USSR. 55 Also in this period, landscape architecture was professionalized. 56 In monographs and brochures and on the pages of the leading urban planning journal, published by the Commissariat of Communal Economy, The Planning and Construction of Cities (Planirovka i stroitel’stvo gorodov), urban planners and landscape architects, including the first Commissar of Communal Economy, N.P. Komarov, who served from 1931 until he was removed from his role in 1937 during the purges, discussed the function of green spaces in Soviet cities. These debates focused largely on hygiene and public health, aesthetic and physical education, the improvement of the territory of cities, fire and erosion prevention, and controlling industrial pollution. Writing also focused on the place of ecologically clean nature in the Soviet city and the importance of urban nature protection, for health. A look at the writing of urban planners suggests, however, that the understood function of green space extended beyond questions of sanitation and hygiene, to population politics. The writings extended to the broader question of establishing state control over rural-urban migration and settlement patterns throughout the Soviet territory. This suggests that a key function of urban planning after 1931 was to assist the state in gaining centralized control over urban land, over how it was used, and by whom, that is, the territorialization of power.
Formally the state already had control of urban land, which was municipalized during the revolution and Civil War. One of the first decrees issued by the Soviet government, “On Land,” abolished private land ownership, and with it speculation and trading in land. 57 However, even during the revolutionary years, the process of municipalization of land in the cities and towns was far less furious and comprehensive than in the countryside, where landed estates were broken up and distributed among the peasantry, often on the initiatives of the peasants themselves. In the cities, the focus of Soviets was more often on the buildings and infrastructure that occupied land than on the land itself, and even the process of municipalization of buildings was uneven and highly contingent on local conditions. 58 Furthermore, many of the buildings that were municipalized during the years of revolution and Civil War were de-municipalized during the period of the New Economic Policy. 59 For example, in the town of Sochi, while private ownership of land was nominally still abolished, leases for land were given freely by municipalities to anyone who could pay. 60 Moreover, infrastructure and urban land was in practice not held collectively as one unit, but rather reflected the organization of space at the time of the revolution, based on already established plots and infrastructure. Thus, while land was nationalized and in theory, unenclosed, the landed estates remained intact as units in the administrative apparatus of the local soviets. Rather than re-dividing plots or estates, in the first instance, each existing property was held intact and rented out or administered separately, as individually municipalized properties, and were even often referred to by the names of the previous landowner or of the estate. 61
This changed during the years of the First Five-Year Plan, which saw a push to renationalize and reorder land use and integrate it into the planned economy. And in the period that followed, as urban planning became more deeply institutionalized, there was a push for the consolidation and systematic reorganization of urban land holdings. This became a prominent theme in theoretical writings about urban planning. In an editorial in 1935 in The Planning and Construction of Cities, the editors argued that, despite the elimination of private property, competing state agencies approached land as private owners would, ignoring the plan. This the editors of the journal called an “anti-state” tendency: We have long ago liquidated private ownership of land. Yet we still observe the approach of a private owner of separate construction agencies to the plots distributed to them. We should decisively battle against this anti-state tendency with urban planning.
62
Urban planners condemned what they saw as the practices of private property ownership that continued to exist in Soviet cities and the private “approach” of state agencies to the land. They focused on fences and walls as markers of private ownership or private approaches to land use and promoted their removal and the integration and consolidation of land holdings.
The prolific Soviet theorist of urbanism and urban planner P. Koval’skaia-Il’ina sought to take down walls and fences that surrounded parks and gardens. Such “vulgar” markers of private ownership of land stood in marked contrast to the ideal of state ownership of land. And one benefit of state ownership of land was the creation of accessible green space. As Koval’skaia-Il’ina wrote in 1930, such green space was for broad social use. She noted that many organizations had built parks for themselves, surrounded by walls, removing them from open, social use: It seems inappropriate that the exclusive right to use city parks and gardens has been given to separate organizations, which results in fact in the removal of the garden from general urban use and negates all the work done of opening up access to greenery to the entire city.
63
She argued that individual gardens were “useless.” 64 Instead, she argued that the green spaces along streets should be integrated into “garden strips” for collective use: “The socialist life of the population of new homes will have to be met by new forms of home gardens: street garden strips for collective use.” 65 Integrating green spaces would transform once scattered individual plots into an aesthetic whole: “Compared with the diverse, tiny and sometimes vulgar private gardens, with fences of different types, colourful and often clumsy plantings, a uniform garden design for the entire street can provide a much more pleasant impression from an aesthetic perspective.” 66 Green construction was an important method of integrating plots of land that were formally under private land ownership and opening them to broad, social use.
Removing walls and fences also had another function. It allowed for the greater visibility of park visitors, and therefore promoted social surveillance. Here, discussion shifted to questions of population control. Koval’skaia-Il’ina noted that removing urban fences and walls around parks and gardens improved the levels of surveillance over these spaces. As she wrote, “Removing fences increases the visibility of the garden, and strengthens societal control, which influences less conscious visitors.” 67 She called fences an “optical obstacle” and argued that fencing should be “expelled” from the socialist city, along with dark courtyards and rubbish heaps. 68 Greenery would fill in the space opened up by the removal of walls. 69 The “system of fences” that characterized urban spaces in the capitalist city would be replaced by a “system of green space,” including green space within neighborhoods, physical culture squares, schools, hospitals, along streets, in cemeteries, and in the outskirts of cities. 70
In the early 1930s, removing park and city walls became a common territorial practice. Many of those spaces freed up by walls were transformed into green spaces and widened streets. In Leningrad, in the early 1930s, the department of urban planning removed park walls from large, formerly private gardens along Bolshoi Prospect on Vasilevskii Island that faced the avenue, creating a broad, green boulevard for “social use,” with the preservation of old trees. 71 During the Reconstruction of Moscow in 1935, the six-meter thick brick wall of the commercial quarter Kitaigorod, built between 1534 and 1538, was removed, replaced by green space and a wider road 72 (Figure 3). Formerly privately held lands were consolidated and reshaped into integrated spaces with an aesthetic whole, serving a new set of purposes. Green construction, including the processes of removing city, park, and garden walls, the widening of roads and elimination of alleyways, was a mechanism by which the state established control over land use, channeling mobility. It marked the power of the state to impose new principles of access. Moreover, this discussion of the use of green space for “societal control” preceded the turn to urban policing that took place from 1932.
The Kitaigorod wall in Moscow, targeted for historical preservation in the 1920s, was removed in the early 1930s, consolidating green spaces on either side of the wall, removing the gate, and broadening the streets, particularly Staraia ploshchad’ (pictured). A. Zaslavskii, “Planirovka Moskvy,” Planirovka i stroitel’stvo gorodov no. 10 (1934): 4-5.
The reordering of urban space without the restrictions of private property demonstrated the superiority of planning in a socialist country. As planners wrote, the institution of private property in capitalist countries meant weak planning. In 1934, the engineer I.O. Movshovich, who was employed by the leading design bureau of the Commissariat of Communal Economy, Giprogor, argued in an article entitled “The Planning of Socialist Cities”: The sacred bourgeois capitalist property laws tie the hands of the bourgeois urban planner. In all his efforts is thrown in his eyes the inability of the planning idea to be realized, the planning of the position of the most important institutions: industry and housing. And this is to be expected, as in each case the planner meets with the law, which is cast by the idea of exploitation, based on private ownership, which inevitably flows from the very existence of the capitalist system.
73
By consolidating and opening up formerly privately owned lands, urban planners asserted the power of the state under socialism.
The Problem of Overbuilding and the Solution of Spaciousness
Another way to make cities more orderly was to reduce population density. Consolidating existing pieces of land into green spaces helped to establish state control over land that it already nominally owned and controlled. However, this did not in itself influence the conditions of overcrowding and congestion that existed within residential buildings or on the streets. The condition of overcrowding was determined by the flows of population, on one hand, and the lack of state commitment to building adequate new housing under Stalin, on the other. It was not primarily determined by the built environment as it existed and its intended capacities, or even the capacities that the state had set up through sanitary norms. In the Stalinist context, it was largely the task of the police to enforce changes in the migration patterns, on one hand, and enterprises, on the other, with their housing and access to registration.
Yet, the overbuilt centers of old cities also influenced the form that urban congestion took. Urban planners struggled to define terms by which the built environment might do more to determine a less dense urban form. Urban planners considered urban overcrowding a problem. However, overcrowding was also related to overbuilding. In 1935, the architect P. Gol’denberg criticized existing Moscow as too dense: “Many Moscow neighborhoods are characterized by their excessively high density of buildings and population. The population suffers from the chaotic mixture within one neighborhood of residential buildings, factories, garages and warehouses.”
74
Older quarters of the city were narrow and dark, lacking sufficient space. As Koval’skaia-Il’ina argued, The most negative elements of large cities, the narrow, dark courtyards, the wells to which cling bad air, are the result of the unsystematic construction of the past and the exploitation of every scrap of land, and must immediately vanish and leave no trace.
75
Overbuilding was tied to the exploitation of the land in a capitalist system of private land ownership, enabling the exploitation of people. Socialist cities, by contrast, would be characterized by their “spaciousness.”
By opening up formerly private land and through planning larger and more open neighborhoods, urban planners hoped to create what they called “spaciousness” in cities. In 1933, P. Khaustov wrote about the spaciousness of a neighborhood, asking, “What is spaciousness?” Khaustov defined spaciousness as the relationship between the amount of land covered by buildings and land left as free and open. He argued that the area of land in a residential block under greenery should be at least 50 percent of the total land area. This would make Soviet cities far greener than their European counterparts. 76 Indeed, this was a point of direct comparison for Soviet urban planners. A 1933 study of green space held that the area of green plantings in London made up about 9 percent of the area of the city. Only 3 percent of the territory of Paris, the least green of the major European cities, was under greenery. 77 Yet even this was greener than actually existing cities in the RSFSR. As another 1933 study found, on average only about 2 percent of the territories of the cities of the RSFSR were under greenery. 78 Khaustov also argued that from a sanitary perspective, it was perhaps even more important to calculate the amount of free space per apartment or per person within each neighorhood. 79 Khaustov raised what he explicitly called the question of “population density” (plotnost’ zaselenii), measured in people per hectare, as an aspect to consider in the creation of spaciousness. He argued that controlling population density should become an objective of the urban planner. 80
Urban planners also argued for the elimination of alleyways and small roads in new designs, using the space saved as green space. As Gol’denberg argued in 1935, old neighborhoods, with their narrow and frequent alleyways, darkness, lack of greenery, and sprawling single and two-story buildings would be replaced with much larger residential neighborhoods designed as an integrated whole, with much less land used for roads. As he argued, the old, dense style of residential area was irrational, as low buildings took up enormous amounts of space and each building required a road. He argued that such tiny streets and alleyways should be removed. 81 Narrow and winding neighborhoods would be replaced with larger and more spacious neighborhoods, with fewer roads. As Gol’denberg noted, in the new Moscow, residential buildings would be taller, freeing up space for greenery and playgrounds.
Spaciousness was usually discussed in terms of “green spaciousness.” State green construction trusts focused on the cultivation of landscaped parks, central green boulevards with tree-lined walking paths removed from traffic, central squares, courtyard gardens and gardens around residential homes, systems of Parks of Rest and Culture, and large forest parks, which served as “green lungs” around the periphery of cities. Green spaces were spaces free from buildings and industrial and economic processes. While buildings could, and did, expand vertically, the protection of spaciousness in cities limited the horizontal growth of buildings. 82 Green areas in cities placed a material barrier to the amount of territory that could be settled in the city. This was also represented in maps, where parks were blocked off from urban space.
This also meant that green spaces, as spaces free of industrial enterprises, did not contribute to the pollution of air, soil, and water. As Z.G. Frenkel’, a social hygienist turned sanitary physician and specialist in urban improvement, author of a 1923 textbook on social hygiene and a 1926 textbook on urban improvement, wrote in 1935, green spaces brought into the cities the characteristics of nature and supplies of fresh air: “Green spaces (ozelennye prostranstva) can with good reason be considered as spare tanks of untouched, clean air in the city.” 83 Green spaces were pieces of nature within the city.
The “Green Norms” of the Stalinist City
The ideal of green cities was not limited to abstract discussions of spaciousness, but was translated into construction norms that were meant to determine how Soviet cities were built, the foundation for the standardization of urban space. In the formulation of green norms, the influence of ideas of health and hygiene on urban planning and their intersection with questions of access to nature and space is illustrated. The historian Steven Harris has highlighted the influence of medical ideas on the Soviet built environment, in his discussion of the sanitary norms for “living space” per resident in Soviet apartments established by the Commissariat of Public Health, and their influence in shaping the design of Soviet housing. As he found, housing norms established in the Stalin era were largely exceeded by architects in that period, which meant that city housing committees often settled more than one family into an apartment: the norms were treated as a maximum rather than as a minimum. In the Khrushchev period, architects who now sought to design apartments that would be settled in practice by individual families, designed apartments that strictly matched housing norms. This led to remarkably small apartments and tiny “auxiliary” spaces (kitchens, hallways). 84 The study of urban green space suggests that these living space norms should be understood in the context of the broad influence of medical ideas, medical officials, and public health on the design of the built environment of the Soviet Union.
The Commissariat of Public Health established norms of green space per urban resident, for health. These norms competed with norms established by various design groups and by the green construction departments of cities. The standardization of urban planning that took place from 1931 further entrenched the creation of various “norms” for urban spaces, in so doing regulating and standardizing urban space. Within residential areas the most commonly referenced standard norm of green space per resident and the most common norm established by the Commissariat of Public Health was twenty square meters of green space per resident within a residential neighborhood. 85 However, urban planners proposed an ever-increasing quota of green space per resident, establishing a trend in urban planning in the 1930s toward the expansion of green spaces. Proposals for green space reached truly enormous proportions, including a proposal to introduce in Zaporozhe, a city in Ukraine, the norm of more than 100 square meters of green space per person. 86 Zoos and botanical gardens of scientific meaning were not included in the norms (although the popularization sectors of these were included in the norms for Parks of Culture and Rest). Agricultural and water areas were also not included in the norms, as depending on the topography and individual characteristics of the city. 87 Urban green spaces were not tied to scientific research. Rather, they were tied to the individual, registered, urban resident.
Green space was even considered a part of the living space of urban residents. As Frenkel’ wrote in 1935, Greening the city, creating a network of landscaped parks, boulevards, squares, courtyard gardens and gardens around residential homes promotes the improvement of living conditions, promotes, so to speak, the expansion of the living quarter beyond the walls of the apartment and building, carrying the living quarters and a part of the living process into free space (na voliu).
88
Green spaces were social spaces, for social use, but they were also tied to individualized, territorialized residential units, tied to a residence permit. These units were tied to concepts of health and hygiene. However, as is the emphasis in this study, green spaces were also meant to determine a less dense distribution of urban populations, contributing to the ordering of the chaotic urban populations. “Green norms” were a mechanism for distributing the population of a city into the territory of the city. They also further were a mechanism for reordering the land, replacing the unequal pre-revolutionary private landholdings with hygienically determined and equitably measured and distributed, state allocated space.
The design of green space according to residential norms fit further into norms that regulated the distribution of green space throughout the territory of a city. Planners aimed for the even distribution of green space, to prevent the sort of inequality that was characteristic of the distribution of green space before the revolution, in the era of private land ownership. Parks would be at intervals of 600 to 800 m, regional Parks of Culture and Rest, every 1.5 to 2 km, and Parks of Culture and Rest, every 8 to 10 km. 89 This focus on accessibility was part of the social mission of the planned city. It also contributed to the elimination of slums, with their overcrowding and lack of green spaces. Green norms would not be reached according to averages, but rather, green spaces would be evenly distributed through the territory of the city, starting with the spaces integrated into each new residential block. The equitable distribution of green space within the territory of a city became part of the Stalinist narrative of revolutionary gain. 90
The green norm was attached to the individual, planned person, who had a place in the new socialist residential neighborhoods being constructed under Stalin, fitting into a planned city. This built environment, and the green spaces attached to them, could be emptied or filled and indeed overcrowded, but the ratio of built environment to green space was set in stone and greenery by the norm to determine a ratio of green. This would be a built environment that determined a more evenly distributed urban population, with a consistent spaciousness built into the environment. As the cities developed over time, they would become less, rather than more, densely populated, as residents were removed from overcrowded slums and tent cities and distributed into newly constructed Stalinist neighborhoods.
At the same time, urban planners aimed for a city that was spacious, but also not too spread out. They warned against disurbanist tendencies, and particularly the disurbanist vision of low-story construction. In 1935, F. Popov argued that a too broad expanse already erred into the territory of disurbanism: We are decisively against the unnatural piling up of a huge human mass on small territories; but no less do we battle against the disurbanist theory, propagandizing the construction not of cities, but of non-cities (razgorod’ev). Fans of low-story construction in large cities with exceptionally extensive settlement, leading to the scattering of the city over enormous territories, in practice merges with disurbanism.
91
Instead, Popov recommended the urban population density of 400 to 500 people per hectare, with nine square meters of living space per person in seven- to fourteen-story houses. 92 Limiting urban territory also limited population growth, if norms were enforced.
Urban planners aimed to design urban spaces that would channel and control mobility within neighborhoods and throughout the territory of a city. Urban planners made residential areas less transitory and mobility less diffuse quite literally by reducing the amount of land used for roads in new neighborhoods and planning residential buildings as large complexes built around a courtyard, without winding, hidden alleyways. Reducing mobility, that is, shortening the distance traveled by individuals and populations, and channeling mobility, that is, controlling, and in most cases restricting, the number of routes by which one could travel through the city, was facilitated by limiting the territory of urban space. Cites that were spacious, but at the same time compact, reduced the need for “migration within the city.” As F. Popov wrote in 1935, a city of between 250,000 and 300,000 residents could be freely settled on a territory of 1,500 to 2,000 hectares. Such a compact settlement would not only make construction less expensive, but also make it possible to organize the life of the city in a new way. As he argued, “there will not be as much migration of the population inside the city and it will not be necessary to establish complex mechanical transportation for connecting various sections of the city scattered at a distance of 10-15 km.” 93 Urban planners sought to limit the expanse of cities using urban design. They also limited the total area of large cities by placing large protective green belts, or “lungs,” around the outskirts of cities. 94 These green belts were material barriers to the expansion of urban development and defined and marked the limits of the territory of the city. Mobility would be channeled from back alleys and medieval nets of roads to open, central boulevards and mass transportation networks, such as the iconic Moscow metro or networks of trams.
Urban planners aimed to design residential neighborhoods that would reduce labor migration, fixing workers in place. They argued that green space itself contributed to the fixing of laborers in a locality. V.M. Borkevich directly associated living conditions, filled with green space, with lowering rates of labor migration. As Borkevich wrote in 1934, well-appointed, green neighborhoods were an effective measure for preventing labor migration: After five years we now more and more frequently observe the delight of visitors to the housing districts of Dneprostroi: the settlements are drowning in greenery, the streets are clean, the land is canalized. And it is worth noting that precisely these works need to be carried out at the beginning of a construction project, that they are one of the most effective measures for strengthening cadres, for liquidating labor migration, for raising the productivity of labor.
95
All of these changes in planning practices, such as reducing population density in cities, increasing green space per resident, and carefully circumscribing urban territories, in turn served the interconnected objectives of capping the population in developed cities and expanding and fixing the populations in new cities and industrial areas. Discussions of green space revealed a critical approach to urban growth and wariness of very large cities. The party and state shared such ambivalence. Decisions to forbid further industrial construction in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, and Gorky were adopted prior to World War II. After World War II, such limits were extended to all towns with a population of over half a million. 96 These caps supported the state economic strategy of placing new urban developments and populations near sources of raw materials, and, for strategic purposes, behind the Urals, a pattern already established during the First Five-Year Plan. These state objectives corresponded with long-established preferences among Soviet urban planners for moderately sized cities, even among members of the pre-1931 urbanist faction.
Population Politics and Soviet Territory
Socialist town planning under Stalin was characterized by its close connection to the social, cultural, technical, and economic development of the country as a whole. But how did the plans for individual cities relate to the national plans for the development of the entire territory of the Soviet Union and the distribution of its population? Did urban planning occur at an all-Union level, and was this related to how individual cities, and, indeed, neighborhoods, were conceptualised? How did the design of neighborhoods relate to the entire national economic plan for population distribution and economic development of the Soviet Union?
Discussions among urban planners about the distribution of populations into urban space extended to the scale of the entire territory of the Soviet Union, as did discussions for the planning of urban green space. These discussions were grounded in a way of approaching the question of how to determine the size and location of planned cities. It is useful to focus here on the writings of the state planner A. Vedenov. Vedenov was occupied with a discussion about how to determine the ideal population size of cities, which would in turn determine the allocation and distribution of green spaces. As he wrote, overpopulation was a remnant of the capitalist past of the country, as was spontaneous labor migration, and should be eliminated through planning. In the context of a planned economy, the state should gain control of the distribution of the population through the territory of the country and make the growth of cities into a planned phenomenon under state control rather than a spontaneous process. Vedenov related the national plan for labor migration to individual cities by thinking about how to distribute the entire labor force of the Soviet Union into individual cities, from the top down. At the same time, he determined the size of a population of a given city, building up from the economic foundation of the city. From a reconciliation of the two, he argued that population size for all cities could be rationally determined.
Vedenov argued that the population of a city could be determined by its economic foundations, based on the labor needs of its leading enterprises. He proposed that norms could be used to project the population requirements of a city. He sketched out such norms, building up from the labor needs of the main enterprises of the city. This included, in first order, the workers of the main enterprises of the city, cadres in training, a body of artisans, and workers in the transportation sector. In the second order, he added categories of service workers, in the provision and trade of groceries and household items, communal dining establishments, educational institutions for the younger generation, a medical system, cultural-enlightenment work, urban services and housing, state administration, and economic planning, with a norm of 11.44 service workers for every 100 urban residents. He also included in his norms women of working age but not working for a wage (“occupied in individual service”) and population without working ability, below age 15 and above age 60. 97
The labor needs of cities were dynamic, however, marked by key processes of change over time. In a new city, construction work was temporary, ending when a city was built. In the earlier years of a new city, the population was also younger and more male. 98 Over time, requirements for laborers would be gradually reduced as construction of the industrial enterprises was completed and due to improvements in labor productivity. New cities had a relatively larger proportion of population of working age, as opposed to children and the elderly. Overall, Vedenov projected a downward trend in populations of new cities from a peak at the beginning, when major enterprises were being built and when they were mostly populated by unsettled, single men working in construction. Vedenov argued that planners were over-projecting the sizes of their cities, in order to acquire more investment from the state budget. He called instead for the rationalization of urban populations. 99
Vedenov argued that population planning could, using his normative calculation method, take place at the level of the entire labor power of the country, in order to redistribute the population according to the economic imperatives of the state. The entire population could be distributed into cities according to economic plans. Vedenov aimed for the ideal of state control over population migration, turning population settlement into an aspect of planning: The redistribution of the population between urban and rural areas, between different regions of the country, should now take place on the basis of the planned settlement of labor power, instead of as a result of the spontaneous movement and flow of labor power, which previously took place because of the leftovers of capitalist overpopulation.
100
The state should gain control of the flow of population from the countryside to the city, and from city to city, and distribute that population according to the norms that he proposed.
Vedenov was engaged with the question of bringing settlement patterns and population distribution under state control, aiming to make the growth of cities cease to be spontaneous and rather transform urban development into a planned phenomenon. But how would such a plan be enacted? How would the spontaneous movement of workers be brought to an end? He offered no method for enacting this plan. However, by focusing on projected populations rather than actually existing populations, Vedenov made the lack of provisioning and services for unplanned populations in effect part of the plan. Plans and provisions from the state were for workers who were needed to fulfill economic plans, and in second order for service workers, not for the actually existing populations of a given locality. Populations were to be supported in terms of the needs of industry, not in response to spontaneous growth or existing social need. Vedenov also did not call for universal social provision.
The Green Spaces of the Soviet Territory
Planners of green space also engaged in territorial planning at the regional and all-Union scale. Green planners looked beyond the limits of the city in their plans for urban green space. Il’in and Kovalevskaia-Il’ina argued that planning extended beyond settlements, to systems of settlements: “Modern planning is not contained in its view to the spatial limitations of cities, but extends to the planning of systems of settlements, with large territorial reach.” 101 They argued that the work of planners of urban green space included the placement of new cities into the territory of the Soviet Union.
Koval’skaia-Il’ina wrote that decisions about where to locate new residential settlements should take existing forests, lakes, and other landscapes into account. Koval’skaia-Il’ina argued that urban planners should examine the natural resources of the entire territory of the Soviet Union in relation to planned new economic enterprises and urban developments to allow for the integration of sites of natural beauty, scientific interest, or economic function into new settlements.
102
Koval’skaia-Il’ina argued that existing forests, lakes, or river landscapes could be attached to a city at the moment of the creation of the city itself, informing the choice of site: The moment comes when successfully planted (in the sense of the chosen place) human settlement can permanently secure for itself this or that forest, lake or river landscape, considering them no longer as distant natural beauties but as their own places of rest and treatment, directly attached to the city, sometimes entering into the city limits.
103
Taking the all-Union scale as a starting point, she argued, would help planners determine the site locations for urban settlements and incorporate urban green spaces with exceptional natural landscapes into urban plans.
Koval’skaia-Il’ina argued further that urban planning at an all-Union scale could intersect with nature conservation work at an all-Union scale. The development of urban green space could be used to support nature protection measures. Urban planners could work together with nature conservation organizations to determine optimal site locations. Those protected areas within cities would also serve an important health purpose: Nature protection in populated areas is a condition for the healthy life of the population, organized not as occasional, temporary campaigns, but as constant, in-depth work, and in the nearest period in time can make a valuable contribution to the common cause, given intensive work on concrete real objects.
104
Koval’skaia-Il’ina argued that a map of protected areas, nature reserves, and natural places of interest could inform the planning of sites for future industrial cities. 105 Thus, by increasing the scale of urban planning to incorporate the entire territory of the Soviet Union, the development of urban green spaces could ensure the conservation of valuable natural environments.
Conclusion
The process by which the Soviet state and party managed urbanization was critical during the twenty years of Stalinism to ensuring that central plans would be completed. The party and state attempted to garner sufficient political power to move, mold, and control human spatial organization at vast scales. Green space became one of the instruments of territoriality that the state engaged to this end. Green spaces constituted emptiable spaces and became part of the urban geography of mass operations, at the confluence of a variety of territorial strategies to establish social order and extend state power, including planning and policing. In the 1930s, Soviet police swept up populations from urban public space and fed these populations into the coercive population distribution system of the gulag. Many of these gulag camps supplied labor to remotely located state enterprises. Fed with populations through deportation, gulag camps and areas within remote settlements that housed imprisoned laborers became carceral spaces, settled by force. Such populations were kept in place with fences, guards, and geographical distance. Urban planners in this period advocated, to the contrary, for the removal of fences and walls. However, the removal of fences and walls served not to promote freedom of movement. In the texts analyzed in this study, urban planners made no mention of the liberal ideals of freedom of movement, nor did they defend private property. To the contrary, some voices within the planning community directly proposed mechanisms for surveillance and population control. They engaged deeply with the question of developing innovative spatial methods for establishing state control over land use and population settlement patterns. They aimed to control mobility. These urban planners positioned themselves as contributing to the violent population politics of the Soviet 1930s. Far from inhabiting a distant world far from the population politics of carceral spaces, new socialist cities fit together with carceral spaces in the project of territorialization that aimed for the state to assume total control over urban territory, as a method of assuming total control of population settlement patterns.
The sociologist Neil Brenner argues that any process of territorialization is necesssarily also a process of deterritorialization, as these processes do not unfold on a blank slate. 106 The territorial turn in theories of urban green space under Stalin was also a process of deterritorialization, of dismantling the vestiges of the power of former landowners. The approach of urban planners to urban land from 1931/1932 focused on the systematic consolidation and reorganization of urban land holdings. In the 1920s, bundles of recently municipalized land, formerly the property of private landowners, were still maintained and administered largely intact, as distinct units. Focusing on eliminating what they called the practices of private ownership, urban planners in the 1930s sought to integrate these holdings into the land mass of the city. These land holdings were to be broken up, reorganized, and integrated into the totality of public, urban land, subject to central planning. In so doing, urban planners contributed to the dismantling of the territorial power structure of one community, established around the landowner and private property, and the establishment of a new, complex, hierarchical society, organized around state property, the planning system, and the power of the party and state. The state, in breaking up pre-revolutionary plots of land, was to bring the land under the control of the party and state and of the planned economy. 107 It is possible then to frame the project of urban construction, and of green construction in turn, as territorial strategies to expand the scope of the planned economy and increase its efficiency. These territorial strategies increased the advantages of those in control, that is the state and party, over society and added to the ability of the state to bend society to the aims of the planned economy, providing labor power to new enterprises.
The relationship between the party-state and territory changed in 1931, with the creation of highly statist urban planning institutions and the consolidation of urban policing. The territorial strategies for controlling population developed by urban planners after 1931 significantly overlapped and even aligned with the territorial strategies of Soviet police. Parks, now designed by urban planners to promote social surveillance, with visual obstacles of walls removed, were used as instruments of social control by the police and became common targets for mass operations. These spaces, especially streets, squares, green spaces, and transportation networks, in practice became subject to systematic surveillance, patrolling by police, and spot document inspections. 108 Parks were regularly cleared and controlled by police, removing non-registered populations and others caught up in the mass operations. 109 Indeed, the spaces that urban planners transformed, including city walls and gates, parks, and the twisting alleyways of city centers, were known sites of social disorder, criminal activity, and vibrant street life. Around the city gates, all sorts of trade once took place: farmers’ and flea markets, votive shrines frequented by pilgrims, beggars, and holy men. 110 The state sought to order street life, using policing and planning as its instruments. This is not to imply that these policy aims were realized in practice.
The struggle of the state to shape society by controlling territory unfolded in urban green spaces. Here, the power of the state and its experts was also contested. The vibrant street life which had made green spaces sites of criminalized behaviors found its way into the newly Sovietized spaces, competing with new models of Soviet settlement and behavior. Gaining state control of parks, streets, alleyways, and other public land was in practice an ongoing struggle for the state and party. The struggle to establish social order and habits of cultured recreation faced a formidable and entrenched criminal and criminalized culture and a population that was not easily disciplined. 111 Robberies, murders, drunken knife and fist fights, and random attacks on passers-by were common on Soviet urban streets throughout the 1930s. 112 Parks were known as meeting and hiding places used by criminals, as sites of illicit trade, and as hot spots of sexual activity and the transmission of venereal disease. Urban planners sought to employ territory to exert control over and shape populations, but these strategies were contested from below by a population newly empowered by labor shortages.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article was first presented at the Borders of Biopolitics: Gender, Population, and Power in Russia conference at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 2016. The author thanks the conference organizers, Philippa Hetherington and Yanni Kotsonis, the panel discussant, Claire Shaw, as well as the peer reviewers, for their insightful comments and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany, and a Kennan Institute Title VIII-Supported Short-Term Research Grant in Washington, DC, USA.
