Abstract
There are various critiques of the “transition” grand-narrative which implicitly inoculated the post-socialist city (and the socialist city before being “post”) with the notion of being “overly ‘orientalized’ as radically different,” where the “difference is interpreted as mere ‘backwardness’ within the Western paradigm of urban modernization.” 1 Tolyatti: Exploring Post-Soviet Spaces and Infrastructures put urban infrastructures of post-socialist Russian regions at the center of their analysis. 2 They aim to investigate global capitalism by analyzing the complexity of these spatial transformations. Both books use photography as a medium for conveying information and consider the projects to be more artistic than scientific. The text is presented in two languages—English and Russian—which I find a decided advantage considering the increasing number of texts devoted to post-Soviet and post-socialist urban spaces written solely in English. The critical methodology is intended to overcome the exotic “orientalism” of the perception of post-Soviet space, including industrial cities. Moreover, these books capture some phenomena in provincial Russia, images of which rarely appear in media or urban studies scholarship. Through highlighting some almost invisible material objects and tracing their Soviet legacy, the authors elucidate power structures, the human relationships with infrastructure and the connection between poverty and politics in post-Soviet Russia. The ambition of these two photography books is great, and this critical review explores what is achieved and what might have been further explored.
Besides many similarities between these books, however, the role of photography in them is different. In Tolyatti, the central framework is offered in introductory and concluding texts, which elaborate on the authors’ main approaches to the analysis of visual material, their political position, and their attitude to the transformation of post-Soviet cities. The texts are concise, just a few pages each, but provide a general idea of the authors’ vision and history of Soviet Tolyatti. Tolyatti (former Stavropol-na-Volge) received its new name in 1964 after the Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti, who was instrumental in setting up a joint venture with Fiat, “one of the leading world producers of budget cars” (p. 16). Two years afterward the large VAZ automotive plant was founded. Currently AvtoVAZ (Lada), it is Russia’s largest car manufacturer, and has dominated the economy of the city since then. Avtozavodskiy district—home of the factory, and a significant part of the modern city—was constructed in the 1960s to house the factory workers. In just six years (1964—1970), the population of the city doubled and reached 251,000. It was constantly growing until 2009, and today Tolyatti is a city of about 700,000, the largest city in Russia which does not serve as the administrative center of a federal district. The main part of the book is a photo album, consisting of photos from the Avtozavodsk district, to which there is not a single caption. They capture Soviet urban planning, the housing, leisure and industrial structures, private and public spaces, and rarely the commercialization of these spaces during the last thirty years.
In the introduction, the authors elaborate on the political motivations to publish such a book: mainly, to shed light on the political and social context within which single-industry towns (or company towns, “monogoroda”) were built in the USSR. They argue that state socialist heritage, culture, and, in particular, architecture is subject to exoticizing stigmatization and orientalization, and that the urban landscape image is at the core of it. The image of alienated gigantic science-fiction-like structures and environments implies an eerie relic of the past (p. 12). They aim to challenge this narrative. Socialist mass housing estates still serve as home for more than half of the Russian urban population, and public spaces built in Soviet Russia still play a significant role. Recreational buildings, Houses of Culture (“Dom kultury”), and Houses of Sport (“Dom sporta”) with swimming pools are often the only places for public (and budget) leisure activities, especially in smaller cities. Despite such achievements, the main narrative around state socialist architecture is “emptied of any socio-political-ideological meaning or contemporary significance” (p. 12). Following Vladimir Kulić, 3 the authors argue that such decontextualizing is a market-oriented “urban development” tool that claims to create more efficient space.
To address this issue, the authors present a history of a modern Soviet city built on the ideological set of urban space, welfare, and industry—a triad for an egalitarian socialist society. From the 1960s to 1980s, many hundreds of towns centered around a single factory were built in the country (p. 20). Sechi and Gera elaborate in the introduction and in the pictures on the Soviet innovation of a micro-district—“a new type of residential complex consisting of panel buildings separated by yards provided with playgrounds, green space,” and public leisure places. Company towns were supposed to serve as an anchor of a “classless society,” where all kinds of residents (not only factory workers) would live together. The factory was responsible for welfare in the entire city. This Soviet planning, based on an understanding that industries and urban forms go hand in hand, are embodied in the structures of industrial cities. As Sechi and Cera underline, although company towns were a key element of Soviet ideology, this type of urban settlement is not unique to the USSR or state socialist countries. The USSR was following the latest urban trends of the mid-twentieth century when an ideal city of the future projected an image of novelty and modernism. They represented the technocratic view of welfare provision and the application of Fordist principles of productivity, similar to Detroit and Brasilia. This critical approach to analyzing an industrial post-Soviet city is backed up with the open claim to challenge the cold war discourse (p. 106) according to which Soviet cities were catching up or “underurbanized.”
However, the photographs in Tolyatti do not fully support such statements. They capture how the urban infrastructure is inhabited by people, elaborating on sometimes changed relationships between space, buildings and people. But one cannot find any contemporary building in the pictures, which creates the feeling that urban infrastructure in the Avtozavodskiy district has not changed at all in the last thirty years. The photos are perhaps a good representation of the Soviet heritage in the post-Soviet city, not as a burden but rather as something still serving in the absence of contemporary alternatives. We can see children playing on the playgrounds of the last century, the grandiose mosaics on public buildings, the palaces of culture, swimming pools and ice rinks, and various public spaces for social interaction. Cera and Sechi are not interested in showing the Soviet heritage as ruins or decay, but in demonstrating how objects and spaces created in the USSR continue to decorate the city, create an atmosphere, and serve people. The ambition of these images is to be sensitive to the lived experience of human beings. These pictures hint that Soviet urban planning provided an alternative to individualized profit-oriented neoliberal planning. The authors seek to learn from Soviet urban planning and use it as a base for future. By focusing on human experience, the book invites a question about lived experience and everyday practices, today and, most importantly, tomorrow. What can we bring from these imaginaries to our future?
Nevertheless, looking at the images one gets the sense that almost nothing has changed in the Avtozavodskiy district since the advent of the market economy, except maybe the appearance of churches (pp. 46, 96-97), which did not exist in Tolyatti before 2003 (as the authors claim). They argue that gentrification has had no effect on the city, and I cannot entirely agree. In the background of the photos included in the book (pp. 92-93), one can find metal kiosks, supermarkets looking like big plastic boxes or large company names (M-Video on p. 88), glass buildings, and advertising banners that transform the image of the neighborhood. In most of the photographs, though, we do not see shopping centers, banks, and supermarkets in glass buildings, small business outlets, or new types of leisure activities that appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This makes the commercialization and marketization of post-Soviet cities invisible.
Moreover, given the color and contrast of the photographs, one gets the feeling that the authors wanted to create an image of the eternal Avtozavodskiy district, which does not change over time, as they say, due to the plan by which it is built. This is supposed to demonstrate that the structure of the micro-district itself might act today as a preservation system for the original goals. The lack of captions and photo information reinforces this feeling. Focusing primarily on the Soviet heritage in post-Soviet Tolyatti—to be more precise, in the Avtozavodskiy district—the authors decided to almost totally exclude the infrastructure built after the Soviet period. This creates the illusion of a frozen city, which is only slightly affected by the presence of Christian churches and new logos. It is vital to destigmatize the Soviet heritage, architecture, and socialist ideology. However, considering that the full name of the book is “Tolyatti: Exploring Post-Soviet Spaces,” it is also important to admit that in contemporary Tolyatti the Soviet and the post-Soviet co-exist. Contemporary Russia’s single-industry cities were Soviet cities for about thirty to forty years, and have been post-Soviet for thirty years, which affected their inner life. Human experience would be addressed more deeply if one could trace different daily places of a resident. Soviet apartments, Soviet public schools and the House of Culture, where kids go for art and sport classes, coexist with supermarkets and franchise shops (which replaced the department stores), malls (which replaced the open-air markets), new Lada cars, and the updated AvtoVAZ buildings (pp. 10-11). This perspective would make a better reply to the “decontextualizing” of “second world” neoliberalism.
The structure of Infrastructures is the opposite of Tolyatti. There are no concluding or introductory parts, but fifty independent essays on what the authors call “phenomena.” We find historical sketches of roads, villages, hotels, churches, kiosks, border signs, bridges, museums, and large-scale industrial infrastructures. Each “phenomenon” tells a story of an object or space and attempts to shed light on historical and existing political and social relations in post-Soviet Russia. The role of images in the book is to accompany these essays. The photographs are catchy, intimate, unpretentious, and offer a fascinating variety of objects, spaces, discourses, social practices, each of which deserves further research.
As the authors themselves claim, they wanted to understand the political economy of infrastructures to shed light on economic relations. One of the tasks was to show the peculiar logic and rationality of Russian capitalism. Therefore, the process of privatization is told through the history of many objects. Chapter 34 tells a story of utilities. The common Soviet idea that heat, water, electricity, and snow removal should be provided and guaranteed by the government as a common good was challenged in the 1990s when the authorities incorporated the utilities sector into the new economy. The authors elaborate on the mechanism of such a “creative incorporation”: “It doesn’t really matter which type of property: it could be in the form of commercial management companies (which as a rule belong to bureaucrats or their friends and relatives), opaque municipal monopolistic enterprises, or even formally non-commercial public institutions, which are in turn controlled by bureaucrats. All of them, in the majority of cases, work to constantly milk residents and the government budget for money that goes straight into the pockets of bureaucrats and the ‘businesses’ connected to them” (p. 237).
The authors highlight that market reforms in Russia were not ultimately welcomed by residents or even local nomenklatura. One illustration is in the second chapter which recalls a rally in Nizhny Novgorod in April 1992, organized by directors of shops and restaurants which were put up for sale. Assigned to manage the enterprises, they now expected to get them free of charge as a result of informal agreements, and were against the sale through an “open” auction, which meant the end of their power, as they did not have enough money to buy them. Deputy Prime Ministers Egor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais (who was responsible for privatization as an influential member of Boris Yeltsin’s administration) came to observe the auction. To greet them, several dozen people organized a protest in front of the building where the auction was to take place. One sign read, “Gaidar and Chubais! Find another city for your questionable experiments!” (p. 17).
Other examples of handling Soviet utility infrastructure can be seen through a story of a telephone box that has been illegally hooked up to get electricity, or of a road which connects the city of Volgodonsk with the Rostov Nuclear Power Plant. In new cities of the USSR, especially single-industry cities such as Volgodonsk, electricity, heat, water, and even medical, shopping, and leisure facilities were centrally provided by the main employer. The road was no exception, and was built and maintained by the plant. After the beginning of market reforms, the plant abandoned all assets that didn’t generate profit. The region was meant to take ownership of the road, but it never did, and until this day the road belongs to nobody (“nichejnaya doroga”). As cited by Novikov and Sher, Olga Molyarenko found that in Russia, there are thousands of “ownerless” infrastructure facilities: roads, bridges, cemeteries, and heating and power networks. 4 The absence of an owner does not necessarily mean neglect or abandonment. She notes that many formally ownerless facilities are in fact quite well used, and serve their communities thanks only to the self-organization of people—such as local governments, activists, and entrepreneurs—even if they are all forced to break laws. As Novikov and Sher conclude, “after the ‘introduction’ of capitalism, the former Soviet countries have acquired extensive experience in maintaining and building alternative infrastructures, unaccounted for by the government but working for the benefit of society” (p. 9).
I find these stories valuable and exciting because they are about everyday life. The photographs sometimes show an object during renovation or demolition, such as in Phenomenon 11 about construction in Makhachkala (p. 70) or an advertisement in Nizhniy Novgorod (p. 78). There is a sense of both temporality and flexibility. There are also staged photographs, such as the one on page 114, which illustrate the phenomenon of candidates’ doppelgangers during elections in contemporary Russia. The enormous scope of themes reveals the heterogeneity of Russia’s social landscape. The pictures also show different people, post-Soviet subjects. Here you can find villagers, ambitious male businessmen embracing neoliberal ideology, social workers, or people belonging to subcultures such as conspiracy theorists. I find such a creative attitude to visualization a good way to present phenomena and experiences in many post-Soviet locations. I can easily imagine the continuation of this project to highlight other cases.
As the texts to the photographs aim to deconstruct the political economy of social and cultural phenomena, they are blatantly political. In most of the fifty essays, there is a hidden but strong anti-Soviet narrative. The Soviet Union is portrayed as a totalitarian, economically doomed, military-bureaucratic system that used people exclusively for its own needs (pp. 17, 36, 41). The anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ideology of the USSR is presented as pure rhetoric, which had nothing to do with practice (pp. 54, 294). The Soviet man is seen as profit-oriented and inert (pp. 54, 69). Since this Cold War-like narrative is widely shared, I was unsure if this is a political position of authors or an unreflected reproduction of “common sense.” They essentialize Soviet citizens, thus making them uniform to fit their views. Treating the Soviet Union as exclusively totalitarian and identifying Stalin’s rule with the USSR also conflicts with the research of Alexei Yurchak, Jochen Hellbeck, Stephen Kotkin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and many others who present Soviet experience as multidimensional and chronologically varied.
An illustrative example here is Phenomenon 22 (pp. 152-55), which offers a history of the polar city of Norilsk. The city was developed under Stalin. In the 1930s, the construction of metallurgical plants and industrial mining began; in the 1940s, the city was built by Gulag prisoners; and in 1953 it was officially opened. Building the city had an enormous human cost. This history is offered to the reader as the universal story of the “Soviet economy.” The fact that in 1956 the Norilsk camp was dissolved, and another history of the city started, is not mentioned. Within this anti-Soviet narrative, company towns like Norilsk are presented as a pure extension of state industrial corporations and thus as lifeless. As the authors say, these cities are a “necessary evil and something inconvenient” (p. 22). However, a growing number of studies offer more thorough research and demonstrate that people living in single-industry cities might find them more advantageous and more comfortable places to live than immense urban centers. 5 Novikov and Sher also portray the citizens of Norilsk as driven by money (p. 154). We cannot see the variety of residents, their dreams, values, hobbies, or agency. As sociologists show, 6 residents of industrial areas are often stigmatized as “dangerous,” “underdeveloped,” and “backward.” Tolyatti also mentions “the supposed Soviet mentality” of workers and their factory-based identity as reasons for non-adaptability to “the flexibility and innovation required by the logic of globalization” (p. 16). This claim, in my view, contradicts the authors’ claim to challenge the image of Soviet industrial workers’ life as inferior.
I would also like to add some technical points regarding the books. The authors of Tolyatti are familiar with a great variety of scholarship about socialist architecture and, more broadly, post-socialist transformation, and they express their revulsion without, however, citing specific works. I wanted to dig further into some of their observations, but one cannot find many references in the book, which is a pity. Post-socialist and post-Soviet urban studies is indeed an undertheorized field, with much potential for more theoretical discussion and contribution to global urban studies. These books draw attention to the “provincial” places and processes in primarily urban and partially industrial post-Soviet Russia. This is an important contribution as for many researchers it is still “scary” and “backward” Russia.
Out of a desire to highlight the “nature” of a post-Soviet city, the books turn to the history of material objects, urban infrastructure, and property relations. Both books explore the socialist legacy in these cities, but do so differently. There is a lot of critique of Marxism and Soviet socialism in Infrastructures, while Tolyatti argues that the socialist built environment keeps fulfilling its social function in some form even after the economic order has changed. In Infrastructures, all phenomena are presented as unique in the world context, a product of a Russian kind of capitalism rooted in the property relations established in Soviet times. Tolyatti in contrast offers the history of a modern and socialist city of the twentieth century. Although both books seek to overcome Orientalism as the prism through which researchers look at provincial post-Soviet Russia, a sense of Soviet reality as “Other” keeps emerging. Infrastructures emphasizes a feeling of catching up to “normal” (Western) capitalism. Tolyatti rather appeals to those inclined to aestheticize Soviet modernity, whether as a thing of the past, the future, or as an alternative way of inhabiting space. A new history of Soviet non-homogeneous urban culture has not yet been written. Understanding the mechanisms of the various Soviet institutions and political economy with their influence on different parts of life in post-socialist Russia requires a great deal of research and public debate, to which both books greatly contribute.