SUMMARY:

In this article Monica Ruiters explores Soviet city planning and focuses on architecture as a language of self-description of the Soviet polity. The main focus of the article is on the urban space of Moscow from the 1920s to the 1960s, and on three forms of communicative practices: general urban development plans, built spaces, and iconographic representations of architectural constructions. The article shows that the Soviet homeland was conceived as an urban space, but the meaning and the languages of representation of this urbanism varied with time. Utilizing the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, the author maintains that Soviet urban planning attempted to create a web of ideal gardens of socialism, which illustrated the officially proclaimed victory of communism, and in which Soviet citizens could compensate for the deprivations of everyday life, acquire ideas of the future, and identify with authority. Such places, as the example of the All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV) illustrates, substituted for reality, demonstrated the state’s concern for its citizens, and legitimated power relations. The concept of ideal gardens of socialism, along with the main principles of architectural planning, served as an instrument of imperial expansion. VSKhV (and the Moscow subway) offered a virtual tour of the Soviet Union. VSKhV architecture evolved from the ideologically anti-colonial but semantically typical modernizing colonial discourse to the universal Soviet style based on classicist forms with the addition of some national decorative elements. By adapting “national styles” to the Soviet canon, the architecture of the exhibition created a hybrid style that was exported to the capitals of Soviet republics and used in constructing representative administrative buildings. The article also investigates the languages of description of Soviet architecture by studying three representative architectural albums in which the historical view on its development was conceived.