SUMMARY:

Alla Sal’nikova stresses the “gardening” functions of the new Soviet state and brings the concept of a “garden town” to the fore. Her article follows closely different periods in early Soviet urban planning and the changing meanings of urban space in Kazan. This analysis is accompanied by reconstructing the practices and circumstances of turning multiethnic provincial center (gubernskaia) Kazan into a normative socialist town. The article draws a complex picture of rapid, ideologically-motivated transformation of the urban landscape that had evolved historically in the course of many centuries. Kazan’s landscape combined many cultural layers; modernity and archaism, sacral sites and new public spaces and ethnic “reservations” as well as transitional and mixed spaces. New socialist urban planning intended to refashion Kazan with the help of new architectural and population policies; it aimed at eliminating private and religiously marked spaces, actively using the symbolic language of visual propaganda. This article traces the change from universalist values in urban planning to the adaption of the principle of hierarchical spaces that reflected a new Soviet hierarchy of people. Sal’nikova pays special attention to the peculiarities of urban planning in provincial and multiethnic cities such as Kazan and distinguishes her case from better known cases of Moscow or St. Petersburg, on the one hand, and Siberian industrial cities constructed from scratch on the other.