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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.

SUMMARY: The history of the Western periphery of the Russian Empire has long been told as a story of violent oppression and forced “Russification.” Recent studies attenuate this dire picture, stressing the incoherent and often improvised nature of Russian policies and underlining the importance of individual actors. One key actor, however, has been largely absent from historical research: the Russian army as agent of imperial rule. Using the history of the Warsaw garrison as an example, the present article explores the role of the Russian military in establishing a political order on the Russian periphery. In this context, it devotes special attention to the use of violence. Norbert Elias and others have demonstrated how modern states have been eager to monopolize violence. Their actions aimed at banning it from the public sphere, rendering violence the exclusive competence of the military and police forces. As an ideal, the application of violence should be replaced by its symbolic representation. Instead of acts of violence, the threat of force became a desired mode of action. The first section of the present article describes how the presence of Russian soldiers was partially an attempt to create a system in which the threat of force buttressed colonial rule. The pinnacle of this system was the fortress. As a symbolic threat, it was designed to demonstrate to the population who was ultimately in charge of the city. In 1905, however, this economy of threat reached its limits, as the article’s second section demonstrates. Violence lost its effect as a deterrent. The high level of everyday violence on the streets of Warsaw triggered the complete breakdown of this system of symbolic threats. The visual presence of the Russian army ceased to have any deterrent effects. Drawing largely on unpublished sources from the Russian military archive, the article shows in its third section how the symbolic representation of violence was now replaced by its excessive and demonstrative application. By these means, leading Russian military officials wanted to reimplement the efficiency of threats of force. The conclusion discusses the long-term consequences of these measures for the history of the Russian Empire leading up to 1917.

SUMMARY: While Soviet rule was the vehicle of communist ideology in all of Eastern and Central Europe, religious, national, and regional traditions considerably transformed it in the Warsaw Pact countries as well as in the westernmost Soviet republics from the 1960s on. In the post-communist period, these pre-communist and communist variations are particularly obvious when looking at attempts to come to terms with the communist past. Four categories of post-communist cultures of remembrance can be identified in Eastern and Central Europe: (1) Societies characterized by a general consent concerning an “alien” communist rule forced upon from the outside – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania being prominent examples; (2) cases where such a consent does not exist and where fierce political controversies on the interpretation of the dictatorial past have taken place – as in Hungary and Poland, but also in Ukraine; (3) societies dominated by an apathetic ambivalence toward the communist past – Bulgaria, Romania and other Balkan countries belong into this category; and (4) states with a continuity of authoritarian structures and without a clear dissociation from communist rule – like the Russian Federation, Belarus, Moldova, and other CIS republics. That categories (1) and (2) are divided from (3) and (4) by the line separating western and eastern churches – with Ukraine cut in two – is probably less surprising than the fact that Poland is a driving force in establishing an institution of European societies’ remembrance.

SUMMARY: This article explores the Communist Soviet rulers’ attempts to resettle the formerly German Königsberg after 1945 with population from the rest of the USSR. One of the central questions in the article is the process of creating a new Soviet historical narrative for the city with an established architectural order. In order to accelerate Kaliningrad’s integration into the Soviet Union the city had to be transformed into a Soviet lieu de memoire . In this context the capture of Königsberg by the Red Army in April 1945 was the source for the foundation myth of the “new” city. The slow reconstruction of the city, however, undermined this strategy. The new inhabitants transformed the initially negatively connotated lieu de memoire Königsberg into a “retrospective promise”: Königsberg became a positive model for Soviet Kaliningrad.