Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination

Abstract

Ideology does not just exist in linguistic form; it also appears in material structures. The Soviet party-state believed architecture to have a transformative effect and promoted communal dwellings in order to mould a new socialist way of life. What was the outcome?Using the examples of the communal hostel and the courtyard, the article suggests that we should take account of the eventual everyday sociality but also go beyond it to investigate how the imagination worked in such places. The material structure did not generate the socialist values quite as intended. Imaginative literature and satire are used to show that architecture acted, rather, like a prism. Ideas were deflected from it, yet not in a random way.The relation between early Soviet ideology and infrastructure appears straightforward -yet it has a breathtaking audacity if one thinks about it. According to Marxist materialism, the base determines the superstructure, and the task of Soviet construction was to build material foundations that would mould nothing less than a new society. This reminds us that ideology is found not only in texts and speeches; it is a political practice that is also manifest in constructing material objects. After the Revolution, architecture became one of they key arenas of ideology. In the 1920s, it was actually believed that carefully designed living quarters, for example, could eliminate the conditions for individualistic and meshchanskie (petty-minded bourgeois) ways of life, and on this basis a new human type would become the norm: Socialist Man and Socialist Woman. 1 A new kind of building, the House Commune (dom kommuna), would provide the infrastructure. Previous ('obsolete') social groupings, such as the patriarchal family, the private firm, or the peasant household, would give way to the new ideal, the labour collective. 2 For anthropology, the Soviet case is significant because it makes clear not only that political ideology can take material form, but also that artefacts are not material objects divorced from social relations. The latter point has long since been made with regard to 'the house', which, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) have argued, both embodies and generates sociality. But the house built by people for themselves is different from the case of state construction projects in which housing is allocated and the inhabitants are mere passive recipients (Semenova 2004). What the Soviet example requires us to think about is the particular situation where there is a definite pronounced intention of the state to make use of the materiality of dwelling

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

“…People actively contribute to the continuous reconstruction of the past, articulating accounts which get transmitted intergenerationally, contributing to the creation and definition of value and constituting a tangible part of local affective history (Navaro-Yashin 2012). This is a highly political process, materialising new social forms, historical regimes and political ideologies (Humphrey 2005;Verdery 2003). …”

“…The building enfolds time, as much as it is enfolded within it. Through its multiple durations and improper standing (parasitic on history and people's biographies), Linnahall provides an eventscape where a long-timescale process produces an effect in a much shorter timescale, enabling the experience of several temporalities in a single durée among those who encounter it, conveying vanished worlds and futures that did not come to pass, inspiring diverse memories as a prism, which gathers meanings and scatters them again, yet not randomly, since a prism has a given number of faces and scatters the light in particular directions (Humphrey 2005).…”

“…Architecture acts like a prism: ideas shape and are deflected from architecture and infrastructure, motivating inferences and interpretations, serving as practical models out of space (Humphrey 2005). The reinforced discontinuity within the cityscape has not been the result of random architectural choices, but of particular decisions and factors such as neoliberal policies and the embrace of new values, which followed a sort of anticontinuity strategy.…”

Traveling Architecture. East German Urban Designs in Vietnam

“…13 Yet recent work has revealed architecture under socialist regimes to be more heterogeneous and experimental than is commonly acknowledged. 14 Even communal dormitories in Russia were designed as "futuristic experimental prototypes", 15 and surely we cannot dismiss the Russian embassy in Havana -dubbed "the robot" -from the catalogue of modern architectural wonders (see figure 1).…”

Introduction

“…Over recent years, a rapidly growing number of studies have been published in the burgeoning theoretical and empirical interface between anthropology and science and technology studies (see, e.g., Chu 2014;Fisch 2013;Harvey 2012;Harvey et al 2016;Harvey and Knox 2015;Howe et al 2016;Jensen and Morita 2016;Jensen and Winthereik 2013;Larkin 2013;von Schnitzler 2008; for two pioneering studies from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and anthropology respectively, see Star 1999 andHumphrey 2005). It is instructive to reflect upon the ways in which the concept of infrastructure, as developed within this expanding literature, compares to other anthropological concepts with which its shares empirical or analytical family resemblances.…”