This video is sponsored by Curiosity Stream. When you sign up at the link in the description you also get access to Nebula, a streaming video service that City Beautiful is a part of. Every New Year's eve, millions of Russians sit down to watch the 1976 romantic comedy, "The Irony of Fate.
" It's a national tradition. In the movie, the protagonist ends up drunk and in Leningrad. Unaware that he has taken a plane from Moscow, he gets into a taxi and tells the driver his address in Moscow.
It turns out there's a street with that same name in Leningrad and the building at the address is the exact same as well. The protagonist stumbles into the building and finds that his key works in the lock to what he thinks is his apartment. He doesn't notice any minor differences and falls asleep in someone else's bed.
I don't wanna spoil the entire movie here, but you can imagine what hijinks and romance ensue after this epic mix up. But the whole joke is based on the reality of Soviet housing. It's so standardized that a scenario like this is plausible.
The cherry on top is this movie's introduction which explains how the Soviet Union got to be this way. It depicts a local architect's designs overridden by the central state which then proceeds to place the exact same nondescript housing blocks in every part of the USSR regardless of climate. I wish more romantic comedies hinged on some planning subplot like this.
Russia, you're lucky, we get stuck with movies like "Love Actually". . .
ugh. This movie confirms a stereotype that a lot of people have about Russia and countries in the former Communist Bloc. When you think about Russian cities, those cold, plain, mid to high-rise buildings are what come to mind.
They're often set in nondescript landscapes on the edge of cities. In this video, we'll learn more about how the elimination of private property, dedication to providing housing for all, and the encouragement of communal living led to very different cities in the Soviet Union when compared to Western counterparts. (bike bell dings) For those needing a very brief history lesson, the Soviet Union, more formally known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, existed from 1922 to 1991.
The Soviet Union was a byproduct of the 1917 Russian Revolution where Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lennon, overthrew the successor government to the Romanov constitutional monarchy. The Bolshevik government instituted state socialism with strong central government authority over local planning. They believed that the physical form of cities should reinforce the principles of Soviet socialism and cities should be reimagined with that goal in mind.
Private property was eliminated and all land was in control of the central state. As you can imagine, these changes would have a profound impact on how cities would be planned, designed, and built. But it's important to know that the Soviet Union at its apex controlled 1/6 of the total land area on the planet.
It spanned 11 time zones and two continents in its 69-year history. I'm gonna be speaking about Soviet city planning very generally but it's important to know that regional variations existed and ideas evolved through time. It's fascinating to compare cities in Estonia which had a lot of contact with Western Europe to cities deep in Russian territory.
That's a topic for maybe another video. Soviet city planning in the 1920s and 1930s at the beginning of the Soviet Union focused on the transition from private property to state control of land, as well as early attempts at creating cities according to socialist principles. Architects and planners at the time championed a form of modern architecture known as constructivism.
The austere industrial functional design was a perfect fit for planners and architects tasked with providing housing for millions of people. In fact, Russia had its own university for teaching modernist architecture which closely paralleled the more famous Bauhaus in Germany. Many constructivist ideas came from this school and it had influence beyond the Iron Curtain.
The basic principle of Soviet city design of this era was that everyone should be spending their time outside in communal environments, working, eating, socializing and so on. Thus Soviet housing was built with the barest minimum of living space. The result was buildings that were basically dormitories and that's how they are used today.
They were built in the Constructivist style so they were not only small but plain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, living full-time in industrial style dorm rooms was not popular with the general public. This phase did not last long.
The next prominent apartment building type is often referred to as the Stalinka as they came to be associated with the Stalin era from about 1930 to 1950. They came in two flavors. Smaller, cinder block structures were built for the working class while larger brick buildings with ornamentation were for the Communist Party elite.
The larger Stalinkas aged gracefully and represented some of the finest state-constructed housing in the history of the Soviet Union. These housing units were prized right up through the fall of the USSR. Soviet city planning stalled during World War II as most of the state's resources were dedicated to rebuilding industry and rebuilding cities in the years that followed.
The next big epoch in Soviet planning came after Nikita Khrushchev came into power after Stalin's death. Khrushchev had an interest in domestic policy and reform and housing was high on his list of concerns. His interest came from when he was the head of the Communist Party in Moscow.
In 1950 he led a large scale housing construction project in the city. His interest was building many homes and quickly. Khrushchev and his architects and planners developed a standard building type that came to be known as Khrushcheyovkas.
They were all five stories tall because elevators would be needed for buildings any taller and elevators weren't in the budget. They were built out of prefabricated concrete panels and a team of builders could assemble a Khrushcheyovka in two weeks. Units in these buildings were small, though not as small as the Constructivist dorms of the past.
A one bedroom unit was 30 square meters and a three bedroom unit was double that. Kitchens were tiny, only six square meters. These may have been perfectly sized for a small family, but in reality they often housed multi-generational households.
When Khrushchev became leader of the entire Soviet Union, he scaled up the Russian housing program to the entire nation. At the peak of the program, 60 million people lived in Khrushcheyovkas. That's the entire population of Italy all living in essentially the same buildings.
The Communist Party was not against ornamentation or beauty, but their priority was ubiquity and equality. The Soviet Union had promised all of its citizens a home and the only way they could do that was with mass production of very few building plans. These building plans were polarizing amongst the public.
Many hope for more amenities or a larger unit, while others grew to love them. The Soviet government often compare them to US public housing which were eventually inhabited by very low income households. The buildings often lacked maintenance and policing.
The Khrushcheyovkas were for everyone and were better kept. The Communist Party used this point to highlight how their political and social systems were better than those of the West. I've spent a lot of time in this video talking about housing.
Housing was critically important to the Communist Party's socialist agenda, but there are other aspects of Soviet city planning as well. I mean, what kind of neighborhood did all those Khrushcheyovkas create? The answer was the microraion which translates to microdistrict in English, so that's the word I'm gonna use instead of butchering that word over and over again.
Microdistricts were the urban building blocks of new Soviet cities and the additions to existing ones. There were areas of around 10 to 60 hectares that housed around 20,000 people. They also included senior centers childcare, schools, shops, and restaurants.
The idea was that everything a person needed on a daily basis except work would be within 500 meters of a resident's home. Microdistricts would also include things residents needed less frequently such as healthcare facilities, but not every microdistrict would have one. There were spaced such so that a resident would be no further than 1,500 meters from it.
Microdistricts were typically surrounded by arterial streets. They were designed so that residents could access everything in their microdistrict on foot. Arterial streets carried car, bus, and tram traffic.
Residents were expected to use mass transit when moving throughout the larger city such as on their commute to work. While the Soviet government was more centralized than Western ones, Soviet cities were less centralized. Western cities in the 1950s and 1960s were designed to move people from the suburbs to the central city and back again.
Soviet cities were designed to move residents from any one point to any other point. Many new Soviet cities were built around a mine or steel mill so most workers weren't commuting to the center anyway. Microdistricts were critical to the realization of the socialist city.
They were called the smallest administrative unit in the Soviet reorganization of urban territory. They were designed so that everyone would have the same housing and access to all of the same amenities. No microdistrict would be any better than any other and because Soviet cities were less centralized, it wasn't like microdistricts closer to the city center necessarily gave those residents a shorter commute.
The self-contained unit of the microdistrict was perfect for adding onto a city almost indefinitely. As new employment uses such as offices or factories popped up, new microdistricts could be added to the edge of the city like simple building blocks. After Khrushchev came Brezhnev and some of the laser focus on efficiency and standardization fell to the wayside.
If you see Soviet apartment buildings taller than five stories, they were probably built after 1964 when Breznev was in power. There was still standardization. This was still the Soviet Union, but there's also more consideration of climate and local conditions.
Instead of one standardized apartment building, there were several. As Soviet cities began to expand outward, planners began to value density. New apartment buildings were now nine to 16 stories and included elevators.
The units themselves were larger and nicer than those in Khrushcheyovkas but smaller than the Stalinkas. This model of planning lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Soviet cities show how different urban form can be if the underlying societal goals are different.
The Soviet Union's socialist perspective called for the elimination of private property, encouragement of communal living, and housing for all. The result is mass-produced apartment buildings and standardized urban districts with pedestrian access to all daily activities, save work. This video is not meant to be an endorsement or a critique of this city type.
I will say that it's amazing that love it or hate it, Soviet citizens find the time every New Year's to laugh about it. Hey, if you wanna see an extra minute or two of video on this subject, go sign up for Nebula. Nebula is a streaming video service filled with videos from thoughtful creators like Wendover Productions, Lindsay Ellis, and Tom Scott.
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