Fabien Bellat
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense (Paris X University), France
The USSR was probably the regime which built most during the 20th century. However, Soviet architecture is still largely not known enough, or, worst, badly understood. Political reasons (shadow of ideology), stylistic reasons (lack of empathy for Stalin Era style, even larger distrust for Brezhnevian architecture), or lack of public interest, all this often led to a lack of recognition of this important heritage.
During the 1980s history of Soviet architecture produced useful first explorations, both by Russian, French, Italian, English scholars — however, most of them focused on constructivism. Few tried to truly understand Stalin Era works; even fewer showed interest to Soviet architecture after the 1950s. More recently, American scholars did extensive field explorations in Magnitogorsk, Nijni-Novgorod, Sebastopol. Despite their great interest, these works were written by pure historians, who obviously couldn’t understand urban and buildings specific problems, consequently misunderstanding many points of the 1930s architectural production in the USSR. A German team achived more success in rediscovering Soviet architecture of the 1970s. Fortunately, step by step, Russian scholars are doing their best to publish more researches. However, it seems to me that still many of these works are too descriptive, they don’t contain historical and stylistic analysis.
In order to have a more accurate vision of the Soviet architectural heritage, probably more field researches should be done in other towns than Moscow, Saint Petersburg or Ekaterinburg. I did that for Togliatti; I intend to do it for Stalingrad. My work (research, exhibition, and book in Russian / French) in Togliatti helped a little bit this municipality to have more sensibility for its heritage — in which they saw meanwhile a useful tool for promoting their city, both on a local, national and international scale. Better understanding Soviet architecture should be a way to celebrate cultural memory, to write an honest history — i.e. telling about both crimes and accomplishments. Such researches should help the national and international public to get this legacy, while drawing a fairer and more complete view of the 20th century.