Inventing Soviet Blagoustroistvo

After the October Revolution questions of public space and the relationship between the state and the people were thrown into flux. The Bolsheviks proclaimed a dictatorship of the working class and Lenin’s “Decree on Land,” one of his first actions in office, declared the abolition of private land ownership.Footnote ¹⁰ One challenge the fledging Bolshevik dictatorship faced was to make the transformation of property relations, new economic principles, and social hierarchies seen, felt, and understood. It was necessary to mark and facilitate a new kind of presence to demonstrate that the land now belonged to those previously dispossessed, and that those formerly pushed to the fringes were destined now to occupy the center. The new state confronted the task of creating a material reality that would make the working classes feel and know their newly elevated role, render the city theirs, and bring the revolution’s ambitions to life. Moreover, this project became a means to define and address those groups of people in whose name the revolution had been made as much as to construct a shared class identity for them. It became a way to invent, ascribe, and affirm class, to “make workers Soviet,” to use Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny’s catchphrase, by creating, as if for them, a space with particular aesthetic and material qualities.Footnote ¹¹

The many ways this was achieved in urban centers varied from directly implementing housing requisitions and installing new bodies of government into the old palaces, to performative means such as revolutionary festivals that drew large crowds to the centers and covered old buildings with temporary decorations and edifices. Old imperial insignia were scrapped, obsolete statues toppled, and new kinds of monuments to revolutionary heroes, as well as posters, flags, and propaganda stands were scattered around the city. Often the symbolic intermingled with the actual and the myths of the revolution merged with its realities; festivities evoked the revolution’s motive forces of the strike and demonstration, churches were turned into workers’ clubs, and important buildings were converted; for example, Moscow’s House of Nobles—the city headquarters of the Russian aristocracy—was made the House of Unions. Crucially, such changes were not merely executed behind closed doors but were broadcast by flags and banners hung on facades and reproduced in the media, rendering the space of the city as well as its image anew.Footnote ¹² Some of these strategies were more successful than others, and all were marked by conflicting interests. The process of dispossession and redistribution of urban housing was often violent, chaotic, and confused, and it was implicated in profiteering and opportunism.Footnote ¹³

The reconstruction of public space was intended to give workers a sense of belonging, a sense of direction, and a new kind of affinity with a city whose material, morphological, and aesthetic (if not political) realities were, in fact, still imperialist-bourgeois ones. Here, many of the state’s methods built on the idea of the collective, summoning the idea of the strike and demonstration as expressions of the power of the masses, but also as defining moments of revolution and the class identities related to it.Footnote ¹⁴ The reconstruction of the urban realm in the name of the once-seditious masses became a project to define the proletariat as a group by creating for them a shared space. “Their” old Moscow became “our” Moscow (Nasha Moskva), as Lenin reportedly referred to the capital city after the revolution.Footnote ¹⁵ In this process both the city and the “we” were mutually affected. In this context, blagoustroistvo emerged as an omnipresent and universal material practice with the capacity to express, execute, and mark this transformation.

In the Soviet period, blagoustroistvo continued to connote the core idea of public works, although it was also applied more generally to broader questions of how to organize aspects of life ranging from housing to health care.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1920 the state’s highest executive authority, the Sovnarkom, issued a decree outlining the structures and tasks of local government. It enumerated blagoustroistvo as consisting of “planning, cleaning of pavements and bridges, embankments, gardens, squares, monuments, carrying out works and repairing the streets, et cetera.”Footnote ¹⁷ As before, Western cities were often seen as exemplary, but blagoustroistvo’s public character was seen as something particularly proper to the Soviet state.

In a 1926 book based on a series of lectures delivered in 1922 and 1923, the historian and founding director of the museum of the city of Moscow, Petr Sytin, argued that a key symptom of capitalism’s shortcomings was a lack of blagoustroistvo. In outlining the city’s history and its present conditions, Sytin argued that because blagoustroistvo was “clearly unprofitable” its different forms constituted one of “two fields in which private capital cannot be relied on” (the other being monopoly enterprises).Footnote ¹⁸ He thus positioned blagoustroistvo as the state undertaking that socialism was uniquely equipped to carry out—it was the essence of socialist (as opposed to capitalist) city management. In another lecture, Sytin hammered home the foundational point that now, in socialist Moscow, since “all land has become the property of the city,” there existed “the possibility of a complete redevelopment of streets, squares, and entire districts.”Footnote ¹⁹ He said this included redeveloping the city’s markets, that had previously “served as an eternal accumulation of dirt both in the city center (Okhotnyi Riad, Trubnyi, etc.) and on its fringes.” He also listed other “heroic efforts to improve the blagoustroistvo of the fringes,” emphasized their neglect by the pre-revolutionary administration, and signaled a new quality of state interest in the periphery. Now, he proclaimed, the city’s suburbs were being connected to the center via tram lines, sewage systems, and water supplies. Further, “many gardens, parks, and other green spaces that previously belonged to individual owners and were used by them only for themselves” now had become open “to the entire population, and especially children, for play and recreation.”Footnote ²⁰

Electricity: Recharging the Masses

Although blagoustroistvo functioned as an infrastructural tool for building socialism and a socialist reality, it was also powerfully infused with symbolism, and its infrastructural and symbolic aspects were inseparable. Even simple buildings like public toilets played a double role. They were built as infrastructure to facilitate the new presence of the masses in the city centers. At the same time, placed in central places, such as those the engineer F. Gauze in 1928 proposed be installed in the Kremlin Wall or the pediment of St. Basil’s Cathedral, they transcended public hygiene and became important signs and symbols that flagged a new proletarian presence and remade the city’s old monuments and spaces.Footnote ²¹ Similar meanings were attributed to improvements in infrastructure and public works, and some sites acquired distinctive symbolic force. Take, for example, Moscow’s Sukharev Market, which was so infamous for its black market hustlers that Lenin employed it in his speeches as a metaphor for “petty proprietorship” and even the very “basis of capitalism” (“basis” used here in the Marxian sense of material infrastructure).Footnote ²² Such language made clear that the redevelopment of such spaces transcended the amelioration of welfare or hygiene and instead they became essential components of the new state’s politics, instruments and means to execute and propagate both the infrastructural and symbolic transformations of state and society. Moreover, they lay bare how the idea of material infrastructure was related to the broader understanding of infrastructure as an expression of superstructure—the socioeconomic basis of society. Projects of blagoustroistvo and reconstruction, such as Konstantin Melnikov’s famous redesign of the Sukharev Market, were guided and charged by such meanings as they sought to materially articulate the new system.

The Square of Soviets, now Tverskaya Square in central Moscow, serves as an archetypal terrain upon which the many forms of Soviet blagoustroistvo condense. The Moscow Soviet that after the revolution evolved into the city’s administrative body took over the former governor general’s palace adjacent to the square for its headquarters in 1917, and flags, signs, and posters became permanent features of its façade. An equestrian statue of General Skobolev erected just a few years before was replaced by a monument to the Soviet constitution, designed in 1918 by Dmitrii Osipov and Nikolai Andreev. The police headquarters at the square’s other end was torn down and replaced with an open gatehouse pavilion, until, following Lenin’s death in 1924, it became the site for the Lenin Institute. All such projects—on the levels of temporary decorations, architecture, urban morphology, and monumental art—both symbolically and through spatial and formal means signaled the recharging of urban space.

In 1928, party leader Nikolai Bukharin utilized language of electricity to describe the power that monuments should exert over their surroundings. If art finds the right language and form, he claimed, “significant masses of people will be ‘charged’ (zariazhaiutsia) and ‘tune’ (nastraivaiutsia) toward the revolution.”Footnote ²³ This is what the monument on the square of Soviets can be seen to aim for (as, indeed, can Gauze’s public toilets), enacting formal means to charge and re-tune its surroundings. In a similar way, replacing the old police building with a new open pavilion was a strong gesture that retuned the space to the people. The subsequent building of the Lenin Institute charged the space of the square with what after 1924 became a ubiquitous feature of Soviet urban space: symbols of and dedications to Lenin, now seen to stand for Leninism. Footnote ²⁴ The non-monumental (literally infrastructural) forms of blagoustroistvo played no smaller role, and worked similarly to charge and re-tune the space of the square. The replacing of imperial cobblestones with new asphalt was illustrated as a triumph of public works and a significant achievement of the new order (see figure 1).Footnote ²⁵

Figure 1.

“Paving Works on The Square of Soviets.” The replacement of cobbles with asphalt illustrated as a triumph in the journal Stroitel’stvo Moskvy in 1924. “Blagoustroistvo Gor. Moskvy,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy 1 (1924): 19–22, 15.

The use of the vocabulary of electricity was not limited to depictions of new objects and structures endowed with a capacity to recharge and reengineer. In political and infrastructural visions, such as Lenin’s GOELRO plan to electrify the entire country and his famous speech “Communism Is Soviet Power + Electrification of the Whole Country,” electricity and current became the foundational constituents of the new society.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, in theoretical terms specific to artistic and architectural visions (such as the constructivist idea of the “social condenser”), electrical metaphors were used to imbue artistic form and spatial programming with the capacity to forge new socialist subjects.Footnote ²⁷ New objects of art and architecture, together with new technologies and materials, were all seen as core instruments for building the new society and shaping its new subjects, inventing and reforming their shared (class) consciousnesses with a capacity to “charge” and “tune” the reality around them. As an extension of those objects in urban space, as well as through its own material and technical qualities, blagoustroistvo-as-process was endowed with similar electrical power.

Inversion/Reversion/Expansion: Red Beams of Blagoustroistvo

As Petr Sytin conveyed, blagoustroistvo was not only a phenomenon of the center, but also played a role in manifesting and rehearsing the revolution’s double act of inversive and expansive promises. The new asphalt, monuments, and toilets underscored and facilitated the movement of the workers from the periphery to the center, but blagoustroistvo also served as an instrument to spread the matter of the center outward to the periphery. It acted as a means of marking territory. As a centrally distributed common good, it heralded Sovietization as well as the means of spatially distributing Soviet power. This expansionist aspect of blagoustroistvo worked both materially and rhetorically and played an important role in consolidating the centrally governed Soviet state that was formed out of ethnonationally diverse regions of the former Russian Empire and desired to further expand its borders into Europe and in Central Asia.

In his memoirs, the revolutionary Alexander Arosev described the importance of the Square of Soviets, once again employing electrical metaphors: “From this square, the red beams extended their rays along the streets and alleyways to the farthest ends of Moscow.”Footnote ²⁸ Blagoustroistvo is the material form of these rays that delivered such promises of revolution to the city’s suburbs, a process closely followed and reported on by media. One article, among many similar ones in newspapers and journals dedicated to the urban sphere, describes the newly paved streets in the town of Podolsk: “Here, say the workers, for years we trampled on dirt, like kneading dough.” Podolsk’s newly rebuilt park, the article continues, “previously served as a place for hooligans. Now: it has become the beloved place of rest for laborers.”Footnote ²⁹ The text details the means deployed to reach this end, from the introduction of electricity to the paving of new alleyways and the planting of green spaces and the construction of a reading room, stage, and sports facilities. At once centripetal and centrifugal, such projects of infrastructure spread the progress of the center toward the fringes as a distinct, inversive act of redistributing and re-evaluating spatial hierarchies. While derivative of the center, the diffusion of blagoustroistvo also established a new relationship of dependency. This duality of progress-as-violence, or de-centralisation or centrifugal colonisation, was the basic characteristic of early Soviet infrastructural projects. The ideological transformation they were tasked with enacting inherently necessitated the cleansing not only of class, but also of ethnic, cultural and religious constellations inherited from the pre-revolutionary past.Footnote ³⁰

This dynamic relationship between center and periphery—characterized by the duality of inversion/expansion and progress/violence—was typical of the early Soviet society far beyond Moscow. But, especially in the early Soviet period, there was a substantial attempt to re-establish hierarchies and tip the balance away from the center. Regional centers such as Tashkent and Kharkiv were remodeled in the image of Moscow, but the process of developing them often took place through dialogue between central authorities and local actors.Footnote ³¹ In the 1920s, at least, the latter often had more impact on the material environments created. The same dynamic was manifest in provincial and peripheral representations of blagoustroistvo. Footnote ³² As in Podolsk, electricity, parks, and new alleyways proclaimed the new inverted social order, one that often necessitated the violent removal of not only class enemies, and their material trappings such as old monuments, but also agrarian livelihoods and ethnic differences.

Faktura: Power of the Pavement

The granting of special meanings to pavements in the Square of Soviets and Podolsk are not isolated cases, but closely related to the idea of the street and the square as spaces where the revolution took place, in both myth and reality, spaces where, as Trotsky worded it, the “oppressed classes make history.”Footnote ³³ Further, the newly paved roads that extended outward from cities facilitated a new dynamism in the center-periphery relationship. Streets, squares, and roads and their material qualities became important in redefining city and country. In Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long-format poem Vladimir Il’ich, written in 1924 after the leader’s death, Moscow’s streets bow to him: “Here every cobble / knew Lenin / in person,” stomps the poem’s rhythm.Footnote ³⁴ The very material of the street is described as being affected by the new society, with Lenin as its signifier reflected in them. But, as Mayakovsky indicates in another poem, the roads themselves want even more: a complete material transformation. This is spelled out in his 1922 poem “150,000,000,” a number that according to its opening lines “is the name of the craftsmen of this poem” printed “by rotary footsteps / on the cobblestone paper of squares.”Footnote ³⁵ The poem describes people, cars, and locomotives gathering for a demonstration and endows roads with their own voice: “Listen, what do the roads say? / What do they say?” and the roads reply: “Suffocated by dust and gusts” and “many unpaved and rickety miles / tired of loitering convicts,” now “we want to be covered with asphalt.”Footnote ³⁶

Asphalt was also seen as a key material agent for the capital’s transformation. Writing in 1922, Mikhail Bulgakov provided a lively testimony of this in his story, “God of Renovations” (Bog Remont), a new god that, he writes, appeared in the city in 1922.Footnote ³⁷ In this (ironic) description of the city’s transformation, asphalt acts as a mirror and marker of the new reality, emerging from all the ruin, humdrum, and chaos that characterized the early Soviet urban space. He concludes his story: “In the autumn, watching the asphalt cauldrons sparkling with hellfire in the streets, I shivered with joyful anticipation.” This was a sign of no less than “Renaissance.”Footnote ³⁸ In these literary depictions, and in the Soviet reality of reconstruction, improved road surfaces, especially with asphalt, became the sign and material reality—the superstructure and infrastructure—of the revolutionary modernity they facilitated. They took on a special faktura that, through their material qualities and transformative repaving, linked them to the idea of the masses and to building a new socialist society.Footnote ³⁹

The aura of such faktura, and the attendant politicization of city pavements, were not all poetry and symbolism. A professor of psychology, Ivan D’iakov, in a 1925 article on municipal upkeep addressed blagoustroistvo in relation to the consuming nature of urban life. He directly connected the energy of the soul (dukhovaia energiia), physical energy consumption, and the new reality of blagoustroistvo, specifically the paving of streets and squares. D’iakov drew on theories of “NOT” (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda), Taylorist-influenced notions of the scientific organization of labor permeated with ideas of biomechanics. D’iakov suggested that asphalt-paved streets greatly improved everyday life by reducing redundant energy consumption. In his theory, asphalt was superior to other kinds of pavement because “only tarmac paving kept in perfect conditions on streets and sidewalks allows the fluctuation of the height of the feet on average at less than 4 cm,” compared to up to 10 centimeters with cobblestone paving. Therefore, he surmised, paving improvements would result in huge leaps of productivity.Footnote ⁴⁰

In a second article, D’iakov directly linked the replanning and repaving of streets and other public works of blagoustroistvo with the reflexive conditioning theory developed by the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, and he proffered planning informed by contemporary psychology and theories of NOT as the key to standardizing urban life at large.Footnote ⁴¹ Remarkably, such thinking on NOT, “collective reflexes,” and the urban sphere was not merely expressed as opinions in journals, but embedded in process of design and construction on the level of the governance of space. From 1926 to 1929, D’iakov ran a special laboratory of psychotechnology within the Moscow department of public works, which researched a range of topics on psychotechnics and the urban sphere.Footnote ⁴² Psychophysical experiments on perception were also conducted within architecture schools as part of research on architectural form, and they were deeply rooted in the architectural culture.Footnote ⁴³

Taking Affect: Marxist-Pavlovian Determinism

The Soviet politics and meanings of blagoustroistvo were reinforced by a belief in the ability of lived environments to shape the subjects within them. This “deterministic” conviction derived from a key Marxist-materialist principle, that it is material reality that molds consciousness. This was echoed in the general rhetorics of “building socialism,” where the metaphor of physical construction was often used to describe the political project. Marx’s principle of “being determines consciousness” (bytie opredeliaet soznanie in Russian) was part of the discourses on art, architecture, and culture from the early 1920s onward. The phrase itself was often employed in arguing for a shift in focus toward the real space of the city, and in various arguments about architectural form. Used as a catchphrase and meme, at times ironically or mockingly, it consistently referred to the same set of core principles.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such usage reveals the concept’s embeddedness and ubiquity in the public discourse. It is also echoed in Lenin’s calls to move from “convincing” toward “administration,” and from “politics” to “action” and “achievements,” and similar rhetorics common during the early years of Bolshevik rule.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even when not directly quoted, the principle was obliquely present in many debates pertaining to blagoustroistvo. This is illustrated by a 1931 article by I. Voblyi that called for a rethinking of Moscow’s public spaces.Footnote ⁴⁶ It petitioned for more resources for blagoustroistvo, and advocated for new designs to make the city’s “outer appearance match its content,” pointing to, “the role of monumental redesign of cities as a sphere of fighting for life and empowerment (blagopoluchie) of your class, as a sphere of impact on the psyche of the enslaved masses in order to establish their supremacy (gospodstvo).”Footnote ⁴⁷ Voblyi evoked both “content” and “outer appearance” to assert that infrastructure works to both “convince” and administer the people. He also connected questions of hygiene and physical improvement to empowerment and positioned the “impact on psyche” between the two. This was an important argument and aspect of the discourse around blagoustroistvo and its capacity to “charge” people with class consciousness and “re-tune” individuals to collectively oriented class formations.

Physical reality was seen to shape the new revolutionary consciousness in many ways, and blagoustroistvo, as the universal material tool for shaping that reality, acted as a critical mediator between the material basis of socialist society and its subjects, and was imbued with deterministic transformative and instrumental capabilities to shape both physical reality and consciousness. Crucially, and more conservatively, blagoustroistvo was also viewed as a tool the state used to guide, direct, and gain total control over its subjects. This was an inheritance from imperial ideologies and governmental habits that sat cozily alongside Bolshevik transformative ambitions and it endures in altered but recognizable forms today. A similar mutating continuity can be detected in the way blagoustroistvo acted as an instrument of spatio-political expansion. There was a deliberate attempt to rethink the spatial hierarchies of the state and, typical of the early Soviet period, constant negotiation between central administration and local praxis. Projects of blagoustroistvo and their representations became sites to undo the old imperialist system, at times violently. And yet, such practices of blagoustroistvo testify to the survival and persistence of imperialist, expansionist tendencies, which came to dominate in the decades of accelerating centralization and verticalization of Soviet power that followed.

Mutations of Blagoustroistvo

During later Soviet periods, the importance of blagoustroistvo increased. The reconstruction of Moscow’s squares and spaces in the 1920s pales next to the transformation project set into motion by the new city plan of 1935 and the huge building projects of the Khrushchev era, but many key mechanics and meanings remained the same.Footnote ⁴⁸ From the early 1930s onward, the centralization of urban planning combined with the reintroduction of internal passports made the political instrumentalization of blagoustroistvo more effective. As argued by Johanna Conterio, small projects such as parks were increasingly conceived as sites of surveillance, while the blagoustroistvo of the systems of kolkhozy and GULAG were employed in reorganizing the entire country and its workforce.Footnote ⁴⁹ With such developments, blagoustroistvo increasingly became a means of internal control and colonization.

In Moscow itself, the 1935 plan, drawn up under Vladimir Semenov, author of the aforementioned 1912 “blagoustroistvo bible,” accelerated many of these mechanisms. Blagoustroistvo now became a project of total reconstruction supercharged with the new politics of Stalinism. The jubilant publications documenting the plan amplify and extend all the tropes and visual tools associated with blagoustroistvo. The official 1936 book of the plan displays on its cover a photograph of Stalin together with a plaster relief of Lenin hovering above a map of Moscow indicating, through the dialectics of montage, an urban transformation charged by the two figures.Footnote ⁵⁰ One of the many “before-and-after” images of another celebratory publication, Moskva Rekonstruiruetsia (Moscow reconstructs), designed by the avant-garde duo Liubov Popova and Aleksandr Rodchenko, showcases how the “old Moscow streets were covered with cobbles. The New Moscow replaced the cobbles with asphalt” (see figure 2).Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 2.

“Old Moscow streets were covered with cobblestones. New Moscow changed the cobbles into asphalt.” Before-and-after image from Moskva Rekonstruiruetsia (Moscow: Institut izobrazitel’noi statistiki sovetskogo stroitel’stva i khoziaistva tsunkhu gosplana sssr, 1938), n.p.

During and after the 1930s such projects became part of the backbone of the Soviet system. The first edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia published over the 1920s and 1930s covers blagoustroistvo in a short, technical subsection within the article “city.” The second, published in the 1950s, dedicates to it an article that runs across several spreads, boasts rich illustrations, and opens by proclaiming that the task of blagoustroistvo expresses “the tireless concern of the Bolshevik Party and the socialist state to improve the welfare of the people” (see figure 3).Footnote ⁵² During post-Stalinist decades, projects and imagery of urban improvement remained central to Soviet rhetoric and iconography, with Moscow as its model. These were the myths and dynamics of space and power that post-Soviet society inherited and had to navigate. In Moscow, the first two post-Soviet decades brought a period of so-called “wild capitalism” under the charismatic and authoritarian mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Still, even if aesthetic preferences quickly changed, the economy and bureaucracy of Soviet city-building remained an unwavering presence. Beyond the aesthetics, the staunch rhetorics and ideologies of blagoustroistvo can also be detected in municipal practices during Luzhkov’s time, and especially during the reign of his successor, Sergey Sobyanin.

Figure 3.

Collage of the entry for “Blagoustroistvo,” in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (The great Soviet dictionary) 2d ed., 51 vols. (Moscow: Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1950), vol. 5: 279–86. Image courtesy of authors, collage by Nene Tsuboi.

Introduction: The Blagoustroistvo Regime, 2009–2022

Since the early 2010s, Russia has been in the grip of one of the most ambitious blagoustroistvo campaigns in its modern history, and Moscow, as usual, has been its epicenter. During this time, the capital has been filled with a proliferation of blagoustroistvo debris, the chief elements of which are the falshfasad—the canvas screen behind which blagoustroistvo’s messy reality is hidden—along with the migrant gastarbeiters on whose toil it depends; and plitka—the paving stone, whose ceaseless laying and relaying throughout the last decade has both infuriated and captivated Muscovites.Footnote ⁵³

In terms of scale, zeal, and extravagance, Moscow in the second decade of this century underwent arguably the most important transformation of its center since Stalin’s time. In fact, comparisons to Stalin’s 1935 plan for Moscow’s reconstruction are openly invoked by the municipality itself. In 2018, it distributed a limited-edition anniversary album titled Moskva Razvivaetsia (Moscow develops) to several hundred hand-picked members of the city’s elite (photos of it were shared with us by an acquaintance).Footnote ⁵⁴ The new book was sent in a padded leather container accompanied by a new reprint of Rodchenko and Popova’s 1938 album Moskva Rekonstruiruetsia (Moscow reconstructs). The obvious implication was that Sobyanin’s 2010s blagoustroistvo campaign was a direct continuation of the project begun by Stalin’s 1935 General Plan. The 2018 book featured photographs of the new, post-blagoustroistvo widened pavements of today’s Tverskaya in an equivalent position to pictures of the 1930s widening of Ulitsa Gorkogo (now Tverskaya) from Rodchenko and Popova’s album. The new volume explicitly compares the two projects and also draws a parallel between their commissioners. Hammering the point home, the frontispiece of the 2018 book features an airbrushed photograph of S. S. Sobyanin, its placement on the page and the subject’s comportment mimicking Rodchenko and Popova’s 1938 I. V. Stalin mugshot (see figure 4).

Figure 4.

I. V. Stalin in the 2018 re-issue of Moskva Rekonstruiruetsya (Moscow: Institut izobrazitel’noi statistiki sovetskogo stroitel’stva i khoziaistva tsunkhu gosplana sssr, 2018[1938]); and S. Sobyanin in 2018’s Moskva Razvivaetsia (Proekt Moskva: Gradostroitel’naia Letopis’ Stolitsy XX–XXI Vekov (Moscow: Institut Genplana Moskvy, 2018), authors’ photo.

Sobyanin’s self-fashioning as blagoustroistvo dictator is grounded in the ambition of his project. As geographer Natalia Zubarevich points out, in 2016 and 2017 Moscow spent previously unheard-of amounts of money just on blagoustroistvo, over 15 percent of the municipal budget.Footnote ⁵⁵ This was triple the average annual amount spent during the reign of Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor between 1992 and 2010, and sixteen to seventeen times more, in real terms, than any other Russian city or region spent at the time. The manner in which blagoustroistvo, and its chief material artefacts plitka and falshfasad, so deeply permeated the physical, aesthetic, imaginative, and affective lives of the city’s residents during the 2010s was, we argue, symptomatic of and instrumental for the current wave of blagoustroistvo’s breathtaking scale and scope.

Via the work of specialized urban consultancies (most significantly Strelka Consulting Bureau) and federal grant programs, this blagoustroistvo drive is currently being exported from ur sites, like Tverskaya, Moscow’s Garden Ring, and its Gorky and Zaryadye parks, in a “centrifugal” or “neocolonial” fashion to hundreds of municipalities and regions throughout Russia, and beyond.Footnote ⁵⁶ Meanwhile, the politicians, innovators, architects, designers, and businesspeople who conceived or drove the process of Moscow’s transformation talk openly about it as a deterministic project of social engineering, using language redolent of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s. Moscow’s makeover is not just about making the city pretty, improving traffic flows, and making money for developers, construction firms, and urban consultancies. As in the 1860s, 1910s, and 1920s, it is about creating, from above, a new, better, classier—or, in the preferred adjective of today’s cognitive techno-determinism, “smarter”—type of Muscovite. It is about forging a model of urban aesthetics, government, and subjectivity that can be imposed, coercively or otherwise, on the country’s provinces and peripheries, and even its neighbors.

When did this new wave of blagoustroistvo begin? Most periodizations date its inception at around 2010, amid the modernization drive embarked on by Dmitry Medvedev during his stint as Russia’s President. There were several possible actors and factors in its initiation. One was the 2009 founding of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design by entrepreneur and journalist Ilya Tsentsiper, oligarch Alexander Mamut, and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Initially an education and research institute, by 2013 it had spawned a powerful consultancy offshoot called KB Strelka. Another factor was Moscow’s perceived need for an aesthetic and infrastructural makeover following Medvedev’s 2010 sacking of longtime Mayor Yuri Luzhkov—associated with the bombastic “Luzhkov style” of architecture—and his replacement with still-reigning technocrat Sergey Sobyanin. Finally, it is alleged that the 2011–2012 Bolotnaya Square protests were an influence since they led Moscow and Federal authorities to believe that they needed to embark on a grandiose project to placate the capital’s restless bourgeoisie.

In subsequent years—notwithstanding the return of Vladimir Putin to the Presidency and Russia’s irredentist/conservative turn following the 2014 Crimean annexation—the process of blagoustroistvo mushroomed and intensified, its momentum boosted by preparations for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and a string of Federal grants, loans, and incentive programs. Correspondingly, organizations like KB Strelka grew significantly. Strelka itself, by far the most important implementer of blagoustroistvo in Russia today, grew from around a dozen employees in 2013 to over 350 by 2018. Today, Putin regularly refers to the importance of blagoustroistvo in public speeches, and in 2018, under the heading of “comfortable environment for life” (komfortnaia sreda dlia zhizni), blagoustroistvo was elevated to stratospheric levels of political prominence, being named one of the Russian Federation’s three official national priority projects for 2019–2024 (alongside human capital, and economic growth).Footnote ⁵⁷

Inversion/Reversion/Expansion: Excluding Marginal Elements

The unrelenting ubiquity of blagoustroistvo is a symptom not merely of the sweeping scale of Moscow’s makeover but also a profound political-economic and proprietorial transformation underway in the city. Bolshevik blagoustroistvo was part and parcel of a post-revolutionary de-privatization of property that sought systematically to invert reigning hierarchies of class and ownership, center and periphery, and initially it found some success in doing so. The post-2010s blagoustroistvo regime has the opposite intention: it is an index of and mechanism for reconstituting hierarchy and inequality through the terrain of the city and amplifying the power of the center.

Today’s loud rhetoric about decentralizing by distributing blagoustroistvo throughout the Moscow suburbs and the Russian regions is contradicted by centripetal reality. The blagoustroistvo projects of KB Strelka are, by any measure, overwhelmingly focused on the center of Moscow rather than its peripheries, and in 2018 the consulting bureau found itself in a media storm after its chief economist penned a tone-deaf op-ed in the financial broadsheet Kommersant bemoaning the allegedly “slow pace” of the gentrification of Russian cities, and Moscow in particular. “The fact is that a classic capitalist model of urban development does not allow for a situation in which pensioners and people on below-average incomes can live in the center of the city.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As if to dispel any doubt as to whether Moscow’s alleged immunity to gentrification was being lamented or celebrated, the urban economist continued: “Gentrification is always beneficial for the city. The process ensures the growth of property prices and consequently the growth in the volume of taxes collected and of revenues in the city treasury. City boroughs become more peaceful as marginal elements (marginalnye elementy) are excluded.”

Whereas the current reconsolidation of hierarchy was preceded by the Luzhkov-era re-privatizations and elite-formation processes, their dynamics were volatile, unpredictable, and hyper-centralized around the person of the then-mayor (and his wife, property developer Elena Baturina). Today, the processes are at once stabler and more capillary. While property arrangements remain “fuzzy,” and therefore liable to manipulation by the powerful and well-connected,Footnote ⁵⁹ a fairly stable coalition of elite interests is steadily coalescing around the blagoustroistvo regime. Blagoustroistvo, of course, is not a story of just elite formation, but also one of dispossessing the poor from the city’s center and the mass exploitation of the migrant laborers responsible for its materialization. Further, it is increasingly clear—as the work of scholars and investigative journalists has shown—that it is one of the core processes through which the restitution of property to a steadily-consolidating late-Putinist elite is enabled and implemented.Footnote ⁶⁰ If Bolshevik blagoustroistvo was tangibly linked to an invertive process of de-privatization, Sobyaninist blagoustroistvo is palpably connected to a restorative or revertive process of gradual but steady re-privatization.

Finally, blagoustroistvo is about remaking the city in the image and for the comfort of the middle classes: not merely for those who benefit financially from the blagoustroistvo regime itself, but also for its users: those middle-class city dwellers (propertied but non-elite) who may otherwise be tempted to spill out onto the streets and engage in seditious activities. Blagoustroistvo, then, caters to those to whom the city does not actually belong, but who are sufficiently propertied to avail themselves of its services. According to onetime dissident architecture critic and now KB Strelka chief ideologue Grigory Revzin, thanks to Tverskaya’s new wide pavements, its commercial offerings are slowly becoming more “democratic”; it no longer accommodates only the “luxurious boutiques” which (in the urbanist’s imagination at least) dominated the street during the 1990s.Footnote ⁶¹ After the fashion of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, representations of such changes continue to feature, and place much rhetorical emphasis on, before-and-after images that emphasize blagoustroistvo’s transformative power (see figure 5).

Figure 5.

Screenshot of before-and-after sliding image of the Krasnye Vorota metro station, from https://media.strelka-kb.com/before-after. Image courtesy of KB Strelka.

Most disturbingly, the colonial dimension of blagoustroistvo—long noted by critics to refer to the Moscow-centric nature of its centrifugal diffusion through the Russian regions—is today being highlighted by Russia’s apparent eagerness to spread the blagoustroistvo model of development to the Ukrainian territories occupied following the invasions of 2014 and 2022. Geographers Daniela Zupan, Vera Smirnova, and Amanda Zadorian have dissected the Moscow-centric “stolichnaya praktika” (capital practice) of Putin-era urbanism. They note that Russia’s current Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Construction Marat Khusnullin—from 2011 to 2020 the Deputy Mayor of Moscow and municipal Minister of Construction—has placed a disproportionate emphasis on blagoustroistvo and infrastructure projects in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian Autonomous Republic of Crimea.Footnote ⁶² In 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Khusnullin has brazenly referred to the need to formulate a plan for the “reconstruction and blagoustroistvo” of Mariupol and other occupied, decimated, and depopulated territories. He has gone so far as to advocate replacing the ruins of Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant with a post-industrial park on the model of Moscow’s Zaryadye Park.Footnote ⁶³

Inversion/Reversion/Expansion: Recolonizing Russia

Most explicitly excluded from the “luxurious” new city of blagoustroistvo are the migrant laborers, or gastarbeiters, from central Asia, the Caucasus republics, and the Urals, and other parts of the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine and Moldova. As Murawski details elsewhere,Footnote ⁶⁴ the gastarbeitery are not only excluded, but are literally hidden from view by the many kilometers of falshfasady, the distinctively designed tarpaulin banners stuck to barrier fences to mask the gritty reality of construction work from ordinary Muscovites, the users of the city of blagoustroistvo.

However, the sites from which the gastarbeitery hail are not unplugged from the geography of the blagoustroistvo regime. The terrain of blagoustroistvo—of which Moscow and its flagship sites, such as Zaryadye and Gorky parks, lie at the very center—is gradually being spread across the entirety of the Russian landmass. Vastly uneven budgetary realities notwithstanding,Footnote ⁶⁵ central Moscow sites such as Zaryadye are aggressively promoted as the ultimate benchmark against which blagoustroistvo projects ought to judge themselves. As Director of Marielgrazhdanproekt told Murawski, the regional government-owned institute that almost monopolizes urban planning and design projects in the remote, low-income Republic of Mari-El in central Russia: “As part of our preparations for an application for KGS [Komfortnaya Gorodskaya Sreda, a federal grant program for blagoustroistvo], we traveled to Moscow … in order to visit Zaryadye Park. We were encouraged to make this visit by the administrators of the program, by the center.”

Urban activist Svyatoslav Murunov writes that this centripetal model of blagoustroistvo, which seeks to remake Russia in the image of Zaryadye, operates according to a model that can be described as “colonization 2.0.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The present regime, which might be called a “re-colonial” one, is much more vividly colonial, Murunov says, than was the Soviet model of center-periphery interaction. At least in the Soviet Union, colonization “often had broader public (gosudarstvennoe) aims and values bundled in with it,” so that, in effect, “colonization Soviet-style had a mass of contradictory and unintended effects” even if, “at its core, it did constitute a form of colonization.” Today, however, we are witnessing the full-on “return of the imperial thinking in Russia … the construction of a rigid vertical [configuration of power].” On the level of urban planning and blagoustroistvo, Murunov sees the symbolic and actual agent of colonization 2.0 to be KB Strelka, which is often believed to have preferential access to blagoustroistvo consultancy and project management tenders. “And of course,” Murunov told Murawski, “it is clear that as soon as Strelka is included in this process, it will mean the copying of the Moscow approach.” He characterized Strelka’s modus operandi as behaving “like colonizers … ‘now we will conduct blagoustroistvo on you [vot my vas blagoustroim]!’”

Murunov’s characterization of Strelka’s method of operation is uncannily presaged in the tone of a response by Grigory Revzin—during a Moscow public debate in December 2017 organized as part of this article’s fieldwork—to a panelist’s invocation of the “internally colonial” character of Strelka’s operations in the Russian provinces. We will leave Revzin’s words—delivered in a defensive, sarcastic register—without comment for now, but they clearly take on a dark significance in light of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine:

Faktura: The Politics of Plitka

The class character of blagoustroistvo, and the process of revertive re-privatization it entails, manifests itself most directly on the material level through the fetishization of granite plitka and the denigration of asphalt. The reverse mirroring of the latter’s 1920s glorification by the psychologist D’iakov and the poet Mayakovsky is stark. This is mirrored also in 2010s Moscow’s flagship blagoustroistvo program Moya Ulitsa (My street), named as if in explicit contradistinction to Lenin’s collectivist Nasha Moskva (Our Moscow) of the 1920s. In a much-quoted, 2016 manifesto-like article on blagoustroistvo, Revzin presents the virtues of plitka’s superiority over asphalt in terms diametrically opposed to the Bolshevik lauding of the progressive and proletarian virtues of asphalt: “Instead of asphalt pavements, there ought to be stone surfaces, podiums for an urban [fashion] parade … at street level, there ought to be a park atmosphere … instead of walls, there should be mirrors, shop windows, and advertisements, so that people can constantly but unobtrusively delight in themselves from the side.”Footnote ⁶⁸

In an infamous 2016 Facebook post titled “Putin v Kazhdoy Plitke” (Putin in every plitka), Revzin, speaking once more in a tone that now seems uncannily and cynically prescient, castigated those who insisted on ascribing some sort of demonic political power to plitka. A consensus had formed, Revzin claimed,

Revzin’s sarcastic protestations were the subject of a direct refutation in artist and architect Anna Shevchenko’s installation Putin in Every Plitka, executed for a July 2018 exhibition at Moscow’s Museum of Architecture (co-curated by Murawski) (see figure 6).Footnote ⁶⁹ She stenciled images based on disembodied details of several iconic bodily comportments adopted by Putin (crucifix-emblazoned muscular torso; muscular arm fishing out classical amphora spontaneously discovered off the coast of Ukraine’s temporarily occupied Crimean Peninsula; trickster wink) onto original hexagonal plitki from Zaryadye Park. Laid on the floor of the museum, only some 100 meters from the Kremlin wall, her Putinized plitki elicited a mixture of terror and delight from exhibition audiences. Revzin’s protestations are disingenuous, Shevchenko’s work suggests. A singular and indivisible Putin may not literally inhabit every one of Moscow’s plitki, but they are necessarily marked by an identifiable, if dismembered and mediated, sovereign presence. There is some Putin in every plitka.

Figure 6.

“Putin in Every Plitka,” installation by Anna Shevchenko, from the exhibition “Portal Zaryadye,” Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, July–August 2018. Image courtesy of Olga Alexeyenko.

Taking Affect: Determinism and Social Engineering Recharged

There clearly is politics in every plitka, then, but what is their political effect? The official line, according to Strelka and ideological fellow travelers of blagoustroistvo, is that public space-focused projects constitute machines for the top-down engineering of “freedom” (svoboda). These include Moya Ulitsa, the ongoing reconstruction of Gorky Park that began in 2011, and the re-paving of Tverskaya, the Garden Ring, and other prominent Moscow public spaces.Footnote ⁷⁰ Among all of blagoustroistvo’s flagship projects, the Kremlin-abutting Zaryadye Park, designed by New York architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, is arguably the most grandiose. At another public debate devoted to Zaryadye, the geographer Olga Vendina posed a question: “Is it, in fact, possible to realize a democratic program of urban development through authoritarian means?” She answered in the affirmative: “Here [in Zaryadye], an artificial environment is created, which emphasizes and enables freedom. And when this kind of space of freedom appears adjacent to the sacred spaces of power and secrecy, then this can only mean one thing—the desacralization of power.” This kind of desacralization, Vendina claimed, “works on the formation of citizens’ consciousness … in the spirit of social engineering, when through the organization of space … it is possible to mold people’s behavior, mold people’s imaginations.”

Zaryadye Park, and public space in general under the blagoustroistvo regime, is presented here as an architectural tool for engineering people’s freedom, by decree from above. Similar statements abound in pronouncements of active players in Moscow and Russia’s blagoustroistvo regimes. Moscow Chief Architect Sergey Kuznetsov wrote along these lines in 2016, in reference to the restoration of the Stalin-era exhibition ground VDNKh in Moscow’s northern suburbs to a pristine version of its high Stalinist incarnation, and the expulsion from that space of petty businessmen, shopkeepers, and barbecuing Muscovites: “I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that architecture as a field of professional activity is … first and foremost, an instrument for shaping the environment and managing life.”Footnote ⁷¹

Sobyaninist blagoustroistvo possesses a deterministic character that is unmistakably and curiously reminiscent of the social engineering mission of Bolshevik blagoustroistvo, but in an inverted direction. As Murawski has shown elsewhere, building on the work of Anna Kruglova, a kind of “vernacular” or “everyday” Marxist speech (and ideology) survives and flourishes in discussions about architecture and infrastructure in post-Soviet Russia;Footnote ⁷² so much so that the Russian translation of Karl Marx’s phrase “being determines consciousness” (bytie opredelaet soznanie) is still cited repeatedly and almost unthinkingly in everyday conversations.Footnote ⁷³ The socialist trope used as a meme and catchphrase in the early Soviet context has become an automated part of the vocabulary and understanding of the material environment (the infrastructure) and its relationship to the political, aesthetic, and subjective (or superstructural) dimensions of everyday existence.

Electricity: Discharging the People

In the condition of the blagoustroistvo regime, however, this deterministic language has more than merely Marxist colorations. The name of Zaryadye Park is taken from old trading district of Moscow which, until the 1930s, occupied the site (za riad’ami, or “behind the trading rows”), and can be interpreted as a pun on the Russian word for appliance charger (zariadka) or the verb “to charge” (zariazhat’). In reference to the Zaryadye, its then-Director Pavel Trehleb told Murawski that he saw his, and the park’s, main task to be to “charge people with positive energy, emotions … which allow you to live to be joyful.” Here, Trehleb distantly but directly echoes the Bolshevik-era pronouncements on the need to charge (zariazhat’) people with revolutionary energy.

Trehleb elaborated further, explicating how this act of charging carries an explicitly social function, even a patriotic one. The “positive energy” emanating from the park allows people to “change their attitude toward the city and country;” it impacts on “people’s emotional state, on their social adaptability. Even if you have financial problems at home, or family or other life problems, nevertheless you have [in the park] a source of energy, a place to charge yourself, you go there to suffuse yourself with useful energy.” Trehleb’s words lay bare the sarcastic smoke-screening device of Revzin’s (non-)political plitki: Zaryadye really is conceived by its administrators as a site for the “drawing out of life power” through the limbs of its users, for their depoliticization-through-joy, for their political discharging.

The park-visiting experience, for Trehleb, consists of a series of unique pathways, which have been “programmed into” the park and allow park users to “experience a series of awesome emotions in an average time of just two–three hours!” This complexity and intensity are necessary, he claims, because “for the brain it is very important that you find yourself constantly within some sort of external impulses which constantly nourish our emotional system.” Trehleb describes the park’s program as a “new ideology.” Zaryadye is, in fact, “not a park”; it is a “discrete ideological complex,” “an enormous cultural hub which incorporates a park-landscape element.”

Revzin espouses similar theories regarding the “unconscious” functioning of plitka versus asphalt: “City dwellers … behave in an unconscious way, like animals. They don’t like slithers of asphalt in the midst of traffic jams … and intuitively migrate away from such places;… To walk, they need fresh air, and they react in an automatic way to this, like a flock of sheep react to fresh grass.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Again, Revzin politicizes (or rather, depoliticizes) his narrative: “Those warriors against the evil regime, who say that asphalt is no worse than plitka … will never have any impact on people’s behavior.”