This study analyzed the growth of three cities crucial to jump-starting the industrial potential of the fledgling Soviet state—Baku, 1920–1927, Magnitogorsk, 1929–1932, and Kharkiv, 1930–1932. Baku in Azerbaijan had immense oil reserves; Magnitogorsk in Russia was the model Soviet steel town; Kharkiv in the Ukraine built tractors and machines. Situated far away from Moscow, they showcased a country-wide network of state-supported industrial nodes. Eighty-seven new towns, planned to house some five million workers, were to be situated in the underpopulated Urals, Siberia, and the Soviet Far East.
The breakneck Soviet industrialization drive of the late 1920s and mid-1930s enacted Joseph Stalin's first two Five-Year Plans, echoing the analogous but much lower intensity developments abroad. Soviet planners visited English garden cities and industrial towns, housing developments in Weimar Germany, and American oil towns. Foreign expertise helped the Soviets to unleash and develop their country's industrial potential.
The first oil well drilled in Baku in 1871 turned the shoreline settlement on the Caspian Sea into a chaotic, unhealthy boomtown. Its street patchwork grew from a medieval Islamic core surrounded by middle-sized Russian colonial settlements and a large-scale industrial grid built by czarist entrepreneurs. The restless, underpaid workers were crowded inside quarters that were plagued by cholera, typhus, and dysentery. In the mid-1920s Azneft, the Azerbaijan oil company, built workers’ housing based on Garden city prototypes, soon augmented by two and three-story buildings. The 1927, Baku General Plan proposed a comprehensive, regional solution to replace the entire area's sprawling road network. Wide boulevards would weave through the city, linking it to the outlying industrial zones. Housing and industry received equal due. New roads connected the previously separated neighborhoods. Public institutions and services were equitably distributed. Parks and trees shaded the otherwise dusty city. Significantly, local planning officials, not the central state apparatus in Moscow, transformed Baku.
A 1918 competition announced the birth of Magnitogorsk, a plant intended to produce “all the steel that Russia might need” (51). The site, four days by train from Moscow, was a geological wonder—an iron ore mountain protruding from the steppe. The Civil War stalled the birth pangs of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works until 1926. A mine was developed north of the mountain, a factory to its west, and a rail yard nestled in between. Workers settled down in dugouts, yurts, and shacks, waiting years for proper housing. The 1929 competition brief for Magnitogorsk outlined a model sotsgorod (socialist city) featuring an exemplary residential commune. Urbanists and disurbanists proposed alternative visions for the brief, while ideologues pronounced the traditional family's demise. Henceforth communes would raise children. Canteens would prepare meals, freeing parents from home-making chores for factory work. Ultimately, the competition results were disappointingly inconclusive. Except for the Kirov District, the entire site sidestepped master plans, and the competition became more of an intellectual exercise, prompting further theoretical discussions. Socialist theory generated for Magnitogorsk was applied in a new sotsgorod near Kharkiv.
Stalin's desperate need for foreign currency, obtained by selling grain, combined with his ruthless collectivization of Soviet agriculture underpinned the creation of the Kharkiv Tractor Factory and the attendant sotsgorod. In the 1920s, the Soviets imported most tractors from the United States. American architectural and industrial firms were then invited to design the factory complex and to transfer technological knowhow to the Soviets for building their own machines. Workers were housed in four-story and six-story, walk-up minimal living units lacking private kitchens, bathing facilities, and toilets. Canteens provided communal dining. Nurseries, kindergartens, and schools cared for the children. Survivors from the Kremlin-orchestrated horrific Holomodor in Ukraine were absorbed into the ranks of unskilled laborers constructing Kharkiv and other industrial centers.
During the fifteen years discussed, the Soviet state was hell-bent on multiplying industrial nodes throughout the countryside and transforming its citizens into model socialist workers. Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv energized the immense ideological undertaking. In each case the city planners and builders encountered site specific problems that forced them to make hands-on, pragmatic decisions countering nebulous socialist theories. The study at hand contains a wealth of competition literature, master plans, photographs, and architectural drawings, augmenting the narrative explaining how each city erratically progressed to its completion. This exhaustive, clearly-conceptualized study is an invaluable and permanent addition to the literature about the early Soviet Union's industrialization and urbanization.
