T 0 S R V O L U M E V I I I N U M B E R I I 1 9 9 7 33

Sov i et O r i e nta l i s m :

Greg Castillo is an urban historian and a

Ph.D. candidate in Architectural History at

the University of California at Berkeley, u. S.A.

Socia l ist Rea l ism and Bui l t Tradition

G RE G CAS T I L L O

The cultural practices of the Soviet Union in consolidating its eastern empire after the 1917

revolution bear a striking, yet largely unexplored, resemblance to practices that have been well

documented in the West as colonialist and Orientalist. Under an imperative to remake "back-

ward" societies in the image of socialism, cultural authorities monumentalized the forms of

vernacular design to symbolize the regional identity of peoples, at the same time they were

eliminating the social and political strucures that underpinned vernacular traditions. The

paper studies these practices both in the construction of high-profile individual buildings and

in terms of a more general attack on regional urban forms. The calculated use of regional folk

tradition largely disappeared in the years after Stalin's death. But modern variants have

reemerged since the late 1960s in ways that border on kitsch.

The cultural invention of a Soviet "East" assumed a privileged role within the discourses of Stalinist architecture. According to the USSR'S design authorities, pavilions erected in Moscow to represent Central Asia and the Transcaucasus were among the first buildings to successfully negotiate Socialist Realism's call for a compositional method "national in form and socialist in content." These exhibition structures of the late 1930S cross-fertilized Neoclassicism with decorative elements borrowed from folk traditions. The result was a stylistic hybrid which monumentalized vernacular architecture and was intended to supersede it. Stalinist architecture's essays in geographic and historical identity were publicized as proof that a univer­sal socialist culture was being built from the ground up, in a host of native dialects.

This expressive system bore remarkable affinities to practices now identified with Orientalism. Like British and French colonial architectures, Socialist Realism was the signifier of a domain assembled by force and legitimized by a myth of a modernizing mission civilisatrice that was reflected in the reform of the built environment. Soviet architectural

34 T D S R 8 2

strategies, like those of other European empires, began with the straightforward implantation of new building rypes, and cul­minated with their srylistic "nativization." In the process, local cultural traditions were studied, cataloged, and redefined in the context of new power relationships - the paradigmatic tasks of an Orientalist epistemology. '

AN U N EX P LO R E D H Y B R I D

The myth of a Soviet family of nations composed of Russia and its "younger" and less advanced "brothers" is colonialism's terra incognita. Western architectural histories are particularly uninformative. Their evaluation of the Stalinist building pro­gram - both that associated with the cultural revolution of the late 1920S as well as its Neoclassical successor - is largely driven by the canons of taste (or in the case of Socialist Realism, their violation). The architecture of high Stalinism is portrayed as monotonous and undifferentiated, its personalities as unworthy of individual assessment, and its history as static - verdicts that in themselves rehearse colonial appraisals of cultural inferiority.

Nor have scholars of Western European Orientalism stepped in to fill the gap. Difficulties in accessing sites and archival sources have certainly played their part in maintaining the state of academic underdevelopment in which Soviet Oriental ism remains mired. Equally important is its violation of a key precept of colonial studies: that empire is the story of global capitalism. Russia's imperial legacy, launched by Tsars and commandeered by commissars, is consciously omitted from Edward Said's enormously influential works, which negotiate a tense truce between Marxian paradigms lost and reframed. Said abandons the class-based formulas advanced by Marxism/ Leninism as the means to redress imperialism. Yet he concurs with the framework developed by the Marxian historian of empire VG. Kiernan to explain imperialism's emergence as a competitive global project.2 Said and Kiernan agree that mod­ern empires imitate each other. Capital accumulation is the payoff for these efforts, but imperialism's underlying causes "are to be found less in tangible wants than in the uneasy tensions of societies distorted by class division . . . . "3

The USSR provides a case study that deviates radically from this ideological convention. Soviet expansion was driven by a program ro replicate a formula for rectifying class stratification. Soviet architecture, devised to serve that goal, documents the confluence of anti-colonialism, socialism, nationalism, and impe­rialism: the seemingly incompatible cultural strategies which intermingled in the Socialist Realist deployment of Orientalism. As a tradition of scholarship, Soviet Orientalism was derived from a prerevolutionary Russian roOt stock. It flourished in Russia during the 1920S, like other ethnographic disciplines devoted to the study of pre- and proro-socialist native cultures. But after the "Great Break" (velikii perelom) of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan (1928-32) , Orientalism, like other ethnographic enterprises, was retired for its fixation on backward practices now seen as incom-

patible with the construction of socialism. Only with the elabo­ration of a Socialist Realist epistemology in the latter 1930S did such research find a new raison d'etre. Native traditions within Soviet borders would become fodder for local expressions of a Stalinist cultural master plan; native traditions abroad (that is, in capitalist colonial settings) would be examined by Soviet Orientalist scholars to diagnose cultural shortcomings.

"The October Revolution opened up the widest possibili­ties for a genuine scientific development of orientalism," declared an exponent of the revived discipline in 1955.' Marxist/Leninist empirical methods permitted Soviet Orientalists to reveal the presence of de-facto class relationships in traditional societies. This was done through the "unmasking" (razoblacheniye) of outdated cultural practices which deadened

'

their subjects to the promise of socialism, and which were con­served under Western imperialism, it was claimed, for exactly that purpose.5 Socialism would come ro backward peoples only through Socialist Realist prescriptions for social transformation. Because the Soviet construction of Oriental Otherness postulat­ed this condition as historical rather than essential, backward subjects had not only the possibility, but the personal responsi­bility, to conform to Stalinist standards of social modernity: any­thing else would be an act of resistance that invoked other categories of identity - namely that of recidivist deviance. A forced march into a new hisrorical epoch would end the Orient's chronic exhaustion. Redemption would be characterized by multiculturalism (as formulated by Socialist Realism) and a vibrant spectrum of post-imperial subjectivities (as defined by Party doctrine): objectives that challenge the notion that these cultural phenomena were certified remedies for imperialism, rather than counting them among its many possible symptoms.

Russia's imperial bequest to the Bolsheviks was geographic rather than territorial. Post-revolutionary independence move­ments in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkestan, and the Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara obliged Lenin to use the mili­tary power of the Red Army to reassemble the Tsarist realm. What was passed along to the new authorities without a fight was the mental map of a domain split by a modest continental divide and a formidable cultural chasm.6

The West's sway upon Russia was a contentious topic in imperial times, prompting acrimonious debates between "Westernizing" and "pan-Slavic" factions. The topic of Asia's influence, however, usually inspired a contemptuous consensus among these rivals. "Millions of Asiatics stagnate today in proud satisfaction with their decrepit civilization, or vegetate on the various levels of savagery and crudity . . . , devoid of practically all hopes for an independent and sovereign future," remarked the ethnographer Vladimir Lamansky in a pan-Slavic manifesto of 1892.7

Prejudices aired by Lamansky, among others, found an unlikely source of support in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx's theory of "Oriental despotism" was founded on the inferiority of Asiatic cultures, which were inca­pable of plunging into history's turbulent current without a

push from the West. His elastic geography of a despotic Orient included China, India, Turkey, Persia, and Russia.' According to Marx, England's imperial subjugation of India, while brutal, served rwo historical missions: " . . . the annihilation of the Asiatic sociery, and the laying of the material foundations of Western sociery in Asia.'" Engels elaborated on the theme, proposing that "all impotent nations must in the last analysis, owe a debt to those who, under the laws of historic necessiry, incorporate them in a great empire, thus allowing them to take part in an historic development which would be otherwise impossible for them."lO Colonialism thus served history's ulti­mate ends, a plot line that would reappear in Stalinist histories of Russia's nineteenth-century territorial expansion. I I

Aspects ofTsarist and Marxist thought overlapped in the Bolshevik view of the East. Within Soviet discourse, ''Asiatic'' was a synonym for "backwardness," although its manifestations were by no means limited to one continent. The Russian peas­ant of the Bolshevik imagination - dirry, ignorant, passive, and unconscious of time - was ''Asiatic.'' So was the sociery that kept him oppressed. The problem was one of historical retardation rather than racial inferioriry, and so historical inter­vention was its patent remedy. "The profound meaning of the revolution," Trotsky declared, "is that the people have made a final break with the barbarism of Asia, the seventeenth century, the icons and cant of Holy Russia."12

The Russian peasant's Oriental counterpart was the Muslim traditionalist of Central Asia. Semi-nomadic agrarians of the steppe were seen as remnants of the feudal past. An equally retro­grade urban counterpart was identified in the torpid but garrulous habitue of the bazaar, who victimized his wife by keeping her sequestered behind veils and blind walls. "Those old men take their tea as seriously as one does the Revolution," complained a Russian worker to Anna Louise Strong, an American feminist vis­iting Central Asia in the mid-1920s. Bolsheviks saw such local rypes not as part of the "picturesque background," according to Strong, "but as a positive obstacle - something to be removed that young life may flourish."13

The young life slated to replace socialism's Asiatic Others was that of a proper proletariat. Its individual members would be characterized by ethnic and linguistic diversiry and catalogued into discrete national identities, as outlined by Stalin in his 1913 treatise, Marxism and the National Question. The universal attributes of productiviry, orderliness, optimism, and correct class consciousness would bond human variery into a coherent socialist organism, an ideal displayed to best advantage in mass demonstrations of the sort convened for Soviet political holidays. A 1922 Pravda report on a march in Moscow noted that its "sense of order and balance in the mass movements" stood in stark contrast to ''Asiatic chaos, lack of discipline, and contagious disorder. . . . "1'

Soviet architects argued that their profession would perform a crucial role in purging the USSR of its ''Asiatic'' tendencies. In the 1920S, Constructivists elaborated a theoretical basis for the transformative influence of built form. Modern building rypes were conceived as "social condensers" capable of instilling socialist

C A S T I L L o · S 0 V l E T 0 R l E N T A L I S M 35

modes of conduct and thought while meeting basic needs: the fac­tory and the workers' club were celebrated exemplars. Implicit in this theory was the concept of demolition as a technique of social reform. If a social condenser could function as a "workshop for the transformation of man," traditional environments might cont­aminate new proletarians with discredited ways of life.I5

The First Five-Year Plan of 1928-32 and its accompanying cultural revolution set into motion a Janus-faced program of construction and demolition. New factories were designed to forge an economy based on heavy industry and a true working class. A rural proletariat would be created by reorganizing agri­culture on a collective basis. As "social condensers" went up, buildings that embodied traditions deemed incompatible with industrial socialism were vacated, put to new uses, or razed. Religious buildings were at greatest risk. Adaptive reuse was more cost-effective than demolition, and the new uses to which sacred structures were put could, in effect, combine the best of both. Conversions of cathedrals into museums of atheism, churches into Soviet worker's clubs, and monasteries into pris­ons involved minor remodeling. The technique established the regime's institutional hegemony on a budget, while packing the ideological wallop of a wrecking ball.

R E B U I L D I N G T H E S O V I ET " EA S T "

Islamic Central Asia was one of the proving grounds for this approach to creating a socialist urban infrastructure. Indigenous cities of the region were composed of residential communities called mahalIa, each particularized by a neighbor­hood khauz (water pool), chaikhana (tea house) , and mosque. The Friday mosque and the madrasa, an Islamic academy, crowned the ciry's sacred topography. In the late 1920S, when Anna Louise Strong toured Bukhara's religious structures -itself a comment on their changed use - she noted that work­er's clubs and the dormitory of the construction workers union were located in former madrasas, and that the ciry's largest reli­gious academy was in the process of being remodeled as a women's club. Well-funded "Red chaikhana" were appended to the headquarters of trade unions and social organizations, Strong reported. Here, patrons quaffed tea beneath portraits of Lenin and posters exhorting them to revolutionary activi ry. Above the waters of a neighborhood khauz, a banner welcomed the Regional Congress of Trade Unions to a conference in Bukhara. Beside it was a recently remodeled club room plas­tered with "instructive placards about tuberculosis, the indus­trial loan, the unveiling of women, venereal diseases -everything at once that is new and scientific."16

The socialist reformatting of Islamic urban life was achieved through new construction as well as adaptive reuse. Most of Central Asia's largest cities conformed to a morpholo­gy of nineteenth-century colonial segregation in which Muslim districts were separated from a newer zone of broad avenues and geometric ciry blocks of Russian provenance (FIG. I) . The

3 6 T D S R 8 . 2

_.1.. _ _ SNIIARKAN O

J..6Q.OOO

FIGURE I. Russian colonial Samarkand, ca. I9IO. (Source: Karl Baedeker,

Leipzig.)

pattern could be found in Tashkent, Samarkand, Kokand, and Andizhan, among other examples. Soviet construction in the late 1920S focused primarily on sites in the new town; but there were exceptions. Tashkent's master plan of 1929-31 by A. Silchenkov called for demolitions within the mahalla in prepara­tion for new construction. In Samarkand a large outlet of the Uzbek State Trading Company was built in the old town along­side the bazaar. The department store's antiquarian location was determined by a marketing policy intended to establish socialist hegemony in the distribution of goods. Strong notes: "The crowds outside were greater than anywhere else in the market; they were standing in line to buy cotton goods at prices below those in the private booths."'7 Private trade was undercut by the innovation of low- or below-cost retailing in a market regulated by scarcity instead of profit. Cooperative stores set up to distrib­ute goods to agrarian populations also interrupted the flow of consumers to urban bazaars. Socialist merchandising, bewailed by native shopkeepers, sent the bazaar into a period of decline."

The economic hegemony of Islam's male breadwinners was assaulted by a revolution in production as well as in distri­bution. Samarkand's Khudzhum silk factory opened in 1927 on another site near the bazaar. The rationale behind this loca­tion, which broke with the Five-Year Plan's fetish for modern industrial practices, can be explained in a name. Khudzhum, the TurlGC and Arabic word for "assault," was the official title of the state campaign to eliminate the traditional sequestration of women. The new factory would access the untapped resource of female labor, representing an unprecedented advance in social productivity, as well as in the Party's search for a native proletariat. i9 Managers initially hired out piece­work to be done at home, at least until female employees were considered vocationally and culrurally equipped for factory labor. Within a decade, all Khudzhum workers were unveiled and putting in regular shifts at the mil!.'o

Semi-nomadic agrarians of Soviet Central Asia, deprived of "the cultural effects of factory life," were to be transformed

through the reorganization of agriculture into a collective enterprise. The key to the project was their resettlement into permanent villages, considered a requisite step in the liquida­tion of "tribal attitudes" that came with a "semi-feudal" way of life." The yurt was the architectural corollary of nomadic exis­tence, and as a functioning building type, it assumed a posi­tion in Soviet culture that could well be described as purely illustrious. As the state prepared to eliminate demountable dwellings from the vocabulary of socialist housing, yurtS pre­sented a fitting contrast with a modernist futute in the "new­and-old" imagery of First Five-Year Plan propaganda (FIG.2)."

The campaign to reforge the aul (migrating village) of the steppes into the fixed settlement of a rural proletariat gained momentum with a November 1929 decision by the Party's Central Committee plenum to appropriate the nomadic lands of Kazakhstan for state agricultural communes. Moscow's

FIGURE 2. The original caption reads: "In the Kalmik region in the middle of

the naked steppe grow buildings of steel and concrete alongside the filt tents of

the nomads. (Source: 1. Ilin, Russia's New Primer: The Story of the Five-Year

Plan, G.s. Counts and NP Lodge, trans. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, I9P].)

architectural avant-garde jumped on the bandwagon. Students at Vkhutein (the successor organization to Vkhutemas, a kind of Soviet Bauhaus) , including Andrei Bunin, Mariia Kruglova, and Viktor Kalmykov, drew up futurist-inspired resettlement communities for Central Asian nomads. Those by Kalmykov, a native of Tashkent, combined the yurt's domical space with avant-garde shapes and details associated with works by the Moscow architect Konstantin Melnikov (FIG.3). This stylistic arrogation of indigenous form, said to support "a traditional life style and social organization" while simultaneously eradi­cating both, presages later Socialist Realist praxis, and demon­strates one of the many continuities between "high" Stalinism and its avant-garde preamble.23

Socialist Realism fashioned a literally fabulous narrative atound agrarian resettlement. Soviet journalists recounted its ultimate success as a fairy-tale come true, as demonstrated in this postwar account:

Given every encouragement by the State, the former nomads settled on the land and gave up their wander­ings. From year to year the nomad camps grew smaller and smaller and in their place arose new towns and vil­lages, and the people of whom it had once been said that they were "born in the saddle" were finally able to dismount and lead a happy existence. '4

The reality had a greater affinity to social chaos - albeit one strictly governed by state directives. To guard against "vagabondage," newly settled peasants were forbidden to drive their herds to pasture, although fodder was neither available nor provided by authorities. The futurist communities drawn up by architects in Moscow remained an outstanding order as well. For the 400,000 Kazakh nomads declared settled by I936, only 38,000 housing units were built.'5 Native resistance included armed insurrection, a mass slaughter of livestock (resulting in mass starvation) , and migration to labor-starved industrial sites. At the new steel town of Magnitogorsk, visi­tors reported seeing "Kirgiz girls who had arrived directly from the tents of the nomads" laying the bricks of a new German­designed kindergarten.26 Collectivization's final scorecard with respect to Kazakhs has been calculated at one million deaths in less than a decade, and this out of a total population of about four million. Nomadic resettlement was an exercise in geno­cide that Western imperialism would be hard pressed to match, as the historian Robert Conquest has noted."

Paradoxically, in the wake of the First Five-Year Plan's demolition of vernacular traditions in the name of a socialist economy, a call went out in Moscow for a revival of folk art. Denigrated in the late I920S as a dangerous cultural remnant, folklore had become by the mid-I930s an artistic legacy that, according to its proponents, "has been and continues to be a weapon of class conflict.'''' Maxim Gorky, the eminence grise of Socialist Realism as well as Stalin's confidant, provided the folk renaissance with its biggest boost." Since his return from exile

C A S T I L L 0 : S O V l E T 0 R l E N T A L I S M 3 7

FIGURE 3. Elevation, section, and floor plans of a housing prototype for the reset­

tlement of nomads, Viktor Kalmykov, ca. I929-30. (Source: S. 0. Khan­

Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture [London: Thames and Hudson,

I9871J

in I93I, Gorky had advocated a formal synthesis of high litera­ture with the traditional fable as a means of meeting the didac­tic demands of Soviet literature. In his closing remarks to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in I934, Gorky admonished authors to:

Collect your folklore, make a study of it, work it over. . . . The better we come to know the past, the more easily, the more deeply and joyfUlly we shall understand the great significance of the present we are creating/'

The Soviet cultural apparatus was quick to respond. Collecting and studying folklore became primary tasks for regional ethnographic centers. Specimens of native literature suddenly graced the pages of newspapers, and new epic poems and folk songs, considered genuine contemporary examples of their genre, began to appear in I935. Modes of production were revolutionized here as well. Native bards created their composi­tions under the tutelage of ethnographic specialists, thus guar­anteeing the pedigree of the performer, the authenticity of the rendition, and the political correctness of the content.3l Traditional Russian bylina verse rode into the age of steel in an early prototype of this new genre, A.V Morozova's "Of the Miracle Staircase," which appeared in Pravda in December I935. The poem describes a first ride on the Moscow Metro and its escalators from the point of view of a provincial babushka (granny), and ends with reverent thanks to two miracle workers, Lazar Kaganovich and "The great and greatest, Our wise

38 T O S R 8 . 2

Stalin."32 New folklorists sang their praises of leadership in the heroic imagery of myth, establishing a template for all subse­quent public discourse concerning the state. Works by Karelia's Marfa Kriukova, Dagestan's Suleyman Stalsky, Tadjikistan's Munavvar-sho, and many other folk artists from across the USSR, all conformed to the standard creative method.

T H E V E R N AC U LA R AS S Y M B O L

Two exhibitions of the late 1930S, both in Moscow, served as the incubators of the new folklore's architectural equivalent. At the Tretiakov's 1937 exhibit, "Soviet Folk Art," the gallery itself was the canvas. Craftsmen from across Russia painted directly onto walls and door frames in a purposeful experiment. Miniaturists from Palekh tried their hand at frescoes, and for the first time woodworkers from Kudrin worked at the inflated scale of architec­tural features. Critics were enchanted by the results. They pre­dicted that this creative adaptation of regional tradition, properly tailored to monumentality, would yield a new Soviet style.33

The new traditional architecture made its debut at the 1939 All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, or vsKhv in its Russian acronym. Celebrated in the Soviet folklore as "a paradise on earth," the exhibition was originally conceived as a pilgrimage site where collective farmers could absorb the latest develop­ments in Soviet agriculture. A second programmatic mission soon eclipsed that function. Visitors arriving through the main gates were led to a cour d'honneur surrounded by regional and national pavilions. Two thousand artisans had been brought to the fairgrounds from their native lands to contribute their mas­tery of traditional decorative techniques to works designed by academy-trained architects. The most highly acclaimed struc­tures, representing Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, were exercises in hybridity that mounted ornament derived from folk sources on a regulating Neoclassical matrix. Wben viewed from a distance, cultural idiosyncrasies disap­peared in a Beaux Arts display of collective unity. The vsKhv

was remembered in Soviet design histories not as a model farm, but as the Eden in which a family of socialist architectures came into harmonic coexistence.34

Socialist Realism, defined as "national in form and socialist in content," had been espoused as the goal of Soviet architecture for several years preceding the opening of the vsKhv, but practic­ing what the profession was instructed to preach had turned out to be a risky venture. Earlier expressions of national culture had walked a thin line between ideological virtue and the deviance of "bourgeois nationalism." It was a charge that in the mid-1930s had the power to make members of the intelligentsia in non­Russian republics vanish into thin air.35 The question of what constituted an appropriate national heritage was dogged by other paradoxes as well. Wbile Azerbaijani designers were being exhorted to learn from the treasure house of native tradition, for example, the millennial shrine of Bibi Eyat, just outside Baku, was dynamited and backfilled as part of a road-building pro-

ject.36 The socialist expressions of national tradition put on dis­play at the vsKhv may have been formulaic exercises that mea­sured success in terms of Party endorsement, but this by no means demeaned their achievement. Coming on the heels of a purge that had sent bands of "bourgeois nationalists" to the Gulag, it was, in fact, the very basis of the breakthrough.

Socialist Realism's "working over" of folk literature (to use Gorky's apt phrase) , which created state-managed expressions of a cultural gemeimchaft, was mirrored with great fidelity in the vsKhv's approach to architectural tradition. Wbile professional architects and the artisans they supervised quoted from the ver­nacular, this was done creatively rather than slavishly, according to contemporary accounts. Design elements were simplified and religious symbols avoided. New socialist content was injected into traditional motifs. At the Uzbek pavilion, built to the designs of the architect Stepan Polupanov, abstract foliage pat­terns found in native Uzbek ornament were revealed to be cotton plants: the "white gold" of the region's state agricultural collec­tives. The Islamic eight-pointed star motif was here given ten points. Now composed of two superimposed and slightly rotated five-pointed stars, it echoed the famous symbol of Soviet power.37

Vernacular building types were charged with new symbolic meaning as well. The point of departure for Polupanov's design was the Uzbek courtyard dwelling. Rooms in the indigenous prototype turned windowless walls to the outside world, opening instead onto a central court. In prerevolutionary times even the poorest two-room versions would set one of these aside as a women's realm (hiiriim) from which the household's male visitors were banished. In warm weather the focus of domestic life was the courtyard, with its refreshing pool of water, cooking facili­ties, and sleeping platform. The vsKhv's Uzbek pavilion glorified this inner yard, surrounding its pool with a carpet-pat­terned mosaic terrace, and crowning it with a polygonal trellis supported by delicate columns (FIG.4). ''Antiquated and reac­tionary" aspects of Islamic life - the segregation of women

FIGURE 4. Uzbekistan Pavilion at the Moscow All-Union Agricultural

Exhibition, I939: aerial view. Architect: Stepan Polupanov. (Source: A. Voyce,

Russian Architecture [New York: Philosophical Library, I948].)

from men and from the public realm - were expunged from the original building type by peeling away one of its sides. The court of this revised prototype opened directly onto the street, further emphasizing the inner yard's role as a showplace rather than a living space.3' Within the pavilion's richly decorated interior, a panoramic landscape mural framed a view of the Central Asian countryside (FIG. 5) . An architectural journal described the ambiance as that of "a house where the hostess invites guests to see the beauty of the sunny country, its fields full of tractors, (and) precious cotton . . . . "39

The revision of vernacular form used to created this idyll of a socialist Uzbekistan inverted the tropes of Islamic exoti­cism deployed at nineteenth-century colonial expositions. There the claim was that the visitor was seeing native culture in its unadulterated form. In contrast, at the vsKhv pride was taken in the overt manipulation of tradition. Western colonial representation fetishized the mystery of unintelligible calligra­phy and "curious" practices. Socialist Realist representation domesticated the exotic - in the Uzbek case by superimpos­ing upon it the conventions of an idealized collective farm and household. And whereas the colonial exposition froze native cultures "in an ambiguous and distant past," demonstrating them as "incapable of change and advancement," the vsKhv

depicted exotic national cultures converging at full speed upon a predetermined communist destiny.'·

Not all vernacular artifacts, however, were suitable as raw material for the construction of progressive national traditions. Monumental building traditions were the most suitable for recycling. Where these were lacking, "true examples of folk art" - as found in the elaborate window-frame ornament of Karelian wood cottages, for example - could be exploited as a regionalizing motif.4J Perhaps the most daunting task that confronted Soviet architects in the latter 1930S was that of designing buildings to represent cultures "without any national traditions in architecture."" The term applied to peoples who were formerly semi-nomadic, and whose transient housing was a target for state intervention during collectivization. One attempt to resolve the dilemma, illustrated in a ptoject by V Veriuzhsky, used monumentality as an anchor (FIG.G) .

Appropriately enough for its proposed function as a Kirgiz museum, Veriuzhsky's design is a catalogue of regional form. Native textile patterns embroider the ample surfaces of a yurt­like edifice rendered in masonry; a vaguely Doric portico frames four greatly enlarged Khivan columns. The project was to remain unrealized, a fate insured by its attempt to salvage the yurt as a cultural memory worth reprocessing. In a state devoted to eliminating agrarian movement in order to "sever patriarchal and tribal survivals of the past and . . . hasten the development of culture," the vernacular symbol of a nomadic existence was considered too retrograde, both economically and culturally, to constitute the basis for progressive traditional design.'3

A "correct" (by Stalinist standards) resolution of tradition and progress is displayed instead by the headquarters of the "Alisher Navoi" Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, com-

C A S T I L L 0 : S O V l E T 0 R l E N T A L I S M 39

FIGURE 5. (TOP) Uzbekistan Pavilion at the Moscow All-Union Agricultttral

Exhibition, I939: interior. (Source: A. Voyce, Russian Architecture [New

York: Philosophical Library, I948}.)

FIGURE 6. (BOTTOM) Design for a Kirgiz museum in Frunze, Kirgizistan.

Architect: V Veriuzhsky. (Source: VB. Veimarn, Arkhitektura respublik

Srednei Azii [Moscow: Gosudarsvennoe lzadtelstvo Arkhitektury i

Gradostroitelstva, I95Ij.)

pIe ted in 1947 in Tashkent. The home of art forms alien to native Uzbek culture, Tashkent's opera house was named for a fifteenth-century bard, Mir Ali Shir, who appended the nom­de-guerre "Navai," or "the melodious," to his writings in the Chatagay language (he was "the transitory" - "Pani" - to his Arabic and Persian readers) . Alisher Navoi, as he became known to Uzbeks, enjoyed a posthumous career as Uzbekistan's "national poet." His monumental namesake structure was designed by Alexei Shchusev, a Moscow architect who achieved legendary status as the creator of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. Tashkent's opera house, his final work, was rewarded with a Stalin Prize, First Class.

The hierarchies embodied in this building, both in physi­cal form and labor organization, summarize the Orientalist dis­courses of late-Stalinist architecture. The delicately carved stucco ornament (gdnch) showcased throughout the interior

40 T D S R 8 . 2

was executed by local artisans, who were supervised by craft masters, who in turn labored under the watchful eye of a Western-style professional. At the very bottom of the pyramid were the forced laborers who provided the muscle for unskilled construction tasks, and who, by the mid-I940S, were mostly Japanese prisoners of war."

Externally, the opera house is a neoclassical mass accented with exotic details (FIG.7). Within this "nativized" shell, walls were graced with themes from ancient miniature paintings (here inflated to the scale of murals) , ornamental bands inscribed with the words of the prophets (Lenin and Stalin) , and an Oriental carpet proclaiming the twenty-fifth anniver­sary of socialist Uzbekistan. The diversity encompassed within the republic's bounds was catalogued in six celebrated foyers. Each was executed in a distinctive manner identified as that of a specific region; each bore the name of that region's main city: Khiva, Samarkand, Bukhara, Termez, Fergana and Tashkent. In the Bukhara foyer, carved tracery recapitulated the organic and geometric patterns found on local carpets, overhead beams bristled with honeycomb muqarnas, and hanging fixtures filtered electric light through perforated arabesques (FIG.8) . Wall panels in the Tashkent foyer paraphrased the traditional motif of a floral bouquet framed by a Muslim ogee arch. Stylistic traditions corresponded as nicely to administrative centers in these interiors, as language, ethnicity and geography did to the Stalinist construct of a national identity. Tashkent's opera house was more than a public monument "which could well grace any European capita!," in the words of two English visitors.'s It was a hybrid of the extremely familiar and the extremely exotic, the product of a culture steeped in ancient Oriental traditions, yet conversant with arias, electrical wiring diagrams, and the collected works of Lenin - precisely the dialectic that Socialist Realism created and resolved in its invention of a Soviet "East."

All six master artisans charged with creating interiors for Tashkent's new opera house - Shirin Muradov, Tashpulat Aslankulov, Kuli Dzhanilov, Abdulla Boltaev, Gaibulla Nigmatov, and Said Narkoziev (to use their Russified names, as was done in Soviet publications) - were inducted as honorary members of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences.'6 Tributes bestowed upon these and other indigenous artists under the patronage of Socialist Realism were publicized as proof of Soviet resistance to Western imperialism's destruction of craft tradi­tions (FIG.9). In the late nineteenth century, the British social­ist and craft enthusiast William Morris had decried this aspect of the British Raj, lamenting that the "beautiful works of the East . . . [are] fast disappearing before the advance of Western conquest and commerce . . . . "" Soviet texts of the 1930S aired the same condemnation of colonial capitalism. It had drawn Russia's distant periphery "into world commodity circulation, wiping away its local characteristics, ruining its ancient handi­craft industries, turning it into a market for manufactures.""

In the case of Soviet Central Asia, the charges were mis­leading. As noted earlier, Soviet state retailing was also respon-

FIGURE 7. Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet namedfor Alisher Navoi,

Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I940-47: exterior view. Architect: Alexei Shchusev.

(Source: KN Afonasev, Proizvedeniia Akademika A.V Shchuseva Udostoennye

Sralinskoi Premii (Moscow: Ikdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, I954}.)

sible for undermining the bazaar's viability - and by extension its native crafts - by flooding the market with cheap goods. In addition, traditional architectural handicraft had also found its own market niche under Tsarist rule, and had survived quite nicely in the service of capital. In Samarkand alone, the local school of builders had produced sixteen major projects in the two decades before the Revolution. Almost all of these consist­ed of buildings incompatible with the new regime: mosques, madrasas, private mansions, a ritual ablutions facility ( tdharatkhand) , and a Jewish synagogue." This late resurgence of native craft accounted for the survival of the ornamental techniques exploited in Socialist Realist extravaganzas like Tashkent's opera and the pavilions of the vsKhv. Under the previous mode of production, however, craft masters like Shirin Muradov were not merely specialists in carved stucco, but repositories of a comprehensive architectural tradition that included all aspects of building design.so Socialist Realism indeed perpetuated some aspects of folk art, rehearsing a colo­nial model of cultural exchange in the process. Like the Indo­Saracenic architecture of the British Raj, it provided a stylistic framework in which masters of indigenous construction were reduced to specialists in the decorative arts working under the supervision of outside "expertS ." In Soviet Central Asia, as in British India, the process reconstituted vernacular tradition to suit the needs of a foreign power.S I

C H A N G E S I N U R B A N F O R M

While proponents of Socialist Realism found beauty in local ornament, they had no patience for indigenous urban form. Even the bards of the new folklore rallied against the native city. A "song of wonder" by the Tadjik poet Munavvar­sho began with an inventory of Asiatic memories, like that of a "multitudinous bazaar where the silence is never broken," only

C A S T I L L O · S O V l E T 0 R l E N T A L I S M 4 1

FIGURE 8. Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet named for Alisher Navoi, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I940-47: interior view of the Bukhara foyer. Architect: Alexei

Shchusev. (Source: KN Afonasev, Proizvedeniia Akademika AV Shchuseva Udostoennye Stalinskoi Premii [Moscow: Ikdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, I954].)

to dispense with such trifles in a paean to the miraculous new capital of Stalinabad, which held him transfixed by its "great, big square with clubs and cars and cinemas and factories and lights."" Soviet Orientalists and urban historians concurred. Their investigations revealed that Central Asian cities had been in decline since the end of the fifteenth century. Straight streets marked by domed intersections, long consumed in the snarl of unregulated incremental construction, had been built during a lost golden age. Stagnation was manifest in the centuries of subsequent city building which had "preserved the traditional forms without making any innovations." This unhappy state of affairs came to an end with the introduction of Russian imperial rule. Irs military new towns were artifacts of "a more progressive culture . . . distinguished by the breadth of their streets, by their parks and public gardens."53

Praise for nineteenth-century garrison-town planning was based on teleology rather than history. The true referent was

Moscow's urban improvement scheme of 1935, the so-called "Stalin Plan" (FIG.IO) . Irs renderings showed a city in which virtually every structure outside the Kremlin walls would be razed and rebuilt. In accord with "the masterly suggestions of Stalin concerning the development of the construction of cities of the USSR in general, and of Moscow in particular," the new capital would be composed of solidly framed street corridors, symmetrical building ensembles, and vast expanses of formal park landscape: an townscape promoted as the universal signifier of progress.54 This design formula would purge the capital of any resemblance to an older Moscow characterized by "Russian backwardness, Asiatic ways, merchant extrava­gance, clerical obscurationism, and extreme exploitation of the workers and toilers ." Particularly unloved were "narrow, crooked, filthy, ill-smelling, dusty, and unpaved streets, with numerous lanes and blind alleys . . . ": reminders of a Moscow mocked by sophisticates as "the big village."55

42 T D S R 8 2

FIGURE 9. (TOP) Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet named for Alisher

Navoi, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I940-47: craftsman Tashpulat Aslankulov in the

Tashkent foyer. (Source: KN Afonasev, Proizvedeniia Akademika AV

Shchuseva Udostoennye Stalinskoi Premii [Moscow: Ikdatelstvo Akademii

Nauk SSSR, I954].)

FIGURE 10. (BOTTOM) "Stalin" plan for Moscow, I935, shown on crest on

Club of Architecture Union. Designer-in-chief Vladimir Semenov. (Photo by

Greg Castillo.)

The fetish for arrow-straight streets and wide, open plazas boded poorly for the tight-knit urbanism indigenous to Central Asia. Moscow's 1935 plan was promoted as a model for emulation, and master plans such as that by M. Bulatov for Samarkand were drawn up throughout the USSR by local archi­tects in collaboration with colleagues from Moscow and Leningrad (FIG.II).,6 An aerial perspective of Bulatov's plan reveals Muscovite precedent in its planned web of radial and ring boulevards dividing the city into administrative quadrants, the parceling of land into superblocks, and the convergence of this new urban fabric on an enormous square designed to accommodate mass pageantry. Of the native city's landmarks, only the Timurid-era Registan complex, the Bibi Khanum mosque, and Timur's tomb appear to be preserved, a telling indication of the monumental and archeological biases of the Socialist Realist notion of tradition.

The eradication of tortuous lanes in the former old town suggests that the new Samarkand was to be a city built for speed, and perhaps surveillance. Colonial administrators in the previous century had been frustrated by the tangle of window­less alleys in native districts, which concealed inhabitants from census takers, public-health officers, and the police. Modern transportation imperatives had provided a rationale for minor interventions in the 1920S, when massive gates which had sealed off native neighborhoods at sundown began to be kept open around the clock to permit the passage of buses.57 With its unobstructed thoroughfares and panoptic organization, Samarkand's new plan was not only a bus driver's dream, but that of a colonial official as well, permitting the administrator's gaze to penetrate every urban quarter.

As in the case of many other Soviet cities, Samarkand was spared the totalizing redevelopment prescribed by its 1939 master plan. Financing for urban construction was more often guided by the pragmatic needs of industrial ministries than the aesthetic and ideological inclinations of city administrators and their archi­tects. Except in the case of showplace cities (and, later, cities rav­aged by war) , funds were not often available for the tabula rasa approach to urban renewal depicted in the plans of the 1930S.

An unfortunate exception was that of Tashkent. Considered the most "advanced" city of the region, it bore the standard imprint of Russian colonialism in its division into a nineteenth­century new town and an Islamic old town. The latter was a wellhead of ''Asiatic'' impressions that muddled the city's repre­sentational role as a national capital. Old Tashkent's memories were given this stream-of-consciousness inventory by Nikolai Mikhailov, a Russian geographer writing in the late 1930S:

. . . an ant-heap of clay huts with no windows facing the street, flat roofi, a labyrinth of narrow streets as tor­tuous as the path of a worm in a tree- trunk; the sinister reticence of the Mussulman family; the lack of rights for women before men, and men before the authorities; nests of white storks on the minarets of the mosques; the confosed and noisy activity of the oriental bazaar. 58

C A S T I L L 0 : S 0 V l E T 0 R l E N T A L I S M 43

FIGURE II. Samarkand master plan: detail of aerial perspective view, I937-39. Architect: M. Bulatov. (Photo courtesy of Mamfo Tokhtakhodzhaeva, Uzbek

Institute for the Restoration of Architectural Monuments, Tashkent.)

To lay claim to a more fitting image of Uzbekistan's first city, Alisher Navoi Street, designed by M. Bulatov and V.

Smirnov, was cut through the old town in 1943 to broaden and straighten the course of what had been known previously as Dzharkucha Street (FIG.I2) . Navoi Street penetrated the old town with an extension of the arterial network native to the colonial district, demolishing every indigenous structure in its path. From a Socialist Realist perspective, the displacement of Tashkent's oldest neighborhoods by the new monuments of Alisher Navoi Street in no way implied an abandonment of tradition, but rather the careful mending of its flaws. The finished product was another triumph of the progressive social­ist East over its Asiatic Other. "Now there is a women's club here, a medical technical school, a printing press, and the Uzbek National Theater," Mikhailov thrilled. "In the heart of the 'old' town, which till quite recently was a stronghold of Islam, there stands a monument to Lenin. "59

The victory was demographic as well as ideological. As in

all Soviet Central Asian cities, the cleft structure inherited from colonial times was reflected in continued ethnic segregation, with almost all Russians residing in the new town and Uzbeks and Tadjiks in the old. Demolition of the mahalia's housing stock eliminated the option of cultural insularity for many of its former residents. Mikhailov noted that "most important of all changes is the fact that many Uzbek doctors, engineers, pro­fessors, and industrial workers live in the new town now . . . . " According to the official narrative, the native city's disappear­ance was accompanied by an apparition. The long-awaited socialist subjectivity, ethnically varied and uniformly classed, was observed at home in the zone formerly associated with colonial occupation, but now absolved of that legacy. In the wake of extensive demolition, almost all of Tashkent had become the new town.

The emergence of a "New Man," multinational in form and socialist in content, proved to be more apparent than real. Ethnic segregation remained a fact in cities with intact mahalla

44 T D S R 8 . 2

districts. In apartments where Slavs and Central Asians mixed, the latter were disgusted by the constant smell of cooking pork, the former by noisy neighbors unaware of how one lived 's drugimi" (with others) . Russians continued to perceive the diet, dress and rites of Muslim culture as Asiatic vestiges best expunged from modern life. In accord with the ongoing cele­bration of Soviet socialism's cultural specificity, Central Asians regarded these legacies as legitimate components of a modern ethnic identity."o Stalin had defined national identity as a sin­gle, carefully delimited element in the construct of a socialist post-colonial subjectivity. Non-Russians with increasing fre­quency saw nationalism, and the body of cultural traditions that were its signifier, as post-colonialism incarnate: a synec­dochic revision that contained the seeds of the New Man's unmaking. Socialist nationalism proved, in the end, to be an unstable hybrid that reverted to its "bourgeois" stock in the absence of ruthless pruning.

LATT E R- DAY VA R I A N T S

Soviet architecture's manifestations of regional tradition went into a brief remission during Khrushchev's war on those aspects of the recent past that seemed "Asiatic" in their own right - namely the "Oriental despotism" of the Stalin era and the barbaric splendor of its monuments. Authentically socialist architecture suddenly became synonymous with mass production and an industrial kit of parts. The public rela­tions spectacle of Central Asian artisans posed beside stucco filigree now made way for shots of their younger counterparts in hard hats, hoisting precast panels. But while handicraft of the time-honored variety was out, local ornament soon caught up with the times and came back in. By the late 1960s, standard Soviet glazing details were disappearing

FIGURE 12. (LEFT> Reconstruction plan for Alisher

Navoi Street, Tashkent, I943. Architects: M

Bulatov and V Smirnov. (Photo courtesy of

Martifa Tokhtakhodzhaeva, Uzbek Institute for the

Restoration of Architectural Monuments, Tashkent.)

FIGURE 13. (BELOW) Concrete-panel housing,

Uzbekistan. (Photo courtesy of Pietro Calogero,

Calthorpe Associates, Berkeley, CA.)

behind exterior light baffles of vaguely Islamic configuration. Concrete-paneled housing slabs received larger-than-life vari­ants ofTimurid tile patterns on their windowless stub ends (FIG.13) . By the 1980s, traditional motifs had become almost mandatory in public construction of every sort. Tashkent's Maxim Gorky Russian Drama Theater, bordering a new civic center, featured an overhanging cornice of precast concrete fins suggesting the muqarnas found on mosques of a bygone era (FIG. I4) . The city's television tower and revolving restau­rant introduced the minaret to the space age, and under­ground metro stops were a tour of contemporary design's archeological reminiscences. To the uninitiated, these appli­cations of tradition had more in common with generic kitsch than with local craft, but they held a cultural message deci­pherable by those with a previous knowledge of the language, although now layered with unintended meanings. The exu­berance with which local ornament was being reproduced and propagated at the periphery drove Moscow's design authorities to ponder just why it was that the issue of nation-

R E F E R E N C E N OT E S

C A S T I L L o · S O V l E T 0 R l E N T A L I S M 4 5

al tradition in architecture so often seemed to be the propri­etary domain of non-Russian republics .61

The building rype that invariably received the full allot­ment of contemporary tradition was the "palace of culture." Every major ciry in Soviet Central Asia got one, and always in a ptominent place. Samarkand's went up beside other build­ings executed in the modern Oriental manner as part of a new civic center. The project owed two debts to Stalinist design precedent: one in the vast scale of its central plaza, the other in its location. The plaza 'and its administrative and cultural institutions were planted at the edge of the old town, at the confluence of the colonial district's main avenues - precisely where Bulatov's 1939 ciry master plan showed a square sur­rounded by an architectural ensemble flush with Orientalisms of a lower-tech order. Until the 1960s this site had belonged to an ancient citadel, long considered a hindrance in the integra­tion of modern socialist Samarkand and its Asiatic counterpart. The structure's demolition to make way for demonstrations of mass identiry recalled a Stalin-era slogan: "There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm!" Given the ends to which their cultivation of national tradition was eventually put, one should add that there turned out to be fortresses from which Bolsheviks could not escape, even if they happened to have been the architects.

FIGURE 14. Russian Drama Theater named for Maxim Gorky, I977' con­

struction progress as of I993. Architects: Yt"i Khaldeyev et al. (Photo courtesy

of Pietro Calogero, Calthorpe Associates, Berkeley, CA.)

I. Of course, the spectrum of locally and histor­

ically specific constructions of ethnographic

Otherness ranges far beyond the limits of Anglo­

European imperialism. As in the Soviet case,

many of these have also spawned subsequent

"imagined communities" of national identity. To

consider all of them in relation ro Soviet

Orientalism would demand comparisons of the

USSR with Fascist Italy, Kemalist Turkey, Spanish­

colonial portrayals of Mesoamerica and the reverse

discourse of "La Raza," Ghandi's invocation of

British Raj prejudices to spin a nationalist vision

of an eternal Indian village nation, and so forth

- a task clearly beyond the scope of this paper. I

conceive my assignment instead as the complica­

tion of the construct of Orientalism proposed by

Edward Said; this I attempt through consideration

of the Soviet deployment of parallel tropes within

a Socialist Realist epistemology which included a

Marxist/Leninist discipline also called

"Orientalism" by its scholarly proponents.

2. In a 1993 interview with David Barsamian

(published as "The Pen and the Sword" in

Design Book Review 29/30, PP.I3-23), Said notes:

"Interestingly enough, I'm not really concerned

with the kind of imperialism that one finds in

Russia, where the Russians simply advanced by

adjacents. They moved east and south, whatever

was near them. I'm much more interested in the

way the Europeans, the British and French pre­

dominantly, were able ro jump away from their

shores and pursue a policy of overseas domina­

tion." The author's explanation is remarkable

for a number of reasons. Taken literally, it envis­

ages Russians as non-Europeans, and reinforces

rather than dismantles a Western Orientalist

conception of Russia's Asiatic "Otherness." It

rehearses the nineteenth-century notion of land­

based expansion as categorically different than its

overseas counterpart, a geopolitical rationaliza­

tion common to both Russian and American

imperialism. Finally, Said's explanation is, of

course, factually inaccurate. By the early nine­

teenth century the Tsarist domain had vaulted

across the Bering Straits to include Alaska and

trading posts located in what is today California.

46 T D S R 8 2

3. VG. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism:

studies (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), p.67, as

quoted in E. Said, Culture and Imperialism

(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993), p.lI.

4- "Za dalneishii podyem sovetskogo vos­

tokovedeniya" ["To Further Advance Soviet

Orientalism"] ' Kommunist 8 (May 1955), as cited

in "Soviet Oriental Studies: The Need for

Further Development," Central Asian Review 3,

NO·3 (1955), p.252.

5. Ibid, P·256.

6. For a discussion of the history of this conti­

nental division, see M. Bassin, "Russia Berween

Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction

of Geography," Slavic Review I (1990), pp.I-I7.

7. VI. Lamanskii, Tri mira Aziiskogo­

Evropeiskogo materika (Petrograd, 1916), pp.15-

16, as quoted in Bassin, "Russia berween Eutope

and Asia," p.13.

8 . On the Marx's notion of the Asiatic, see

KA Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A

Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven:

Yale, 1957).

9. K Marx, Surveys From Exile, David Fernbach,

ed. (London, 1973), as quoted in E. Said,

Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), P.154.

ro. F Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung 15

February 1849, as translated in N. Weyl, Karl

Marx, Racist (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington

House, 1979), p.12o.

II. For an account of this development in

Soviet historiography, see L. Tillett, The Great

Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian

Nationalities (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina, 1969).

12. Leon Trotsky, as quoted in H.C

d'Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities

and the Bolshevik State I9I7-I930 (New York:

Holmes & Meyer, 1992), P.159.

13 . AL. Strong, Red Star in Samarkand (New

York: Coward-McCann, 1929), p.roo.

14· Pravda, NO.253 (9 November 1922), as

quoted in V Tolstoy, I. Bibikova, and C Cook,

eds., Street Art of the Revolution (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1990), p.143.

15 . For a discussion of the relationship berween

Soviet modernism and demolition, see G .

Castillo, "Constructivism and the Stalinist

Company Town," in Urban Design Studies 2

(Greenwich, England: 1996).

16. Strong, Red Star, pp.129-34.

17· Ibid., pp.86-87·

18. Ibid. , p.145. The bazaar would spring back

to life by the late 1930S, when the state tem-

pered its policy on private sales of foodstuffs as

a means of addressing their chronic scarcity.

19. For the history and ourcome of this policy,

see G. Massell, Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem

Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet

Central Asia, I9I9-I929 (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1974).

20. FJ. Jankunis, Samarkand· An Urban Study

(Ann Arbor: University Mictofilms, 1970), P.153.

21. R. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet

Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1986), P.19I.

22. A similar anchoring of domesticity eradicat­

ed Russian avant-garde proposals for modernist

mobile housing and "destationized" models of

urbanity. See V Paperny, "Men, women, and

the living space," in WC Brumfield and B.A

Ruble, eds., Russian Housing in the Modern Age:

Design and Social History (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1993), PP.152-60.

23. M. Bliznakov, "International Modernism or

Socialist Realism: Soviet Architecture in the

Eastern Republics," in ].0. Norman, ed., New

Perspectives on Russian and Soviet Artistic Culture

(London: The Macmillan Press, 1992), P.Il7.

For a discussion of the continuities berween

Soviet modernism and Socialist Realism, see B.

Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde,

Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, Charles

Rougle, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1992); and with respect to architecture, G.

Castillo, "Classicism for the Masses: Books on

Stalinist Architecture," Design Book Review

35/36 (Winter/Spring 1995), PP-78-88.

24- Boris Krinitsky, cited in WP and Z.K

Coates, Soviets in Central Asia (London:

Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., 1951), P.153.

25· Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, PP.193,196.

26. K Junghanns, "Deutsche Architekten in der

Sowjet Union wahrend der erste Funfjahrplan

und des Vaterlandischen Krieges," in

Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift fitr Architektur und

Bauwesen 29 (Weimar, 1983), as cited in A Kopp,

"Foreign Architects in the Soviet Union during

the First Two Five-Year Plans, in Architecture and

the New Urban Environment: Western Influences

on Modernism in Russia and the USSR

(Washington: Woodrow Wilson International

Center for Scholars, 1988), pp.33-34-

27. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, P.190.

28. Iu.M. Sokolov, "Piroda folklora i problemy

folkloristiki" ["The Nature of Folklore and

Problems of Folkloristics"] ' Literaturni kritik 12

(1934), P.127, cited in FJ. Miller, Folklore for

Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of

the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,

1990), p·7·

29. According to contemporary observers,

Gorky's relationship with Stalin was one of con­

siderable influence. Boris Nicolaevsky claimed

that Gorky "remained until his death the only

person whom Stalin was compelled to take into

consideration, to some extent at least," See B.

Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: "The

Letter of an Old Bolshevik" and Other Essays

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975),

p.62. The author Isaac Babel went even further,

claiming in 1932 that when Stalin was out of

town, Gorky acted as an informal "number rwo

man." See Boris Souvarine, as quoted in M.

Heller and A Nekrich, Utopia in Power (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), P.73.

30. Maxim Gorky, as cited in Miller, Folklore

for Stalin, p.8.

31. K Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as

Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1981, 1985), pp.147-52.

32. A.V Morozova, "Of the Miracle Staircase,"

FJ. Miller, trans. , in Miller, Folklore for Stalin,

PP·152-54-

33. C Borngraber, "Nationale und regionale

Bauformen in der sowjetischen Architektur,"

Archithese 3 (1981), pp·44-47·

34. On the history and mythology of the

vsKhv, see I. Belinceva, ">Das Paradies auf

Erden<, oder wie die Allunions-landwittschaft­

sausstellung gebaut wurde," in P. Noever, ed.,

Tjrannei des Schiinen: archite!etur der Stalin-zeit

(Munich: Prestel, 1994), PP.189-91; Borngraber,

"Nationale und regionale Bauformen"; G.

Castillo, "Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet

Architecture and the National Question," in T.

Lahusen and E. Dobrenko, eds., Socialist

Realism without Shores, special issue of South

Atlantic Quarterly, 94, NO.3 (Summer 1995),

Pp.715-46; J . Gambrel, "The Wonder of the

Soviet World," The New York Review of Books

41, NO.21 (December 22, 1994), Pp.30-35, and V

Paperny, Kultura Dva (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985).

35. For a review of some of the effects of the

purges of the 1930S on the native intelligentsia

of the non-Russian republics, see R. Conquest,

The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1990), PP.250-90.

36. T. Dragadze, "Azerbaijanis," in G. Smith,

ed., The Nationalities Question in the Soviet

Union (London, 1990), p.166.

37. I. Rabinovich, "Arkhitekturnye motivy nat-

sional'nykh pavil'onov" ["Architectural Motifs

of the National Pavilions"] , Arkhitektura SSSR

No. 1 (1939), pp.12-13·

38. J. Jaralow, "Nation ale Zlige in der

Architektur der Unions­

Landwinschaftsausstellung in Moskau,"

Deutsche Architektur No.6 (1954), PP.255-56.

39. Ya. Kornfeld, "Arkhitektura vysravki"

["Exhibition architecture"]' Arkhitektura SSSR

NO·7 (1939), p.16.

40. Z. <;:elik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture

of Islam at Nineteenth-Century Worlds Fairs

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, (992), P.56.

41. N. Mikhailov, Land of the Soviets: A

Handbook of the USSR (New York: Lee Furman

Inc., (939), p.m.

42. Kornfeld, "Arkhitektura vystavki," P.19.

43. Mikhailov, Land of the Soviets, p·312.

44. Coates, Soviets in Central Asia, p.266.

45· Ibid., PP·265-66.

46. K.N. Afanasev, Proizvedeniia Akademika

A. V. Shchuseva Udostoennye Stalinskoi Premii

[ The Works of Academician A. V. Shchusev, Stalin

Prize Recipient] (Moscow: Ikdatel'srvo Akademii

Nauk SSSR, (954), p.62.

47. W Morris, "The Art of the People," an

address delivered before the Birmingham

Society of Art, 19 February 1879, as cited in T.R.

Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture

and Britains Raj (Berkeley and Los Angeles,

University of California Press, (989), P.153.

48. Mikhailov, Land of the Soviets, P·241.

49. A. Sprague, "Modernizing Architecture,

Art, and Town Plans," in E. Allworth, ed.,

Central Asia: IJO Years of Russian Dominance, A

Historical Overview (Durham: Duke University

Press, (994), P·490.

50. Ibid. , p.516.

51. On the Indo-Saracenic style advanced by

Britain's Raj, see Metcalf, An Imperial Vision,

PP·55-I75·

52. J. Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand (New

York: Covici Friede Publishers, (935), P.15.

53. VA. Lavrov, Gradostroitel'naya kul'tura sred­

ney Azii [ The city-building civilization of central

Asia] (Moscow: State Publishing House of

Architecture and Town Planning, 1950), as cited

in "Central Asian Town Planning in the Middle

Ages," Central Asian Review 4, NO.1 (1956),

p.65·

54. L. Perchik, The Reconstruction of Moscow

(Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of

Foreign Workers in the USSR, (936), P.19.

55. Ibid. , p.I2.

56. T.F. Kadirova, Arkhitektura Sovetskogo

Uzbekistana [Architecture of the Soviet

Uzbekistan] (Moscow: Stroiizdat, (987), P.52.

57. Strong, Red Star in Samarkand, p.130.

58. Mikhailov, Land of the Soviets, p.294.

59· Ibid., P·295·

60. R. Wixman, "Ethnic Attitudes and

Relations in Modern Uzbek Cities," in W

Fierman, ed., Soviet Central Asia: The Failed

Transformation (Boulder, co: The Wesrview

Press, (991), PP.163,1lJ.

61. A. Ikonnikov, "The live traditions of

Russian architecture," Architectural Design 57,

NOS·7i8 (1987), P·27·

C A S T I L L O : S O V I E T O R I E N T A L I S M 47