ABSTRACT
In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Soviet Union underwent a programme of urban development and new-town construction on a scale unimaginable in Europe. Its mission was to ‘catch up and outstrip’ the capitalist world in industrial output and to do so, in Lenin’s famous words, by ‘building upon those reserves of knowledge developed over the centuries by capitalism’.1 In urban planning and management, as in industry, Russia’s own ‘reserves of knowledge’ were modest, and after ten years lost in revolution and civil war, that knowledge was outdated and the fabric appallingly run down. The new Soviet state, therefore, had to acquire and apply the latest technologies available from the capitalist West. But the organisational aspirations, and hence the spatial organisation, were to be socialist.
