ABSTRACT
Modernity has had to bear a lot of work over the years. In this chapter I use the concept in two related senses: as it figures in international architectural history and as it was applied for much of the Soviet period within the USSR itself. It is crucial to keep in mind both usages in order to understand how Soviet architects and town planners could be among the chief beneficiaries of the increasing identification of the USSR as a modern society. For, operating in the name of a Socialist modernity that they identified as an extension of the most progressive features of international modernism, the architects, engineers, and urban planners who designed new Soviet cities in the 1960s and ’70s occupied a powerful technocratic and transnational space. They used this discursive space to redefine urban physical spaces within the USSR, particularly, though not exclusively, in new cities. The failings of the First and Third World versions of international architectural modernism have been attributed to excessive (or “high”) modernism; those of its Soviet socialist application were not, as some would argue, the result of insufficient modernism, but rather insufficient socialism.
