ABSTRACT
The forced collectivisation of the late 1920s dramatically transformed the Soviet rural landscape into a literal site of class struggle. It came with negative consequences for the country's ecology as the majority of the population became displaced from its land. Several decades later, after Stalin's death, despite the emergence of the Soviet Union from the politically centralised isolation and its rapid horizontal expansion towards the periphery, the new leader Nikita Khrushchev continued to force the country through the strenuous process of industrialisation without regard to the environmental and social damage that had already been done. Despite the new government's little attention to the devastating effects of forced industrialisation, the renewed sense of freedom marked the formation of the Soviet civil society and a politicisation of the environmental subject in architectural practice that previously remained peripheral to mainstream dialectical Marxism. Departing from Marxist ecological critique of capitalism as well as Soviet ecological thought and environmental movements emerging during late socialism, these changes in Soviet unofficial architecture could be traced through the gradual intensification and plasticisation of form. The emerging understanding of architecture as environment as well as its formal “identification” with the concept of nature – no longer peripheral but now essential to the Marxist theory, triggered the conceptualisation of “national” landscape and “nature” itself as central agencies of political change.
