“Down with the Skyscrapers of Historical Backwardness,” or the Paradoxes of the Disurbanist Revolution

What architectural and spatial shape should a socialist society take? This was a question of heated debate in post-revolutionary Russia, all the more so in the late 1920s and early 1930s, once the survival of the Bolshevik state seemed assured and the focus could turn to constructing its infrastructures. This essay examines one short-lived but significant episode in the history of Soviet architecture and urban planning: the disurbanist philosophy of “new resettlement,” formulated in 1929 by the sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich (1896–1937), as a fundamentally Marxist program. In conversation with but more radical than Le Corbusier’s circulatory city plans, and anticipating Frank Lloyd Wright’s disappearing city, Okhitovich’s theory of disurbanism proposed to do away with urban space altogether.[1]

Disurbanism’s imagining of a territorially decentralized society and its rejection of communalism in architecture put it at odds with the prevailing views of the day and have been read as a sign of opposition to the politics of early Stalinism and the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932).[2] Okhitovich, “Soviet architecture’s most famous martyr,” was briefly expelled from the Party in 1928 as a member of the Left Opposition; he would be arrested in 1935 and executed two years later.[3] Yet many of disurbanism’s tenets—the tight linking of living with industrial work, for example—were in sync with the policies of the Five-Year Plan and its modernization drive. Others, such as the disurbanist call for a technologically determined society in the name of developing individuality, were even more radical.

Far from a Garden City, disurbanism was a unique approach that seemed to arise out of a host of contradictions: it took capitalist development as the basis of future communism; saw the uneven progress of Soviet industrialization as allowing for far more advanced infrastructure than in the industrialized West; imagined a hyper-technologized society drowning in green space; proposed a profoundly mobile settlement structure that enabled the inactivity of its residents; and was based on ruthlessly standardized housing in the name of individuality. This seemingly futuristic vision, moreover, took its inspiration from the present and amplified its tendencies, such as decentralization and division of labor. The progressive claims were hence founded on a premise that might, at first glance, seem reactionary: disurbanism insisted not on transforming ongoing social and technological processes but on following them. The rearguard was not the opposite of the vanguard but its inescapable foundation.

Socialist Dispersal

The theory of disurbanism emerged in 1929 as part of the debates around the future of socialist city-building and “socialist resettlement” or “socialist dispersal” (sotsialisticheskoe rasselenie).[4] The two lines of thought that dominated this discussion—the “urbanist” and “disurbanist” camps—both sought to address the overwhelming housing crisis of the time, especially evident in urban areas where population numbers had exploded after the end of the Civil War. Both were in agreement that megapolises were a capitalist phenomenon to be undone through an alternative planning system, and both, following Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin, suggested a diffusive model of spatial organization.[5] In parallel with the ongoing Soviet attempts to reform the material conditions of everyday life, or byt, into a more socialist form of relation, both the “urbanists” and “disurbanists” aimed to design housing that would loosen the attachment to family and to private property, the latter of which was arguably exacerbated by the makeshift collectivizing of living space under conditions of extreme housing shortage.[6] Both called for dispersing the handful of overpopulated and congested metropolises (primarily Moscow and Leningrad) in favor of a more territorially uniform distribution of production centers and living quarters, an approach in lockstep with the First Five-Year Plan’s development of major industrial centers and regions, from the Donbas to the Urals (fig. 1).

The crucial difference between these two lines of thought was the scale of such distribution: the “urbanists,” led by Leonid Sabsovich, called for the creation of settlements of forty to a hundred thousand residents, while the “disurbanists,” with Okhitovich at the helm, proposed beading smaller production centers and accompanying settlements along “ribbons” of road and electric and communication arteries that would stretch across the entire territory of the Soviet Union (figs. 2–3). The scalar difference characterized not only the size of settlements but also the proposed housing systems: while the “urbanists” called for large house-communes with up to four thousand residents, the “disurbanists” insisted on individual housing units, with each resident receiving a separate dwelling. “Instead of a house-commune” they proposed a voluntarily organized “commune of houses,” which would comprise an expansive grid of settlements, and a nearly uniform distribution of population across housing units.[7]

The “house-commune” was an already-existing phenomenon, if not on such grand scale: none other than Moisei Ginzburg, one of the central figures of the Constructivist Organization of Contemporary Architects, or OSA (Organizatsiia sovremennykh arkhitektorov), had designed its best-known example, Narkomfin. Construction concluded in 1930. An ambitious housing complex in Moscow, Narkomfin was conceived as a “social condenser,” a building meant to facilitate the move from family- and individual-based apartments to a form of collective living.[8] One of Narkomfin’s key aspects was its organization around small units or “cells” (iacheika) of limited space and minimal household appliances. Fundamentally, this was meant to serve as structural encouragement to move potentially communal activities—such as eating, exercising, and studying—into collective spaces. (Some elements of Narkomfin’s plan, in particular the building’s relationship to green space, are nevertheless formally consonant with disurbanist ideas.) And while OSA was a fairly pluralistic group, its members had, until 1929, predominantly gravitated towards the design of urbanistic and communal spaces. Yet it was also OSA, with Ginzburg at the helm, that made the development of disurbanist theory its main task at the turn of the decade.

Disurbanism’s origin story is anecdotal: Ginzburg’s colleagues recalled that he was won over in one afternoon by Okhitovich, who was apparently shopping around his newfangled theory of “socialist dispersal” and dropped in on Ginzburg unknown and unannounced. Contemporaries described Okhitovich, with a mix of equal parts awe and exasperation, as a semi-messianic figure (fig. 4).[9] Okhitovich had no training or working experience with the built environment or urban planning, nor was he part of any architecture-adjacent social circles. Yet he proposed a radical new solution to the problems plaguing socialist construction at levels both infrastructural and political. Structuring (some might say atomizing) living space around the smallest possible common denominator, a person, and in turn distributing construction across the entire national expanse, he argued, would undo social divisions that continued to beleaguer actually-existing socialism, most notably the patriarchal family and the division between town and country.

The End of the City

Okhitovich viewed the disappearance of the city as a historical inevitability. The city’s self-combustion would arise from а set of internal contradictions. The tempo of modern life powered the exponential relationship between the premium placed on time (the commute from one’s residence to place of work) and space (the rising price of land and rent).[10] Yet technological developments meant to alleviate the shortage of time and space would only exacerbate them: as modern transport in all its possible forms (trams, buses, trains, and personal automobiles) was brought in to speed up travel between different areas of the city, the streets became increasingly congested, in turn slowing transport to a halt.

At the root of this problem, Okhitovich argued, was the spatial division of labor. If a city was initially a site where production, commerce, and consumption were united (as had been, according to Okhitovich, the case for most of human history), in the run up to the industrial revolution, with the arrival of manufacture (manufaktura), the sites of consumption and exchange became separated, and eventually the place of residence was detached even from the place of consumption (consumption and what Okhitovich saw as its fundamentally individual character were a crucial aspect of disurbanism). Increasing division of labor and, with it, the spatial dispersion of residence, production, and consumption were “tearing” the urbanite “apart.”[11]

This spatial separation increased the need to economize time, Okhitovich wrote, leading both to urban density and to the modern city’s verticality. Walking was replaced by mechanical transport, which in turn became unsustainable in the conditions of tight urban spaces and endless traffic jams. This series of temporal concentrations—and the attempt to resolve them spatially and technologically, the success of such attempts always short-lived—would eventually lead to the city’s collapse. The “constantly growing” contradiction between the methods of building and movement in the urban space would destroy it from the inside (Okhitovich, “Otchego gibnet gorod,” 9).

The Skyscraper of Historical Backwardness

As Okhitovich saw it, the contradictions of the modern city were structural and hence irresolvable through amelioration; the only way to fix the problem of the city was to do away with it. As the first disurbanism-themed issue of OSA’s journal, Contemporary Architecture (SA), proclaimed in 1930: “Down with the skyscrapers of historical backwardness!” (pokonchit’ s neboskrëbami istoricheskoi otstalosti).[12] In place of the skyscraper’s verticality, it was horizontality, the stretching of inhabited and worked space, that could more effectively use the possibilities of modern technology, including nationwide electrification, transport (eventually) made possible by machine-building industry, and, crucially, the expansion of telecommunications.[13] In the end, the long-standing problem of the “distinction between town and country,” the miserable living conditions of the city and the “idiocy of rural life”—noted in the Communist Manifesto and explored by Lenin—would be erased as “every center” would become “periphery” and “every point on the periphery a center” (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii,” 14).[14]

“The historical backwardness” of the skyscraper was the backwardness of capitalism, but not all capitalism: only the kind that had not yet caught up with contemporary technology, technology that Okhitovich saw as defined by its centrifugal tendency.[15] Like Soviet advocates of Taylorism earlier in the decade, and most architectural thinkers of the time (to say nothing of the Soviet state’s reliance on American engineering know-how during the First Five-Year Plan), Okhitovich did not view technology’s capitalist origins as disqualifying.[16] Rather, capitalist experience (“Amerikanizm” was the buzzword) with cutting-edge technologies—which the Five-Year Plan was to help the USSR “catch up to and outstrip”—could be harnessed to anticipate the next logical step in development. Soviet planning, Okhitovich wrote, had to be based on the “experience of global technology” [opyt mirovoi tekhniki] to find the foundation of a new, socialist kind of technology (“Kuda itti?,” 6).

In this sense, the Soviet infrastructural and technological lag—what Leon Trotsky had called the “privilege of historic backwardness”—laid the foundation for skipping the height of the city’s self-destruction in favor of moving directly to the next stage, de-urbanization.[17] Okhitovich argued that Soviet socialism was uniquely positioned to embrace disurbanism: the nomadic societies that were part of the Soviet demos—the deer-herders of the Far North and the nomads of the Central Asian steppes—continued to organize their lives through the spatial merging of production, consumption, and residence as they moved together with the resources, and processed and consumed them on-site (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii” 10). Hence, the existing “backwardness” of nomadic societies—which Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, following contemporary Soviet discourse, described as “primitive”—was one factor allowing for a relatively painless transition to the most advanced disurbanist model (“Kuda itti?,” 6). The boldness of this claim becomes clearer in light of the contemporaneous change in Soviet nationalities policy, as forced sedentarization of Central Asian nomads replaced the strands of “pronomadic” thought at the start of the First Five-Year Plan.[18] This vision of the pre-industrial as facilitating industrialization was sustained in real life—paradoxically, given the state’s anti-nomadic policies—as the first builders of Magnitogorsk, the soon-to-be largest ironworks in the country, moved into tent cities and yurts to break ground on construction (fig. 5–6).[19]

Uneven development could accelerate the arrival of the most advanced technological forms. Yet, as OSA argued, skipping intermediate stages of development was not a forced transition but a response to actually existing economic structures and ways of life [uklady], such as those present in nomadic societies and unindustrialized rural settlements. Disurbanism, SA proclaimed, applied Marxist theory to “concrete reality,” refusing to “jump over the living real existing person” [zhivogo real’no sushchestvuiushchego cheloveka] (“Kuda itti,” 5).

It was also a response to infrastructural policy. Electrification, which Lenin in 1920 had famously declared a central precondition of communism in the Soviet Union, would make disurbanism possible. “The revolution in energy transport,” Okhitovich wrote, replaced the road with the power line (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii,” 9). In this sense, the disurbanist “ribbon cities,” stretched along transport arteries, were also creatures of the electrical grid or network [set’], which would eventually render all centers obsolete. And while the “urbanist” model likewise relied on transportation arteries and electrification in its plan of “polynuclear” space, for the disurbanists the electrical grid and the telecommunications network entailed full decentralization, allowing for what Catherine Cooke has described as an “evenly loaded anodal network” of settlements (Crawford, “From Tractors to Territory,” 57; Cooke, “Extensive or Intensive,” 170). A later issue of SA took an even more radical stance, positioning disurbanism itself as a transitional stage on the way to fully “dispersive” planning: first slowly moving out of the radial city, then undoing the nuclear structure of urban life (disurbanism), eventually settlements would move on to dicentric and acentric planning. In the end they would spread along flexible—and potentially changeable, following the movement of resources and production—road-ribbons that stretched freely across the regularized and uniform grid of electricity and telecommunications (fig. 7). At this final stage, the division between city and country would cease to exist. The “network [set’] will win,” Okhitovich wrote, “and the center will die away” (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii,” 14).

As settlement sites were transient, potentially moving along with the resources and needs of the industry, so was housing. Imagined as low-cost, standardized units—made from cheaply available local materials, delivered by automobile, and potentially assembled by the resident without the need for a construction crew—it was only meant to last for a decade, as opposed to the long-term investment of building large house-communes. While this proposed standardization was in lockstep with contemporary Soviet thinking on efficient building (Ginzburg had been named the head of the “Typification Section” in 1928), its intentionally brief life was not.[20] The deliberately short-term nature of these constructions was a response not only to the ongoing development in construction methods but also the unknowability of socialism’s future forms.[21]

?WHAT IS IT? SOCIALIST DWELLING?....

Among Okhitovich’s fundamental ideas was the thoroughgoing decentralization of housing, not only away from administrative or urban centers but also away from any kind of collective or familial structure (fig. 8). His schemas of the historical process of urban self-destruction delineated the centrifugal fleeing from the radial city or burg (here it’s also worth noting that Moscow grew as a ring city), and he perceived a similar process in all forms of non-individual housing. Take, for instance, his diagram of the “(social) decentering of the apartment, cottage” (fig. 9). The nucleus represents a single-family dwelling divided into four parts: “children,” “wife,” and “kitchen/dining room” each take up a quarter of the space, with the remaining quarter shared between “relatives” and “shoes/clothing” (!). Missing from this diagram is the presumed male head of the household: more tightly associated with production than residential space, his presence in this apartment is suggested only by a caption stating that the bedroom remains outside the diagram. Sleep and procreation hence remain the only aspects of residential life that are not naturally decentered by the city’s development. Otherwise, consumption and production take place outside the home, as the centrifugal arrows—themselves splitting in multiple directions—demonstrate. Clothing and shoes are neither acquired nor repaired inside the home, leading to laundries, shops, and markets; the work of the family kitchen is increasingly moved to eating in restaurants, cafeterias, and cafes. Children are connected to the “street”—playing outside—and to school. The wife too does not remain at home, her work now having three potential areas: production (factory); civil service (sluzhba); or sex work, which, according to Okhitovich’s schema, likewise takes her into the public space of the “boulevard.” The emancipation of women from household tasks and their work outside the home, with the simultaneous reduction of domestic labor, Okhitovich writes, has “paved the way for the death of the [family] house.”[22]

This diagram, then, also illustrates one of disurbanism’s key tenets: that construction should neither perpetuate nor “outstrip” [peregoniat’] the development of social relations but rather “follow” the logic of these transformations. This is a distinct approach to remaking—or, as Okhitovich writes, destroying—byt and its obstinate “immutability,” and one at odds with the First Five-Year Plan’s accelerated temporality, with its drive to “catch up and outstrip” (dognat’ i peregnat’) (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii,” 15). Okhitovich’s apartment diagram seeks to show how disurbanist theory moves from actually existing conditions—from the already ongoing decentralization of the household—to create a new kind of socialist dwelling (compare it, too, to the “first” disurbanist stage in the undoing of the city). This would be a dwelling (zhilishche), as SA enumerated, “without a trace of housewifery” or household tasks; a dwelling of an individual; and a dwelling that, in the opportunity it offered to develop individually, would lay the possibility of the emergence of a “socialist non-exploiter individual” (sotsialisticheskoi neekspluatiruiushchei lichnosti) ( “Kuda itti?,” 5). Husband and wife would have individual units, which they could choose to join together—or not.[23] (Children were to be housed in small collective pods, a tacit acknowledgement that collectivity and communalism were useful and necessary for some social groups.) The mobility and impermanence of the proposed disurbanist settlements were also echoed in the ease with which individual units could be assembled and disassembled following the inhabitants’ desires.

A succinct articulation of the nature of individual (socialist) dwelling was published as part of OSA’s plan for Magnitogorsk in the “disurbanist” issue of SA designed by Varvara Stepanova. Here, the graphic plan for Magnitogorsk stretched across the top of three pages, enacting the lateral spread of the disurbanist plan (fig. 3). The proposal (designed for a competition eventually won by Ernst May, although his vision would also remain unbuilt) summarized the basis of an individual dwelling:

Not only the influence [vozdeistvie] of the collective, but also deep self-cultivation [rabota nad soboi].

Not only social action [deistvie], but also concentrated contemplation [razmyshlenie].

Not only the living people of today, but also books—the experience of previous generations.

Not only the multifaceted influence [vozdeistvie] of social reality [deistvitel’nosti], but also the absence of outside stimuli. All of this the dwelling must provide.

All can organize their living as they wish, including as a family or commune, but one of the socialist dwelling’s key functions was to offer physical and social inactivity (M. Barshch et al., “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k proektu,” 44). The text made this point even at the linguistic level, through adnomination: by the repetition of words with the root “act” (dei) in oppositional clauses, such as “not only . . . influence [voz-dei-stvie: to act on] of reality (dei-stvitel’nost’, actuality).” In this endlessly mobile and transient, connective world, the “socialist dwelling”—however temporary in its siting—was the space of the contemplative, rather than active, self. In its facilitation of the contemplative self, it was also a space free of household activity, as all domestic tasks would be performed through a nearby network of services: laundries, cafeterias, childcare centers, as well as shopping vitrines from which one could pick items for home delivery (it was easier and cheaper, Okhitovich argued, to bring an item to a person than to transport an “80 kg person” to the item).[24] Contemplation was not inactive here: it included self-cultivation and self-improvement. But this kind of work, for the disurbanists, required the opportunity to reduce social interactions and physical labor to near zero.

Physical or biological “consumption” (potreblenie) was not, as has been argued, the disurbanist definition of individuality, but rather a material justification for it: since, SA suggests, collective “sleep, lying down, sitting down, standing up” do not produce meaningful social relations, these forms of consumption could be assigned to individual dwellings. The reduction of individual space within house-communes, limiting it essentially to a sleeping-cabin, produced only a “pseudo-commune,” OSA argued in 1930.[25] From individual dwellings, collective or social “processes of production” could become meaningful “even at a distance”—through the circuits of telecommunications (M. Barshch et al., “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k proektu,” 55).

Communalism, as disurbanism had it, was neither equivalent to nor constitutive of communism. Rather, the collective and the individual were mutually reinforcing: the stronger the collective, Okhitovich wrote, the stronger the individual. They were also mutually constitutive: if to praise the individual without praising the collective was to praise the effect without the cause, he argued, then to praise the collective without the individual was like “praising the Russian language while banning the use of Russian words” (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii…,” 13). In its emphasis on individual development, Okhitovich’s thinking was consonant with that of early postrevolutionary Bolshevism, including the thinking of Anatoly Luncharsky, the first head of Narkompros—but it was very much out of sync with contemporary Soviet discourse, including the campaign against the Left Opposition, which declared the triumph of the collective over the “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti).[26]

Delineating “private” (chastnyi, as in private property) from the “individual” or “personal” (lichnyi), Okhitovich considered socialism’s ultimate goal to be the creation of society where individuality—from consumption to education—would be the domain of all, not the few (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii,” 13). As with the self-destruction of the city, he saw this as an already ongoing process that, while arising out of capitalism, would lay the foundation for a communist future. Undergirding the development of individuals and individuality (distinct from, as SA made clear, individualism) was division of labor: not social division of labor (between classes or genders, between town and country), but individual division of labor achieved through deep specialization. Disurbanism was, again, a profoundly industrio-technicist approach: it was the development of machines and telecommunications technology that would allow for an increased specialization of labor (here, too, we see the idea of following rather than reforming or outstripping processes already underway) and, in turn, for easy work in shifts. Specialization of labor and shift-work would undo the hierarchy of work (mental or physical, industrial or agricultural) and allow labor to become only one part of life. Paradoxically, by geographically structuring settlements around sites of production, the ratio of work in life would be reduced, eliminating the “one-sidedness” of individuality—with capitalist “professionalism” and bourgeois “specialism”—and allowing for a comprehensive (or, literally, “multi-sided”) development of a true socialist individual (Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii,” 13). On the one hand, then, the individual was made the basis of standardization: not anthropomorphically, as in Le Corbusier’s Modulor, but technologically, as the single standard for housing and labor. On the other hand, this profound standardization, which avoided even modifications for varying family structures or differences in work, would in turn make individuality possible on all other fronts. The radical remaking of Soviet space and its inhabitants proposed by Okhitovich belied its source of inspiration: not the future but the here and now, not what “should be” but what already was.  For the disurbanists, another revolution lay dormant in the present.