Our journey begins in Slavutych, a town built to rehouse those displaced in the evacuation of Pripyat following the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Starting here is like starting nowhere — the city is built in the middle of a forest, seemingly untethered from any preexisting infrastructure, and everywhere — the eight districts of Slavutych are each designed by the architects and built by the builders of eight Soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine.
Slavutych is a Soviet microcosm (or “Microcosmos,” as Hatherley terms it). It is a dream town, if not in its final manifestation, then certainly in its inception. It’s built in the woods; there are no variables; nothing to connect to, no forces behind its design other than the political will of the Soviet government and the aesthetic will of the architects. [...]
Slavutych is the perfect place to start our journey because it is an actually existing example of a fully realized ideal Soviet city plan. In examining the city’s built environment, we see an attempt to rectify what hadn’t worked elsewhere in the Soviet Union, whose cities were often criticized for being too inhuman, too cold, too prefabricated. In an attempt to “show off how good and reformed the system could be,” the designers of Slavutych doubled down on Soviet values but changed the way they manifested physically and aesthetically. Because it was a city-from-scratch, they were able to do so without resistance. [...]
Within these loose boundaries, Hatherley’s project becomes apparent. This book is not about Soviet architecture, though it certainly spends plenty of time describing it. Rather, it’s about what architecture reveals about Soviet history and the process of “de-communization” that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.[...]
Outside of Slavutych, though, with more variables and much less controlled conditions, the architecture, as well as its history, tend to be much more complex and more difficult to understand, and certainly more difficult to consume as objects of tourism. In the Ukranian towno of Dnipro, for example, we see how the late-Soviet (very late — built in 1991) Palace of Pioneers blends in its design the gaudy decoration and fine materials associated with the Stalin era with structural elements meant to evoke the techno-centric, futurist ethos of its contemporaries, like the Pompidou Center in Paris. On the exterior, a smooth, sand-colored stone combines with rough, geometric concrete structural elements, while inside, carefully patterned and glossy-finished parquet floors contrast brightly colored, kistchy murals.
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