Beyond Heroes and Victims: Reconsidering the Soviet Architect’s Agency
How ethical is it, to paraphrase Theodore Adorno’s famous saying that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, to write a history of Soviet architecture of the 1930s — the period of growing terror and totalitarianism? How can architectural history be anything more than an account of terror supported by the production ‘kitsch’? As an architectural historian whose work focuses on architectural theory of the interwar period, I often find myself responding to such arguments and defending the right of architectural history of the Stalinist period to exist — to exist independently of the history of mass repressions, yet, without forgetting about it. For doing the latter would not only excuse Stalinism but also obscure architecture’s original meaning. How is this fine methodological line to be walked? To answer this question, I will problematize the received notion of the architect’s agency, suggesting to disrupt the deceptively simple opposition between the alleged unlimited creative freedom and the total passivity and objectification of the victim of political terror. In the words of Betty Glan, the long-term director of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow, who spent eighteen years in the GULAG system following her arrest in 1937, “One cannot reduce life, and not only ours but the life of the entire generation, to one, even if deeply tragic, year. As if we were interesting only insofar that we survived 1937 […]. It is clear today that bright and strong people were destroyed. Write about what made them such”. Only respecting the agency of the architect operating in a totalitarian environment while simultaneously understanding this agency’s limits, learning to read between the lines, can a historian find architecture behind kitsch and meaning — behind the form.
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