Demolishing Soviet Modernism

After 1917, modernist architects in the multicultural south of the Russian Federation attempted to build a new society with bold design – but today, their buildings are being dismantled along with the Soviet past.

‘Architectural heritage is not protected in post-Soviet spaces. That is to say, architectural heritage of all styles—classicism, eclectism, art nouveau—everything is being completely destroyed,’ says the Ukrainian architect and researcher Evgeniia Gubkina. This is a conclusion shared by Artur Tokarev, a Rostov-on-Don-based academic whose architectural guide to the works of the Soviet avant-garde in the South of Russia was recently published by DOM.

‘We personally undertook eight expeditions through the south of Russia… The total extent of [which] came to more than 40,000 kilometres,’ Tokarev and Igor Bychkov write in the introduction to the volume. The researchers looked at areas of the South of Russia which were part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) between 1922-1941, such as the oblasts of Rostov, Volgograd (then Stalingrad), Stavropol, and Krasnodar, as well as ‘the Crimea’ (sic).

Outside of this, they also visited the autonomous republics of Kalmykia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachevo-Cherkesia, North Ossetia, and Chechnya. A non-Russian reader (and probably even a Russian one) could use some context here – particularly when it comes to Russia’s North Caucasus republics, which have a fraught history, and the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014 (or ‘integrated into Russia’, as some Russian politicians have put it).

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