Soviet Industrial Architecture and Its Afterlife in Eastern Ukraine

Christina E. Crawford provides historical context for the present-day destruction of industrial architecture in Eastern Ukraine by Russia through focus on Kharkiv, the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1919-34). In research drawn from her recent book, Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022), Crawford will discuss how, in the 1920s and ‘30s during Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan for industrialization, Soviet authorities invested heavily in capital projects in Kharkiv and the Donbas, a territory rich in the natural commodities of iron ore, coal, and grain. A late-breaking decision to construct a tractor factory on Kharkiv’s outskirts pushed Ukrainian architects to embrace intense design standardization not only for the factory, but for its residential sector as well. New Kharkiv, the so-called socialist city designed by Ukrainian architects for tractor factory workers, utilized standardized housing, social service buildings, and even repeatable urban blocks to ensure swift construction. Industrial architecture innovations developed with the help of American technical consultants at New Kharkiv were then harnessed by the increasingly centralized Soviet planning regime to quickly construct other industrial enterprises in the region. The Azovstal Steel Factory in Mariupol, where Ukrainian soldiers made a final stand against Russian occupiers in Spring 2022, too, has its roots in the early Soviet period, as Crawford will discuss.