IDEAL AND REALITY: BUILDING UP THE CITY OF MOLOTOV IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1940s
In the article the town-planning situation in the city of Molotov (now Perm) in the second half of the 1940s on the materials of the archival funds of the Molotov Inspection of GASK and the Perm City Executive Committee is described. The documents were intended for administrative use and provide an opportunity to see how local authorities and specialists in the field of architecture and urban planning tried to implement government policies in the field of housing and civil construction. Using the materials of the “Competition for the best residential and civil buildings built in the cities of the RSFSR” as an example, the formation of new approaches in Soviet urban planning is shown. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how in the post-war years a compromise looked like between high standards set by Moscow and the real possibilities of local construction organizations, which were supposed to provide citizens with housing, as well as social and cultural facilities, somehow meeting these really unattainable ideals supported by the unquestionable Stalinist ideology. Simplification of architecture, typical construction using ready-made structures became widespread already in the period under review. Insufficient capacities of construction organizations, their poor technical equipment did not allow to realize all the advantages of this approach. Nevertheless, along with the high standard represented by buildings in the Stalin Empire style, alternative examples of relatively cheap standard buildings appeared. The transition to this urban development policy on a national scale will occur in the “Khrushchev era”.