Old and New. Delving into the Origins of Collectivization

Soviet experiences played an important part in the broader international debate on rural planning throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. In this respect, the competition for the Green City of Moscow and the project for new forms of human habitat in the Urals by M. Ginzburg and the OSA group (Sverdlovsk, Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk, 1926-32) –much too often labelled as “utopian” by architectural historians– deserve due reconsideration (Meriggi, 2009). Based on research begun with MA (Kravchenko, 2019; Meriggi, 2019) and PhD students (Batunova, 2017), this paper focuses on Verblyud, Gigant and other collective villages of the Salsk steppes, taking us to the origins of collectivization and epitomizing the 1920s and 1930s Soviet planning theory and practice. Underpinning aspects include, firstly, the land: its population and settlement patterns before and during the modernization process. Secondly, the actual extensions of each production unit and the ratio between the number of farmers and arable land. Finally, we cannot but venture a tentative understanding of the hierarchy of new rural settlements – some acting as sovkhoz headquarters, others as smaller kolkhozy and communes. What follows is an attempt to piece together a heterogeneous set of information with the help of historical maps, building on a methodology in use by the author since 2000 for studying Soviet avantgarde projects performed by iteratively cross-checking bibliographic sources, visual documentation, cartographic selection, interpretation, and elaboration. Historical maps became a tool to contextualize the projects’ actual impact on the places concerned. In the case of the Salsk steppes, the key research output is a map showing the evolution of the main settlements from the early1920s until the late 1930s. Two sources have guided our work: the economic geographer Nikolay Baranskij (1956a), and Eisenstein’s documentary film Staroe i novoe (Old and New), depicting the situation ex ante, the political terms of collectivization and its protagonists. In addition, this contribution is mainly based on Russian sources, maps, journals, books and reports dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, as well as recent scholarly works. This contribution expands the research carried out at Politecnico di Milano on sovkhoz-heritage sites near Zernograd (lit. “city of grain”), the former Verblyud (lit. “camel”), whose populations, like that of many other medium size towns in the Rostov Region have both been shrinking (Meriggi, 2019). This paper examines four rural areas and settlements along the Rostov-Salsk railway line: the Tselinskij rayon (Tselina District, former Zapadno-Konnozavodcheskiy rayon), 1922–6; the Stalin kolkhoz (originally the Sejatel’ Commune), 1930s to 1950s; the Gigant zernosovkhoz no.1 (Gigant State Grain Farm), 1928¦; and the Uchebno-opytnnyj zernosovkhoz no.2 (Educational-Experimental State Grain Farm, originally named Verblyud), 1929. It argues that, from the early 1920s to the late 1950s, the Salsk District became a testing ground for early Soviet rural planning and architecture.