Modernism in the woods: Soviet architecture for rural landscapes

Abstract This paper explores the urban-type reconstruction of Soviet rural non-agricultural settlements during the Cold War, focusing on timber production workers’ settlements in the Republic of Karelia of the north-west Soviet Union. It expands current debates on late-Soviet mass housing by incorporating a rural perspective, examining how residents responded to architectural and planning decisions designed to urbanize their environments. Drawing on architectural blueprints, archival records, oral history interviews, and participant observation, the study argues that the design of workers’ settlements reflected both state planning ambitions and the lived practices of their inhabitants. It asks why residents of rural settlements remained dissatisfied with urbanized lifestyles imposed through new design solutions and how their efforts to preserve subsistence farming revealed grassroots resistance. The analysis situates this resistance within the broader tension between two contradictory post-war Soviet policies: one promoting agricultural self-sufficiency through migrant labour benefits and the other pursuing urbanization for rural and semi-rural areas. By tracing changes in settlement design from the 1940s to the 1960s, the paper shows how evolving planning policies reshaped everyday life and exposed the limits of Soviet modernization in transforming rural identities.