A common problem with planning the command economy was that of co-ordination. In Tomsk, under the 1968 plan, the apartment building programme was unable to keep pace with industrial development, which was under the control of more powerful government ministries - while the provision of social, cultural and public transport facilities lagged even further behind. Zoning restrictions were routinely violated and by the 1970s, new development in Tomsk, which had begun in the former outskirts, had reached the city centre. Under the Soviet model of urban growth, where land had no intrinsic value, peripheral areas became ‘central’ while the historic core lost its importance and was allowed to decay (Renaud, 1995). A revised Tomsk plan of 1985 proposed to tackle this problem of decay by adopting a strategy of urban regeneration combined with development of disused urban land and expansion along the city’s eastern periphery (Figure 15). This process highlighted the new, hitherto unrecognised problem of preserving the historic urban fabric of Tomsk while at the same time adapting it for contemporary conditions (Chernov, 1986). Towards the end of the Soviet period, an awareness of the architectural heritage as providing a local and national focus of identity had developed among the Party nomenklatura and in Tomsk and Vladivostok, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, protected zones of historical or architectural monuments were established and where the erection of modern buildings was under strict control (French, 1995). 

 

In Vladivostok the communist authorities which took over in 1922 brought order to the city after years of chaos and neglect and made some improvements to the city’s decaying infrastructure. With the implementation of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, significant changes were made to Vladivostok’s streetscape. As in Tomsk, structures not conforming to communist ideology and representing a challenge to the authority of the State, e.g. church buildings, were either torn down or converted to other uses - monuments to the new ‘saints’ of Bolshevism being erected in their place (Richardson, 1995). A pair of large Stalinist apartment buildings was constructed in the city centre (Figure 16) and there was enormous expansion in industrial production and infrastructure enhancement projects. During the 1930s a general development plan for Vladivostok was drawn up by the architect E. A. Vasiliev, to include a complete restructuring of the city centre in the spirit of the model Soviet city plan for Moscow of 1935. Grandiose set-piece buildings were to be used to frame an enormous lighthouse surmounted by a statue of Lenin and visible for 50km out to sea, with wide avenues and staircases radiating out from the tower in every direction (ibid.). However, the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in 1941 brought an end to these plans before much of the scheme had been realised, and the city authorities turned their attention once again to further boosting Vladivostok’s industrial production, as part of the war effort.

 

 The next phase in the city’s development came with the assumption of power by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Stalin’s neglect of housing and basic infrastructure provision was tackled during the early 1960s when another grand development plan for the city was drawn up. This time the emphasis was on housing and between 1960 and 1965 new apartment block construction in Vladivostok doubled the amount of living space available to the city’s inhabitants (Figure 17). Public transportation, leisure, and green space provision were also improved and the rapid development of the city continued during the Brezhnev years. By 1981, architects were planning the city’s 56th mikrorayon as a home to 10,000 residents (Richardson, 1995). 

 

In both Vladivostok and Tomsk such was the urgency for basic improvements to the urban quality of life after Stalin that little attention was paid to the aesthetic impact of new construction on the historic core, or even to the structural quality of the new buildings themselves - nearly all new apartment blocks required large sums spent on them for maintenance purposes almost as soon as they were built! (Renaud, 1995) The new mikrorayoni in both cities lacked any sense of identity as much as they lacked basic social and cultural amenities, (e.g. Kashtak, in Tomsk) yet despite this there was still a tendency even in the later Brezhnev years to build large set-piece public statements to the ‘Victory of Socialism’, such as Vladivostok’s new parade ground - a desolate place which is totally outside the human scale in public space terms. The final chapter will examine Tomsk and Vladivostok in the post-Soviet period and suggest possible scenarios for the future development of these cities.