Page 26 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 13(1) (2025)

together, offers an approximate idea of the spa- out the protests, including the anatomy of the
tialisation of the bodies and the objects involved crowd, its distribution in the city, the layout of
in the protest, which in turn interact with the provisional structures, the removal of commu-
built environment. According to Elias Canetti’s nist symbols, the creation of murals, the make-
analysis, the destructive power of crowds that shift stage where the agitators spoke from, and
damages statues and objects stands for the vio- their confrontation with the police. Finally, the
lation of what they represent. The destruction stage of representation urged us to condense our
of the representational is a crack in the solidity reflections in visual forms, producing five por-
of their meaning as they are meant to permeate traits of protest that best signify these key mo-
the symbolic realm for a long time (Canetti 1978, ments in the urban space.
19). Hence, our attention is directed at episodes
of dissent in which the Soviet space is appropri- Stalinist Architecture
26 ated, defaced, and repurposed. These moments Josef Stalin’s view was predominantly shaped
in which national movements have broken the by the power of discourse, materialising its se-
boundaries of centralised authority, social crit- miosphere through spatial elements (Adams
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 13 (2025), številka 1 / volume 13 (2025), number 1
icism has gained public visibility, and the de- and Lavrenova 2022). His manifestation of the
structive power of the crowds has shaken the sta- supremacy of the USSR combined the pow-
bility of the Soviet Union. er of language with the power of architecture
We limited our analysis to five Soviet suc- (Naiman 2003). The spatial politics of the Sta-
cessor states – the Russian Federation, Azerbai- linist Era was, as a result, formed around the im-
jan, Armenia, Ukraine, and Belarus and their agery of Soviet cities with ensembles of public
parliament buildings. These structures, designed squares, monumental buildings for governmen-
mostly with an eclectic blend of Stalinist and ver- tal or public facilities, vast city gardens, major
nacular architecture, imposed a material homo- streets, and impressive statues of Lenin (Čepai-
geneity on distant cities all over the continent. tienė 2015). Soviet life was envisaged on a city
Today, they stand as architectural landmarks, scale; the city-planning professionals were to
transformed over time into focal points for con- build the urban structure to accommodate the
fronting the traumatic memory of the twenti- Soviet rituals, culture, and, most importantly,
eth century and forging new political identities. economic activities, which were controlled by
Their entanglements with politics make their the decisions of the party – the Politburo (De-
heritage status particularly problematic, while Haan 2013). The design of these Soviet cities was
the transformations these places and their topo- intended to symbolise the narratives that rein-
nyms have undergone reveal rich points of anal- forced the centralised power of the union and
ysis for seeing decommunisation politics at work to visualise the authority of the socialist regime
in Soviet successor states. (Chmelnizki 2014). The urban space, mainly
The proposed methodology employs CAD turning into the stage for festivals and parades,
drawings, which designers generally use ex-ante was constructed for visual propaganda, both for
to anticipate a certain spatial configuration, as internal and external politics.
a tool for analysis ex-post, after the events have Heavily influenced by neo-classical, neo-ba-
occurred. Following the methodologies opened roque, neo-gothic, or Byzantine forms, Sta-
up by the forensic aesthetic paradigm, popular- linist architecture was an eclectic blend of his-
ised in forensic architecture’s visual investiga- torical components and socialist-realist spatial
tions (Romeo 2024), we traced the morphology configurations (Khmel-Nitskii 2006). These
of the protest, its form, and the transformations aesthetics extended beyond the centre, Mos-
made to the built environment. By analysing vid- cow, to the peripheries and other republics in
eos, photos, and newspaper articles, we mapped the union, especially after WWII (or the Great