Page 39 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 13(1) (2025)

Sokolova, O.-G. M. 2014. ‘Semioticheskoe moved symbols, renamed squares, and repro-
prostranstvo Minska: Simvolika goroda.’ grammed spaces. The article’s method blends media
Vestnik Belorusskogo gosudarstvennogo archaeology (photos, videos, press) with large-scale
universiteta kul’tury i iskusstv 2 (22): 11–25. axonometric drawings to map crowd morphology,
Tass. 2020. ‘Armenian Parliament Speaker temporary structures, barricades, police lines, and
Injured by Protesters, Prime Minister Says.’ the symbolic removal or survival of monuments.
Tass, 10 November. https://tass.com Drawing functions here like ‘forensic’ analysis: it
/world/1221775. freezes ephemeral movements against static edific-
Tunbridge, J. E., and G. J. Ashworth. 1996. es to reveal how non-human actors – rivers, trees,
Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the fences, boulevards – shape visibility, circulation,
Past as a Resource in Conflict. Wiley. and confrontation.
Vermishyan, H., and S. Michikyan. 2020. ‘The In Moscow’s 1993 constitutional crisis, the
Transformation of Urban Public Space of White House’s defensible gardens, river front-
Post-Soviet Yerevan: The Case of Northern age, and armoured cordon pushed the public into 39
Avenue.’ Journal of Sociology: Bulletin of watchful perimeters; fire and smoke became the
Yerevan University 11 (31): 3–15. protest’s graphic signature as tanks shelled the
Vlasenko, Y., and B. D. Ryan. 2024. façade, followed by securitisation (fences) in re-
‘Decommunization by Design: Analyzing construction. In Baku (Black January, 1990), Gov-
the Post-Independence Transformation of ernment House’s tiered massing and broad, ob-
Soviet-Era Architectural Urbanism in Kyiv, stacle-free square invited vertical and horizontal
Ukraine.’ Journal of Urban History 50 (2): appropriation: crowds climbed levels, formed pro-
247–288. cessional corridors, and left murals – an especially
Vremia, N. 2021. ‘Pustoi ‘Sborochnyi Tsekh’ three-dimensional dissent. Kyiv’s 1990 Revolution
Soiuza, Protesty Rabochikh i Deputat on Granite organised tents first in Independence
Lukashenko: Belarus’ nakanune razvala Square and then at the Verkhovna Rada, produc-
SSSR.’ Nastoiaschee Vremia, 25 August. ing an intentional ‘town’ plan that contested aus- The Critical Position of Soviet Parliament Buildings Today
https://www.currenttime.tv/a/belarus tere geometries; soldiers’ cordons inscribed a rec-
-nakanune-razvala-sssr/31426131.html. tangular buffer, making a face-to-face diagram of
White, S. 1992. ‘Towards a Post-Soviet Politics?’ state vs. crowd. Minsk’s Independence Square, a
In Developments in Soviet and Post-Soviet vast concave parterre, staged a workers’ rally (1991)
Politics, edited by S. White, A. Pravda, and with Lenin’s plinth as podium; despite renaming
Z. Gitelman. Macmillan. and some removals, Lenin’s statue persists as an
‘ideological recycling’ of Soviet identity. Yerevan’s
Summary parliament lacks a front square; protests (2020)
This paper investigates how Soviet and post-Sovi- therefore elongated along Baghramyan Avenue,
et parliament buildings became stages where state distanced by fences and policing, with mobile stag-
power and collective memory collide, using five es and longitudinal flow linking the parliament to
case studies – Moscow, Baku, Kyiv, Minsk, and Ye- Republic Square – re-activating spatial lines first
revan – to read protests through the geometry of politicized during the Artsakh movement.
the built environment. The authors situate these Across cases, the authors show how protest
buildings within a Stalinist planning logic that diagrams are co-produced by terrain and urban
paired monumental institutions with vast squares form: rivers enable spectatorship at a distance; tree
for ritualised mass performance, producing a spa- belts occlude self-visibility; pedestals and terraces
tial toolkit – axes, voids, pedestals, parade grounds afford elevation; fenced setbacks compress or de-
– meant to visualise centralized power and a fed- flect assemblies. Axonometric overlays reveal how
erative ‘Soviet people’. After 1991, the same archi- short bursts of action reconfigure monumental en-
tectures were re-scripted as arenas of dissent and sembles and how decommunisation’s edits (names,
nation-building, as decommunisation policies re- symbols, programmes) sediment into new narra-