Across the Plaza: the Public Voids of the Post-Soviet City

allegedly unused and unusable (or more to the point, non-profit-making) space

many remain ambiguous spaces, spaces nobody is quite sure what to do with. Contestable spaces

the dreamlike ambience of these spaces provides an attraction that is a counter to the chaotic pile-up of the capitalist streetscape.

That does not necessarily make them socialist spaces.

These spaces, with their sweeping scale, their now-inconceivable wastage of potentially very lucrative land values, are not capitalist spaces.

This part of the work, Across the Plaza, is centred on the spaces where the Soviet system was born, in a successful socialist revolution, which became the ceremonial spaces where the regimes that took the name ‘socialist’ displayed themselves; which were in turn the spaces where those regimes were brought down, where sometimes the regimes that followed them were brought down, and where something new could still take shape.

It also finds them full of layer upon layer of meaning, with unavoidable spatial and physical reminders that there were once alternatives, and there could still be.

‘Normalisation’ was the watchword of the regimes of the 1970s and 80s, after the 1968 Prague Spring was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks.

A similar function is performed by a phrase which is spoken all the time in this post-Soviet territory — the longing to become ‘a normal country’.

The post-1989 system also enforces a ‘realism’ that prohibits alternatives; if, before, October 1917 was the last permissible revolution, now November 1989 is the last word.