Oxana Gourinovitch (Berlin): The Presence of the Past:Soviet Modernism and Construction of National Nostalgias. Case Study Lithuanian SSR and Belorussian SSR

The notion of Khrushchev’s reforms as igniting an emergence of Soviet Modernism is omnipresent in the architectural history of the socialist block. Meanwhile another, no less significant transformation, induced by those reforms, remains barely regarded: a transfer of decisive power in architectural production from the Soviet centre to peripheral administrations of the fifteen Soviet national republics. The redistribution of architectural competence and decreased control from the centre granted a previously unprecedented planning sovereignty to republican governments. Produced in national republics, the Soviet modernist architecture was aligned with international modernism, and Soviet ideological guidelines – while simultaneously accommodating national assertions, and serving needs and ambitions of republican administrations and cultural agents. Connotation of Soviet modernist architecture with evolving national narratives climaxed during the last two decades of the state socialism, as the emerging post-modernism
redefined the rules of the accepted in contemporary architecture, and invited pluralism and symbolic coding over modernism’s formulaic non-ambiguity. The new stylistic liberties, adopted by Soviet professionals, enabled Soviet architecture to became a vehicle of local nostalgias and national sentiment. On two examples from Lithuanian and Belorussian Soviet republics, this paper analyses the process of association of architecture with national assertions during the 1970s.