Dariusz Aleksandrowicz Aleksandrowicz - Europa-Universität ...

6 F.I.T. Discussion Paper 10/99
ryone, was in fact a no-one’s space. It was due to the failure of the original task of
socialism to make a “new” man out of the “old” one, for whom the very distinction
between the “private” and the “public” wouldn’t exist anymore.
III. Idea and reality of a socialist city: remarks on Naberezhnye Chelny
Like all other institutions of a socialist society, socialist cities have developed in the
context of a tension between the ideology-conforming design and the given reality.
What the city in effect was like as well as the very dynamics of its development,
were at least as much due to the original assumptions of the plan as to a tentative
adjustment of contradicting factors. 10 In “non-reforming” countries, like Russia, as
well as in the “reforming” 11 ones some determinants of this type of dynamics survived
the disintegration of the institutional system of Communism. There are, however,
some crucial differences between the respective processes which are at work
in both of them.
Naberezhnye Chelny (1982-1988: Brezhnev, in Tatar: Jar Chally), a city in the
Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan within the Russian Federation, is one of world’s
best examples of a socialist “new city.” It is a city of over half a million inhabitants
the construction of which has started only three decades ago. It therefore owes its
existence to a voluntary design of Soviet politicians and city planers of the Brezhnev
period.
The city has been planned and built along with the “Kamaz” production plant, which
– according to its size and output measured in tons and numbers – once was the biggest
truck factory in the world. Like in any other model socialist city, the very functioning
of the urban organism of Naberezhnye Chelny as well as its inhabitants’ conditions
of life depend upon the plant. But this dependence here is much more substantial
than it was the case in a Central European socialist city. This is because of
the dimensions of both the city and the plant and due to the geographical distance that
separates Naberezhnye Chelny from other industrialized areas.
After the collapse of the communist system in Russia, the dominant role of the
plant did not disappear but it adopted new forms. What one was now confronted
10 I’m not dealing here with the question as to how far several types of adaptive spontaneity of this
kind simply promoted functional disorder and degenerated into anarchy. For analyses of related
issues cf. Wódz (1990).
11 By “reforming countries” I mean the so-called “Visehrad” and Baltic countries, and Slovenia.
They follow the course of post-communist transformation which consists, roughly speaking, in
approximating the “Western” model of democracy and market economy. Contrasting these
countries with the “non-reforming” ones, I ignore the question as to whether it would make sense
to differentiate some intermediate cases. The examples for “non-reforming” countries can especially
be found in much of the post-Soviet spectrum.