Urbanising the Virgin Lands

Full text

1 Urbanising the Virgin Lands
At the frontier of Soviet
socialist planning
Gianni Talamini
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic to investigate
the Soviet project to urbanise the Central Asian steppes, an enormous,
pioneering project that remains largely underinvestigated. Starting in the
1930s, the Soviets began to build an extensive network of canals, railways
and roads to exploit the region’s natural resources. The Virgin Lands
Campaign, promoted by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, further con-
tributed to the human colonisation of a vast barren area by providing a
territorial infrastructure for further spatial development. Tselinograd was
established as the capital of the USSR Virgin Lands in 1961. The planned
city ultimately showcased a new conception of town planning and the
standardisation of buildings under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev.
Over a large span of time and space, new typologies were synthesised and
reproduced. These typologies eventually became fundamental components
of the cultural history of Central Asia. Moreover, the Soviet territorial
infrastructure is still shaping the region’s socio-economic development
trajectory today. This chapter contextualises the association between sys-
tems of signs and modes of spatial production, discussing the socialist phase
of territorial development from a longue durée perspective, that of the
evolution of a peripheral settlement into a new centrality.
* * *
The production of space as an apparatus of power has been the focus of
extraordinary research, partially inspired by and building on the works of
French intellectuals such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault. Although a
small portion of the urban space is intentionally conceived as an apparatus,
urban and architectural spaces often unintentionally express, shape and
operationalise the hegemonic values of a society. A crucial theoretical
attempt to investigate the association between modes of production and the
production of space was carried out by Henri Lefebvre (1991; 1996). As
David Harvey (2010) put forward, both the basis and superstructure – as
well as their inherent social, economic, political and ideological attributes,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003327592-3
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

including the relationships between them – can be rendered through the study
of the production of space. Notably, no necessary link of reciprocity exists
between spatial forms and modes of production. Yet a reasonable assumption
is “that a dominant mode of production will be characterised by a dominant
urbanistic form and, perhaps, by a certain homogeneity in the built form of
the city” (Harvey 2010:204).
As a premise for this research, the etymology of the word periphery (from
peri – “around” + pherein “to bear”) could help clarify how this notion
depends on that of a centre. The periphery is also commonly intended in
geometry as the outer surface, the outside boundary of a closed gure, thus
indicating the limit of a nite system. How this boundary is interpreted and
shaped can manifest a society’s ideological superstructure and the spatial
relations of production. In the USSR, since the 1920s, the need to intensify
and extend the territorial control and exploitation of natural resources in
non-capitalist ways drove an intensive debate on the periphery as the place to
experiment with new spatial forms for building communism. The periphery at
this historical juncture coincided with the notion of the frontier, intended in
both physical and intellectual connotations.
Notably, Andrei Platonov set some of his most famous and controversial
works at the periphery of the USSR in the depth of Central Asia. The village
of Chevengur, the imagined last reserve of a group of people searching to realise
communism in the aftermath of the October Revolution, is located in an
undened area of steppes; both The Sea of Youth and Dzhan are set in areas
that could be identied in the steppes of modern Turkmenistan. These works
not only reected the vibrant intellectual debate about giving a coherent spatial
form to the newly established communist society but also questioned the
pioneers’ role in the utopian construction of real socialism.
In parallel to writers – Engineers of the Soul (Westerman 2010), such as
Platonov, Gorky and Olesha – urbanists such as Milyutin, Leonidov, May
and Forbat were confronted with the need to put ideas into practice and give
a physical form to communism. Soon after the 1930s, the urban planning
discourse initially clustered around two polarised positions: the so-called
urbanist and disurbanist. The utopianism of such early proposals left space for
more pragmatic approaches, which served for the development of industrial
and agricultural production under the leadership of Stalin and Khrushchev,
respectively.
This chapter focuses on the case of Astana as a peripheral Soviet space in
which it is possible to read the stratied layering of the spatial crystallisation
of power but also as a place semanticised through territorialisation. Astana is
the current name of a location in the heart of Central Asia, previously known
as, in order of time, Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, Akmola, Astana and Nur-
Sultan. It has developed from a tsarist Russian outpost on the north bank of
the Ishim River to the current capital of Kazakhstan (Figure 1.1). Crucial
evolutions of the site followed the establishment of Tselinograd and Astana,
respectively.
16 Gianni Talamini

Central Asia urbanism from a longue durée perspective
A paucity of research exists on the Central Asian spatial palimpsest, both as a
space in which to read the stratied layering of the spatial crystallisation of
power and as a place signied by urban planning and architecture. Drawing
on the theoretical framework proposed by Giovanni Arrighi in his world-
system analysis (Arrighi 1994), the production of space in Central Asia can be
read as part of a longue durée process fostering the material expansion of the
world system. This transformation unfolded in three centuries-long strati-
cations of the territorial palimpsest: (1) the Russian Empire territorialist
Figure 1.1 Top: In grey, the Virgin Lands Campaign area and Astana; bottom:
Astana’s urban area, with the superimposition, in the centre, of the 1963
plan for Tselinograd; white square: Akmolisk fort; white star, left: Palace
of Tselinograd Virgin Lands Developers (today, Concert Hall “Astana”);
and white star, right: Palace of Youth (today, Zhastar Sarayy).
Source: Author; adapted from the 1963 plan for Tselinograd.
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 17

expansion in Central Asia (1718–1917); (2) the Soviet infrastructural devel-
opment (1922–1991) and (3) national self-determination, conjoined with
supranational hegemonic capitalism (1992–).
The rst period was marked by the construction of outposts in critical
geographical locations and the early planning and construction of territorial-
scale railway infrastructure. In this phase, the location of tsarist settlements
was primarily determined based on military and commercial considerations.
This phase was crucial in determining the location of future settlements.
Nevertheless, despite being relatively long, this phase left only minor traces
on the territorial palimpsest.
During the second period, the Soviets began to build an extensive network
of canals, railways and roads to rationally exploit the natural (underground
and agricultural) resources of the barren deserts and steppes surrounding the
oases and fertile valleys, such as the Chorasmia and Fergana valleys, that had
served as cradles of civilisations for centuries. This period was marked by
two crucial phases: industrialisation in the 1930s and 1940s and agricultural
expansion in the 1950s and 1960s.
The third phase started with the dissolution of the USSR. Since then, new
state entities have overtaken former Soviet republics and strived to project
a coherent image of cultural and political independence. The new states
also concurrently opened to foreign investments, exploiting both natural
resources and locational advantages. As a consequence, a double production
of space occurred. On one end was the expression of an ideological super-
structure through the synthesis of a new architectural idiom that aimed to
achieve internal stability and international recognition (Fauve & Gintrac
2009; Fauve 2015; Köppen 2013); on the other end, the production of space
served the functional needs of the external resource acquisition.
Phase 1: A point for control
The rst phase coincided with the territorialist expansion of the Russian
Empire and congured a diffusion of strategic points in an untamed en-
vironment. Initially military outposts and then trading hubs, these points
functioned as the early footholds in the following infrastructural development
of the territory. Astana was established, although with a different name, two
centuries ago as one such early point of territorialist expansion.
A tsarist outpost on the Ishim
The Kazakh capital stands in a place whose urban history is short but par-
ticularly eventful. A crossing point of the Ishim river, this place was traversed
by the Kazakh nomads who left the rst faint traces of human life in the
kurgans, the burial mounds used by these people. The site was the north-
ernmost place in the vast area over which the routes of the cyclical trans-
humance of the Kazakh nomads extended.
1
The name of the rst tsarist-era
18 Gianni Talamini

camp that arose here, Akmolinsk, was reminiscent of the original necropolis
that stood next to the camp: Akmola (meaning “white tomb”). Established in
1824 and developed from 1830 onwards in the southern expansion within the
larger framework of the Great Game, the tsarist camp arose as the site of a
small military garrison resembling the many others established in the same
period. The garrison was permanently inhabited by Cossack ofcers and
guards; it served as a shelter, a sort of caravanserai, for the merchant cara-
vans passing through. As Andrey Fyodorovich Dubitsky (1986) mentions,
the place was crossed by an ancient caravan route known as the “Blood
Road” due to the bloody attacks of marauders – ambushes that usually oc-
curred in the thick bushes on the south bank of the Ishim. The need to control
the ford is why Colonel Fyodor Kuzmich Shubin II established the garrison
near the Qara-Ötkel (meaning “black ford” in Kazakh). The military garrison
initially consisted of only stone pavement and adobe barracks. However,
constant attacks by nomadic populations quickly forced the tsarist govern-
ment to take defensive countermeasures and thus erect a fortication to
shelter the barracks: the complex had a square plan and ve bastions. In
1839, a low defensive rampart and a moat were built to defend three sides
of the fort, and in 1840, the central bastion on the northern side (the most
exposed to attack) was crowned by a squat tower.
The small agglomeration, little more than a village, overgrew for two
main reasons: its location and exceptional benets, including the cancella-
tion of customs duties. These same reasons also attracted merchants, par-
ticularly Tatar merchants who arrived in large numbers. As a result, despite
having a military origin, the settlement’s dominant nature soon became
commercial: the place began to act as a distributor of Russian goods
transported there to meet increasing local demand. The town also began to
develop administrative functions by enhancing the commercial vocation
and embryonic manufacturing industry. By the end of the 19th century, the
small town had a settled population of a few thousand people outside
the fortress in spatially bounded social groups: the Cossack, the Tatar
and the Kazakh villages. The cattle trade drove the economy of the town,
whose appearance was marked by the many surrounding windmills.
Regarding housing, buildings of usually one or two storeys were built of
wood, brick and wood or entirely of brick. Adobe brick buildings were
relatively rare. The small town along the Ishim then continued developing
until the time of the revolution. In the following period, the civil war
paralysed the development of the town: on 1 January 1912, Akmolinsk had
14,756 inhabitants but only 10,686 on the same date in 1923. A sudden
growth due to an abnormal and forced wave of migration occurred during
WWII: Germans, Chechens, Koreans, Poles and other ethnic groups
present in the territory of the Soviet Union were deported to the less
reachable regions of the USSR. However, this considerable population
displacement only partly touched Akmolinsk since most of this population
was assigned to major industrial centres, such as Karaganda.
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 19

Phase 2: A line of a network
Since the 1920s, the urbanists in the Soviet Union have been confronted with
an essential question: which urban form has a socialist city? This question
pushed the frontiers of the intellectual debate into the Virgin Lands, literally
and guratively. The initial debate, which involved European intellectuals,
has been widely reported. The following phase – one ruled out by Stalin
coming to power and the consequential departure of Europeans such as
André Lurçat, Ernst May, Hans Schmidt and Mart Stam – has been less
avant-garde and remains largely underinvestigated. What emerges from the
case of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic is the pragmatic application of
the linear city model that was coherently proposed for Magnitogorsk and
typically developed along an extended railway network. This model was
rst implemented in the early process of industrialisation of Central Asia, for
example, in Fred Forbat’s plan for Karaganda of 1932. Under the leadership
of Nikita Khrushchev, the model was adopted in an attempt to eliminate
the “‘contradictions between town and country’ in Bolshevik parlance.
Khrushchev wished to turn the peasant into skilled agricultural labourers,
a rural proletariat whose mindset and way of life would differ little from
that of urban industrial workers” (Tompson 2016:96). Driven by the in-
dustrialisation of agriculture, a new impetus towards the heavy anthropisa-
tion of Central Asia occurred. The momentum resulted in human history’s
largest policy-induced cropland expansion – with the anthropogenic effects
on climate recently identied through science (Rolinski et al. 2021).
Concurrently, the standardisation of construction, although lowering spatial
and material qualities of the built environment, provided a large population
with new residential spaces. Thus, the Virgin Lands of Central Asia provided
Khrushchev with the ideal space to test the industrialisation of agriculture
and construction at an unprecedented scale. In such historical circumstances,
the intellectual effort focused on speeding up production via simple con-
struction techniques and standard design to quickly implement projects
across the Union.
The network – The railway as a territorialist infrastructure
The railway development played a crucial role in the territorialist expansion
of tsarist Russia and, later under the USSR, in the construction of socialism.
The rst project for a railway line connecting Tyumen to Tashkent, passing
through Akmolinsk, dates back to 1878: the Russian Ministry of Railways
was considering the possible realisation of the work at the time, but the line
stopped in Omsk in 1895 due to lack of funds. By the end of the rst decade
of the 20th century, Akmola Oblast had only about 40 kilometres of narrow-
gauge track. Outside the administrative boundaries, British concessionaires
built a section between Karaganda and the Spassky copper factory from 1906
to 1908. Shortly before the WWI, Russian and foreign capitalists formed a
20 Gianni Talamini

company to build the South Siberian Railway. The route would pass through
Orsk, Akmolisnsk and Semipalatinsk. Construction occurred during the
WWI and spurred the mass employment of prisoners of war. However, the
October Revolution, followed by the Russian Civil War, halted the expansion
of the rail infrastructure until Lenin – who recognised the urgency of com-
pleting the work to be able to transport food and supplies to those starving
from the great famine that hit the southern Union provinces in the early
1920s – ofcially started the urgent construction of the infrastructure con-
necting the cities of the Kazakh steppe on 5 August 1920. Workers were
sent from other cities, and the area’s army and population were mobilised.
In 1922, the railway reached Kokshetau, one of the northernmost regional
capitals of present-day Kazakhstan, but the work was later interrupted due
to the enormous economic difculties the country was experiencing; work
was not resumed until the late 1920s. Accordingly, the rst train arrived in
Akmolinsk on 8 November 1929, and from then on, the city quickly became
an important railway hub due to the strategic location. Karaganda was joined
by the railway two years later in 1931; the Akmolinsk-Kartaly line’s con-
struction began in 1939 and was completed in 1945; and the Akmolinsk-
Pavlodar link was completed in 1952. However, Akmolinsk had to wait until
1962 for a new, modern station.
Meanwhile, Kazakh SSR played an essential role in the early 1940s due
to the war’s events in the geographical European side of the Soviet Union.
Far from the seas and possible enemy invasions, Kazakh’s cities were in-
dustrialised to compensate for losses on the Western Front and support war
needs. These reasons also fuelled the crucial mining discoveries in the Kazakh
underground. Akmolisk quickly found itself equipped with many state-of-
the-art production facilities, laboratories and equipment.
The linear city – A line in the Virgin Lands: the plan for Tselinograd
From the beginning of the 1950s, the infrastructural expansion of Central
Asia gained renewed impetus; the Virgin Lands Campaign, promoted by
Khrushchev, further contributed to the human colonisation of a vast barren
area. This expansion provided a territorial infrastructure for further spatial
development. Stalin’s successor was a son of peasants convinced that the
development of the Soviet Union had to pass through that of its agriculture;
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev launched the Virgin Lands Campaign in
1954. The aim was to expand agriculture to those areas of the Soviet Union
that had never been cultivated to permanently remedy the Union’s food
shortage. To host a large migrant population employed within the expanded
agricultural sector, the conversion of a vast territory of the Eurasian steppes
to arable land entailed the expansion of urban areas in the region. The ur-
banisation of the Virgin Lands was accomplished via the movement of people
and ideas from the Western and – at that time – more advanced parts of the
Union. Eventually, the campaign allowed Khrushchev to conceptualise ideas
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 21

he developed as head of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic, such as collectivising agriculture and eliminating the dif-
ference between town and countryside. To achieve the latter, Khrushchev
conceived the concepts of “rural proletariat” and “agro-town” – larger than
the typical rural village, such a settlement would have offered public facilities
and services typical of a town (Tompson 2016). To rapidly achieve this goal, a
new residential typology was proposed in conjunction with the Virgin Lands
Campaign. Popularly known as khrushchyovka, the typology was adopted
throughout the USSR territory and exported to other socialist countries.
In the early 1950s, within two decades, this new typology was used to supply
dwellings for around 60 million people in the USSR. The khrushchyovka
contributed to shaping the socialist society into an essential part of USSR
history, popular culture and collective memory.
The Virgin Lands Campaign is a heroic period in the region’s history
(Dubitsky 1986). The campaign yielded extraordinary results in the short
term but was later run aground for various reasons, starting with the sudden
impoverishment of the soil. Trainloads of volunteers, following the call of the
supreme leader, enlisted from all over the USSR and arrived at Akmolisnk.
The city was renamed Tselinograd (literally “city of the Virgin Lands”) on
20 March 1961 and elevated as the capital (leading centre) of the Virgin
Lands. Agricultural policies marked the history of these places for a long
time, starting with the development of a town plan to regulate the consid-
erable population growth.
The Lengorstrojproekt, Leningrad’s planning institute – with the assist-
ance of the Urban Development Institute, the Promstrojproekt and other
planning institutions in the Union – was therefore commissioned to draw up
the plan for the new city. Vyacheslav Alekseevich Shkvarikov directed the
work; the architects Knyazev, Varlamov, Yargina, Zhukov, Lukyanov and
Zarudko collaborated on drafting the plan. The plan was nally drafted at
the end of 1962 and approved in February 1963. Only a few paper fragments
of the graphic design remain, but the city’s urban structure results are
still legible today (Khairullina 2015; Figure 1.1). The plan envisaged a linear
development in three functional zones: an industrial zone on the northern
side of the city (extending from the railway line), a median residential zone
(containing ve districts of 50–100 thousand inhabitants) and a nal strip to
the south, near the river, dedicated to institutions and recreational activities.
The linear scheme then has a signicant advantage in that it can potentially
be extended indenitely. The plan was the occasion for Shkvarikov, a leading
academician and director of the Central Scientic Research and Design
Institute for Town Planning of the Soviet Union, to experiment with inno-
vative approaches in the organisation of the microraion (microdistric) and
the dynamic growth of the urban area. According to Elvira Khairullina
(2015), the plan makes clear reference to the 1934 Van Eesteren’s plan for
Amsterdam in both the relationship with the historic settlements and the
green areas as structural articulation elements of the plan. Each microraion
22 Gianni Talamini

was planned to be served by community facilities in urban green spaces, and
it was provided with direct access to the green network and public trans-
portation system (Khairullina 2015). The size and layout of such superblocks
adapted to the existing condition; in historical central areas, the size of the
block was reduced to conform it to the pre-existing urban materials.
The new plan showed a signicant discontinuity with the old tsarist set-
tlement: the balkanisation of Akmolinsk’s population – its spatial division
into ethnically homogeneous settlements of Cossacks, Tatars and Kazakhs,
with toponyms such as Mechetnaya Street (Mosque Street) and Cerkovnaya
Street (Church Street) – contrasted with the homogeneity of the new neigh-
bourhoods, and the old religious buildings were replaced, per socialist dic-
tates, with the headquarters of the new secular institutions.
Immediately after approval, the plan became operational, and construc-
tion of the city began to provide an immediate response to the pressing
demand for housing. The construction was sponsored by experienced builders
who had travelled to Tselinograd from Moscow and Leningrad to construct
the rst demonstration buildings. In just six months, the city measured an
expansion of 650 dwellings and comprised four, ve-storey school buildings.
The rst street in the plan to be realised was the Mira, on which ve-storey
buildings were constructed. At the same time, the main square had also
begun to take shape: the seven-storey Soviet Palace, as was the housing, was
erected with prefabricated concrete modules. The blocks of ats were mostly
ve storeys, and after learning the techniques for assembling the modules,
the local teams quickly learned how to erect the buildings themselves. By the
end of 1962, the city’s housing had increased by some 115,000 square metres,
and the network of educational institutions boasted an impressive 2,270 seats
and a dining hall seating 300. In addition, a network of paved roads and
pavements stretched a total of about 36 kilometres.
The city’s construction proceeded apace, and to meet the demand for
building materials, on-site production of expanded clay, bricks, cement,
asphalt, precast concrete blocks and other concrete products was started.
However, these efforts were not sufcient to meet the needs. Therefore, during
June 1964 alone, 600 loads of materials, technicians, plumbers, painters,
plasterers and electricians were sent from Moscow. The settlement expansion
also brought further material demands for water and electricity. The rst
was solved by building the vast Vyacheslavkoe reservoir 60 kilometres east of
the urban centre. The electricity network, on the other hand, was implemented
thanks to a line running alongside the new road infrastructure: in 1964, the
electrical connection between Tselinograd and Karaganda was built in record
time, covering a distance of over 250 kilometres. Aviation then developed
as well: on the 46th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, the rst
scheduled turboprop plane (an IL-18) landed at the city’s new airport on
4 November 1963, inaugurating the direct Tselinograd–Moscow route. The
non-stop ight to Moscow took four hours and twenty minutes, and the ight
to Alma–Ata only one hour and forty minutes: the large distances between the
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 23

city and the two capitals could thus be bridged in no time. Finally, in 1964,
television signal transmission became possible thanks to electrication.
During this period of fast urban development, while anonymous residen-
tial blocks were constructed according to standardised models, the
most iconic buildings were designed by prominent architects: emblematic is
the case of the Palace of Youth, designed by a team of architects led by the
Russian Anatoly Polyansky (Figure 1.2). Polyansky gained fame for the
pavilion of the USSR at the International World Fair in Brussels in 1958 and
was later appointed as the chairman of the Union of Architects of the USSR.
The Palace of Youth was completed on 20 March 1975 and designed by
architect Kirill Mironov, engineer Tsilya Nakhutina, and artists Dmitry
Merpert and Nelli Mironova; the palace housed 1,200 seats, a convertible
stage, a 400-seat sports hall, a swimming pool with diving boards, exhibition
halls, a library, group work rooms, a 150-seat bar, a banquet hall for 50
people and several other rooms. The construction of the building was
achieved using imported materials and local Taskol marble, but construction
was put on hold for a decade after the dismissal of Khrushchev (Iskakov
2020). A copy of the Palace of Youth of Tselinograd was constructed in the
city of Donetsk in 1975; evidently, design references were circulating across
and within the boundaries of the Union, despite the international isolation.
Figure 1.2 Palace of Youth in 1975.
Source: Photo courtesy of Vasily Toskin.
24 Gianni Talamini

Another notable case is the Palace of Tselinograd Virgin Lands
Developers, whose design was picked up by Khrushchev at the National
Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow: “We need such a
building in Tselinograd”, dictated Nikita Khrushchev (Gudro and Krastiņš
2019). The building was originally designed in 1960 by the Latvian archi-
tects Kraulis, Danneberga and Fogels as a panoramic cinema for Riga,
a cinema which was never built. The palace’s auditorium had 2,355 seats,
about 50 speakers, a dozen projectors and a 34-metre by 13-metre monitor.
Architect Daina Danneberga, a key member of the design team, was
indirectly inuenced by the work of Finnish masters Armas Lindgren and
Eliel Saarinen, with whom Danneberga’s professor Andrei Olj had worked.
The Palace of Tselinograd Virgin Lands Developers was developed by ve
institutes based in Moscow, Leningrad and Riga, together with the Latvian
State Urban Design Institute. Furniture for the palace was also produced
in Riga and transported on-site (Gudro and Krastiņš 2019).
In the same year the Palace of the Youth was completed, on the occasion
of the 58th anniversary of the October Revolution on 5 November 1975, the
new monument to Lenin was also inaugurated, crowning the large city
square. The 16-metre-high bronze statue of Lenin dominated the square,
his back to the tallest building (the headquarters of the Giprosel’hoz). The
buildings overlooking the ample open space were characterised by the regular
rhythm of the openings, the absence of decoration and achromia. The
only note of colour was the faces of Lenin and Marx, painted large on the
massive volume of the House of Soviets. As Takashi Tsubokura (2010:16)
noted, “the main point of the central square of the Tselinograd days was a
combination of representational gures of socialist heroes and anonymous
architecture on the background. It was nothing else but a visual represen-
tation of ‘an orderly society led by socialism’”.
Phase 3: A radial city
The last of the three phases was inaugurated by the collapse of USSR and
marked by the mutation of the Union’s internal administrative borders into
external national boundaries. The balkanisation of Central Asia resulted in
the elevation of regional centres into new pivotal centralities. Such mutation,
accompanied by the restructuring of the socio-economic basis, produced new
urban forms and new architectural idioms.
When the periphery became the centre: The construction of a nation in Astana
In 1992, the government of the newly formed Republic of Kazakhstan
changed toponyms to mark a distance from the Soviet past. Alma-Ata
became Almaty, and most of the pre-Soviet cities regained the name they had
before the 70-year communist era. Such was the case with Dzhambul, now
Taraz; the same fate befell Tselinograd, which took back its original toponym
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 25

to become Akmola. However, apart from such a formal mutation and con-
currently with the removal of Soviet vestments and efgies, no transforma-
tion of a structural nature was recorded. On the contrary, in the precarious
economic and political situation of the period following the dissolution of
the USSR, a general shrinkage of means, people and knowledge led to
social atrophy and impoverishment. Along with losing centralised power,
Moscow’s managerial and organisational functions also disappeared: internal
restructuring began but was long and difcult to implement given the
shortage of means. The lowest point in this historical transition occurred in
1996 when the country’s economic situation reached its lowest point.
To exit the economic impasse – and in all likelihood to also free himself
from the increasingly suffocating grip of the elites of the old capital – the then
president of the Republic of Kazakhstan made ofcial in 1997 what seemed
to be a somewhat risky and doomed move: the relocation of the capital from
Almaty to Akmola. The ofcial reasons were many: they ranged from the
need for a strategic relocation, which would avert potential dangers due to
the peripheral location, to the strong seismicity of the territory where the old
capital stood. Whatever the reason, the move was clearly to avoid the danger
of an internal uprising and the consequent detachment of the northern part of
the territory, where the Russians were still the majority. Subsequently, the
city name was changed from Akmola to Astana (“Capital” in Kazakh). The
ofcial reasons ranged from the possible misfortune that a name as funereal
as Akmola (meaning “white tomb”) could bring, to the easy pronunciation
in many languages of Astana. However, many saw in Astana a temporary
name and, in Nazarbayev’s decision, the wish to emulate Peter the Great in
naming the new capital after himself. Indeed, the project was hatching both
Peter the Great’s and Atatürk’s footsteps. In 1996, a national competition
for the design of the new capital was called; the winner was a design studio
from Almaty with a somewhat emblematic name: Ak Orda (“White Horde”).
The plan completely overturned the inspirational principles of the 1963 plan,
undermining the linear development itself: the scheme envisaged an expan-
sion southwards, beyond the river, where the administrative and commercial
functions would be primarily housed. The basic principles of this proposal,
headed by Kazakh architect Kaldybaj Montahaev – who designed Almaty’s
Republic Square in 1980 – were preserved by subsequent plans. The reloca-
tion of the capital and its government institutions was remarkably rapid, and
what had been Lenin Square in Tselinograd was equipped as a temporary seat
of government.
Dissatised with the results of the above competition and to give the
operation international prominence and prestige, Nazarbayev decided to
expand the scope of the call beyond national borders. The Kazakh gov-
ernment therefore launched an international competition that was
announced and published in foreign media in April 1998. The call was sent
to 40 participants from 19 different countries; 27 participants submitted a
project proposal. On 6 October 1998, the president of the Republic of
26 Gianni Talamini

Kazakhstan ofcially awarded the rst prize to the Japanese architectural
rm Kisho Kurokawa & Associates. The concept behind the plan is struc-
tured around the critical notions of Kurukawa’s theory: symbiosis, metabo-
lism and abstract symbolism. The rst of these three concepts, foundational
in the Japanese architect’s intellectual production, was expressed as a dia-
logic relationship between the different groups of buildings. The plan was to
leave the existing structure, buildings and trees untouched. In contrast, the
new addition was to be built across the river as stipulated by government
dictates but located along the watercourse – the symbiotic relationship was
intended to be between the natural environment and the articial additions –
in continuity with the original idea of linear development. According to
Tsubokura (2010), who worked with Kurokawa on the plan, the metabolic
city was an enlarged reproduction of the linear zoning advanced by the 1963
land use plan, and the three zones were to be articulated into seven: a green
buffer zone to protect the north side of the city from north sandstorms; a
regenerated industrial zone; an intermediate green zone for environmental
protection; a retained urban area; a new residential zone; a new urban centre;
and an ecological park in the south. As stated by Tsubokura, Kurokawa
held the 1963 plan in high regard, witnessing in it the capacity to guide urban
development in a balanced order.
Not long afterwards, an unexpected event upset the outcome of the com-
petition: in December 1999, a master plan for the city of Astana, drafted by the
Saudi Binladin Group, was delivered to the municipality of the new capital.
The Saudi master plan appeared to be developed in continuity with the plan
submitted in 1996 by Ak Orda and was to be implemented with Arab funds.
On 10 February the following year, the new plan was approved. Kurokawa was
confronted with the difcult decision to either abandon the table or take the
paternity of the Saudi plan; he chose the latter by combining the features of
the three plans into one. In August 2001, the government of the Republic
of Kazakhstan approved the new Japanese plan and shelved the Saudi one.
A mutated perspective: From a linear to a radial plan
Since 1997, the physical transformation of the built environment in the city
was initially carried out primarily as façadism; buildings were covered with
new efgies and decorations taken from the pre-soviet Kazakh tradition.
“Simple solids of the Tselinograd period were thoroughly covered with this
kind of supercial graphics, which changed these buildings out of all
recognition […] It was a change of city image, from a provincial utilitarian
town reecting the well-being and status of a basically industrial society
into a high-status urban capital city” (Tsubokura 2010:16). The following
phase of urban development, still ongoing, has been marked by the ex-
pansion on the south bank of the Ishim River, with the addition of the
Millennium Axis clustering a collection of buildings designed by renowned
international rms.
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 27

The construction of the new capital proceeded quickly, initially per the
indications given by the Japanese rm. However, the prescriptions of the plan
were not always adhered to, and the plan had to quickly accommodate
Nazarbayev’s aspirations and pressures from local and foreign investors. The
planning body in charge of controlling urban development is the GenPlan:
the bureau where Nazarbayev’s requests were promptly answered, in front
of an enormous three-dimensional model of the future urban layout. The
continuous modications to Kurokawa’s plan eventually distorted it, and
GenPlan was commissioned to develop a further elaboration that was nally
drafted at the end of 2010 and approved in January of the following
year. With the new plan, the innovative charge of the 1963 plan came to an
end. Whilst the Kurokawa’s second plan already proposed a peripheral
green belt protecting the agglomeration, superseding the linear articulation
of Tselinograd with a concentric development, the new plan completed that
morphological mutation, accentuating a radial form. From a formal point of
view, the new plan seems to be inspired by the one developed for Copenhagen
under Peter Bredsdorff in 1947. Like Fingerplan and unlike Kurokawa’s
2001 plan, the new plan for Astana also has a regional vocation, paying
particular attention to the development of connections between the capital
and the surrounding territory: a vision that was aimed at directing the city’s
growth until 2030.
The new capital had a little over 250,000 inhabitants when it was elected to
house the institutions of the newly founded republic. A quarter of a century
later, the ofcial population is now about 1.3 million. The city seems to be
increasingly oriented towards self-sufciency, having promoted and begun
to develop a construction industry that encompasses the entire supply chain.
On the other hand, the recent urban expansion, like every new urban area,
lacks the charm of the patina of history (Keeton 2011) and the variety that
comes from stratication. Concurrently, many city inhabitants still reside in a
khrushchyovka; the old Tselinograd is still the city’s core. Today, Astana is a
rich palimpsest, comprising what Françoise Choay (1986) would dene as
hypersignicant built-up systems, where extraordinary architectural artefacts
illustrate a history of powers within the layering of diverse planning models
(Khairullina 2015).
Conclusion
This chapter investigated the spatial production in the former Soviet repub-
lics of Central Asia, the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, building on the
Schmittian reciprocity between spatial forms and forms of power (Schmitt
2003). Thus, the chapter aimed to contribute to the Foucaultian project to
write a whole history “of spaces – which would at the same time be the history
of powers” (Foucault 1980:149). The intuition of this investigation was that,
on the periphery – of the world system – the correspondence between spatial
forms and forms of power is more readable than in the centre due to the
28 Gianni Talamini

absence (or irrelevant presence) of spatially xed social structures. Such a
peculiar condition makes the periphery the ideal testing ground for urbanism
and the space where the planning experiments often occur on a tabula rasa,
manifesting themselves purely in stratied spatial structures. As emerged
from the investigation, the three phases of development of the city went along
with the transformation of the city’s socio-economic base. The rst was
marked by the necessity of strategic control of the territory, with an outpost
on a ford. The second made the city a linear development along the railway
infrastructure to showcase Khrushchev’s aspiration to industrialise agricul-
ture and construction while dissolving the difference between town and
countryside into the “agro-town”. Finally, the third phase elevated the city
to a new capital from which power and control irradiate concentrically. In
the rst phase, the economy of the small settlement was based on trade, while
in the following two phases, the economy was sustained by organised ex-
ploitation of natural resources – through agriculture and materials extraction,
respectively. Concurrently, architecture expressed the hegemonic values of
the Russian territorialist expansion, the Soviet infrastructural development
and the Kazakh national self-determination.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by a grant from the City University of
Hong Kong (project title: Superimpositions of Spatial Orders, project no.
7005771). The author thanks the editors for the insightful comments and
enthusiastic commitment and Elvira Khairullina for sharing her extra-
ordinary knowledge about the 1963 plan; he acknowledges Weike Li and
Chenxi Huang for their assistance and Maria Babak for her crucial help
in getting permission for Figure 1.2. Finally, the author is thankful for
Vasily Filippovich Toskin’s generosity.
Note
1 Those who were called Kyrgyz by the Russians: the term Kazakh was only intro-
duced in Soviet times to differentiate the Kyrgyz from those who were called “black
Kyrgyz”. Since then, the former, nomads of the steppes, started being referred to
as “Kazakhs” and the latter as “Kyrgyz”.
References
Arrighi, G. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our
Times. Verso.
Choay, F. 1986. Urbanism and semiology. In: Gottdiener, M., and Lagopoulos, A.
Ph. (Eds.), The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, pp. 160–175.
Columbia University Press.
Dubitsky, A.F. 1986. City on Ishim [original in Russian]. Kazakhstan.
Fauve, A. 2015. Global Astana: nation branding as a legitimisation tool for author-
itarian regimes. Central Asian Survey 34(1):110–124. 10.1080/02634937.2015.1016799
Urbanising the Virgin Lands 29

Fauve, A., and Gintrac, C. 2009. Production de l’espace urbain et mise en scène
du pouvoir dans deux capitales «présidentielles» d’Asie Centrale. L’Espace
Politique. Revue en ligne de géographie politique et de géopolitique, (8). 10.4000/
espacepolitique.1376
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977.
Vintage.
Gudro, I., and Krastiņš, J. 2019. Contribution of architect Daina Danneberga to the
architecture in the second half of the 20th century. History of Engineering Sciences
and Institutions of Higher Education 3:11–34. 10.7250/HESIHE.2019.002
Harvey, D. 2010. Social Justice and the City. University of Georgia Press.
Iskakov, T. 2020. Lost palaces of the capital. The Zhastar Palace [original in Russian],
Vlast. https://vlast.kz/gorod/40062-utracennye-dvorcy-stolicy-dvorec-zastar.html
Keeton, R. 2011. Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in Asia. International
New Town Institute, SUN.
Khairullina, E. 2015. Tres pasos en una distancia: los planes y manzanas en
Astaná durante el periodo soviético (1957–1987). In: VII Seminario Internacional
de Investigación en Urbanismo, Barcelona-Montevideo, junio 2015. Departament
d’Urbanisme i Ordenació del Territori. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
10.5821/siiu.6115
Köppen, B. 2013. The production of a new Eurasian capital on the Kazakh steppe:
architecture, urban design, and identity in Astana. Nationalities Papers 41(4):590–605.
10.1080/00905992.2013.767791
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. 1996. Writings on Cities. Trans. H. Kofman, and E. Lebas. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Rolinski, S., Prishchepov, A.V., Guggenberger, G., Bischoff, N., Kurganova, I.,
Schierhorn, F., Müller, D., and Müller, C. 2021. Dynamics of soil organic carbon
in the steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan under past and future climate and land
use. Regional Environmental Change 21:1–16. 10.1007/s10113-021-01799-7
Tsubokura T. 2010. ‘The next metropolis of Central Asia: Astana, a geopolitical node
in the steppes’. In: Atlas: Asia and the Pacic: Architectures of the 21st Century, 16.
Fundación BBVA, Bilbao.
Tompson, W. 2016. Khrushchev: A Political Life. Springer.
Schmitt, C. 2003. The Nomos of the Earth. New York: Telos Press.
Westerman, F. 2010. Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s
Russia. Abrams.
30 Gianni Talamini