Study on the Formation of the Scientific Concept of the History of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Soviet Period

Abstract

The article discusses the change in scientific approaches to the study of architecture and urban planning of the Soviet era, characteristic of the research of the last three decades. The discussion at the round table in 1991 where the methodological issues of the study of Soviet architecture have been seriously raised for the first time is taken as a “starting point”. The qualitative change of approaches can be associated, first of all, with the opportunity for historians to take a new research position, to look at the phenomenon of Soviet architecture “from the outside”, with the necessary time distance. It is shown that the attitude to the subject of research has been gradually changing not so much evaluatively but axiologically. It has been not so much rethought, but expanded and integrated into the complex socio-cultural context of the Soviet era. The desire to overcome the “knowledge exhaustion syndrome” in regard to the Soviet architecture and attract new types of historical sources is revealed. Such phenomena as the complication of the principles of the periodization of Soviet architecture, as well as a significant increase in attention to the manifestation of regional features within the unifying influence of the general architectural and urban trends of the Soviet time