Urbanization in People's Minds: Stalin’s “Right to the City”, Soviet Subjectivity, and Citizenship Practices in Khanty-Mansiysk

Abstract

The article investigates the concept of Stalin’s “right to the city”, in which urbanization in the USSR is interpreted through the lens of Soviet subjectivity and implemented in specific practices of citizenship. In the socialist context, Stalin’s “right to the city” was discursively reproduced as a state-given ‘gift of modernity’ and was reflected in specific citywide events that represented the new Soviet citizens and consolidated the reciprocal connection between power and society through the idea of the city. The city as a gift concluded a civil agreement between the authorities and ordinary people through citywide practices—rallies, celebrations, ceremonies, and competitions, and became a place of activity and emotion for the Soviet citizen. The activists who spoke this discursive language—and participated in the citizenship practices framed by it—thereby acted within the framework of urban subjectivity. In other words, they understood themselves as citizens and accepted the corresponding obligations. The study is based on the case of Khanty-Mansiysk of the 1930s to early 1950s, the district center of the Khanty-Mansi National Okrug. These practices of interaction between citizens and the state make it possible—moving beyond the binary opposition of ideology and reality—to conceptualize Stalin’s “right to the city” as an implicit urbanization in the minds of urban subjects who sought to become full-fledged citizens of the Soviet state. Stalin’s “right to the city” became their civil obligation.