Perfect representations of soviet planned space: mono‐industrial towns in the Soviet Baltic Republics in the 1950s-1980s
ENThe article looks at mono-industrial cities in the Baltic States during the Soviet era. In terms of economy, ethnicity and their urban appearance these heterotopic towns were outposts in the integration of the occupied European-like territories into the Soviet Union. Thanks to the principles of planning and state-favoured development that were applied across the Soviet Union, these towns, built for Russian speaking immigrants, stood out from the surrounding patterns of settlement that had developed naturally over time. The uranium producing town of Sillamäe in Estonia was built in secret and with lightning speed amidst the panic concerning the atom bomb immediately after the war, and provides us with a perfect model of Stalinist urban development. Stučka, built in the 1960s near a hydro-electric power station in Latvia and Sniečkus, built in the 1970s next to a nuclear power station in Lithuania, were less separated from the surrounding landscape, but both provide a perfect example of Soviet modernism, which had been learned from mass-housing in the West. Keywords: mono-industrial towns, sovietization, urban planning.
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