If military order was the substance of administrative Utopia, spatial symmetry and panegyric facade was its form. The early modern town in Russia was a bastion of static order and control rather than a symbol and base of transformation. The new capital, St. Petersburg, "reflected imperial grandeur and monumentality" and the new towns were expected to do the same. Eighteenth century Russian town planning reveals an extraordinarily detailed and uniform design for all new cities of the Empire: radial, rectilinear, or fanlike layouts; grids of straight thoroughfares, to be twice as broad as the height of the tallest buildings; regularly placed squares and plazas, with a central square for military parades, a main avenue, and the administration building at the center; a unified architectural style; and rigidly segregated zones of residence as well as graphically differentiated structures, according to social class, in size, height, material, and facade design. Under Alexander I, especially in the fear-ridden decade of 1810-20, the Scottish architect William Hastie and his Russian colleagues designed model facades to be used in town and home construction all over the Empire. Grid layouts were even decreed for villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though not universally enforced. Custine called St. Petersburg a "camp of stone" and "the general staff of an Army, riot the capital of a nation." The Russia that he visited reminded him of Prussia under Frederick William I. "The square and the chalk-line," he observed, "accord so well with the point of view of absolute sovereigns that right angles become one of the attributes of a despotic architecture."
From the time of Peter the Great through the eighteenth century at least, a tradition of "panegyric Utopia" flourished in court ritual and ceremonies, creating an "iconography of happiness"—prosperity, security, order, virtue, harmony, and calm. Such iconography was an essential element of administrative Utopia. The new towns themselves were icons of the imperial order; some planners of St. Petersburg even proposed model facades in the capital, allowing the owners to build anything they wanted to behind them. The famous dream of Prince Gregory Potemkin to colonize newly conquered lands in the south and to adorn them ex nihilo with a network of new and magnificent towns was a perfect example of the rationalism inherent in administrative Utopia. The notion of social and environmental transformation by administrative means captivated him, and he longed to "modernize" and "rationalize" the anarchic world around him by planning and mobilization—in the literal sense of that word: to move people around. Kherson, Nikolaev, Taganrog, Mariupol and other towns sprang up under his command on the broad southern steppe and on the coast of the Black Sea. Ekaterinoslav, the ultimate panegyric city, was designed as the "Athens of the Ukraine"— a monumental "ode" to his Empress, Catherine the Great. And he achieved it by the use of serfs, drafted artisans, and all manner of enrolled labor.
Historians have cast some doubt upon the accepted legend of "Potemkin villages"—whole communities and structures raised overnight to delight the eyes of Catherine and her entourage as she sailed down the Dniepr River in 1787, but there is no doubt that the miniature Utopia on the banks of the river was an outgrowth of the larger production design of Potemkin's Utopian dream. His preparations and the voyage of the imperial suite combined all the elements of panegyric Utopia: as Catherine's spectacular festivities on shipboard replicated the "iconography of happiness," the ship itself floated serenely past artificially built villages, symmetrical towns, and—to complete the vignette with a graphic summary of obedience—a military parade along the shore.
Panegyric Utopia, the geometrization of space, rationalism, and the military ethos of order and obedience were fused in the early nineteenth century in the Military Colonies. The man who helped create them was Alexei Arakcheev, a prominent civil and military servant of Paul and Alexander I. Under Paul he served as commandant of the City of St. Petersburg; his "passion for detail, order, and smartness" led him to clean up the streets and squares of the capital; and his weakness for facades allowed him to store the refuse and filth in the courtyards and side streets. He modelled his estate at Gruzino after Paul's Gatchina, thus in the manner of a Prussian camp. Rows of identical pink two-family houses stood on each side of the straight paved streets. Showplaces were erected near the approaching roads, and the tiny military city was adorned with twelve monuments, and with towers, lookouts, turrets, flags, and an Athenian Acropolis on a rise (see Fig. 2). Arakcheev's soldier peasants were put into uniform, subjected to a rigid daylong routine of drill and work details, given minute instructions on the upkeep of streets and buildings, and cared for by welfare services. Punishment books were maintained for all inhabitants.
On visiting Gruzino, Tsar Alexander I became enamored of "the order which prevails everywhere, the cleanliness . . . the symmetry and elegance." He was converted by the outward appearance of Gruzino, just as his brother Nicholas was later converted to the colonies by their neatness. His vision of a network of Gruzinos across Russia grew into the huge project of Military Colonies, combining field work with army service under a military regimen. They began to appear before the 1812 campaign, reached their peak in the early 1820s with about 750,000 men, women, and children, and were gradually dissolved in the reign of Nicholas because of disorders, corruption, and general unpopularity.
A glimpse of life inside these colonies illustrates vividly their Utopian character and their immense debt to a Prussian model that was ill-suited to the social infrastructure of Russia. Isolated and immune from the rest of Russia, they were an artificial state within a state where farming alternated with drilling and meaningless tasks. The population was formed into five separate classes of settlers ruled by military officers. All the houses and buildings were designed according to a master plan hatched in the War Ministry by imperial architects and were symmetrically arranged. Poverty in the familiar sense was eliminated by free housing, health care, and schools, although no one was permitted to own any real property. "Loose elements" were eliminated and the entire community was subjected to collective responsibility. It was as artificial and unrealistic as the communities dreamed of by Cabet, Fourier, and Owen, but imposed from above upon an unwilling and uncomprehending population of peasants whose own dream of the good society was precisely to be left alone. Furthermore, this "planned, rational society" of clocks and schedules, aside from violating the ethos of country folk, failed ultimately even in its stated purpose because of the rampant inefficiency, the resistence to regimentation that flashed into violent revolt, the corruption, and the bungling administration.
- Stites, R 1989, "Administrative Utopia: Parade, Facade, Colony", Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press, pp.21-23.
