“A Factory of Consciousness Alteration”: The Symbolism of Soviet Parks of Recreation and Leisure as Represented by the Authorities between the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

The paper considers the potestary symbols of a Soviet person’s everyday life. The Soviet government did not only work towards a total control of production, but also of private life. The altered leisure concept in the 1920s–1930s helped to create a special type of the so-called “parks of recreation and leisure”, which were meant to raise a “new person”. The architectural and symbolic design of parks shaped patterns of citizens’ behavior, instilling in them new cultural practices that facilitated the tasks of ideological education and formation of a system of total control over society. The author uses materials of the 1920s–1930s, guides of the parks, and archival documents from the Museum of Architecture named after A. V. Shchusev. An analysis of architectural projects, the description of landscape design in Moscow and Leningrad, and the impression it produced on its contemporaries allows to draw a conclusion about a special kind of Soviet canon as to the design of parks of recreation and leisure in the 1930s, which later spread throughout the Soviet Union. The nature of the events that were held in the parks of recreation and leisure were political and educational rather than recreational.

Keywords

• парк культуры и отдыха
• воспитание
• «новый человек»
• повседневная жизнь
• советский человек
• потестарные символы
• репрезентация власти.