Abstract
Minsk was ruined in the Second World War and reconstructed after it as an exemplary socialist city. The aim of the soviet power and soviet architects as its (power) mediums was creation of a representative capital of a soviet republic instead of a provincial and multicultural town.
On the ruins of a gubernatorial center rose a city of a different, much bigger scale. Magnificent central avenue with its architecture alluding to great European and Russian examples was a means of educating Belorussians into Soviet citizens.
This goal was completed by providing people a reason to be proud of socialist state by owning collectively the Central Universal Shop or the Palace of Culture of the Professional Unions. Not only architecture, but the very poplulation of Minsk also changed in the result of the war.
Depopulated city was refilled and proceeded its growth due to the flood of people from the countryside, who arrived to toil by the newly built industrial giants. If reconstructed center of Minsk created a common background for identification of the newcomers, be they from other soviet republics or Belorussian villages, the housing estates by the tractor, automobile and other workshops were space of everyday life of new citizens.
How the tractor plant neighbourhood, designed as an architectural ensemble, organized life according to socialist doctrine of new man, is another spot of interest in the article. Altogether - the socialist realist architecture, social structures of the neighbourhood, the system of housing distribution - created social world of lived Communism.
How people accommodated it, is the main question.