Svetlana Levoshko

Svetlana Levoshko, PhD of Architecture, Associate Professor at the SPbGASU Department of Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture, “found” the topic of her next scientific work on a business trip to the White Sea. Her research “Regionalism in Soviet architecture of Karelia and the Leningrad region at the turn of the 1920s–1930s: the problem of identification and preservation of heritage” this year was awarded a grant for research work by SPbGASU scientific and pedagogical staff.

“In 2018, our department conducted master’s studies in the White Sea region. Having visited the cities of Kem and Belomorsk, nearby villages, we found ourselves at lock No. 19 of the famous White Sea-Baltic Canal, built during the first five-year plan of Soviet Russia (1929–1933). I was attracted by the amazing, romantic look of a wooden house for construction managers (now a residential building for three families). Here they assured that such wooden mansions exist in all gateway villages; they were erected in the early 1930s for the managers and engineering workers of BelBaltLAG (a Soviet forced labor camp, the main task of which was the construction and maintenance of the White Sea-Baltic Canal). I realized that this story is worthy of study, especially since this problem, as it turned out, has never been searched,” said Svetlana Levoshko.

The PhD of Architecture emphasized that folk wooden architecture of the Russian North has always aroused the interest of researchers, but during the Soviet period it remained unstudied. Industrialization, the typification of architecture, which began in the 1930s, and the state's focus on neoclassicism seemed to exclude continuity, folk and professional tradition, regionalism, locality, and identity of architecture.

Segezha. Residential building on the Gagarin street, 11a

“This research is based on my studies of the Karelian National Archives and the departmental technical archive of the Pulp and Paper Mill (PPM) in the city of Segezha. I found that in many settlements of Karelia (Petrozavodsk, Segezha, Medvezhyegorsk, Povenets, Nadvoitsy, Kamenny Bor), nineteen gateway settlements of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, residential houses of the 1930s continues the tradition of national-romantic modernism of the early twentieth century, having common features of Finnish -Karelian neo-romanticism,” explained Svetlana Sergeevna.General view of one of the streets of Sotsgorod in Segezha

She recalled that after the construction of the White Sea-Baltic waterway in 1933, urban development of the territory began. At each gateway, a settlement was built for deported and “free” workers, prisoners and exiles to work on the sites of the first and subsequent five-year plans. The plans of the second five-year development project on the banks of the Vygozero at the mouth of the Segezha River provided for the construction of the largest timber and paper chemical plant in Europe (now a pulp and paper mill) and with it the workers' village of Sotsgorod. There is no mention of the Segezha Socialist City in the specialized literature, and this name of “old Segezha” has washed out even in the everyday life of old-timers.

“The draft master plan for the social city of Segezha was developed in Lengiprogor, just as were the standard wooden two-story apartment buildings and “cottages” for one or two families for managers and engineering workers. They are interesting for their variety of types and, according to local historians, are not found in other places in Karelia. There are 132 wooden houses of thirteen types.

Today, the fully preserved two-story wooden residential buildings of Segezha attracts attention primarily for its expressive volumetric-spatial composition and stylistic unity of a large urban area. Arc-shaped streets, subordinate to the topography and the existing railway line, provide excellent opportunities for perceiving the ensemble of the development.

These cottage development projects are rooted in the ideas of the early twentieth century, but constantly evolving, adapting to the requirements of new times, they have fully taken root. As a result, in the 1930s, the architecture was apparently perceived as very familiar, although local periodicals wrote that high tiled roofs create the presence of the Baltics or Germany,” explained Svetlana Levoshko.

The author of the study noted that Old Segezha, designed in the mid-1930s as a “social city”, is proposed to be considered an object that has the characteristics of a place of interest. Preservation of this integrity, environment, street panoramas, building materials will allow preserving the unique urban planning object of the historical and cultural heritage of Karelia of the Soviet period.

Medvezhyegorsk House of the head of BelBaltLAG (1933–1936, lost in the 2010s)

In the gateway villages of the White Sea Canal, residential buildings for guards, free technical specialists, and cottages of the camp authorities have been partially preserved. Some even had the status of cultural heritage sites, but the best of them were lost, and quite recently (for example, the two-story mansion of the head of BelBaltLAG in Medvezhyegorsk). Many cottages are in disrepair. However, recently they have attracted the attention of students of Petrozavodsk State University, who took measurements of one such house and examined the technical condition of the structures (it was found to be satisfactory).

“The continuity of the local neo-romantic tradition turned out to be extremely powerful and tenacious. Examples of national romanticism in the architecture of the mid-1930s have been identified, authorship has been partially established, and the current state has been recorded. Using archival materials, the evolution of traditional volumetric-spatial solutions is analyzed in the light of the requirements of historical times. In the development of Karelian settlements there are elusive features of Finnish-Karelian national romanticism - in the monumental architecture of stone public buildings of hotels, offices, and other social infrastructure facilities. The conducted research was aimed at fixing this layer of heritage in the development of cities and towns of Karelia, developing our ideas in a cultural and historical-architectural key about the identity of the territory, which, it turns out, is not limited to the internationally recognized monuments of Russian wooden architecture of the North,” concluded Svetlana Sergeevna.