Paper short abstract:

By considering late-Soviet Frunze's green spaces as "shared texts" cowritten by authorities, experts and citizens, this paper investigates the emergence of a locally-rooted subjectivity based on the tensions and transition towards more individualistic and romantic relationships with nature.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation investigates how green spaces in late-socialist Frunze contributed to the creation of a localised iteration of the Soviet project over the 1970s and early 1980s and demonstrates the important role they played in shaping the way residents of Frunze came to see themselves as Frunzentsy. Drawing on the Soviet subjectivity approach but investigating a geographical area and time period which receive limited attention in the literature, this work considers texts as crucial tools for defining and internalising what it meant to be Soviet. It considers physical (green) spaces as “shared texts” in which various actors, authorities included, negotiate the meaning of public spaces, nature and indeed socialism. Through their textual interactions in the pages of Vechernyy Frunze, in the form of letters to the editors, academic commentaries and responses of government officials, multiple individual voices were shaping a Frunze-based subjectivity. By redefining the role of nature in the urban context and negotiating responsibility for green spaces themselves, writers were not only participating in the Soviet project, they were shaping it and making it increasingly individualistic. This paper therefore argues that Frunze’s green spaces became a crucible in which local authorities and the city’s inhabitants forged their views of culture, nature and indeed of being Soviet.