Materials in Motion: Soviet Cities and Annexed Ecologies After World War II

New materials from high-grade burgundy bricks to fine limestone blocks entered the Soviet building ‘market’ in the 1940s, when the USSR annexed the Baltic states. Transported to construction sites in cities throughout the Soviet Union, these materials supported postwar urban reconstruction efforts after 1945 while also facilitating the flow of Soviet power into newly occupied territories. This paper traces the extraction, production, and movement of materials as they traveled from small industrial towns undergoing sovietization to established Soviet cities like Moscow many kilometers away. Examining the intertwined land- and cityscapes created once materials like limestone were hewn from the earth and set in motion, the paper asks how the USSR’s insatiable need for building materials after the Second World War transformed populations and ecologies far beyond its urban centers. It highlights how attention to the movement of materials allows us to view cities more relationally, not as discrete spatial units but as places dependent on and connected to larger extractive networks, distant pollution and waste-generating industries, and wider flows of commodities and labor.