Over the past few years, the khrushchevka — a five-story, Soviet-era standardised housing block — has come to experience a wide spectrum of urban violence: from the immediate to the imminent, from the discursive to the material, from the historical to the corporeal. In 2017, the Moscow municipality unveiled a comprehensive urban renewal project known euphemistically as the Renovation. The Renovation, in actuality, involves the demolition of several thousand khrushchevki that are set to be replaced with modern, colourful, and densified residential districts. This seminar will outline how the Renovation depends on the discursive constructions of its targets as ‘anachronisms’. Drawing on a highly-localised ethnographic probe of a khrushchevka neighbourhood in Moscow, I discuss how the temporal logic of anachronism not only justifies further intervention, but has also precipitated a degenerative process of displacement, dislocation, and alienation from the home as such. This talk will contend that studying the temporal logic of anachronism employed by the Renovation can equally help us to decipher where the politics of time and urban change are replicated, intersected, and inverted in war-time Russia.

Ekaterina Mizrokhi is an urban and architectural humanities researcher specialising in post-socialist urban transformation. Ekaterina completed her PhD in Architecture at the University of Cambridge and is currently a Junior Research Fellow in Newnham College, Cambridge.