This man is Karl Marx. He was born in 1816 in Prussia, but moved to London later on. He lived in a 2 bedroom flat with 2 servants in North London. He also invented Communism.

In his first book, the Communist Manifesto, he outlined the main problems with the Victorian UK. These were, the rich were too rich, the poor are too poor and have shockingly low living standards. Capitalism was ruining everything, was too powerful and must be stopped. He then proposed a solution. A world where the state provides for everyone and runs everything at first would be called socialism. A world that has had the state withered away, where everyone is truly free and there no more money, war or inequality would be called TRUE COMMUNISM!

These ideas were based on the concepts of the least heard of guy in history, David Ricardo (with thanks to user Pepe Stalin.) He made his money out of being an politician for an area where only 15 people could vote, so obviously a warrior against corruption. Ricardo believed that you could simplify the economy to the point of parody. He thought that the price of goods was actually the cost it took to manufacture them. Marx asked: In that case, where does profit come from?"

Marx realised that profit can only come from the exploitation of workers, or human beings as I like to call them. Remember that, as it is all too easy to forget.

This is Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was charismatic, angry and communist. He had also been exiled from Russia to Switzerland. There, he could write socialist pamphlets, gorge coffee and chat with communist mates. However in 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in front of a hipster pop-up t-shirt shop in Sarajevo. I don't know whether it's closed down since I visited. The assassination, not the t-shirts, caused WW1. The Tsar organised ordinary Russian tactics of winning a war: kill Russians until you win. In 1917, General Ludendorff of the German army organised a sealed train to convey Lenin to St. Petersburg. There, he started the October Revolution in November because of the way the calendar worked then. He encountered no real resistance. Then, he started a civil war against the rest of Russia and also some other groups supported by the West.

The new USSR won the war easily. Russia's economy at this time was comparable to Brazil, which had no real infrastructure, barely any manufacturing capacity, half the country was uninhabitable and the people were some of the poorest in the world.

Lenin set out to change that. He implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP) where you would make whatever you could and the state would take half and redistribute it. You could do whatever you wanted with the other half. This was the foundations of a mixed economy, and mixed economies work. A faction within the Communist Party led by Trotsky supported this.

He implemented wide-ranging social freedoms such as "postcard" divorces, the legalisation of homosexuality, the freedom of citizen's movement and the funding of new types of art. All of this was crushed by Stalin when Lenin died in 1923.

The field of urban planning had been neglected by Marx and Lenin as they had more pressing matters on their minds. However, after the Russian Civil War, the housing stock had burned downdecreased, so new architects and engineers were given resources to be more creative than their counterparts of the West to get houses up faster. Under Lenin, everyone was given way more freedoms than they had previously and the buildings constructed between 1917-1924 reflected that. Buildings had designs that were amazingly ahead of their time and materials like glass, concrete and steel were used in place of large amounts of bricks. Moreover, these buildings were designed to get maximum sunlight in and were surrounded by trees and parks.
These new houses were suburban and idyllic in nature, as was the fashion. There was a plan to divide Moscow up into belts radiating out from the centre with massive parks in between. It was also thought that in the new republic, people would live in large cottages shared with other families. Standards proscribed an average of 9.2 meters squared of living space per person. Enter Nikolai Aleksandrovich Miliutin.

Miliutin would define in his book, Sotsgorod, (Russian for Socialist City) what a modern, modernist, socialist city would look like. He thought that cities (and industries) should be designed like the assembly line model of manufacturing pioneered by Henry Ford. (?!) He called this a Linear Industrial City. He specified that there should be NO difference between the cities and the countryside. People should be moved out of slums in the inner cities to live in clean, modernist, apartment blocks with simple shapes and clean lines in the country. In urban areas, green space (picture an angel choir every time I mention green space) was the most important thing to factor in. Settlements would need excellent public transportation and residential buildings would be designed around communal living, with personal space at an absolute minimum.

Unfortunately, Miliutin and his ideas got on the wrong side of Stalin, who publicly denounced him and he fell from government as swiftly as if he had dropped through a trapdoor shortly after his book was published.

This is Iosif Vissarovich Dzugashvili, or Joseph Stalin as he later called himself when pretending to be Russian. He tried to become a priest, but instead became a communist. He started out as common criminal stealing money and kidnapping people to raise funds for the party. Lenin valued him as useful, but his last words warned against letting Stalin be in charge of the Soviet Union.

He then became in charge of the Soviet Union. He threatened and bribed his way into the top job, then exiled or killed everyone who could threaten him. He then unveiled his Five Year Plan for the Soviet Union. This included, repealing all the rights Lenin had given ordinary people, greater repression, mass industrialisation and collectivisation.

This last one infuriated peasants who had their land given to them by Lenin. Productivity slumped and a famine ensued. All the grain was being stockpiled for the inhabitants of Leningrad and Moscow, the new capital. The famine, affecting Southern Russia and Ukraine, became known as the Holodomor, which eventually killed 7 million people.

Stalin then, starting in 1932, became increasingly paranoid that production targets weren't being met and started to execute and send to gulags the most talented and capable engineers, planners and politicians in Soviet society. This set back development by years.

However, Stalin accelerated Soviet development from a backwards AT THE TIME country like Brazil to one of scientific dynamism, radical modernism and progress.

This will come in handy for WW2.

This building, called the Palace of the Parliament, was, unbelievably NOT constructed for a monarch. No, this was constructed at great expense to a bankrupt country under the tyrannical socialist Romanian dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. It is the culmination of decades of Socialist Realist architecture. Ceausescu and his wife essentially designed the place and they did not make it look great. At all. Where on earth could they have gotten inspiration (and justification) from?

Stalin was obsessed with grandeur. I think you can see.
Socialist Realism was invented by the Communist Party under the first Five Year Plan. It provided housing, large buildings and a chance for Stalin to flex the grandeur that "workers" of the Soviet Union lived in. Like everything that Stalin's government did, it operated under the Animal Farm principle of "Every person is equal, but some are more equal than others." The higher up you were, the nicer apartment building you lived in. Columns and excessive ornamentation was a feature of these buildings, so much so that taller, showpiece buildings like Moscow State University (shown above) became known as "Stalin's Wedding Cakes." In smaller towns, wide, sweeping boulevards and low rise marble apartment blocks became features of the period 1924-1955.

It is generally agreed that the two place that did make Socialist Realism really look amazing is the Moscow and St. Petersburg Metros, with the oldest sections designed by Alexei Dushkin. Praised as "visions of a Communist future", they were criticised for being like palaces for Pharaohs. Dushkin responded by saying that "Our palaces are for the people."

Remember Miliutin? His book made it made it to the desk of Le Corbusier, a Swiss Modernist designer who had both inspired and had been inspired by Miliutin. In turn, the Bauhaus school of Architecture was set up in Germany, inspired by modernism and Miliutin. Plans sprung up around Europe about linear residential development and green space. Thus, a young German designer named Ernst May, fresh out of the Bauhaus school and ironically inspired by Miliutin was brought in to design and build a new socialist city from scratch.

A very large, very rich deposit of magnetite (thanks, user Konrad von Richtmark) had recently been found in Southern Russia. Magnesium is very easily converted into high quality iron, which could then make large amounts of strong steel. In the 1920s-30s, during the Five Year Plans, industrial development had been focused on. New cities sprang up around large factories or mines, which were usually named after the material they were mining or producing. Magnitogorsk was no different, except that they had a l o t o f s p a c e and it was based on the global centre of Communist dynamism, Gary, Indiana, USA. The steel mill took priority, meaning that for years after the completion of the blast furnaces, a large proportion of the population were living in tents. By the thirties, a majestic city of 30,000 people had sprung up in the steppe. Grand, tree lined avenues with plenty of green space and 4-5 storey stone/brick blocky and ornamented apartment blocks decorated with statues. These buildings are called Stalinkas. Even with cafeterias, nurseries and even a tram system, Magnitogorsk had one big problem. It was next to a steel mill. And steel mills generate lots of pollution. Even today, Magnitogorsk is one of the most liveable cities in Russia. It is also one of the most polluted.
Ernst May went on to design 21 cities in total.

If you want your republic to be as realistic as possible, build the industry first, then design the city around it. Pollution doesn't really matter. Does it? Also, name your town after the industry.

Ernst May left a huge impression on the cities of socialist nations of the world. Sadly, even May got on the wrong side of Stalin and was denounced by the authorities. The housing situation deteriorated from 6.45 meters squared per person (ms from now on) to 4.09 ms in 1940. WW2 brought an end to town planning for a bit, but when it was over, the Soviet Union could lord it over Eastern and Central European client states with even grander Stalinkas. Countries such as Poland, Belarus, Germany and Ukraine (although Ukraine was largely Russia's fault) lay in ruins and the Soviet Union's historical preservation team went around Europe restoring places to their former glory.
Stalinka construction continued until...

After the tragi-comedy that was the events after...

..it was realised that the Soviet Union could no longer afford to build heavily ornamented Stalinkas and in any case they were only being lived in by the party higher-ups and not ordinary people. This is also due to a change in power. Nikita Khrushchev was revolutionary in his criticism of Stalin's repressive and tyrannical Animal Farm style governments. Associating the ornamentation of the Stalinkas with anti-Soviet ideas such as wealth, pomp and circumstance and inequality, the new apartment blocks and the landscapes surrounding them were different indeed.

After the Second World War, the USSR had been placing down factories all over the country and their client states. What did these factories make? Prefabricated panels. Which could be transported all over the Union to build Krushchyovkas. What is a Krushchyovka? I'm getting there. It's a 4-5 storey building made out of prefabricated panels with running water and heating, but with living space reduced to a minimum to encourage social interaction. An apartment block could be habitable after the foundations were dug in 2 weeks (HOW!!??!). They started popping up everywhere from Potsdam to Petropavlovsk. The psychological effect of these blocks were huge: imagine moving from an unheated one-room hut to a shiny new apartment with heating, electricity and running water. But, these Krushchyovkas were only meant to be temporary. After transitioning to full Communism, everyone would live in modular houses. So, they were not designed to stay standing after a long period of time. However, many people developed psychological connections with their Krushchyovkas, much more than other types of larger apartment building.
In-game, a Krushchyovka is called "series 464" and is a great and economical choice if you have a prefab panels factory.

Russian for Micro-district, these Krushchyovka filled areas were surrounded by major roads and transport links. However, the roads inside the Mikrorayons were twisting and designed to discourage outside car traffic. The Mikrorayons were also filled with parks and had sports facilities and schools in the centre. Inside the park-like areas, it was extremely quiet, cars and trams having been muffled by buildings and trees. Services were placed around the edges on arterial roads.
The design philosophy of these areas was this:

Anything a person might need in daily life should be, at most 500 m away from them.

These areas were designed as "Complete Areas", places where everything was designed to have all their services provided and you didn't need to go anywhere else. Except for work, you would be expected to leave the Mikrorayon for that.
Finally, the Mikrorayons were scalable too, they could be plopped down on a greenfield site next to the last one.

In game, Mikrorayons are a great way to get happiness up and to build a big city quickly, however, most of the game's buildings are designed to handle a later, more centralized era.

A Soviet Passenger Train!
In the Soviet Union, many things happened that we might think of as strange. For example, as many smaller, but still quite large cities of hundreds of thousands of people would run out of consumer goods like toilet paper or toothpaste. The situation in places such as Kyiv, Moscow and Leningrad wasn't much better, but people of the smaller cities used to flock to larger ones on weekends to buy toothpaste, toilet roll, sausages, toasters, etc, etc. To make your republic realistic (at the cost of happiness) consider placing large shopping centres only in your largest cities.

On arterial roads, leave room for tram lines and bus lines. Metros were only placed in cities with more than one million people in them (except Kharkiv, but that's a story for another time) along arterial roads. Towns with less than 20,000 people were expected to be entirely walkable. The most common tram of this era is the KTM-5, which was made of solid steel and was designed to not break down and to sustain nothing more than a direct nuclear blast. Trolleybuses were placed everywhere in the Soviet Union due to the higher availability of electricity than fuel. Suburban rail (called electrichkas) and rail everywhere was electrified to save money. Trains also stopped in the middle of nowhere for the benefit of mushroom pickers. Freight was generally moved by rail. Helicopters were only used in really remote areas. Planes were used only by party higher ups, and then only when they were going from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. Finally, cable cars were only used in Czechoslovakia and one in Poland.

In 1965, Khrushchev was kicked out of the Politburo for supporting socialism in other countries. he was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. With 2 Hero of the Soviet Union medals, he could guide the country further towards Communism. In actual fact, he did increasingly nothing. The Soviet Union's insane rate of growth was replaced by a sedate growth and then a small decline. In short, Khrushchev was the last premier to believe in idealism. Brezhnev was the first premier to go to engineering school.

The contracting economy was reflected in the Union's desire to save money. Instead of trying to live communally and instil socialism through community, Brezhnev tried to pack everyone in. Apartment blocks grew taller and taller, services were more distant and worse, spaces in between the blocks grew more barren. These new neighbourhoods were vertical subdivisions, no less alienating than their US counterparts.

In the game, police stations, hospitals, universities and TV and Radio stations are plucked from cities of hundreds of thousands and placed in towns ten times smaller.

No less than 5 metros were opened during the 1980s. But these were very different beasts from Moscow or Leningrad. They were stripped down, smaller and went to increasingly useless places.
There was art no longer in these palaces of plastic.

1979 should've been a good year for the Soviet Union. The country had hydrogen bombs, space stations and toilet paper (the first factory opened in 1969). They had achieved so much. A top down society can do big projects very well. But they were running out of big projects. So they did something idiotic. The Union decided to invade Afghanistan.

It was in 1979 that idealism, the Plan and indeed communism itself died.

After this, the country slowly collapsed. Brezhnev awarded himself 2 Hero of the Soviet Union medals. Ordinary people could see the Plan disintegrating into a bewildering existence. But they were continually told everything was fine. Everyone played along until you were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to look beyond it.
One writer denounced the fakeness as "Hypernormal."

Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko died swiftly after each other, but by this time the officials and ordinary people had retreated away from the reality of the Soviet Union's slow collapse.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the Premier of the Soviet Union, and the last idealist. He had woken up to the Soviet Union's imminent collapse and so tried to fix it. But by this time the rot had set in. By introducing freedom into the system, Gorbachev had doomed it. The evil Boris Yeltsin stole the Soviet Union from under Gorbachev in 1991, and Gorbachev gave up and went to make adverts for Pizza Hut and speak at conferences at Las Vegas.

Everything was forever until it was no more.

In the chaos that followed the realisation of the Soviet Union's death, a select group of people with political connections robbed the former Soviet Union blind. These people were called Oligarchs, and no attempt was made to stop them. Palaces of the almighty dollar sprang up in the centre of every city.
By 2000 though, Boris Yeltsin had grown too drunk for the oligarchs to stand. So they replaced him with the person least likely to disrupt their robbery: Vladimir Vladimirovich Pootin.

Pootin started out as a reactionary with no particular ideology. But aided by one of his mates, Vladimir Serkov, around 2005 he became a chameleon. He funded every political action group in Russia from Neo-Naz!s to L!beral Democr@ts. He then let it be known that he was funding these groups. This was all in the intention to undermine ordinary people's perceptions of politics and to turn politics into a constantly changing and bewildering thing that no-one can imagine any alternative to.
The hypernormalisation continues!

But in 2020, Pootin cut ties with Serkov to become a Russian nationalist. Nationalism is a bull that can go out of control very easily and as early as 2022, he felt to maintain his grip on power, he had to ride it to the gates of Kyiv.

However, because the oligarchs had also been robbing the army blind, Russia cannot win the war in Ukraine. And if you ask me, Good!

Pootin has been hanging onto the Soviet Union as a means of control. He doesn't provide any of the good stuff the Soviet Union did, such as free hospitals, schools, universities, an okay standard of living and TRAINS. The day he loses the war will be the day the idea of the Soviet Union dies.

It should be said that we in the West are also experiencing hypernormalisation. Politicians used to promise to change the world. But in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in a new age of neoliberalism, an ideology that is far more destructive than even Soviet Communism., where everything is measured in terms of money only. Neoliberalism was coupled with Individualism. Individualism feels fabulous when everything is going well, but if things go wrong, eg. if the economy crashes like it always does, it leaves you lonely, confused and frightened. So ordinary people have retreated into echo chambers online and politicians have reinvented themselves as not as arbiters of dreams, but as protectors from nightmares. These nightmares come in many forms and are often distorted and exaggerated by the media. These include, Al-Qaeda, obesity, corrupt cops and people who have different political opinions from you. The "nightmares" distract from real problems such as inequality, climate change, powerful monopolies and populism.

We, like the Soviets, are living in a dream world.

But the truth is out there.

This guide was largely adapted from:
Episode The Engineer's Plot of TV series Pandora's Box (BBC, 1992)
Adam Curtis' documentary Hypernormalisation (BBC, 2016)
Youtube user Eco Gecko's video on Soviet Urban Planning:
Various history lessons

Thank you to 3Division for making this fun and challenging game
to Eco Gecko for inspiring me to make this guide, originally called "A History of Soviet City Planning
And to you, for reading all of it!

And because of you, this happened. Thanks!