Founded in 1860 as a naval post, Vladivostok owes its existence to its excellent natural harbor and its position at the far south-eastern extremity of the Russian land mass, which made it the logical terminus for the national Russian railroad, the Trans-Siberian. The city's early growth was haphazard, and only over time did it develop in a more rational way. The military, bureaucratic, and capitalist city of the early years of this century was changed only superficially by the Bolshevik Revolution, but with the advent of the Five Year Plans, and the consolidation of power into the hands of Joseph Stalin, the city began preparing to transform itself into a model Soviet urban center.
The Stalinist era was a time of profound change for the peoples of the Soviet Union. Great achievements took place in industry, and great suffering resulted from the collectivization of agriculture. An enormous and unprecedented initial expansion of the country's economy during the early 1930s was followed at the end of the decade by a repression of unparalleled scope as millions of Soviet citizens saw their lives changed irrevocably by the grinding gears of Stalinist communism. Physically the former Tsarist Empire took on a new look during the first decade of Stalin's rule. Entirely new industrial cities were built in what had been empty steppe and uninhabited forests. Older cities were transformed into new urban conglomerations that bore the mark of socialist planning and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideological theories of urban living. Moscow was intended to be, and to a great extent did become the socialist metropolis, and its new wide streets, impressive government offices and apartment buildings, its monuments to revolutionary heroes, and its infrastructure improvements became models for other Soviet cities to follow. One city that looked to Moscow for inspiration was Vladivostok.
Vladivostok changed substantially during the Stalinist era, though it did not experience the wholesale transformation called for in the centrally-approved master plans of the 1930s until the post-war, indeed post-Stalin era. None the less, the city experienced a fundamental transformation during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Vladivostok's economic and industrial infrastructure was changed substantially, providing opportunities for greater economic expansion and the realization of some of the long-standing dreams of the city's population which dated back more than half a century. Vladivostok's inhabitants, from the beginning among the most cosmopolitan in the country, were subjected to significant social and political engineering during the Stalinist era. Chinese and Korean inhabitants of the city were gathered up and expelled from the city. Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians were arrested and executed for potential treason, and the city's principal cultural institutions were purged of anyone suspected of less than perfect loyalty to the Revolution and to Stalin. Ironically, at the same time, plans were drawn up for the complete transformation of the city into a model of socialist urban planning in the Russian Far East, and the preeminent example in East Asia and along the Pacific Rim of what was seen to be superior Soviet urban planning. The architectural and planning legacy of the Tsarist past was to be modified, adaptively reused, and in many cases completely ignored in the process of creating a new Soviet city. Older buildings were destroyed or remodeled, new streets and avenues planned, and at least some new Stalinist buildings were constructed. The plans for the city's overall transformation, and their imperfect realization, within the context of Vladivostok's overall historical development as a city, is the subject of this paper.