Socialist Urbanism Under a Tropical Gaze: Reports of Brazilian Visitors to the USSR

This article examines, from a historiographical perspective, how Brazilian travelers (doctors, trade unionists, journalists, engineers, and writers) perceived Soviet urbanism when visiting the Soviet Union between the 1920s and 1960s. More than simple trips, these journeys were intellectual, cultural, and political experiences. As we shall see, for many Brazilian observers, visiting the USSR meant encountering a project aimed at building a new type of society, one that was profoundly different from the realities familiar to South American contexts. The main object of their attention was socialist urbanism. Authors of travel accounts and reports – both laudatory and critical – focused on collective housing, territorial planning, sanitary infrastructure, and cultural facilities as material evidence of a distinct social order. The study thus dialogues with the historiography of transnational circulations and cultural transfers, treating the testimonies of these trips not as transparent descriptions, but as interpretations situated in specific contexts that must be taken into account when interpreted today. Upon returning to Brazil, these travelers wrote for an audience immersed in a modernization marked by profound urban inequalities, typical of Latin American modernity. The documentation analyzed (such as chronicles, letters, technical reports and memoirs) reveals that Soviet urbanism was understood as an integrated system, in which housing, health, education, and leisure were linked by a common social logic. These readings, however, were not homogeneous. Doctors emphasized the relationship between urban planning and disease prevention; trade unionists highlighted expanded access to urban services; writers oscillated between enthusiasm and bewilderment in the face of spatial standardization. The article argues, therefore, that these testimonies helped to construct, in Brazilian public debate, an image of the Soviet city as a possible horizon of social modernity, a world that was simultaneously admired, reinterpreted, and still politically disputed today.

1. Vikhreva N.V. (2019) Otrazheniya. Stroitel’stvo kommunizma glazami brazil’skoi khudozhnitsy [Reflections. Building Communism through the eyes of a Brazilian artist], in Malova T.V., Rustaeva N.R. (eds.) Na poroge budushchego. Oktyabr’ 1917 goda i sud’by russkogo iskusstva XX veka [On the verge of the future. October 1917 and the fates of 20th Century Russian Art], Moscow, BooksMart, pp. 201–206. (In Russian)

2. Albuquerque Schmitz L.B. (2019) Cartas de Graciliano Ramos: diálogos entre o AEM e outros arquivos [Letters from Graciliano Ramos: dialogues between the AEM and other archives], Eixo e Roda, no. 4, pp. 69–96. (In Portuguese)

3. Amado J. (1951) O mundo da paz: União Soviética e democracias populares [World of peace: the Soviet Union and people’s democracies], Rio de Janeiro, Vitória, 351 p. (In Portuguese)

4. Amaral A.A. (2003) Tarsila: sua obra e seu tempo [Tarsila: her art and her time], São Paulo, EdUSP, 509 p. (In Portuguese)

5. Andrade O. (1972) A marcha das utopias [The march of utopias], São Paulo, Globo, 228 p. (In Portuguese)

6. Buck-Morss S. (2000) Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MIT Press, 432 p.

7. Cohen J. (1992) Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928–1936, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 254 p.

8. César O. (1933) Onde o proletariado dirige [Where the proletariat rules], São Paulo, Pax, 282 p (In Portuguese)

9. Darmaros M. (2016) Por que ler Jorge Amado em russo: a cultura soviética revelada na tradução de Gabriela [Why read Jorge Amado in Russian: Soviet culture revealed in Gabriela’s translation], São Paulo, TradTerm, 395 p. (In Portuguese)

10. Fitzpatrick S. (1999) Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, New York, Oxford University Press, 288 p.

11. Fitzpatrick S. (1992) The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 296 p.

12. Freyre G. (1933) Casa-Grande & Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de Economia Patriarcal [Master’s house & Slave quarter: Formation of the Brazilian Family under the Patriarchal Economy Regime], São Paulo, Global, 728 p. (In Portuguese)

13. Holanda S.B. (1936) Raízes do Brasil [Roots of Brazil], São Paulo, José Olímpio, 200 p. (In Portuguese)

14. Prado Júnior C. (2023) URSS, um novo mundo e O mundo do socialismo [USSR, a new world and The world of socialism], São Paulo, Boitempo Editorial, 358 p. (In Portuguese)

15. Lissitzky E. (2019) Rússia: a reconstrução da arquitetura na União Soviética [Russia: the reconstruction of architecture in the Soviet Union], São Paulo, Estação Liberdade, 248 p. (In Portuguese)

16. Maia J.M.E. (2008) A terra como invenção: o espaço no pensamento social brasileiro [Earth as an invention: space in Brazilian social thought], Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar, 224 p. (In Portuguese)

17. Miranda G.A. (2023) Embaixadores da medicina soviética: médicos comunistas, saúde e propaganda política no Brasil (décadas 1930/1950), [Ambassadors of Soviet medicine: communist doctors, health and political propaganda in Brazil (1930s/1950s)], Rio de Janeiro, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, 216 p. (In Portuguese)

18. Sato L. (2019) Literatura e Relações Internacionais: recepção de Jorge Amado nos Estados Unidos e na União Soviética [Literature and International Relations: The Reception of Jorge Amado in the United States and the Soviet Union], Brasilia, Universidade de Brasília, 75 p. (In Portuguese)

19. Siegelbaum L.H. (1988) Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935– 1941, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 326 p.

20. Siegelbaum L.H., Rosenberg W.G. (1993) Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 329 p.

21. Sotana E. (2006) Relatos de viagens à URSS em Tempos de Guerra Fria: uma Prática de Militantes Comunistas Brasileiros [Accounts of trips to the USSR during the Cold War: a practice of Brazilian communist militants], Curitiba, Aos Quatro Ventos, 240 p. (In Portuguese)

22. Tôrres R.M. (2019) Transpondo a Cortina de Ferro: relatos de viagem de brasileiros à União Soviética na Guerra Fria (1951-1963) [Breaking the Iron Curtain: accounts of trips of Brazilians to the Soviet Union in the Cold War], PhD Thesis, 414 p. (In Portuguese)