Gefördert durch die Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung

Nikolay Erofeev is a historian who looks at socialist urban development, with a specific interest in mass housing and socialist development assistance to the Global South. He received his D.Phil (PhD) in History from the University of Oxford in 2020 and a Specialist degree in the History of Art from Moscow State University in 2014. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kassel, the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Basel, and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. His research has been supported by prestigious scholarships, including the Hill Foundation Scholarship (UK), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (Switzerland).

Research Interests

Soviet and Post-Soviet History, Socialist Housing and Urbanity, Global History, Development, Cold War

Experiments in Concrete: Manufacturing Soviet Mass Housing

My forthcoming book, based on my doctorate, “Experiments in Concrete: Manufacturing Soviet Mass Housing,” explores the architectural story of Soviet mass housing. In contrast to a rather simplistic view of standardised housing development as the “end of architecture,” the book reconstructs a complex and uneven history of the “bureaucratic modernism” of mass housing. The book argues that that beyond the Soviet universal promise of housing was in fact a never-ending quest to conquer new territories, house different social and national groups, and translate housing forms and norms to the country’s varied geographic conditions and natural environments. In the process, Soviet architects, engineers, and social experts experimented with developing an ever-increasing number of housing types, reengineering foreign prefabrication technologies and developing local ones. Soviet prefabricated housing thus was a complex, multifaceted project of social engineering, territorial conquest, and technological experimentation propelled by the ambition to establish an ever-expanding industry by which to develop living environments.

Architecture and Housing in Socialist Globalisation: Exchanges between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, and China during the Cold War

My postdoctoral research, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2022-2025), focuses on the development of Mongolia during the Cold War. The project explores how urban space and daily life in socialist Mongolia was fundamentally reshaped through exchanges with the Soviet Union, China, and East European states. I looked at the development of urban space within diverse, evolving, and sometimes contradictory instances of collaboration among these state-socialist nations and explored the experiences of local and foreign architects and specialists, construction workers, and citizens alike, engaged in these transnational developments. More broadly, the project seeks to re-establish socialist urban development projects in the global context, provide new understandings about the urbanisation processes in the Global South during the Cold War, and shed light on the complexities and dynamics of transnational cooperation in shaping the built environment.

Mining and Urbanisation in Socialist Resource Periphery

The project is supported by the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung

The project rethinks the history and territoriality of resource extraction in the Soviet bloc. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries engaged in the construction of infrastructure and factories in the former colonies of Asia, Latin America and Africa in exchange for raw materials import. Through an exploration of the ways in which mining-processing plants in socialist countries such as Mongolia have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of mono-industrial towns, roads, and factories, this project rethinks uneven geographies of socialist development assistance in the Global South. The project highlights the complex networks of transnational infrastructure that sustained socialist resource-based industries during the Cold War and questions the role of resource extraction in the industrialization, development, and urbanization of the socialist resource periphery.

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

MONOGRAPH

N. Erofeev, Experiments in Concrete: Manufacturing Soviet Mass Housing, 1955–1991 (In preparation)

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

N. Erofeev, ‘Copper Mining, Development and Urban Planning in Socialist Mongolia.’ Urban History (accepted, forthcoming 2025)

N. Erofeev, ‘Complementary Assistance: Exchanges Between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, China, and Poland during the Cold War.’ Cold War History 24/3 (2024), 453–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2024.2328702

N. Erofeev, ‘Late-Soviet Collective Housing: Self-Help Construction and Self-Management in Youth Residential Complex Housing Movement.’ Journal of Urban History (2024) https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231226327

N. Erofeev and Ł. Stanek, ‘Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Socialist Mongolia.’ ABE Journal 19 (2021) https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.12604

N. Erofeev ‘The I-464 Housing Delivery System: A Tool for Urban Modernisation in the Socialist World and Beyond.’ Fabrications 29/2 (2019), 207-230. https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2019.1611255

N. Erofeev and M. Sapunova, ‘Urban Standard and Norm and Their (Post)-Socialist Transformation.’ Urban Studies and Practices 3/4 (2018), 7-11. https://doi.org/10.17323/usp3420187-11

BOOK CHAPTERS

N. Erofeev, ‘Socialist Offshore Company-Towns: Extractive Urbanism in Erdenet, Mongolia.’ In Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes (eds.), Telluric Transformations: Art and Extractivism in the Socialist Anthropocene (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, forthcoming)

N. Erofeev, ‘Enabling Imperial Expansion: Prefabricated Housing in the Arctic Region.’ In Markus Lähteenmäki and Da Hyung Jeong (eds.), Off-Center: Architectures of Russian and Soviet Imperialism (Leuven University Press, forthcoming)

N. Erofeev, ‘“Camus est petit, Rozanov est grand”: Soviet housing production and technological transfer from France.’ In Natalia Solopova (ed.), Panel Master: the Raymond Camus Story (DOM Publishers, forthcoming)

N. Erofeev, ‘Building Spaces of Internationalism: Socialist Assistance to Mongolia in 1950-70s.’ In P. Betts, M. Colla (eds.), Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century, St Antony's Series (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), 159–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54581-8_7

N. Erofeev, ‘Shabashniki.’ In Alena Ledeneva (ed.), The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3: A Hitchhikers Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in Human Life (UCL Press, 2024), 325-29. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800086142

N. Erofeev and Ł. Stanek, ‘Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Concerns of Comecon’s Technical Assistance to Mongolia During the Cold War.’ In C. Bernhardt, A. Butter, and M. Motylinska (eds.), Between Solidarity and Economic Constraints, (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), 43-72. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110658491-003

REVIEWS

N. Erofeev, ‘Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room. Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991, by Kateryna Malaia.’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (forthcoming)

N. Erofeev, ‘Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital, by Katherine Zubovich.’ Social History, 46/3 (2021), 336-338. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2021.1927403

NON-PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

N. Erofeev, ‘Kira Kartasheva, Architect, Urban Sociologist, Teacher.’ Second World, Second Sex: Women in Architecture under Socialism (10.10.2022) https://womenbuildingsocialism.org/kira-kartasheva/

N. Erofeev and Michał Murawski, ‘Political Aesthetics of Russian Urbanism.’ Sygma (26.06.2022), https://syg.ma/@sygma/poliestietika-rossiiskogho-urbanizma

N. Erofeev, ‘Cybernetics and Standardization: Revisiting a Soviet Vision for Better Urbanism.’ Strelka MAG 10/04 (2021).

N. Erofeev, ‘The I-464 Housing Delivery System: Technological Transfers from France to Moscow, from Moscow to Alma-Ata, from Alma-Ata to Havana.’ Project Russia 96 (2021), 239-64.

N. Erofeev, ‘The President of Our Country Is a Real Estate Developer. Interview with Kimberly Zarecor and Vladimir Kulić.’ Urban Studies and Practices 3/4 (2018), 12-17. https://doi.org/10.17323/usp34201812-17

N. Erofeev, ‘Ot Periptera k «Korobke»: Teatry Epokhi Modernizma’ [From peripter to the box: theatres of the modernist era], in A. Stepina and A. Petrova (eds.), Mir – Teatr. Arkhitektura i Stsenografiia v Rossii (Moscow, 2017), 373–75.

N. Erofeev, ‘Tbilisi: Otar Kalandarishvili’s Apartment Buildings’, in Michaela Geboltsberger and Georg Schöllhammer (eds.), The Empire Strikes Back? A Traveling Academy through the Post-Soviet Cityscape (Vienna, 2016), 60–64.