Alla Vronskaya, last edited on 30.05.2022

In the middle ages, the territory of contemporary Belarus belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1795, after the collapse of the Grand Duchy, it was incorporated into the Russian Empire, where it was administered as the Belarusian Governorate General with the capital in Vitebsk. Vitebsk remained its cultural center until the second half of the twentieth century. It became an important spot on the map of the early avantgarde art when in 1920 Marc Chagall founded People’s Art College in the city, among whose pedagogues were Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. 

Located within the Pale of Settlement (the region of the Russian Empire, where Jews were allowed to settle permanently), Belarus was a center of Ashkenazi culture. Yet, unlike the neighboring Ukraine, the republic did not have big cities or old major centers of culture and education. The economy of Belarus was based on artisanal labor (traditional occupation of Jews) and agriculture (traditional occupation of Belarusians). The region had also a significant presence of agrarian Polish and Russian population. Until 1936, Belarus had four official languages: Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish.

After the Russian revolution of 1917, Belarus declared its autonomy within the Russian Federative Republic. In 1918, Russia and Germany signed the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which allowed Russia to end its participation in the First World War. According to the treaty, most of contemporary Belarus was relegated to Germany. However, the Red Army quickly regained control over Minsk, and the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus with the capital in Minsk within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was announced in 1919. The same year, Belarus left Russia and declared its independence. In 1919-1920, Poland made an attempt to conquer Belarus, but the republic was regained by the Red Army in 1920. In 1922, Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic joined the Soviet Union. 

During the 1920s and 1930s, Belarusian economy was rapidly industrialized. Belarusian State University was founded in Minsk in 1921. Architect Natallya Maklyatsova recalled her experience of moving to Minsk in the 1930s: the new capital of Belarus appeared to her as a small, backward, but rapidly growing and modernizing town. Since no institute of higher education existed in Minsk at the time, all of the architects were newcomers. According to Maklyatsova, only six architects worked in Minsk by 1931–herself becoming the seventh, and the first female, architect in the city.

Belarus, and its educated class in particular, was heavily affected by the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. The repressions also targeted national minorities, particularly the population of the Polish national autonomic region, which was deported to Siberia and Central Asia when the region was eliminated in 1938. Among the victims of the repressions were the parents and grandfather of architect Halina Byahanskaya, who recalled that traumatic childhood experience in an interview.

The Second World War affected Belarus like no other Soviet republic. As Maklyatsova, testified, 80% of the city of Minsk was destroyed by air bombings in just one day, 24 June 1941, and many Jewish residents were exterminated. Moreover, during the war, the territory of the republic was under German occupation. Lyubou Usava recalled the contrast between the festive Moscow, which she left in 1947, and the devastated Minsk that she encountered upon arrival: “The face of a mutilated city appeared before our eyes: ruins, torn apart houses and brick walls, like open wounds.”

The post-war reconstruction of Minsk and other Belarusian cities was thus an ambitious undertaking, which necessitated building residential and industrial areas and urban infrastructure from scratch. Many architects and construction engineers, including Volha Ladyhina, Iryna Khachatrants, and Lyubou Usava, moved to the city at this point. In the immediate after-war years, the construction of Minsk Tractor Plant, supported by specially-created Beltraktarbud institute, was accompanied by the construction of workers’ housing, public transit lines, and infrastructure; upon the completion of the plant, Beltraktarbud was reorganized as Construction Trust No.1, which continued building industrial, public, residential, and recreational buildings in the city. Most of the construction in Minsk was undertaken by Minskpraekt, which employed a vast number of architects, landscape architects, and planners. In comparison, historic preservation in Belarus received much less attention than in some other republics (for example, Ukraine), the first specialized institution not founded until 1968.

The chair of architecture was opened within the Construction Department of Belarusian Polytechnic Institute in 1946; in 1952, the chair was transformed into the Architecture Division within the Construction Department. It saw the first cohort of its graduates in 1958. At this time, Maklyatsova was the only female pedagogue in the division, although a half of the graduates were female. Subsequently, the graduates of Belarusian Polytechnic Institute comprised the majority of architects working in Belarus. 

Despite the access to higher education, women suffered from “the leaky pipeline” effect. Thus, only 191 out 692 (27.6%) of Belarusian architects who became members of the Union of Soviet Architects and only 8 out 64 (12.5%) architects who were awarded the title “distinguished architect of Belarus” by 1991 were women. Volha Ladyhina was the sole female member of the board of the Union of Architects of Belarus. Furthermore, none of the recipients of the State Prize of Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic in architecture were female. 

Overall, the position of women in the architecture of Belarus resembled that in other Soviet republics. While prestigious tasks, such as leading group work on individual projects (significant exceptions such as Volha Ladyhina, notwithstanding) were generally reserved to men, women found themselves working in professional and geographic areas that were considered peripheral. Some, such as Ela Levina and Halina Vinahragava, worked on standardized residential construction (of which Belarus was a main center). Others, like Halina Byahanskaya and Nona Nyadzelka (both based at Dzipraselbud institute) focused on architecture for rural regions, to which they applied standardization technologies within the new urban typology of agrotown, which developed. Vasilisa Shylnikouskaya, Lyubou Usava, and Lyudmila Zhloba became landscape architects; Liya Qajar and Ninel Aladova–interior designers;  Iryna Ioda, Larysa Esman, and Larysa Smirnova dedicated themselves to urban planning. Women also gained prominence in architecture education: in addition to Maklyatsova, examples include Ioda, Ala Sychova, Xenia Khachatrants, Yauheniya Ahranovich-Panamarova, and Ninel Aladova. Women-architects beyond Minsk included Alyaksandra Danilava in Vitebsk and Zinaida Leuchanka in Brest. 

In some cases, women’s careers could have been spurred by their architect-husbands. Indeed, many, if not most, Belarusian women-architects were married to architects: Volha Ladyhina was married to Yaugen Zaslausky, Ninel Aladova–to Valmen Aladov, Lyubou Usava–to Vasil Gerashchanka, Alyaksandra Danilava–to Vital Danilav, Aksana Tkachuk–to Dmitry Kudryavtsev, and so on. This makes the career paths of single mothers like Iryna Khachatrants all the more unique.

Women were rarely able to get to the heights of professional hierarchy: most never rose beyond the position of the project head, whereas the more prestigious positions, such as the head of the workshop or the head architect of an institute were reserved for men. For instance, the couple Lyudmila Gafo and Natan Shpigelman (Spiegelman) moved to Minsk in 1945 upon receiving their architecture degrees from Moscow Institute of Architecture: by 1950, Shpigelman was promoted to the head of Belprampraekt, while Gafo worked as an architect at Beldzyarzhpraekt; in 1954, Gafo moved to Minskpraekt, where she was able to rise to the position of the head of projects in the course of her thirty-year career at the institute–meanwhile Shpigelman joined the institute as a head of workshop in 1961, becoming the head architect of Minskpraekt in 1964. Similarly, upon graduating from the Academy of the Arts in Leningrad in 1952, the couple Liya Qajar and Syarhey Musinsky, found employment at Beldzayrzhpraekt; in 1960, Musinky became the head of a workshop at Minskpraekt, where Qajar later moved in a junior role; in 1967, Musinky returned to Beldzyarzhpraekt as the head architect of the institute, while Qajar became an instructor at Belarusian State Institute of Theater and the Arts. Volha Ladyhina, the head architect of Beldzyarzhpraekt in 1969-1975, provides a notable exception.