Urban studies and urban history have, in recent decades, become a booming field in Russia. The most likely explanation for this is the post-Soviet development and transformation of Russian cities. It is not only the demographic growth – although for some cities it has been quite substantial in the last 25 years – but rather the striking changes made to urban space, economy, governance, social organization and residential patterns that have provoked interest in urban research among scholars and the general public. Reflecting this wave of interest, several new centres of urban studies emerged in Russia during the 2000s (for example, the Strelka Institute, the Graduate School of Urban Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the programme in urban studies at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences).

Among historians, the drastic changes made to the post-Soviet urban fabric and social practices stimulated interest in the disappearing modern city of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Moreover, the exploration of the history of urban social life was also prompted by the attention of Russian scholars to the problems of civil society, its development and relations with the state. The identities, political beliefs and daily practices of urban dwellers, particularly during the late imperial period, emerged as an important component of the discussion on the Russian bourgeoisie, middle class and civil society.Footnote ¹

Perceptions of the city and approaches towards its study have also changed. Since the late 1980s, the image of the city as the cradle of capitalism, the administrative centre or as the object of state reforms has been challenged by the emerging understanding of the city as the generator and articulator of culture. When the strict ideological filter of the Soviet academy disappeared, many scholars, discontented with Marxist socio-economic determinism, turned to culture as the new prism through which they could explore the city. In addition, the opening up of borders allowed Russian scholars to participate in international projects and to be exposed to the works of foreign colleagues with a different theoretical background.Footnote ² This younger generation of historians was able to take advantage of these new developments and looked at the city from a quite different angle. This review, which is based on more than 100 Ph.D. dissertations defended in Russian universities since 2000, discusses the current directions and characteristics of Russian urban history.Footnote ³

Breaking with the Soviet approach to the city is one of the shared features of these dissertations. The Soviet historiography treated the city as the place where capitalism emerged and as a good example to demonstrate the applicability of the Marxist theory.Footnote ⁴ The priority directions of research included economic and demographic processes, city formation and administration, rural–urban relations and peasant migration to the cities, the development of industry and the workers’ movement. Dealing with the broad cultural processes – whatever fell beyond the interest of art historians – especially with the bourgeoisie, was not encouraged.

In recent decades, however, looking at the city through the prism of culture became the mainstream approach among Russian urban scholars. In the global post-cultural-turn context, this approach, perhaps, does not sound surprising. Yet, the Russian dissertations in urban history rarely actively engage with the works of ‘new cultural historians’, despite their apparent similarity in focus. Among the western authors, the most quoted texts are those of German philosophers, from Kant to Simmel, Weber and Spengler and the French Annales School. Except for some selected dissertations, direct references to post-modernist philosophy and post-cultural-turn works as a source of theoretical inspiration are rare. Instead, the methodological background of most doctoral dissertations rotates around the national and local intellectual traditions – not only history, but also literary studies and culturology, including Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman and the Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics with its semiotic reading of the city.Footnote ⁵

In search of new approaches, Russian historians also returned to the authors that remained on the margins of the Soviet academic tradition. In the last three decades, Russian scholars rediscovered the St Petersburg school of local history, which placed cultural processes at the centre of historical research. The main figures of the school, Nikolay Antsiferov and Ivan Grevs, saw the city as the concentration of culture, as a ‘socio-cultural organism’, with its own individuality and its own ‘soul’, and emphasized the need to study urban culture in its integrity, as a whole.Footnote ⁶

In the 2000s, this integral approach to urban culture, developed in and mediated through the works of several urban historians of the older generation, most notably Lidia Koshman,Footnote ⁷ became very popular in Russian dissertations. Many of them try to capture the complexity of the urban experience in some city or town at a given time, which is usually conceptualized as the ‘socio-cultural environment’ or ‘socio-cultural space’. Thus, in her dissertation on the socio-cultural space of the Volga towns at the turn of the twentieth century, Yulia Rogach defines this concept as ‘the complex of material and spiritual values, norms, traditions and the features of life organization in all its diversity, which are created by the society on a given territory and, in its turn, also affect its development’.Footnote ⁸ This is a definition generally shared by many authors with dissertations on similar topics. However, the concept of ‘socio-cultural space’ presupposes totality while a scholar inevitably has to be selective in practice. Despite the claim to capture urban culture ‘as a whole’, these dissertations investigate specific chosen aspects, and these choices – and therefore often the content of the concept too – are left to a whim of the authors. Most study the urban social composition, everyday practices of the different social groups and the activities of educational and leisure institutions; additional perspectives to that core have included the role of religious communities,Footnote ⁹ urban festive culture,Footnote ¹⁰ urban sanitation and the perceptions of the body,Footnote ¹¹ the interactions between society and the physical space and landscapes of the cityFootnote ¹² or deviant behaviour.Footnote ¹³

Other authors, without rejecting the integral approach to urban culture, choose to limit their research focus and from the beginning look only at the ‘part of the whole’ that yields deeper insights into the wider urban experience. Tatyana Balashova, in her dissertation entitled ‘Moscow monasteries in the socio-cultural environment of the metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, reconstructs the social background, internal hierarchies and everyday practices of the Moscow monastic communities and the interaction between the monasteries and the rapidly developing and modernizing city. Balashova demonstrates that monasteries were not only extremely important in the imagination of Moscow as the old Russian capital and emerged as key tourist attractions during this period, but also, despite their promise of solitude, were in fact actively involved in the city festivities, serving as sites of various official visits and celebrations and also as hotels and canteens.Footnote ¹⁴

Olga Malinova, in her dissertation on the cultural history of the summerhouses (dacha) in the suburbs of late imperial St Petersburg, explores the evolution of the concept of ‘dacha’, its change from an elitist to a mass social phenomenon and emphasizes its close connection to the hygienic discourses of the time.Footnote ¹⁵ Svetlana Limanova, in her doctoral thesis on ceremonies in the cultural space of St Petersburg and Moscow under Nicholas II, depicts the transformation of the urban fabric for the festivities and the evolution of the ceremonial models towards publicity and co-participation, explaining it as a form of dialogue between the state power and the population.Footnote ¹⁶

Most researchers studying urban cultural space see it as embedded into, or at least closely linked to, the physical reality of the city. Anatoly Breslavsky, however, in his dissertation ‘Cultural space of the post-Soviet Ulan-Ude, 1991–2010’, interprets it rather as a mental construction, ‘formed as a result of co-existence, intertwining, interactions and conflicts of the different religions, cultural traditions, norms, values and the deep psychological structures of the perception and inaction of the world view’, as a meta-text, almost detached from urban materiality. Breslavsky examines the image of Ulan-Ude in several cultural contexts, reconstructing various, often competing, discourses about the city: ‘Asian’, ‘Soviet’, ‘multicultural’, ‘city-village’ or ‘provincial city’.Footnote ¹⁷

The last two decades have also been marked by greater attention to the history of provincial towns and the concept of provincialism. The broad understanding of culture, with its interest in daily practices and sensitivity to local variations, opened a new way to study the culture of smaller towns that had been somewhat neglected before. This new research direction was also very feasible logistically because it encouraged young scholars to use local archives instead of travelling to the central institutions – which is not easy in Russia considering the long distances and the relative lack of travel funds available to doctoral students.

Provincialism has, since the nineteenth century, been seen as a distinct feature of Russian urban culture given the size of the country and the centralization of its political life. In the modernist intellectual tradition, the provincial town – which could mean basically any place except for St Petersburg and Moscow – became the symbol of backwardness, stagnation and passivity. In the 2000s, many dissertations in history tried to challenge this narrative and to show that provincial towns were actually original and creative centres with an active civil society.

The dissertations of Angelina Stupina (on provincial cultural space in nineteenth-century Saratov) and Anton Aronov (on leisure culture in late imperial towns of the Kursk province) both inquire into the essence and dynamics of provincial urbanism. The characteristic features of provincial culture, as identified in these dissertations, include hidden or delayed temporality, traditionalism, its dependence on nature, its concentration around a small number of actors, the prevalence of informal and oral communication over the formal and written and its catching-up aspect in relation to the metropolitan culture. Yet, both dissertations maintain that by the turn of the twentieth century Russian provincial culture had evolved towards self-sufficiency and liberated itself from subordination to the capitals; the local narratives of the provincial towns changed from backwardness to the apprehension of their uniqueness and self-value.Footnote ¹⁸

The micro-historical studies of provincial urbanism also encouraged scholars to go beyond the traditional top-down approach when writing about their cities. Aleksandra Klimochkina, in her dissertation on the everyday life of provincial Volga towns in the 1930s, studies the practices of adaptation and resistance during times of hunger and Stalinist repression. In particular, she provides a very rich and vivid description of the survival strategies of the social groups discriminated against or completely excluded from the Soviet system of food distribution – for instance, urban agriculture, fishing, barter with the village, consumption of offal, mass cultivation of rabbits on the balconies or work-for-food on collective farms.Footnote ¹⁹

Maria Kholina, in her doctoral thesis on the implementation of the Bolshevik cultural revolution in the east Siberian towns, challenges the Soviet historiography and the works in line with the ‘totalitarian paradigm’ that both, albeit in different ways, saw Soviet society as the passive object of state policy. Kholina examines not only the reforms themselves but also their reception and negotiation by various social groups, revealing the persistence of traditional peasant values and the co-existence of conservatism and revolutionary radicalism amongst Soviet urbanites.Footnote ²⁰

The growing attention to provincialism did not mean, however, a decline in interest in metropolises. The popular directions in this field included the study of urban leisure, foreign migrants in the city, everyday life and welfare, especially in times of catastrophe, such as wars or revolutions,Footnote ²¹ as well as research on social groups and practices, the study of which was discouraged or forbidden in Soviet times.Footnote ²²

The new approaches to the city also meant going beyond the traditional written narratives and using visual or material sources, oral history and folklore to reconstruct the urban experience. One of the most compelling dissertations based on oral and ethnographic sources is the thesis of Ilya Utekhin on everyday life in the big communal apartments in Leningrad/St Petersburg of the 1970s–1990s. Living in a communal apartment was a normal feature of life in Soviet Leningrad with its centralized redistribution of housing resources; it meant that several unrelated families had to share the apartment with almost no possibility of changing their housing conditions. In his dissertation, Utekhin explores the spatial semiotics and folklore of such apartments, the images of cleanliness and dirt, the interactions between neighbours and the informal hierarchies and etiquette. The highlight of the dissertation is the chapter on what Utekhin calls ‘housing paranoids’. It analyses the specific behavioural patterns or even psychological deviations that correlate with living in the communal apartments, providing very rich and insightful materials on the human relations and communication in this type of housing and in Russian society in general.Footnote ²³

Another example of good work with oral sources is the dissertation of Anastasia Mayer on Moscow urban legends. Mayer studies 428 legends, collected between 1838 and 2007 by several folklorists, including herself, to reconstruct the image of the city, the semiotics and mythology of urban space as well as historical memory of the urban dwellers. In particular, she examines the representation of various historical figures – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine II, Nicholas II and Joseph Stalin – in the imagery of Muscovites.Footnote ²⁴

The dissertation ‘Moscow from the late 1940s to the early 1950s: creating the image of the city in documentary photography’ by Maria Dobrenkaya is extensively based on visual sources. Using a rich set of late Stalinist photographs (the dissertation contains more than 100 pages of illustrations), Dobrenkaya examines the dynamics of representations of Moscow in several visual contexts – urban landscape, transport, housing, trade and leisure. This study, as she writes, ‘allows us to analyse the propaganda requests of the state power, on the one hand, and directs us to the system of social stereotypes and clichés in the perception of the Soviet reality, on the other’.Footnote ²⁵ She argues that the late 1940s and early 1950s witnessed the creation of a very powerful and coherent image of Moscow that was preserved even in later visualizations. Amateur photography was only then emerging, which meant that the creation of the photographic images remained in the hands of professionals, who fulfilled the strict ideological request of the Soviet state. The topics and objects of photographs to be published or exhibited were strictly defined by the state that wanted to see Moscow as the ideal city of the future. The documentary photographs, as Dobrenkaya reveals, showed only the side that complied with these ideological demands; therefore, Moscow appeared there as ‘a green city, with many gardens and parks, with broad avenues full of various types of transport, with high buildings and skyscrapers, with big individual comfortable apartments’ – the image that, to put it mildly, captured the reality only very selectively.Footnote ²⁶

Material and archaeological sources appear particularly important in research on medieval or early modern towns where the written documents are relatively scarce.Footnote ²⁷ The deployment of material sources has allowed young historians to challenge the narratives that appear in the written sources. Thus, Pavel Travkin, in his doctoral thesis on the sacral imagery of the population of Plyos in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, questions the role of Christianity in the Volga–Klyazma towns of the pre-Mongol Rus’. Travkin studies a wide spectrum of archaeological, visual, written and ethnographic sources on Plyos, which he believes to be the typical provincial town of the region, and concludes that, two centuries after the Christianization of Rus’, ‘there is no proof that any significant group of followers of Christianity existed in this town’.Footnote ²⁸ Travkin argues that the influence of the Slavic and Christian elements in Plyos remained very weak and that the Finno-Ugric and pagan culture prevailed at least until the thirteenth century: the pagan priests (volkhvy) had greater authority than the Christian missionaries, the Christian attributes were often ‘paganized’, while the cult of the pagan god Veles remained dominant among all groups of the urban population, including the town elites.Footnote ²⁹

Another notable example of using material sources when writing urban history is Georgy Vizgalov's dissertation on the polar town of Mangazeya in the seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁰ The town of Mangazeya, located in north-western Siberia on the river Taz, eastward of the Gulf of Ob’, existed between 1601 and 1672, and was one of the outposts in the Russian colonization of Siberia. This dissertation is the result of archaeological excavations conducted by the group of Vizgalov between 1999 and 2005, which, given the preservation of the archaeological material in the permafrost, allows the author to envision not only the planning structure of the town, but also its economy and culture, including occupation, nutrition, costumes, morbidity, hygiene and many of the daily practices of the urban population. In particular, Vizgalov argues against the assumption that Mangazeya was merely a settlement of fur-hunters. Instead, he claims that it was a developed centre of trade, crafts (pottery, jewellery, tanning, carving), food production and gambling (numerous gambling artefacts were found at the archaeological sites), where the population, despite the harsh climatic conditions and the enormous distance to the agricultural regions, tried to re-enact the traditional urban lifestyle of European Russia.

The majority of recent Russian dissertations on urban history are written about Russian cities. The relatively small number of dissertations on foreign urban experiences tend to focus on medieval and early modern Europe.Footnote ³¹ For example, Andrey Lazarev, in his doctoral thesis entitled ‘The urban space of Paris from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries in the eyes of contemporaries’, explores the imagery of Paris in contemporary diaries, guidebooks and travel notes. Analysing the contexts in which various urban elements were mentioned, he discusses perceptions of the city's form, size and structure, orientation systems, the vertical dimension and visualization of Paris, as well as urban movement and mental maps. Lazarev questions the idea that life in the early modern cities was organized according to small territorial units, that is, parishes, arguing that the authors of Parisian sources thought in different spatial categories. Lazarev also discovers certain elements of the practice of ‘flaneuring’ that would develop in the nineteenth century and argues that the mental maps and orientation systems in Paris varied greatly and depended on the cultural background of its dwellers and visitors.Footnote ³²

Quite surprisingly, comparative projects are almost entirely absent from the corpus of Russian dissertations. In fact the only work which explicitly engages in a comparison of Russian and foreign experience is Lyubov Zuyeva's dissertation, which places the pre-Mongol Rus’ in the context of European urban development. Zuyeva compares the towns of the Vladimir-Suzdal Rus’ of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries with the episcopal towns in Germany: namely, their social and topographic structures, economic development and the mechanisms of urban governance. The key distinction between her case-studies, as Zuyeva indicates, is that in the Rus’ the lords were invited and dismissed by the towns, while in Germany they were appointed from above, without any involvement of the urban population. Given this difference, the structures of urban governance in medieval Russia and Germany, Zueva claims, developed in opposite directions. Unable to influence the choice of their lord, the episcopal towns in Germany struggled for the expansion of their self-government and codification of their privileges, while Russian towns fought only for a better lord, which eventually meant their subordination to the authority of the prince.Footnote ³³

The potential directions for future research in Russian urban history are, of course, numerous, but I would like to point out a few that seem particularly promising given the state of the art in the field. First, although the national, intra-Russian, comparison is more frequent in dissertations, it often remains implicit and asymmetrical and there is certainly more to be done. The recent dissertations presented many case-studies of urban culture, particularly of the late imperial and early Soviet towns, which provides sufficient material for comparative projects and allows for a more analytical exploration and conceptualization of Russian urbanism. Secondly, the absence of research on gender is a striking lacuna in Russian urban history. Although the concept of gender has been much problematized in the international historiography in recent years, this has remained almost unnoticed by young Russian scholars. Bringing gender into the research on cities – and not only in the form of women's histories as some dissertations have attempted to doFootnote ³⁴ – will certainly allow for new insights and a different level of theoretical reflection on Russian urban culture. Finally, another potential new field is that of urban environmental history, which is only now emerging in Russia. Despite the growing public awareness and interest in environmental issues, our knowledge of how Russian cities interacted with their natural environments in the past remains very scarce, and practically any case-study on this subject could become an important contribution to the field.