Urban history as a field has never been just about cities. Even so, recent work is characterized by a remarkable creativity in integrating city-based stories with wider developments as well as experimenting with new methodological approaches.Footnote ¹ This review discusses a few recent examples of early career research on modern East European and Eurasian cities. The selection is partly a consequence of contingent encounters among English-speaking scholars of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. It is also, however, an expression of a shared goal to contribute to broader historiographical debates through the study of our region that all too often has been ‘the flyover zone’ not only of urban history, but other fields as well.Footnote ² It is important to note that the regional scholarship discussed here has been mostly promoted not through institutions and events focused on urban history, but through the framework of East European and Eurasian studies.Footnote ³ This review, then, also serves to promote the benefits of academic collaboration and cross-regional comparisons. Such connections have the potential to be especially helpful in challenging the existing analytical approaches, ‘defamiliarizing’ ourselves with Western cities and bringing forth new insights.Footnote ⁴

Urban history’s role in analytical experimentation can be seen in three recent trends, each one reinterpreted and advanced by the early career scholars whose work is reviewed here. The first trend is towards an increasing interest in urban time and temporalities. The methodological approach stems from the rediscovery of the work of Reinhart Koselleck and fresh contributions from scholars such as François Hartog.Footnote ⁵ A focus on modern historicity, principally the subjective understanding of the relationship between the past, the present and the future, has inspired historians to rethink the relationship between time and urban life. This approach’s promise is apparent in the works of established scholars such as Avner Wishnitzer, Nathaniel Wood and Oliver Zimmer, who have explored how the subjective experience of time and temporality affected and was changed by cultural, social and political developments in modern urban centres.Footnote ⁶

The second trend questions the limits of what historians conceive of as being urban and critically considers the category’s construction in relation to its ‘other’ – the rural. A good example of a study in this vein is the work of Yair Mintzker on German defortification, which challenges the conventional association of the breakdown of medieval city walls with the teleology of urban growth in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷ Another study that questions the binary opposition between cities and the countryside is by Claire Morelon, who explores the history of Prague between 1914 and 1920. Instead of focusing on the city alone, Morelon integrates its history with that of its suburbs and the surrounding countryside.Footnote ⁸ In recent scholarship in particular, cities are part of broader spatial networks, whether social, cultural or economic.

The third trend stems from reconsidering the epistemology of archival research. In the nineteenth century, cities were becoming arenas for particularly intense and widespread politicization. The concern about these processes – shared by states and social elites across the globe – led to the production of staggering amounts of writing. Such sources have, of course, long been used by urban historians. However, recent scholarship has taken advantage of the abundant documentation to analyse popular acts with limited mediation by elite interpretations. Put differently, police documents and other records produced by the ‘scribbling classes’ have been used to study what the subaltern populations did, rather than how their movements were understood by their more prominent and powerful contemporaries.Footnote ⁹ This historiographical trend is not entirely new; it builds on the methodological contributions of the subaltern school that are now being applied to new geographical contexts.Footnote ¹⁰ Recently, the trend has been embraced and advanced by historians such as Ilya Gerasimov, who considers Russian imperial cities to have been loci of a peculiar ‘plebeian modernity’.Footnote ¹¹ The three trends outlined above are only some of the ways in which the urban history of Eastern Europe and Eurasia contributes to the field at large. The discussion below will focus on seven recent first books and doctoral dissertations.

Jana Hunter’s ‘Living modernity through time: Bohemia from revolution to republic, c. 1848–1918’ investigates how time (temporality) and time regimes (a different way to describe a historicity prominent or dominant in a given historical periodFootnote ¹²) were experienced and structured in late nineteenth-century Bohemia.Footnote ¹³ It elegantly and convincingly illustrates how the materialities of urban life were inextricably tied to how cities were temporally imagined. Moreover, in line with the trend to move away from treating cities as isolated units, it ‘collapses the distinction between city and countryside’ by investigating not just Prague, but also the region’s mining and spa towns. Hunter argues that far from being defined by acceleration, modern life in Bohemia was characterized by the coexistence of multiple temporalities that complemented each other, if not always without friction.Footnote ¹⁴ Hunter’s dissertation adopts a chronological structure, with each chapter discussing a different case study from the 1850s up to the First World War. It begins in rural Bohemia where peasants navigated local agricultural time alongside the temporal and economic demands of the industrializing urban economy. Hunter then explores the contrasting stories of mining and spa towns, which, despite their differing economies and temporalities, were nevertheless linked by the shock of an environmental crisis. The next chapter moves to Prague and investigates the political mobilization of the idea of progress. Later, Hunter explores the coexistence of religious temporality with a liberal progressive one, only to return to politics and discuss time standardization and the debates that accompanied its introduction in Austria-Hungary. Each chapter is at once analytically innovative and replete with stories that bring the past to life. A particularly compelling example recalls tram-users complaining that Prague’s trains were so slow that one could just as well walk alongside them and reach the destination at the same time.

The benefits of adopting temporal methodology when studying urban life are particularly clear in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 explores the politics of late nineteenth-century Prague and discusses how the belief in the need for progress smoothed disagreements between the Young Czech and Old Czech parties in the city’s municipal council. Their agreement on the urgency of progress, in turn, underpinned urban planning decisions that had profound repercussions for local inhabitants. For instance, Hunter carefully explains how the social harms created by the uncompromising ‘revitalization’ of the old Jewish district of Josefov need to be seen as part of the contemporary politics of time. Chapter 4, by contrast, shows the limits of thinking about time in teleological terms. In so doing, it complicates the association of modernity with a single time regime, illustrated, for instance, in E.P. Thompson’s classic exploration of capitalist work-discipline.Footnote ¹⁵ This intervention is achieved through the focus on religion. Hunter recalls a common East European story of gentile resentment at Jewish shop closures on religious holidays and Shabbats, illustrating how the cyclical time of religious observance modified the demands of the Bohemian market economy. The story parallels the examples from earlier chapters, where the rhythms of labour in Bohemian mines continued to defer to the Christian liturgical calendar. Hunter shows that religious time was not cast into the dustbin of history by industrial capitalism, but remained an important fact of life under new economic circumstances. More broadly, what is especially refreshing about ‘Living modernity through time’ is that it does not do away with treating the nineteenth-century belief in progress seriously; rather, it shows the limits of focusing solely on one kind of historicity.

Time and the subjective understanding of progress are also some of the key themes of Felix Cowan’s recent book The Kopeck Press: Popular Journalism in Revolutionary Russia, 1908–1918. Footnote ¹⁶ It is a study of journalism, journalists and the public sphere that emerged in an empire often associated with severe limits on popular expression. Cowan’s study discusses how early twentieth-century urban life in the Russian empire was defined by reading and writing, while also investigating how journalists and, sometimes, readers themselves attempted to embark upon ‘the path to truth and progress’. The Kopeck Press begins with a rich theoretical introduction, followed by the examination of the daily functioning of the penny press in late imperial cities. It then explores the audience and readership of those newspapers, including popular reading practices that the author has explored further in his more recent publications.Footnote ¹⁷ The following chapters move on to discuss the politics of the kopeck (penny) press and argue that, contrary to the derogatory opinion of contemporary elites (that deemed it both sensationalist and uncouth), penny journalism was deeply political, consistently demanding reform and justice that was denied to its readership. The book then discusses how cheap newspapers engaged with the issues of gender and the ‘woman question’. Cowan shows how gender relations in turn-of-the-century Russia were connected to many other contemporary concerns, in a pattern also illustrated in Holly Case’s pioneering work on the ‘age of questions’.Footnote ¹⁸ Finally, the last chapter steps back to discuss how the politics of the penny press spurred political reaction in conservative and right-wing circles. As a whole, the book is an innovative addition to the rich literature around the development of the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and carefully locates it in the context of early twentieth-century cities.

Urban time also looms large in Cowan’s analysis. The contemporary understanding of the demands of modernity promoted particular political positions, much as it had done among the Old Czechs and Young Czechs in Bohemia. The desire for ‘truth and progress’ put kopeck journalists in a role akin to that of twenty-first-century urban activists. Penny press editors were engaged in exposing unsanitary housing, precarious employment and the dire state of public health more broadly.Footnote ¹⁹ Their desire for profit and social advancement notwithstanding, newspaper editors attempted to guide the autocratic state towards a fairer future.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, even though kopeck press writers tended not to hold radically left-wing positions, they agreed with the socialist and communist calls for a powerful interventionist state. While there was little agreement on what a just Russia would look like at the turn of the twentieth century, something akin to a consensus emerged in regard to the need for radical change. In that sense, Cowan’s study contributes not just to our understanding of alternative paths towards democratic politics, but also to the history of the welfare state away from Western Europe.

Recent scholarship on mobility and economic exchange, even though not always specifically urban in focus, can make important contributions to urban history. Two recent dissertations, one by Sohee Ryuk and the other by Malika Zehni, provide particularly clear examples of this.Footnote ²¹ Sohee Ryuk’s ‘Unravelling the Soviet carpet: handicraft carpets as commodity, craft, and heritage, 1890–1982’ is a multiscalar study that combines rigorous historical method with a focus on the materiality of carpets. Ryuk transcends the chronological division between the tsarist and the Soviet period, following the carpets not just through space, but also through time. The study is based on research in archives in the Caucasus and Russia, as well as in museums and heritage institutions in Europe and the United States. The inclusion of the latter into the source base gives us insight into the process of making and trading carpets and the cultural role that they played across the globe. As a result, ‘Unravelling the Soviet carpet’ is also a study of contingencies of taste and fashion that affected, but did not determine, the way in which carpets were made and sold.

Ryuk provides an important corrective to our understanding of urbanization and industrialization by portraying urban space as part of a wider network. ‘Unravelling the Soviet carpet’ shows that the common association of industrial intensification with urbanization is not entirely evident when it came to the carpet industry. In fact, while the expansion of the market economy integrated the towns and villages of the Caucasus with the global networks of capital and exchange, the increasingly intensified production of carpets remained predominantly rural. Soviet collectivization altered some stages of production, but did not move it into cities which primarily continued to play the role of key markets and distribution centres. What Ryuk’s thesis underscores is that a focus on urban spaces alone can subsume stories that are not entirely urban. For instance, the labour of female carpet weavers, the most important part of production, would not be visible if one looked only at cities. ‘Unravelling the Soviet carpet’ reminds us that urban history needs to be a connected history.

The importance of cities to nineteenth- and twentieth-century mobility is equally prominent in Malika Zehni’s ‘Chasing papers and documenting mobile subjects in colonial Central Asia, 1865–1916’. The dissertation integrates the analysis of individual stories with the historical reconstruction of the Russian imperial state’s complex bureaucratic rule in Central Asia. It shows how papers – records, documents and a staggering variety of permits – were increasingly necessary not only for imperial rule, but also for the imperial subjects who needed them to belong, to pray, to work and to move not just within the empire, but also between empires. Papers were produced and monitored primarily in the imperial cities, and Zehni shows that urban centres were often frontiers of imperial power, regardless of their proximity to the border. Imperial bureaucrats perceived cities as spaces where imperial power was in particular need of projection (to manage mobile subjects, collect revenue and take control of contentious borderlands), but they were simultaneously spaces where the limits of imperial reach were especially apparent. The state did not have enough resources to manage mobile subjects, whether migrants from the Qing empire seeking work in Central Asia or imperial Muslims embarking on the Hajj. In some cities, local bureaucrats even lacked appropriate spaces to check passports.Footnote ²² This does not mean, however, that individual subjects did not need to fear the policing state’s gaze. As Zehni shows through the story of Mirza Siraj al-Din Hakim, a merchant from Bukhara, it was especially in cities that a lack of appropriate documents could lead to confrontation with law enforcement and imprisonment. More broadly, both ‘Chasing papers’ and ‘Unravelling the Soviet carpet’ show that while it is true that we can glimpse the development of processes that we tend to associate with modernity most clearly in cities, their complexity can only be appreciated when we move beyond the urban.

The political mobilization of urban issues is explored throughout Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman’s The Unruly Everyday: Fights over Urban Housing in Russia’s Long Revolutionary Period. Footnote ²³ Much like Ryuk’s dissertation, the book transcends the division between the imperial and the Soviet periods and attempts to show the continuities between them instead. It traces how the urban problems that emerged in a period of mass migration and urbanization were managed both at the municipal level and on the ground. This holistic perspective means that Harshman focuses not only on urban inhabitants and activists, but also on often-overlooked groups such as urban landlords that operated both in cities proper and in the sprawling suburbs. In a similar vein to Cowan’s The Kopeck Press, The Unruly Everyday brings nuance to our understanding of public participation under highly centralized autocratic regimes. The study begins with a discussion of local power in imperial cities and how it operated in the pre-1917 period. It then moves on to investigate the peculiar and varied role that landlords played in Russia’s urban centres, including as reluctant agents of the weak state’s surveillance apparatus. Harshman subsequently discusses the workings of night-time shelters, whose increasingly widespread construction was meant to improve the plight of destitute urbanites. Then, The Unruly Everyday investigates how the advent of the Soviet Union changed the nature of Russia’s cities and created opportunities for urban reformers to use local power that had been severely restricted under the autocracy. Harshman explores this dynamic by devoting considerable attention to the successes and failings of resident-managed housing. The book finishes with a postscript about local power’s decline under the Stalinist Five-Year Plans.

Chapter 5, which discusses Housing Rental Cooperative Partnerships (Zhilishchoe arendnoe kooperativnoe tovarishchestvo, pl. ZhAKTy) elegantly brings together the theme of local power and the hitherto underexplored story of the residents of early Soviet cities. The programme started in the 1920s and allowed urban residents to obtain the right to autonomously manage their own housing. The book, however, does not portray it as a temporary aberration between tsarist autocracy and Stalinist reaction, but as a consequence of a long radical tradition that briefly flourished in the highly entropic early Soviet period. The enthusiasm with which residents tried to reform urban housing also shows how the communist state, at least initially, created opportunities for its citizens to address genuine social problems. Thus, much like Katherine Lebow in her study of Nowa Huta, Harshman shows the sociocultural basis of the urban socialist project in Eastern Europe.Footnote ²⁴ The conclusion of The Unruly Everyday shows the analytical contributions that East European urban history can bring to the field more broadly. Harshman suggests that there is something about urban (and, I would add, peri-urban) spaces in the late imperial period that promoted local power and ‘created an environment that was more open to revolutionary possibility’.Footnote ²⁵ Such a possibility indeed emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and not merely in the former Russian empire. The Unruly Everyday thus also brings us back to Henri Lefebvre and his belief in the unique capacity of cities to promote emancipatory politics, and invites us to make connections between Eastern European cities and those in other parts of the world. In particular, Harshman’s work strikes me as encouraging comparisons between late imperial cities at the turn of the twentieth century and the Paris Commune, which has been recently reconsidered by Quentin Deluermoz.Footnote ²⁶

Antoni Porayski-Pomsta’s ‘A history of Russian Poland’s urban outskirts, c. 1880–1914’ locates the processes associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanization right outside the city borders.Footnote ²⁷ It explores the commonalities between the outskirts and the urban centres, but also identifies the peculiarities stemming from the outskirts’ liminal position between cities and the countryside. Focusing on the industrializing cities of Warsaw and Łódź (which, at the time, were part of the Russian empire), Porayski-Pomsta seeks to understand how suburban spaces were‘produced’ (in the Lefebvreian sense) through the interactions between the Russian imperial bureaucracy, the predominantly Polish elites and the urban periphery’s poor inhabitants, who were mostly Polish and Jewish.Footnote ²⁸ The dissertation begins with a discussion of the pre-1905 period, during which the outskirts emerged as rapidly growing manufacturing centres that were ravaged by similar sanitary issues to those of the city centres, but exacerbated by their administrative management by the rural communes (pl. gminy), not urban magistrates. However, the material condition of the outskirts did not attract attention comparable to that directed at the poverty and squalor in cities proper. In fact, suburban areas remained peripheral to state and elite imaginations until the end of the nineteenth century. Then, Porayski-Pomsta turns his attention to the revolution of 1905 and argues that the outskirts were at the centre of contemporary waves of protest precisely because they had been largely ignored. This paradoxical centrality, in turn, led to a fundamental rediscovery of the suburban spaces as areas in need of social and spatial discipline, thus changing the outskirts’ discursive and material role after 1905. The final part of the dissertation attempts to trace the consequences of the revolution, including the incorporation of the suburbs during the First World War.

’A history of Russian Poland’s urban outskirts’ traces what the suburban inhabitants themselves aimed for before, during and after the revolution, and follows the patterns of suburban protest in order to identify its aims. It argues that the poor revolutionaries were engaged in something very different from atavistic violence for the sake of violence that was bemoaned by contemporary intelligentsia and tsarist state officials. In fact, by tearing up imperial flags, threatening land guards and occupying theatres, thousands of inhabitants of the suburbs Bałuty and Wola tried to enforce social solidarity and dignified treatment by their social superiors. Revolutionary unrest also illustrates the possibility of cooperation between Polish and Jewish suburbanites, who joined forces in order to protest against the extreme violence of the imperial state. The dissertation explores many of the historical patterns identified by Cowan and Harshman further down the social and spatial hierarchy. The concentration of migrant populations away from the city centres was conducive to various forms of communal organizing and, in some cases, to particularly violent resistance.Footnote ²⁹ Porayski-Pomsta shows how the analysis of the interplay between spatial and social marginality is necessary to understand the nature of modern urban politics.

In Abigail Karas’s On Top of the City: Youth Culture and Urban Resistance on the Rooftops of St Petersburg, historical method meets that of an anthropologist and urban ethnographer.Footnote ³⁰ The book explores the world of twenty-first century ‘roofers’ – young men who experience St Petersburg from above. Karas’s focus on the vertical axis of urban life contrasts with the predominant focus on the horizontal landscape of East European cities. Throughout the book, the imagined, historical and contemporary St Petersburg are portrayed as closely intertwined. Karas’s experiences of exploring the city’s skyline together with the roofers are not only meticulously historicized, but also sharply theorized with the help of scholars such as Victor Shklovskii, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre.

The book begins with an extensive introduction to the investigation’s method and to the practice of roofing itself. It is followed by a history of roofs and attics in Russian history and culture, beginning with Alexander Pushkin’s poetry and ending with the twenty-first-century explorers. The book then explores the multiple meanings of the practice of roofing. Far from a radical left-wing activity, roofing is portrayed as an indigenous Petersburgean form of resistance to the social ordering of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. While Karas notes important continuities between the use of St Petersburg’s (then Leningrad’s) rooftops in the Soviet period and in the twenty-first century, she also notes fundamental changes between them. While under communism rooftops were utilized primarily by their residents to organize informal gatherings or tusovki, currently roofers are much more likely to enter the rooftops of buildings that do not belong to them. The practice of using rooftops has become much more centred around the activity of traversing the roofscape, not merely escaping the confines of one’s apartment. On Top of the City then discusses the evolution of roofing in the twenty-first century against the background of the rise of social media. Hitherto a recreational activity, it became an increasingly risky social practice offering an opportunity for subcultural bonding. Finally, much like Cowan’s exploration of the ‘woman question’ in the penny press, the final chapter of On Top of the City turns to the issue of gender and masculinity, and how they impact roofers’ desire to master the urban space.

The interplay between history and the present is particularly fascinating in the book’s third chapter which shows the analytical benefits of combining spatial and temporal analysis. When discussing the peculiarities of their activities, Karas recalls how roofers appreciate that their refuges are not only spaces away from Putinist Russia’s oppressive and commodified every-day, but also from its temporality. A roofer claims the space ‘for brief, irregular intervals’, in contrast to the city’s repetitive ordinary workings. One described his experience as follows: ‘often when I head up to the roof, I don’t know how long I’ll be there for…half an hour, an hour, longer…and often time moves differently up there… slower… everything seems to just calm down and be still’. This reflection points to the pluritemporality of modern life explored in Hunter’s dissertation.Footnote ³¹ Karas’s conversations with roofers do not prevent her from exploring the meanings of their acts. Regardless of their positions on Putinism, neoliberalism or Russian imperialism, roofing ‘continues to flourish as a resilient critique of state control over urban spaces’.Footnote ³² Much like revolutionary marches from the suburbs into city centres in 1905, the practice of roofing is built upon the transgression of spatial norms and is thus inherently political.

The step above or aside from the city that characterizes these early career works on East European and Eurasian urban history opens new avenues for analysis. In each of the studies discussed above, a slightly different vision of the urban emerges. In Jana Hunter’s ‘Living modernity through time’, cities are temporal tapestries into which modernity is woven, at times seamlessly, at others rather awkwardly. In Felix Cowan’s The Kopeck Press, the urban space is like a growing agora accommodating an increasing number of opinions and voices. In Malika Zehni’s ‘Chasing papers’, cities are sites of fluctuating state power where mobile subjects halted and confronted its material manifestations. In Sohee Ryuk’s ‘Unravelling the Soviet carpet’, cities are nodes in significantly longer commodity chains, but also sites of valuation, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Antoni Porayski-Pomsta’s dissertation presents the urban as constituted by what lies right outside of its limits: spaces where non-elite actors could sometimes have their way. Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman’s The Unruly Everyday portrays the urban space as a locus of the everyday which, far from being a mere fact of life, became a contested category whose meanings changed alongside broader power struggles. Finally, in Abi Karas’s On Top of the City, St Petersburg and its rooftops are a palimpsest of individualistic rebellion. Together, these works point to fruitful future directions for the study of the urban both inside and outside of the East European and Eurasian context. As PhD dissertations become books, and first books turn into new projects, future methodological insights will remain rooted in, but not encumbered by, the confines of the urban.