The Moscow-born sentimental traveler Vladimir Izmailov, who died in 1830, was the first to categorize the Kievans/Kyivites of the city's golden-domed personality, the antiquity of its modernity. This journal's astute readers, those familiar with the scholarship of Daniel Brower, Michael Hamm, Natan Meir, and Faith Hillis, may recall the anti-Semitic and anti-Ukrainian Kievlianin newspaper (51) in its run before 1917. Looking for snapshots of Zion, Izmailov concocted a fiction, a new people for a new imperial century (238).
Cavernous Holy Kiev/Kyiv, having “lost” its Lithuanian and Polish past, had a personality. Or the odd plural: it had nationalities. What made up this East Slavic Sin City, multiethnic and autonomous before the abrogation of the Magdeburg Laws in 1835, a wooden town before its tardy industry and demographic and housing booms? Did it have a Sonderweg, distinct from its urban cousins Kharkiv, Berdychiv, or Odesa? Once a new municipal statute was installed, the central railway station opened in 1870 (226). After this milestone, the mixed “city of migrants” (253), full of planners, students, industrialists, and temporaries, would drift toward “the fragile liberal concept of a cosmopolitan metropolis” (363).
Instead, disappointments followed in the hills and suburbs. Interethnic violence and uneven development favored policing, property gobbling, a cartelistic sugar beet industry, poor public works, anti-Semitic gangs, counter-reforms, and the devastating 1905 pogroms. Bilenky makes a fine effort at visibility and inclusion, but he is critical of the Empire's statistics and spatial practices. He guides us through today's capital of 2.8 million souls, when in 1902 it had around 319,000, the size of Boston or Baltimore.
Ukrainian historiography is his great strength, to detail Kyiv's three “urban regimes” (1800 to 1835, to 1870, to 1905). He shows the importance of the founding of St. Vladimir University in 1842 to the city's intellectual life. Bilenky examines surveys by Ivan Funduklei, the governor-general, Mykhailo Maksymovych, Mykola Zakrevs΄kyi, Mykola Sementovs΄ky, Volodymyr Antonovych and Pavlo Chubyns΄kyi, Ukrainian activists of the Russian Geographical Society's branch in Kyiv (1873–76), and Mykola Ziber, a pioneering Marxist scholar. The fellow historian acknowledges Vladimir Ikonnikov's great 1904 account. Bilenky's knowledge is vast on Kyivan scholarship since the 1920s. Applying this, Chapter 5 examines failed townships (Oleksandriia) and tax havens (Demiïvka and Solom΄ianka) in the 1890s–1900s. Demiïvka was where Jews traded, and formed a near majority, but lingering Russian social fears of change prevented its absorption into a broader, greater Kyiv (224–25).
Bilenky's scaffolding is impressive: Ted Weeks on Vilnius, Mark Mazower on Salonika, Gary Cohen on Prague, Patricia Herlihy and Roshanna Sylvester on Odessa, and Patrice Higonnet on Paris. Interestingly, he applies theoretical work by Fran Tonkiss (on urbanist social life), Merlin Coverley (on psychogeography), Spiro Kostof (on architecture), and Anthony Sutcliffe (on planning). Down on earth, schools and children do not seem to exist; we could have more on the daily press. (Labor force numbers aside, surely working-class people have names!) Still, adding to the new urban history, the interdisciplinary field rendered by social historians who masterfully used census data and sparked the Journal of Urban History in 1975, Bilenky suggests a new “sociospatial” analysis from Hamm's pioneering research on the city, from the 1970s to the 1990s.
In his source analysis, Bilenky never loses sight of the “minor provincial town” (170). He finds an anonymous “poet-bureaucrat” (166–68) who in his passionate condemnation of privilege anticipates Taras Shevchenko. Bilenky's own period-costumed targets are the nativists of Rus΄; real estate vultures; cowboy capitalists; and service professionals to Ukraine's privatizer-geniuses of plutocratic graft. More at times an early modern Polish flâneur of the 1830s (in Kijów) than Gustave Flaubert's M. Guys or Sholem Aleichem's Menakhem-Mendl (“money is everything in Yehupetz,” 51–52), Bilenky prizes dis-continuity. He is critical of Tsar Nicholas I's archaeological obsessions in the “fortress city” (131), or Kyiv's “greedy developers and corrupt municipal officials” (364). Scoundrels of the world, unite! (First in Ukraine.)
With wonderful maps and tables, Bilenky catalogs the vanities of a baggy-monstrous, wild east. The book is dedicated to “all those who perished in the struggle for freedom in Kyiv, in January-February 2014.” He spotlights social factors, such as occupation, temporary residence, and income. Nicholas I expelled the city's 700 Jews in 1827. From the 1830s, Great Russians (Orthodox) were encouraged to settle by tax breaks and incentives (123), the capital's tactic to counter Polish and Jewish influence. Newcomers included civil servants and officers in the 1850s–60s, especially in Lybid΄ and Luk΄ianivka (306–7). Reformers opened more jobs and reconstituted diversity, as expressed by the “Borgesian” censuses of 1874 (city) and 1897. The All-Russian 1897 variant “invented” pensioners, garment workers, arms traders, and even a category for prostitutes, of which 81 per cent were Russians (274).
In terms of method, Bilenky uses urban sociology to situate social stereotypes and examine the “naked city,” from Aleksandr Kuprin's The Pit (1914). Kuprin wrote about the subservience of Ukrainophone culture at large (58–62). Being skeptical of the modern arc toward an “all-Russian nation” (419n1), a coinage of Alexey Miller (he calls this “Russian Newspeak,” 255), Bilenky usefully draws comparisons (and poetic clichés, and feelings of inadequacy) with Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, and Prague. When Ukrainian positivists first designed the 1874 city census, he argues, they were deeply concerned with the social origins of Kyiv's flux of transplants (316), not just frontier monitoring. An all-Ukrainian modernity, perhaps: one could “become” metropolitan, before one “became” Russian.
Bilenky has a poststructuralist bent for travelogue and is a hesitant narrator, yet he effectively deals with human geography. His Chapter 6 on psychogeography is fascinating, a means to envisage an ethno-schematized, sociospatially lived Ukrainian city as text. Bilenky ventures where archive rats fear to interpolate:
With a little imagination we can animate a series of possible social encounters in Kyiv during a single day in 1874 . While walking down towards St. Alexander's Cathedral (occasionally fending off an attack by a roaming cow), you would encounter a Catholic parishioner, probably a landlord visiting or residing in the city on fashionable Khreshchatyk Street . If you suddenly developed a headache, you would visit an apothecary owned by a wealthy German Protestant merchant [and] you would see quite a few barefoot milk peddlers, all women dressed in Ukrainian peasant attire . Several times you would be accosted by poor Jewish hawkers selling cheap hardware or brushes. And you might well see a district policeman, a heavy-set, middle-aged man born in the countryside, chasing away one poor hawker with curse words uttered in the inimitable local speech—a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian known today as surzhyk (259–60).
Now that's some clever yiddishkayt. It's also a lot of conditionals.
As for overall flaws, I am hardly a proponent of russkii mir, but I am confused by the repetition of “Kyiv” in virtually the entire text. Bilenky buries his authorial explanation in a footnote, “The terms Ukrainians and Ukrainian are used for the sake of convenience. I am well aware that with respect to present-day Ukrainians and Kyivites, other terms were applied more often in imperial times, among them Little Russians, South Russians, Cossacks, and Ruthenians (Rusini in Polish). Most external observers also noticed the differences (unless they chose to ignore them for ideological purposes) . Russian and Polish identities were no less ambiguous and different from what they are nowadays” (365n3). Heterogeneity is lovely, but I would prefer candor at the outset. Not to pick at nationalist scabs, I find it a greater fault that we never get an organized, journalistic chronicle. Biggest events aside from 1835 and 1870 are the 1811 fire in Podil΄, Polish uprisings, the 1881 riots, housing booms of the 1890s–1900s, the 1905 revolution, the Beilis events of 1911–13, and scattered municipal shakedowns.
A fine final insight on the social life of urban form, shared with Hillis, is that Kyivites informally participated in politics, thereby aiding clan- and family-based networks. Upon reading, I am more convinced that Kyiv resembled imperial cities in this way, at least on its elite planning levels. Kyiv's franchise before 1905 was very miniscule, 0.8 per cent of the population. Despite the wealth of the Brodskii family, most of Kyiv's Jews were too poor to appear on the city's tax records, a key source for visibility—and hardly transparent, as Bilenky rightly illustrates. The “hooligan mayor” Vasilii Protsenko, “Kyiv's own Karl Lueger,” presided over the 1905 pogroms with his “Black Hundred council” (296).
Bilenky's history of Kyiv is probing, timely, and heady. Borderlanders drew maps to make sense of the lived spaces of difference. A “poster boy for today's ruthless developers” was Vasilii Levashov, the urban renewer and champion of Napoleon III's military-style urban planning. Backroom deals and scapegoats were Kyivites’ specialty way back to the 1820s, even before Nikolai Gogol΄ came of age, and in 1835 when Magdeburg autonomy came to an end. Plus ça change: at the postmodern omega, or plutocratic alpha, Kyiv's last mayor Hryhorii Kyselevs΄kyi (r. 1826–34), a scion of one of the “most venerable” families, managed to get his well-propertied son, the city prosecutor, to help his favored cronies get away with fleecing the city.
