Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855 by Alexander M. Martin (review)

Although Martin has not written another biography of Catherine the Great, his treatment of her reign is the lynchpin of this work: during 1762–1855 her ideas and policy were a constant, sometimes in abeyance but never really eclipsed. In addressing Catherine’s and her successors’ urbanism and their portrayal of Moscow, the author parts company with the cliche of an unremitting dualism of Russia’s two capitals—one, St. Petersburg, Westward-looking, the other, Moscow, introspectively ignoring it. Rather here the focus is on an enlightened Moscow and how this ancient, fuddy-duddy city became a purveyor of new images and ideas.

Catherine had no love affair with the Old Capital: she detested its wooden, muddy, unpaved look and the squalor and baseness of its people, whom she satirized at her coronation for their “stupidity, ignorance, drunkenness, deceit, [and] arrogance … the antithesis of enlightenment” (13). Moscow had reached its nadir in its 1730s-40s fires, the 1771 bubonic siege and riots which led to the lynching of the archbishop, another conflagration in 1773, and the calamitous Pugachev revolt which threatened to engulf the city in 1774-75. Despite all this, Catherine evidently paid some heed to Philosophe Diderot’s urging her returning the capital to Moscow. Even if it took a century to transform the “seat of sloth” (her description to Voltaire, 17) into a city of monarchial grandeur, she determined to invest the effort in creating what Martin calls an enlightened metropolis.

Martin has labeled Catherine’s rational redo of Moscow and its citizenry the imperial social project, detailing it as “a complex of laws, institutions, and social and discursive practices” which required molding an urban middling sort “that would share her regime’s values and support its policies” (13). This project and the emphasis on middling sort’s critical role in achieving it are recurring and dominant themes, and certainly the most imaginative, in Martin’s treatment of enlightened Moscow.

The project and middling sort are especially integral to the author’s treatment of the city’s space—its layout and built environment. With the Turkish war ended and the Pugachev uprising quelled, both in 1774, Catherine turned to domestic matters. Regarding changing Moscow’s look she took a cue from baroque St. Petersburg and from rebuilt Tver after that city’s fire in 1763. She and her architects—Bazhenov (who forgot privies in his projected Kremlin palace!), Blank, and Kazakov—began the process of transforming Moscow’s center from wood buildings, meandering streets, and concentric city walls to masonry edifices, arterial thoroughfares, and circular boulevards. Although making Moscow fire-proof and neoclassical was far from complete in Catherine’s lifetime, the Old Capital did receive a masonry and geometric imprint that could hardly have been imagined in the mid-1770s.

Like so many historians who have dealt with Catherine the Great, Martin discusses her Legislativemania, but with an innovative touch: he neatly ties together the empress’ urbanism and social reforms. Just as the year 1775 was that of the Moscow general plan, it was also crucial to the notions of reform which were implicit in her imperial social project. Rather than dwelling on the shortcomings of Catherine’s Nakaz of 1767, Martin cites its laying “out foundational principles of an enlightened polity” (25)—as evidenced by the Provincial Reform and Charter of Nobility (1775), the Police Code (1782), the Charter of Towns (1785), and the Code for Public Schools (1785). He concludes that Catherine by these acts “created that framework for urban governance and the imperial social project down to the era of the Great Reforms” (24).

Martin does more than chronicle improvements in Moscow’s cityscape and legislative initiatives to improve the quality of life and citizenship of Muscovites: he allows the reader to view Catherine’s Moscow through the lens of new imagery created by cartographers and graphic artists and new perceptions from statisticians and historians. Western and Russian literati of the 1790s...