Urban History in Eastern Europe

What is urban history? Most obviously, the study of the history of a city or cities. But what does that mean? Part of the difficulty in coming up with a good definition is the polyvalent nature of cities themselves. Cities are political entities, with governing bodies (whether elected or appointed), police, and other institutions to control and discipline the population. Intellectual movements, revolutions, and high culture (art, literature, music) usually arise in cities. Social and economic development in the modern period is overwhelmingly determined by events in cities. Revolutions, declarations of independence, the formation of political parties—all these crucial social and political events nearly always occur in cities. So urban history includes—at least—elements of political, social, economic, institutional, cultural, and art history. Add to this conceptions of city planning and the image of the city in the rhetoric of nationalists and other political movements (whether pro or con), and one begins to understand why urban history is such a growing field of interest at present and why capturing "urban history" in a single review essay is quite impossible.

In the context of Eastern Europe (that is, Europe from Prague to Ekaterinburg, St. Petersburg to Sofia, Erevan to Warsaw), urban history has profited from the increase in local and provincial history facilitated by the demise of the USSR. At the same time, the decline of "pure" political and national history has encouraged historians to look at the history of urban areas as a microcosm of larger developments. There is also considerable public interest in the history of cities, as the ongoing column "Warszawa nieodbudowana" (Un-Rebuilt Warsaw) in Gazeta Wyborcza shows. The stimulating work of Karl Schlögel and others remind us that cities are, first of all, spaces and urge us not to neglect urban geography as we think and write urban history.¹

The present review brings together a number of very dissimilar books. We start with two collections of essays, one Russian and one French, that arose out of conferences. We then proceed to six books that consider one city mainly: Odessa, Tashkent, Moscow (twice), Warsaw, and the "workers' city" (rabochii gorod) constructed to house laborers in what would become GAZ, the USSR's first large automobile factory, near Nizhnii Novgorod. We end with a work that attempts to develop a "language of architecture...