Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia ed. by Catharine Alexander, Victor Buchli, Caroline Humphrey (review)

453 Ab Imperio, 3/2008 of the struggle between the general staff and the tsar. Marshall claims that Nicholas II was not the military idiot we have been led to believe, but like so much else this provocative assertion is left undeveloped. Moreover, it is surprising to find no mention here of Nicholas I’s shameful conduct during the 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish War. To conclude, this is an unsatisfactory book, though it cannot be said to be worthless. First, it may serve as a foil for scholars and graduate students working in an area still needful of attention. I imagine that someone with additional language skills in Georgian, Chinese, Turkish, or Persian could provide a much better account of one or more of the Asian sub-theatres. Second, because this text is accessible as an eBook (see http://www.eBookstore .tandf.co.uk), its contents may be searched without having to slog through the prosaic quagmire (though one hopes this technology will not alleviate historians of the responsibility to produce readable books). Finally, despite there being numerous RGVIA fondy cited in the bibliography, endnotes show the book is based on primarily published sources; nonetheless, Marshall had culled from these an impressive amount of detail (indeed, minutiae), much of which might serve as a springboard for more coherent studies than this. Mathijs PELKMANS Catharine Alexander, Victor Buchli , and Caroline Humphrey (Eds.), Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 212 pp., ills. Index. ISBN: 978-1-84472-115-3. Soviet urban environments used to be instantly recognizable. The abundant use of concrete, the monotonous apartment buildings, and the lack of attention to detail made cities from Lvov to Vladivostok appear thoroughly similar. Twenty years after the last Soviet buildings were constructed this relative uniformity has started to unravel. Walking tours in downtown Ashkhabad and Dushanbe , for example, could hardly be more different. The empty grandeur of museums, palaces, theatres, and offices in Ashkhabad has the looks of Disneyland and is somewhat reminiscent of Stalinism, while Dushanbe exemplifies the messiness of economic and architectural improvisation of a city struggling to erase the traces of civil war. Different economic dynamics, political cultures, and transnational flows produce so many different cityscapes. Nevertheless , the Soviet past continues to peak into the present. This is not only because the (now privatised) khrushchevkas continue to “colour” residential areas; the Soviet legacy is also detectable in what citizens 454 Рецензии/Reviews rural-urban migration, housing shortages, and the propiska system during the Soviet period, as well as the retraction of the state after 1990. Drawing on Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life1 the authors critique the idea that cities are simply planned from above and stress the importance of analysing how the “practitioners” of cities create urban space. The focus on networks, hierarchies, and loyalties allows the authors to analyse the ties that bind individuals to the state. If these connections were vital in the Soviet “shortage economy,” this is no less true for contemporary times. As the authors point out, kin and clan relations, ethnic loyalties, and friendship ties continue to shape public and domestic spheres, inform models of legitimization, and influence how various groups imagine and experience (life in) the city. The introduction includes a section “The Region” which oddly only covers Central Asia, even though four (out of seven) chapters discuss the Eastern Siberian city of Ulan-Ude. This mismatch is not the only imbalance of the volume. While it contains excellent ethnographic accounts and analyses of urban change, it also includes several poorly crafted chapters . It is a real pity that the editors have not ensured that all chapters live up to the same standards. expect from a city (government) and in the models of prestige to which the political elite aspires. Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia aims to understand such urban continuities and discontinuities. What is the impact of the privatization of property on how residents use urban space? What shifts in perceptions of a city occur when the state ceases to carry out basic infrastructural tasks? How do new ideological horizons bespeak attempts to redesign cityscapes ? To answer such questions, the book traces different...