The City in Russian Culture

Pavel Lyssakov, Stephen Norris, Stephen M Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138310230
• eBook ISBN: 9781351388023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities are constructed and organized by people, and in turn become an important factor in the organization of human life. They are sites of both social encounter and social division and provide for their inhabitants "a sense of place". This book explores the nature of Russian cities, outlining the role played by various Russian cities over time. It focuses on a range of cities including provincial cities, considering both physical, iconic, created cities, and also cities as represented in films, fiction and other writing. Overall, the book provides a rich picture of the huge variety of Russian cities.

1 The city in Russian culture

Space, culture, and the Russian city

Pavel Lyssakov and Stephen M. Norris

In his 1916 novel, Petersburg, the Russian writer Andrei Bely opens with a passage that captures the spatial aspects of the vast Russian Empire:

What is our Russian Empire?

Our Russian Empire is a geographical entity, which means: a part of a certain planet. And the Russian Empire comprises: in the first place – Great, Little, White, and Red Rus; in the second – the realms of Georgia, Poland, Kazan, and Astrakhan; in the third, it comprises… . But – et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Our Russian Empire consists of many towns and cities: capital, provincial, district, downgraded; and further – of the original capital city and of the mother of Russian cities.

The original capital city is Moscow, and the mother of Russian cities is Kiev.

Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Piter (which is the same) authentically belongs to the Russian Empire. While Tsargrad, Konstantinograd (or, as it is said, Constantinople), belongs by right of inheritance. And on it we shall not expatiate.

(Bely 1995, p. 1)

Bely’s prologue incorporated the official title of Tsar Nicholas II. At the time he wrote these lines, Chapter VI of the 1906 Fundamental Laws had officially defined the Emperor and Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, using these spatial metaphors:

By the Grace of God, We, NN, Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia, Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod; Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Chersonese Taurian, Tsar of Georgia; Lord of Pskov and Grand Prince of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, Finland; Prince of Estland, Livland, Courland, Semigalia, Samogitia, Belostok, Karelia, Tver, Yugorsky land, Perm, Vyatka, Bolgar and others; Lord and Grand Prince of Nizhnii Novgorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Belozersk, Udorsky land, Obdorsk, Kondia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and all of the northern countries Master; and Lord of Iberia, Kartli, and Kabardia lands and Armenian provinces; Circassian and Mountainous Princes and their Hereditary Lord and Owner; Lord of Turkestan; Norwegian Heir; Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, Dithmarschen, and Oldenburg, and others, and others, and others.¹

It should not surprise readers of this chapter that the Russian Empire was big and that writers and lawmakers alike understood it as such. The historiography of Russia has always acknowledged the size of the polity, whether it comes from 19th-century giants such as Vasilii Kliuchevskii or 20th-century American historians such as Richard Pipes. And yet it may surprise readers that the so-called spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has not, a handful of excellent works aside, greatly impacted the field so far.² In her award-winning 2011 history of Nizhnii Novgorod, Catherine Evtuhov could rightly claim that Russian and Soviet history had largely been studied absent of space (Evtuhov 2011, p. 3). Evtuhov’s study of this province, as she defined it, was “entirely place-specific,” operating “on the premise that the most basic of human beings’ activities play out in entirely concrete surroundings and that we must first understand specific, locally circumscribed interactions before proceeding to analysis in terms of sociological categories (class, status, civil society) or generalized historical processes (industrialization, modernization, urbanization)” (p. 3).

Inspired in part by Evtuhov’s study and others who have employed similar approaches, this volume aims to add to the growing list of works that make the spatial turn. It does so by examining the city in Russian culture. Captured so prominently in Bely’s list and the Tsar’s title, cities dotted the map of the Russian Empire, gave it meaning, and provided its sense of importance (as well as defined its size). In his book The City: A Global History (2006), Joel Kotkin boldly declares that “humankind’s greatest creation has always been its cities,” noting that they “compress and unleash the creative urges of humanity” (xx). Among the many ways he analyzes cities, Kotkin stresses that great ones manage to project an image of sacredness and their own sense of power. Cities are sites of social encounter and social division; they also control physical and symbolic space, and they are able to accumulate memories and tell stories. A unique feature of cities is the fact that while they are constructed and organized by people, they in turn become an important factor in the organization of human life. Cities, as recent scholars who have engaged in spatial theory have argued, also serve as sites that create “a sense of place” for their inhabitants (Cresswell 2014, pp. 12–14).³ Alastair Bonnett has argued that “place is a protean and fundamental aspect of what it is to be human. We are a place-making and place-loving species” (2014, xiii). At the same time, cities, or the idea of a city, can inspire “senses of space” conjured up by writers, artists, and filmmakers. One scholar of spatiality has declared that literature – and, by extension, film – can even serve as a “form of mapping, offering its readers descriptions of places, situating them in a kind of imaginary space, and providing points of reference by which they can orient themselves and understand the world in which they live” (Tally, Jr. 2013, p. 2).

This edited volume aims to map out these roles Russian cities have played across time and, in doing so, to illustrate how they have been constructed and how they have inspired representations about their qualities. While a great deal has been written about the many cultural myths attached to St. Petersburg and Moscow (captured so well in Bely’s novel), less attention has been paid to other Russian cities. The City in Russian Culture contains essays that explore topics and places such as Ivanovo’s shift from a serf community to an industrial town in the 19th century, the making of modern Novorossiisk as a memorial to World War II, and the literary fashioning of Kaliningrad. In addition, this volume contains essays on Moscow and St. Petersburg that move beyond the typical ways these two cities have been explored, including chapters on the Moscow text of Russian cinema and on spatial practices in the Russian urban literary narrative. In taking this geographical approach, The City in Russian Culture will accomplish two aims. First, essays on so-called provincial cities (or “non-capital [nestolichnyi]”), combined with new essays on Russia’s two capitals, will help to problematize the often-artificial division between the “center” and the “periphery” in Russian history and culture. Instead, the essays in this volume will illuminate complex connections between Russian cities. Second, the inclusion of cities such as Ivanovo, Novorossiisk, and Vorkuta (to name just three) will further our understanding of Russia in spatial terms. This volume, in other words, will help fill in some of the meanings in Bely’s preface and the titles of the last tsar.

The City in Russian Culture also builds on recent works dedicated to the histories and cultures of Russian cities and provinces. Three books in particular serve as guides to chapters on constructed cities. Evgenii Akelev’s Povsednevnaia zhizn’ vorovskogo mira Moskvy vo vremena Van’ki Kaina (2012) and Alexander Martin’s Enlightened Metropolis (2014) provide useful templates, for both explore 18th-century Moscow and the changes the city experienced after Peter the Great’s reforms. Catherine Evtuhov’s work mentioned previously on Nizhnii Novgorod captured the dynamics of that region while also analyzing the “idea of province” itself. The chapters that examine the representations of cities in texts, films, and theories build on several studies. Julie A. Buckler’s Mapping St. Petersburg (2005) reconsidered the Petersburg text by including non-fiction writing and non-canonical works, while Emily Johnson’s study (2006) analyzed the emergence of local studies in that city. Anna Lisa Crone and Jennifer Day in My Petersburg/Myself (2004) explore the phenomenon of identification of poets and writers with the space of the city, which they find peculiar to St. Petersburg. Katerina Clark’s Moscow, the Fourth Rome (2011) provides an interpretative cultural history of the Soviet capital in the 1930s, while Catriona Kelly’s St. Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (2014) largely focuses on the postwar cultural history of the former imperial capital. Mark Steinberg’s recent book (2011) on St. Petersburg also serves as a guide in these explorations, for his exploration of modernity and the experiences of it in fin de siècle St. Petersburg illustrate that for all of its distinctiveness, the imperial metropole “did represent Russia” (p. 2). To understand modern Russia, he argues, one can turn to the city as a “critically important space in all of this” (p. 5). And St. Petersburg – much like other cities analyzed in this volume – “was never only a physical city” (p. 10) – it was a cultural phenomenon, a metaphysical space, a myth, and a text. These works and others like them focus on one city and its environs; our volume, while not aiming to be a comprehensive survey of all Russian cities, includes comparative approaches and aims to map out new directions in the study of the histories and cultures of Russian cities.

Finally, we have mostly chosen to focus on cities within “Russia” and the “Russian Empire” that have not been well-studied (understanding full well the slippery nature of what can be defined as “Russian” in both the national and imperial contexts). The “imperial turn” in history has enriched our field in many ways, including the study of imperial cities. Tashkent, for example, has two excellent recent histories devoted to it that evaluate how it functioned within Russian imperial discourses. Jeff Sahadeo (2007) examines how tsarist officials and colonists initially imagined Tashkent as a “new Russian citadel” (p. 21); the city served as the centerpiece of the empire’s claim to proclaim its European civilizing mission, to transform lives through culture (in the end, though, pure power prevailed). Soviet officials built on these notions in official discourse, and Tashkent, as Paul Stronski has written (2010), became “the center of Soviet Asia and a symbol of the prosperity, abundance, and progress that the socialist system provided to the region” (p. 2). Our hope is that the chapters in this volume will complement these books, along with other recent studies on imperial cities such as Vilnius, Odessa, Kiev, and Lviv.⁴

The last major volume dedicated to this subject was Michael Hamm’s 1986The City in Late Imperial Russia, which traced the changes modernity brought to eight cities in the empire. This volume reflects changes in the field that have occurred in the last three decades since Hamm’s volume appeared: our contributors are more international and more interdisciplinary (they include historians, literary and cultural scholars, and film scholars). The essays within The City in Russian Culture draw on newer urban histories, recent archival sources, as well as the spatial turn to provide case studies that stretch from the 18th to the 21st century and include Siberian cities, serf villages, and Karelian towns in our portrait of Russian cultures. In this sense, we also build upon the recent edited volume by Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa Stockdale, Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia (2010), which, while also inspired by the spatial turn, focused on spaces such as roads, dance floors, buildings, and maps. Their two thematic foci – on the relationship between space and power and on the use of space to negotiate group identities – complement ours.⁵

The City in Russian Culture is divided into two thematic sections. The first tackles the constructed city, or the various cultures Russian cities have built. From the imperial aspects of early-19th-century Tobol’sk to the building of Russian imperial cities in Nizhnii Novgorord and Kazan, from Novorossiisk as a monument to the Great Patriotic War to Vorkuta as a Gulag city, the chapters in this section, to use the framework established by Tim Cresswell cited earlier, examine how residents in these cities invested them with meaning as places (or engaged in “place-naming”). Cities such as Tobol’sk in the imperial period and Novorossiisk in the Soviet era functioned as “an agent of memory, a store of meanings that belong as much to the place itself as they do to the individual who retraces their steps through it” (Tonkiss 2005, p. 114). The study of space in cities can also reveal the “lines of social division and difference that give shape and sense to the city” (Tonkiss 2005, p. 30), as Ilya Gerasimov’s analysis of Nizhnii Novgorod and Alison Smith’s exploration of Ivanovo make clear. The second section focuses on the represented city, or the symbolic aspects of Russian cities. From the created cityscapes in texts about Petersburg to films centered on Moscow apartments, from the utopian plans of Soviet urban planners to the reimagined geography of post-Soviet Sortavala, the chapters in this section, to borrow from Robert Tally, Jr.’s work, illustrate the ways in which mental mapping of urban space helped to create imaginary, but powerful, forms of meaning. Here we can glean how power is “made visible in the city through struggles both in and over space” (Tonkiss 2005, p. 61), as films about Moscow apartments indicate, the employment of “spatial tactics” in the writings of Petersburg authors, and how cities can be “embodied,” where “issues of gender and sexuality affect the perception and the use of urban spaces” (p. 94), as recent films about St. Petersburg illuminate.

How do Russian cities speak to these discussions on spatial meaning? Our journey begins in Siberia, where Mark Soderstrom evaluates the ways that Tobol’sk became a “legible city.” He focuses on the writing of Peter Andreevich Slovtsov (1767–1843) and how he helped to popularize “a landscape that embodied the imperial state’s enlightenment ideology in its history, physical space, and pomp.” Slovtsov, as Soderstrom writes, served as “a catalyst for his own transformative encounter with imperial institutions.” Tobol’sk became an imperial sanctuary of sorts, and its transformation speaks to the ways that other Russian colonists transformed Siberian cities just as other visitors and cultural figures imagined them as new, “Russian” locales. As the tsarist state expanded eastward, its outposts became the nodes through which empire and nation developed side-by-side. Phrased a different way, Soderstrom’s chapter explains how Siberia became “Russian” through sites such as Tobol’sk (and, although it falls outside the parameters of his study, one could find similar processes at work in Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and other Siberian cities).

Imperial processes may have helped to create the Russian city of Tobol’sk, but internal dynamics linked to the growing industries within the empire “created” Ivanovo-Voznesensk, as Alison Smith argues in her chapter. Most Russian cities originated by imperial decree, and then had meaning ascribed to them by residents and visitors. Over the course of the 19th century, residents of Ivanovo, the “Russian Manchester,” fashioned a distinct identity and claimed to be the first “true” Russian town. The culmination came in 1871, when the village of Ivanovo officially became the town Ivanovo-Voznesensk through a process that was “entirely different than the process that had created Catherine’s administrative towns in the late eighteenth century.” Creating Ivanovo-Voznesensk “came out of the efforts of local industrialists, who first, still in the time of serfdom, bought neighboring land and established several suburbs of the village.” As Smith analyzes, the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of mid-century Russia created a (re)newed city that in turn was the starting point for a new urban history.

The negotiations among factory owners, workers, and former serfs that brought about the “new” Ivanovo-Voznesensk had rough cultural parallels in the Volga city of Nizhnii Novgorod. Here, in the last years of the Russian Empire, as Ilya Gerasimov writes, city residents negotiated their own Russian imperial identity. Focusing on the popularity of Ukrainian musicales and on the centennial celebrations of Nikolai Gogol’s birth, Gerasimov highlights an “unusual perspective on the phenomenon of the late imperial Russian city.” He argues that an actual “sense of place” as an “acute sense of belonging to a locality and its community of inhabitants was formed by distinctivel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 The city in Russian culture: space, culture, and the Russian city
• Part I The constructed city
• Part II The represented city
• Index