The rate of economic growth should not be the sole objective of those responsible for managing a country’s economy. Rather, there should be considerations of a country’s quality of life, which is determined by the development of infrastructure (highly developed transportation system with low tariffs, availability of quality medical and educational institutions, accessibility of recreational areas, maintenance of the country’s ecological well-being, a low crime rate, quality of governance, etc.). Present-day Russian cities generally do not meet even minimum requirements in terms of quality of life, which hampers their development as centers of economic and cultural creativity. In this article, the author briefly considers the evolution of the Russian town and the causes and consequences of its transformation in the Soviet era.
The birth and development of Russia’s middle class and private economic initiative are closely tied to the historical destiny of its towns. One theory suggests that the word gorod (“town, city”) is derived from the verb gorodit’, meaning to “wall in” and fortify a place, thus protecting it from enemies. Vladislav Darkevich, a contemporary researcher who has studied the phenomenon of the town in pre-Mongol Rus’, emphasized the following in this regard: “It was not so much economic factors as it was the community’s desire to avoid fatal disintegration and its quest for previously unknown forms of solidarity and cooperation that compelled human collectives to unite under the protection of the town walls.”
In the late tenth century, after the adoption of Christianity by Rus’, the young medieval Russian state moved to a new quality and higher level of civilization. Simultaneously, a legitimate national authority took shape, and it guaranteed external and internal security, supported the social order, and performed political functions. The old Slavic settlements were faced with new administrative, cultural, socio-economic, and military tasks. “The founding of many towns, which were strategically important as centers for governing the territory of a volost’ (the smallest administrative unit in pre-revolutionary Russia, similar to a municipality), proceeded in a systematic way, as new lands were colonized by the Slavs. At the beginning of their history, when peripheral areas were being settled, many towns were sovereign communes made up of the plucky pioneers of the past and colonists who had come from various East Slavic regions, both from bigger towns and from villages. Riazan’, for example, was such a commune,” Darkevich pointed out.
Period I: Tenth century – 1237. The town of ancient Rus’ as a center of culture, economic initiative, crafts, and trade.
By the middle of the eleventh century, the Old Russian town was already a fully developed independent institution. The number of towns grew continually. In the estimate of Mikhail Tikhomirov, there were 25 in Rus’ in the tenth century, 64 in the eleventh century, 135 in the twelfth century, and as many as 300 by the year 1237. By 1237, on the eve of the invasion of Batu Khan, a Russian urban culture had blossomed. The level of awareness and overall development of a town dweller was considerably higher than the level of a compatriot living in a rural locality. The town served as a source of private and corporate creative work; it influenced migration processes, and helped to change stereotypical thinking, and further differentiate the population in terms of property and occupation. It also facilitated a strengthening of social solidarity. The expansion of international contacts and overcoming of isolation, as well as the development of architecture, painting, literature, and the writing of chronicles, were connected with the towns and the monasteries adjoining them. The disintegration of Kievan Rus’ in the twelfth century led to a regional concentration of resources and had a positive influence on the growth of the towns. “A polycentric system of towns that were independent but related in cultural, religious, and dynastic terms,” Darkevich suggests, “created conditions for further development of urbanization.”
At the end of Period I in 1237, the biggest town of each region also had outstanding political significance as a spokesman for the consolidated public will. The authority of the assemblies and their electoral representatives successfully competed with and combined with the authority of the prince, which was heavily dependent on individual circumstances, as Sergei Soloviev correctly noted: “As a consequence of the relations between the princely families, displacements, and internecine strife, the prince’s authority was something inconstant and changing, and the more it was weakened by this situation, the more the significance of the senior town and volost’ grew, because the town represented permanent authority.” In many ways, this situation was a result of the complex social structure of the town population, in which independent and influential significance was acquired by townspeople who were closely associated with handicrafts and trade, and jealous when it came to their individual rights.
In the first third of the thirteenth century, the specialization of the craft industry in the Russian town became a fait accompli, though elements of a subsistence economy were still in existence. The town as “protector” turned into a center of crafts and trade and a source of the spreading of cultural tradition and Christian education. The first references to merchants—intermediaries between the producer and the market—date from as early as the tenth century. At the start of the twelfth century, merchants were an important social group in the urban population. In big towns and regional centers, merchant associations were formed, reminiscent of European corporations. Both townspeople who engaged in local trade and “guests” —wealthy contracting agents from other towns—were referred to as merchants. Simultaneously, the merchants also performed credit and financial operations, and some became moneylenders and lent money on interest.
Period II: Thirteenth century – first half of the seventeenth century. The decline of the Old Russian town and its transformation in Muscovite Rus’.
The invasion by the Mongol hordes of Batu Khan in the years 1237–1238 and the subsequent pull of northeastern Rus’ into the political orbit of the Golden Horde was a historical tragedy. “Asia on horseback” dealt an almost mortal blow to Russia’s urban culture. Under the ruins of towns and the hooves of the Mongol and Tatar cavalry, the prospects for the development of a legally free town were lost. In Muscovite Rus’, the town, above all, began to exist as a military stronghold (fortress) with a dependent serf population, and it was frozen in this primitive state for many years. The dramatic conflict between Novgorod and Moscow in the late fifteenth century essentially was an unavoidable clash between the town with a pre-Mongol tradition and Moscow, which, in Andrey Sakharov’s expression, at that time “increasingly became enmeshed in the nets of the stagnant Asiatic civilization.” Sakharov sadly but correctly, in my opinion, maintained: “By subordinating to itself all the northeastern lands, above all Novgorod with its traditional liberties, shackling the grand princedom of Tver’ with the iron bonds of vassalage, and tying to its chariot of state the freedom-loving principality of Riazan’ and the always detached Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow simultaneously annihilated the spirit of freedom and liberty that still remained in Rus’.”
The rebirth of the merchants in Muscovite Rus’ was brought about by the natural order of things. But the strict unification of the lands of northeastern and northwestern Rus’ in the context of a centralized Muscovite state was accompanied not only by liquidation of all regional rights and remnants of independence on the part of the subordinated elements, but also by abolition of the tax autonomy and professional self-regulation of the local merchant associations, later deliberately destroyed by the Muscovite vice-regents. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Muscovite authority actively impeded the economic independence of towns and private individuals. To some extent, this procedure was the result of the serf’s obligations and the compulsory military service that characterized the Muscovite state, which Vassiliy Kliuchevskii justly termed “armed Great Russia.” Constant military threats from the east, south, and west required permanent militarization and colossal effort on the part of all the national forces, heavily burdening every social class with a special amount of taxes in the name of the public weal.
To at least an equal degree, however, a negative influence was exerted by the Asiatic model of the state inherited from the Golden Horde, which was not conducive to the development of the institution of property, private entrepreneurship, and economic freedom. Particularly disastrous was the rule of Tsar Ivan IV (1533–1584), whose despotism and reign of terror in reality concealed the revolutionary redistribution of the large landholdings of the Muscovite aristocracy, which was accomplished by seizure. Many representatives of the merchant class fell victim to Ivan the Terrible’s policy of terror. His heirs were left with an economically devastated country with shattered economic ties and an undermined market, which to a significant degree provoked the events of the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. After the Time of Troubles, the rebuilding of Russia and of the merchants’ business activity dragged on for a great many years. As a result, Russian merchants looked considerably poorer and less numerous in comparison with their European colleagues, and the overall conditions of life and mode of operation entailed far greater risks. Nonetheless, the economic activity of the merchants signified the return to the Russian town of its traditional functions.
A certain revival of entrepreneurship took place during the rule of Tsar Aleksei (1645–1676), under whom a kind of hierarchy finally developed in Russian trade. The merchant elite numbered 30 individuals (“guests”) in total; they enjoyed special privileges, including their subjection to court jurisdiction. The members of the honored “merchants’ hundred” (350 people), in contrast to the “guests,” had no landed property. The merchants of the “wool cloth merchants’ hundred” restricted their activity exclusively to trading in woolen cloth. Representatives of the “black hundred” lacked the right to trade in foreign goods, and they primarily engaged in buying up raw materials from local producers and reselling them. Closely associated with the merchants and cooperating with them were the small-scale traders of the towns—miscellaneous townspeople residing and working in settlements (“people”), às well as walking salesmen of consumer goods (“peddlers,” “wandering traders”). Within the corporations, a business ethics of relations and rules of conduct grew up, and independent ranks or “classes” formed: “better,” “middling,” “lesser.” Some researchers suggest that the father of Peter I deliberately encouraged and stimulated the economic activity of the population, despite the wars and internal upheavals in the state. In the domestic market, the government of Aleksei protected the rights of Russian merchants against foreign competitors, admittedly, not only with economic measures, but also with political ones at some times. The adoption of the Customs Charter (1653) and New Commercial Code (1667) was conducive to the development of private initiative.
Period III: Mid-seventeenth century – early twentieth century (1917). Development of the town as a center of economic initiative and culture.
The seventeenth century held special significance for Russian merchants. Under the first Romanovs, accumulated trading capital gradually began to be realized in entrepreneurial activity—in salt mining, the leather industry, and other sectors. The tragic church schism in the middle of the seventeenth century led to the isolation of the Old Believers among the merchants—a consolidated professional group whose business activity and moral and ethical principles of doing business, to some extent comparable to those of the Protestants, had a major influence on the entire Russian commercial and industrial class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It may perhaps be appropriate to speak of the gradual forming in Russia of an Old Believer culture of entrepreneurship, whose distinguishing feature was firm adherence to unwritten corporate rules and a peculiar attitude toward capital and property as a trial sent by God. The Old Believer tradition influenced many big entrepreneurs (the Kuznetsovs, Morozovs, Riabushinskys, Soldatenkovs, and others) who participated in the successful modernization of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the eighteenth century, merchant capital and efforts were realized in the metallurgical, textile, paper-making, glass, and other industries. But the revolutionary and militaristic policy of Peter I in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, his artificial planting of state enterprises and spreading of petty regulation, together with forced recruiting, unsystematic reforms, and enormous worsening of the tax burden, in my opinion, were not conducive to the development of merchants and private entrepreneurs and led to the decline of the cities, the weakening of the urban economy, and a reduction in the able-bodied population. By the end of Peter the Great’s reign (1725), the once-elite “merchants’ hundred” was almost devastated. Because of the high risks, accumulated capital was not put into operation, and at times it was buried in the ground (literally). The town gradually assumed a new aspect, changing from a military center to a predominantly administrative one, while its commercial and economic functions retained a secondary importance.
The town and the policy of economic liberalism
In the subsequent decades, under Empresses Anna and then Elizaveta, certain measures were carried out that were conducive to the development of entrepreneurship, but they were not systematic in nature. The consistent strengthening of the institution of private property, encouragement of economic independence, and expansion of the rights of the towns took place during the reign of Empress Catherine II, or Catherine the Great (1762–1796). As Victor Leontovich asserts, “Catherine decisively rejected every possibility for regulation from above: ‘There is nothing more dangerous than wanting to make regulations for everything.’ Finding herself on the monarch’s throne in Russia, where the state of general lack of freedom was a painful legacy of the preceding centuries, Catherine II decisively intended to provide individual civil rights—above all, the inviolability of person and the right of property ownership— to a certain social group, turning its members into complete private individuals in all respects, protected against despotism. That was the origin of the “Draft Laws on the Rights of Inhabitants or People of the Third Estate.”
The status of merchants, the group with the most economic initiative, was elevated in 1775 as a result of the creation of privileged merchant guilds; complete corporations in all respects, formed in the towns by representatives of the commercial and industrial class with serious capital. The merchants paid no personal taxes, had no recruitment obligation, and were subject to no corporal punishments. Craftsmen, small tradesmen and householders, and handicraft workers belonged to the estate of the petty bourgeoisie and thus were subject to the poll tax and had no privileges. To Catherine’s disappointment, however, the proportion and influence of the townspeople in the mass of the Russian population were insignificant. By 1796, the empire’s urban population totaled only 1.3 million (3.5 percent).
The administrative attempt made during Catherine’s reign to increase the number of towns by correspondingly renaming 250 large villages was artificial. As Natalia Ivanova points out, “many of them never rose to the level of a real town and were once again ‘demoted’ to village status.” Only the members of the nobility were fully entitled to civil liberty and individual rights in the late eighteenth century. In Boris Chicherin’s assessment, from that moment on the chief problem of the Russian state was how quickly the civil rights consolidated for the nobility by Catherine II would be made accessible to the members of all the other estates. Unfortunately, this process took too much time and was completed only in 1906, on the eve of World War I and the revolutionary upheavals of 1917.
The town and the formation of the Russian middle class
Emperor Alexander I’s decree of December 12, 1801, which allowed merchants, townspeople, and state peasants to buy and sell land, had positive significance for the development of the merchants and the Russian urban middle class. As the well-known thinker Nikolay Mordvinov, an advocate of economic liberalism, emphasized, from “that notable day … the right to possess land was spread to people of low birth.” Distribution of state peasants as private property also ceased during the rule of Alexander I. In 1857, on the eve of the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the share of town dwellers had grown substantially in comparison with the situation in 1796, but on the whole it still was insignificant, totaling 5.4 million people (7.4 percent of the empire’s population).
The great reforms carried out during the reign of Emperor Alexander II (1855–1881) also affected the fate of Russia’s merchants. As of 1863, there were expanded opportunities for admitting people originally belonging to other estates—primarily, enterprising peasants—to guild membership. For registration as a merchant, there were certain requirements: the person must have no debts from the previous estate affiliation and must pay, every year, a fixed tax the amount of which depended upon the guild they belonged to, plus other types of trade licensing fees. There were social constraints which required compliance with business ethics which if broken, could have had a most disastrous affect on business and relations with partners in the corporation. Participation in the activity of bodies of self-governance, attention to social needs, and concern with local education, leisure, and the needs of the Church were considered essential for creating a positive entrepreneurial image. Elevation to the merchant estate not only added a certain responsibility, but also substantially increased the personal status of a former peasant or small urban tradesman or craftsman and influenced the increase in social mobility in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The importance of the merchants in economic life and in the development of philanthropy and a social welfare system was indisputable. No less important a role in forming a favorable atmosphere for business operations was played by the good “credit history” of many families involved in trade and industry and by dynastic succession and multiplication of capital, the origin of which in some cases had its roots in the era of Muscovite Rus’.
The free town and the un-free countryside: a conflict of cultures
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the prospect of life in town beckoned to a significant part of the villagers who were gripped in the vise of the peasant community; it seemed more attractive to them. The freeing of the peasants from the obshchina, or agricultural commune, and the bestowal on them of civil rights equal to those of members of the other estates (in 1906) opened a clear path to the town. But the question remained whether former peasants and commune members, unaccustomed to freedom and independence, could in a short time become full-blooded townspeople, “vehicles of the classic values of the middle class” – especially since the share of town dwellers in the overall population remained small. According to 1897 census data, the population of the Russian empire (excluding Finland) was 125.6 million. In 867 towns, including the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland (Vistula District), there lived only 16.5 million people (13.2 percent). In European Russia, in 604 towns, there were 12 million residents. The biggest cities of the empire at that time were St. Petersburg (1.3 million), Moscow (more than 1 million), Warsaw (684,000), and Odessa (404,000). In 80 percent of the towns, the size of the population did not exceed 20,000. The share of members of the merchant estate in the structure of the population was only 0.2 percent.
Painter: Victor Tikhomirov (On the painting: Purely Russian features of urbanization)
Industrialization, which had begun in the late nineteenth century, and Stolypin’s modernization in the years 1906–1913 stimulated the processes of migration. Thanks to the intense influx of peasants, the urban population grew at a faster rate, reaching 26.3 million (15 percent) in 1914. The disproportion between the “old” and the “new” towns concealed a serious danger. The town, which had demonstrated higher standards of living, and the traditionally weak middle class could not cope with the rapid socialization of the large numbers of settlers from the patriarchal countryside, who brought along to the urban milieu their own habits and retained the mentality of people with origins in the peasant agricultural commune (patriarchalism, lack of independence, a low cultural level and a narrow worldview, and as well as a certain class envy). World War I, the militarization of the economy, the development of the military-industrial complex in the years 1915–1916, and the creation of huge rear-area garrisons of recruits increasingly influenced the flow of people from rural locations into the metropolitan centers. According to the estimates of Sergei Prokopovich, in the period 1914–1916 the population of the towns grew by 2.4 million. As a result, as Andrey Sakharov notes, “having failed to take shape as full-blooded centers of urban civilization with all its pros and cons, Russian towns were swamped by the torrent of members of the rural population.”
The Soviet period and the creation of an unnatural urban civilization.
Bolshevism and the criminal experiment of Lenin’s party in the years 1917–1920 were nothing but another Asiatic onslaught on law and property ownership in Russia. To gain and maintain power, the Leninists skillfully took advantage of the numerous socially marginalized people of rural origin and the urban lumpen proletariat, who enthusiastically destroyed an urban civilization, which was more highly developed and cultured but not fundamentally strong. The Bolshevists’ elimination of private economic initiative and entrepreneurial activity was accompanied by the physical destruction of the merchants, industrialists, urban intelligentsia, and other members of the Russian middle class during the ruthless Red Terror of 1917–1921. The naturally formed town began to disappear. Town dwellers became victims of social cleansing campaigns, fled to the provinces, or immigrated to other countries. In southern Russia, almost the entire population of the Cossack villages was subjected to physical destruction and deportation in 1919, and in the period 1930–1932. Many of them, owing to specific features of development, actually were proto-towns that failed to meet the definition of a town in a historical perspective.
Petr Struve assessed the socioeconomic consequences of the Bolsheviks’ anti-urban revolution in the years of “military communism” (1918–1921) as follows: “The abolition of private property and freedom of economic activity in the towns, a process that went through various stages but inevitably led to the same results, steadily undermined the productive forces and destroyed production. A demoralization of labor began; the producers started eating up assets instead of operating with the help of capital and assets, and the cities turned from production centers into congregations of private consumers. As such, the towns became unnecessary to the countryside, and a rupture of the normal economic link between town and country appeared and progressed with horrifying speed. The countryside retired into the circle of its own economic processes, that is, turned into a natural economy… The population of the towns and, in general, of the urban-type settlements dispersed and settled, if possible, on the land, while industry declined and the size of the proletariat actually diminished.”
Sergey Prokopovich suggested that the urban population during the years of “military communism” (1918–1921) had declined by at least 7.7 million (almost 30 percent). Moscow lost 42.3 percent of its inhabitants, Petrograd, 69.4 percent. “Petersburg became a dead city, with collapsing buildings that went unrepaired,” the economist emphasized. Revival of the cities and restoration of the natural conditions of vital activity began only in the period 1922–1923, in connection with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the temporary legalization of small private enterprises in the USSR. It is interesting that the “Nepmen”—the entrepreneurs of the short period of economic liberalization (1923–1926)—owing to the special conditions of business, short-term nature of business operations, their own precarious position, and the doubtful prospects, seriously differed from the members of the destroyed pre-Revolutionary commercial and industrial class, principally the merchants. In several years, the NEP and private entrepreneurs clearly showed their incompatibility with the political supremacy of the Communist Party nomenklatura (bureaucracy), which saw the existence of a class of free producers of goods as a threat to its power and to the privileged position gained during the civil war in Russia.
The Soviet town as a source of lack of freedom
During the years of Soviet power, a new, specially created model of the town came into being. Its characteristic features underscored the break in principle with the entire preceding historical and cultural period. Above all, this was manifested in the crude re-planning of the old architectural face of the towns and subsequent destruction of the historic town center, places of worship, and monasteries, and in the elimination of the place names that had existed for centuries, deportations, and repression of town dwellers of pre-Revolutionary Russia based on their social class. As a result, the typical urban milieu, with its cultural, independent, and freedom-loving space, gradually disappeared. The “new town” was supposed to serve the strategic goal of the Communist Party; the creation and breeding of a “new” man, an obedient disciple of utopia, ideally deprived of any private life, religious values, and family ties. This made urban life resemble a conveyor belt, excluding all self-organization on the part of townspeople. A bogus system of local soviets camouflaged the harsh vertical line of control of the territorial Party organs. The authority saw a danger to itself in any attempt at genuine self-governance.
People’s choice of a place to live and their everyday life and culture were subject exclusively to goals of production and operation (“A person should live in the same place where he works”). Henceforth the city did not serve the interests of its residents and the society as a whole; instead, the proletarianized builders of socialism who were living in poverty became raw material, manpower for the “town-forming” enterprises. The development of the town was linked with the development of state mega-industrial complexes. In 1929, Leonid Sabsovich, an economist and USSR Gosplan employee, described in a popular and easily understandable way the “towns of the future,” which were expected to be erected in the USSR by the early 1940s as a result of implementing the first Stalinist five-year plans. In their extreme display of the distinctive features of Soviet megalopolises, as Sabsovich saw it, there must be a destruction of the household and family economy, a socialization of the labor efforts of town dwellers, a unification and regulation of all aspects of life, and an introduction of compulsory and universal socially useful labor. Total collectivization of everyday life presupposed the creation of colossal factory-kitchens, nurseries, kindergartens, public canteens, and laundries, “to completely free all women from taking care of children in the daytime.”
In the 1930s, the Soviet town performed not only administrative, but also military and police functions with regard to spreading and perfecting the kolkhoz system in the countryside, as this system guaranteed the unshakable power of the Bolshevik Party nomenklatura. The new round of armed struggle between the regime and the society during the bloody collectivization period (1930–1932) was an episode of tragic opposition between the nomenklatura-run town and the agricultural producers who resisted it. The endeavor of part of the peasantry to find salvation from unrelieved kolkhoz life led to a new spurt of migration and another influx of rural inhabitants to the town. Sergei Maslov suggested that in the years 1929–1935, the urban population increased by 12 million as a result of migration from the countryside.
The Stalinist nomenklatura directly established the types of work essential to it, the amounts of food products produced, and the form of payment and amounts of remuneration, and therefore millions of peasants were doomed to harsh state exploitation in “projects for building socialism.” “The whining growl of sirens, the heavy sighs of factories, and the lifeless splash of masses of water near the dams of Dneprostroi and Volkhovstroi — these are the groans of tens of thousands of proletarians and peasants exhausted by heavy labor and a hungry stomach. The blood of millions of laborers has mixed with cold sweat, and now turns the heavy millstones and powerful turbines,” as Petr Ionov, a platoon commander in the Red Army’s 81st Infantry Division, wrote openly in his letter to the Party organization. Ionov was arrested by the organs of state security on September 28, 1932. Unfortunately, today it is not customary to recall how we created the enterprises that in the post-Soviet era became the basis of vertically integrated holding companies (on this topic, see the article by George Shestakov, “Vertical and Horizontal Integration in Russia: Means of Survival in Competition or Method for Monopolization?” in the October 2006 issue of Entrepreneurship Insights e-Bulletin).
From the 1930s through the 1980s, as a result of the development of state capitalism, artificial urbanization, and consequent destruction of the rural infrastructure in Russia’s historic territories, the Soviet industrial megalopolis came into being, and it played a major role in the functioning of the state system of forced labor. Many towns arose and developed as subunits of the GULAG system with a corresponding population contingent. Today, the “town-forming” enterprises around which these towns were built have become key links in the largest Russian companies. As an example, one can cite the city of Vorkuta (the company Vorkutaugol’ is part of the raw-materials division of OAO Severstal’), Kirovsk (ÎÀÎ Apatit, producer of nepheline concentrate, is part of the holding company FosAgro), Komsomol’sk-na-Amure (the aircraft construction plant is part of the OAO Unified Aircraft Building Corporation (OAK), and the Komsomol Oil Refinery (NPZ) is part of NK Rosneft), Magadan (the biggest center of gold mining in Russia), Norilsk (the mines of the Mining and Metallurgical Company (GMK) Norilsk Nickel), Ukhta (LUKOIL-Ukhtaneftepererabotka oil refinery, LUKOIL-Ukhtaneftegaz — oil and gas production, and other structures of OAO Lukoil operating in the Komi Republic), and others. For example, at Norilsk GMK alone, around 100,000 prisoners were used in the years 1952–1953. The “zero” production stage (i.e., construction of dams, foundations, basic infrastructure, etc.) of the “town-forming” enterprises frequently was carried out with the labor of prisoners: hydroelectric power developments along the Volga, hydroelectric stations in Kuibyshev and Stalingrad, “special industrial complexes” in Zheleznogorsk, Novosibirsk, Seversk, Tomsk, and elsewhere.
There is a widespread viewpoint that contemporary Russia inherited special urban settlements (Dubna, Korolev, Obninsk, Friazino, and others), based on scientific research and production complexes, which after 1991 received the status of “science city” in the Russian Federation. In these places, highly qualified personnel were concentrated, and long-term research was conducted that contributed to the development of the branches of science that the top Party nomenklatura viewed as promising. However, the first example of such directive concentration of scientific and technical personnel in any case was the sharashka or sharaga. These were secret scientific research and development institutes and design bureaus created for imprisoned engineers, and they arose in the socialist town around the 1920s and 1930s.
After the October Revolution of 1917, the ratio of rural and urban inhabitants changed radically and with far-reaching consequences. While 15 percent of the population lived in towns in 1914, by 1989 the share of the urban population was 66 percent in the USSR (74 percent in the Russian portion of the Soviet Union). We can conclude that as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, the village took over the traditional town, while those who originated in the kolkhoz-sovkhoz rural environment formed a new subculture of the Soviet megalopolis. Analogous processes occurred in the ruling stratum as well. According to Andrey Sakharov, “the dreadful relay race of lack of culture had an extremely strong influence on all of Soviet history.” While in 1966 70 percent of the Communist Party nomenklatura was made up of children of the poorest peasants and unskilled workers, by 1981 this share had grown to 80 percent. In terms of the development of the Soviet megalopolis, from Sakharov’s point of view, there took place a “dreadful relay race of government marginalism.”
The author’s main conclusions can be stated as follows:
1. In historical retrospect, the Russian town traveled down a long and difficult path of transformation from a defensive center to a cultural and economic center (although this process was interrupted by the Mongol invasion). On the eve of World War I, however, as affirmed by the famous expert on economic geography Veniamin Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, there nonetheless “grew up in Russia, several centuries later than in Western Europe, a commercial and industrial town more or less resembling Western European towns, though quite frequently also different from them in many purely Russian features of the prolonged transitional state from village to town.”
2. The goal of the socialist experiment in the twentieth century was the creation of a new “Soviet man.” The Bolsheviks eliminated the traditional urban culture and its vehicles as represented by an emerging Russian middle class. The traditional town was forcibly replaced by the Soviet megalopolis, whose existence and development in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s were dependent on the system of state forced labor and the nomenklatura’s regulation of social and socioeconomic life, but also on the constant influx of the rural population, migrating from the dying countryside.
3. The present-day Russian Federation has inherited the socialist megalopolis. Its transformation, as well as the return of the appearance and functions natural for a European town, is a most acute problem. Solution of this problem depends on the degree to which domestic state policy will focus on creating social mechanisms that would contribute to the formation of a “middle class,” encouragement of private initiative, development of institutions of self-governance, and overcoming of poverty, social backwardness, and paternalistic and parasitic attitudes.
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