Ivanovo
Ivanovo
Istorija i sovremennost
Kiril Evgenievich Baldin and Aleksandr Michailovich Semjonenko
Ivanovo 1996
Although Ivanovo did not attain the status of a city until 1871, industrialization had ensued much earlier. For here, as elsewhere in Russia, factories were initially built on the manors of the nobility. In the 1920s, Ivanovo was often termed the “Red Manchester”. At that time, it joined Moscow and Leningrad as the third capital of the Russian Federation and was the center of a district twice as large as the Netherlands and Belgium together. This volume sketches the history of Ivanovo – especially its economic and societal development – from the beginnings to the present. One emphasis is the role of the textile industry and the milieus of the workers and the pre-revolutionary factory owners. The volume concludes with a treatment of the difficult adjustment after Perestroika and a view of the city’s future.
Die Städte Russlands im Wandel [The Changing Cities of Russia]
Raumstrukturelle Veränderungen am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts [Spatial-Structural Changes at the End of the 20th Century]
Isolde Brade (ed.)
Leipzig 2002
Recognizing that Western approaches to research on cities do not do justice to the special conditions of the post-socialist transformation of urban regions, the value of this book’s thirteen essays lies primarily in the fact that their analysis and categorization of Russia’s cities are based on the precise empiricism of economic and societal indicators. Characteristic of development in the 1990s is the decrease of intervention by the central state, the minor importance of local public institutions, the opaque interconnections of municipal bureaucracy and private actors, and the relevance of the informal sector. Moscow and Saint Petersburg have secured the best places in the national economy, so longer pieces are devoted to both cities. A glossary of terms customary in Russian urban research is especially helpful for Western readers.
Plans, pragmatism and people
The legacy of Soviet planning for today's cities
R. Antony French
Pittsburgh 1995
The first half of this 200-page book is devoted to the time up to the end of the USSR, the second half to the 1990s. The first part organizes its material in accordance with politics under the Party Chairmen Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbatchov; the second addresses topics. Notable is that aspects like the “Tyranny of the Auto” and the “Appropriation of History for the Present” each receive a chapter of their own. The extraordinarily late industrialization and urbanization of Russia, where millions moved from the cities to the countryside during the Revolution and Civil War, led in the 1920s to controversies about strategies of urbanization or de-urbanization. From Stalin on, the development into big cities was forced with great intensity. In 1926, 17.6 percent of Soviet citizens lived in cities; in 1989, the figure was 66 percent. Planning activity in the sense of creating integrated urbanity had little chance, because municipal administration of superordinated ministries gave priority first to the settlement of production capacity and only then to the supply of housing.
Ocherki istorija starogo Puchezha
Oleg Michailovich Kiseljov
Ivanovo 2002
Puchezh, a small city of 11,000, lies in a “dead end” of the region Ivanovo, surrounded on three sides by the Volga River. The literature on this city is sparse; this book, created by initiatives and supported by the municipal administration, is an exception. It deals with the history of Puchezh, emphasizing the time before the 1917 Revolution. A map of the city and several historical photographs illustrate the text.
Work and Welfare in the New Russia
Nick Manning, Ovsey Shkaratan, Nataliya Tikhonova
Aldershot 2000
The results of a British-Russian scientific study of unemployment and poverty in the “New Russia”, supported by the European Union, are based on 600 interviews with actors in social policy and budget committees. Researched were the situations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Voronesh, a city of 900,000 people in the south of the Russian Federation, shaped by military industry in the communist period and today especially poor. To determine the indicators of unemployment and poverty, the researchers took recourse to official definitions. The book describes the former Soviet and present Russian social policies, as well as statist, free market, and individual strategies to overcome the wretched situation.
Postsozialistische Krisen [Post-Socialist Crises]
Theoretische Ansätze und empirische Befunde [Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Findings]
Klaus Müller (ed.)
Opladen 1998
This extensive book – 250 pages – contains seven essays devoted to the theories, strategies, and ideologies of economic and societal transformation, always in relation to the development of formerly socialist Eastern European states. It thereby reflects not only diverse methodological foundations of sociology, but also the relationship between East and West and sociologists’ inability to even guess that the USSR was about to collapse. Klaus Müller, Professor for Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, says the future shape of Eastern European societies is uncertain. Can post-socialist transformation be grasped as a special case of modernization? Or is rather a radical societal change without any certain model and with an open outcome?
Territorialnaja struktura chozjajstva staroosvoennych rajonov
G.A. Privalowskaja, S.A. Tarchov, A. Trejvish et al.
Moscow 1995
These essays deal with the economic development of the territories early settled, industrialized, and urbanized in European Russia. The authors, a team of economic geographers from the Russian Academy of Sciences, take a development-oriented approach to explain the differences between the regions in relation to the improvement of the land as well as in terms of the restructuring, intensification, and processes of the economy. They advance the hypothesis that the territories exhibit different degrees of openness to innovation. The authors view the character of a landscape as an agent of and resource for regional development.