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 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 urban trajectories in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, detailing the dynamics of declining Soviet industrial cities such as Ulan-Ude and upcoming national capitals such as Astana. The volume does not aim to provide an exhaustive range of urban cases but rather focuses on a few examples: Astana, Almaty, Tashkent, and Ulan-Ude. The selection of these four cities is eclectic, but the cases nevertheless speak to each other in interesting ways, thereby highlighting what are distinctly post-Soviet and what are contextually specific features in each case.
The volume is replete with fascinating insights and detailed analyses of urban change. In the introduction Victor Buchli and Catharine Alexander review the history of (post-)Soviet urbanity, discussing 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 Life^[1] 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.
The first two case-studies are situated in Kazakhstan. Buchli analyses the emergence of Kazakhstan’s new capital Astana, and how elite groups and ordinary citizens have created a meaningful new cityscape. His discussion revolves around the concept of material instability. Arguing that in the nomadic past buildings were meant to be only temporary arrangements and that for Soviet modernity the act of constructing mattered more than finished buildings, Buchli offers a novel approach for linking time, space, and materiality. Instability is particular relevant in contemporary Astana because «No one knows whether the capital will succeed and for how long» (P. 50). Intriguingly, this instability clashes with the perceived need for «authenticity» resulting in a built environment that somehow never looks right.
If Buchli stresses the connections between materiality and ideology, Alexander emphasizes economic and political realities. She adopts the Rousseauian concept «social contract» to analyse how practices and notions of urbanity are linked to shifting relations between the state and its citizens. During the Soviet period the assumption was that utilities and social care were provided in exchange for labour. The concomitant paternalistic attitude has remained, but the massive privatization schemes and the withdrawal of the state in areas such as garbage collection, water and electricity provision, has resulted in a «loss of trust in the state and its institutions» (P. 97). Alexander successfully illustrates these shifts by focusing on the provision of tap water, noticing that this «free commodity» became a focal point for expressing dissatisfaction with post-Soviet change.
After reading these stimulating studies, Marfua Tokhtakhodzhaeva’s discussion of Tashkent is an outright disappointment. The author neither engages with recent literature on Tashkent nor presents a coherent historical narrative or analytic argument. Instead we are given almost random snippets from the city’s past. The chapter rarely rises above factual enumerations and unsubstantiated opinions. For example, what to make of the statement that «the plans for the reconstruction of Tashkent in the twentieth century can hardly be termed a ‘reconstruction’ since they destroyed the fabric of the life» (P. 111)? The statement completely ignores Soviet citizens as «practitioners» of a city which grew tenfold during this period. Furthermore, the author contradicts her own opening statement that «social contrasts have not become blatant» (P. 102) by concluding that «comfortable and well-equipped areas offer a scandalous contrast to the inhabited regions on the outskirts» (P. 116). The reasons for including this chapter remain a mystery, except perhaps to mask (unsuccessfully) the geographical imbalance of the volume as a whole.
The four chapters on Ulan-Ude allow the reader to become familiar with this city from different perspectives. Galina Manzanova’s chapter makes interesting observations about the ruralisation of city life, the importance of migration in coping with economic decline, and the role of networks for survival in new post-Soviet conditions. Unfortunately, the chapter suffers from sloppiness. Sources are not always given for statistical data and grand but superficial statements such as «Soviet modernisation policy ... had an effect on the psychology of the Russian population» (P. 128) leave the reader in the dark. The chapter is nonetheless insightful, highlighting the ruralisation of city life and the importance of kinship networks in post-Soviet urban environments. Manzanova rightly suggests that the continuing economic crisis has undermined confidence in the market economy, but could have taken the argument a step further by arguing that personal contacts are always part of «the market,» even if mythologized understandings of capitalism have prevented us from seeing this.
Irina Baldayeva takes us into the streets, public places, and housing projects of Ulan-Ude, looking at the fate of those who have fallen through the cracks. Her ethnographic depiction of the homeless is a ghastly story of social and individual crises, starkly evoking the dark sides of «the transition.» The chapter would have benefited from a more thorough analysis of the social organization of the homeless and from engagement with literature on homeless people elsewhere, but even without that the chapter succeeds. Detailing the survival strategies of those who have found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder the chapter provides an evocative illustration of the underside of economic and political change in urban Russia.
Altanhuu Hürelbaatar takes us from the homeless’ scavenging for food and shelter to the search for meaning in this changing urban context. New sacred sites play important roles for the Buryat population. They add new layers to the fabric of the city by providing points of reference and by rooting inhabitants in temporal and geographical spaces that transcend the boundaries of the city. At the same time they also underline differences between Buryats and Russians. A stimulating chapter, but the reader may be disappointed with the author’s concluding observation that «all this variety is Buryat variety» which has «contributed to Buryats... rethinking of Ulan-Ude as a Buryat city on Buryat land» (P. 153). This rather flat observation fails to do justice to the chapter’s rich ethnographic material.
In the concluding chapter Caroline Humphrey masterfully connects the core issues of the volume: the effects of economic decline and ideological transformation. The train of thought running through the chapter can be summed up as follows. Privatization has led to socio-cultural segregation and to an erosion of urbanity as civic space. Aiming to counteract disintegration, the city government has promoted a symbolic idea of the city to serve as an object of devotion. Residents are not simply stuck between these counteracting trends, but rather continue to create urban space within structural constraints. Humphrey thus challenges the widespread notion that the post-Soviet trajectory led to individualized spaces, to argue that networks and hierarchies continue to structure the urban fabric, yet in ways that differ from the Soviet city. This is not to deny increasing segregation of the urban environment and the emergence of a new underclass, but to stress that «victims» actively create their own environment. The author usefully makes a comparative analysis by arguing that of the featured cities Ulan-Ude is still the most «Soviet-like.» It is most absorbed in its past, partly because its heyday was in the 1970s, and partly because the government still carries out a number of the infrastructural tasks that have been chaotically privatized in cities like Astana and Almaty.
The volume offers an intriguing window onto changing post-Soviet urban landscapes. The Soviet state had always aimed at the «right disposition of things» (to use Foucault’s summary statement on modern governmentality) even if the fit between promises and realizations was never perfect and the discrepancies often blatant. In these post-Soviet cities the «social contract» between state and society has been alternately shattered, eroded, and transformed, with the various authorities trying to devise new images, metaphors, and landmarks to tie populations to the city. Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia offers valuable contributions to a relatively new field. If the editors aimed to bridge the gap between different modes of scholarship, between outsider and insider perspectives, then they have only been partly successful. Like so many edited volumes, this one suffers from a lack of balance and a less than rigid editorial process. Nevertheless, the book opens intriguing discussions on post-Soviet urbanity and will prove an important landmark in a field of study which, like the post-Soviet city, is still rather fragile.