During Catherine the Great's reign (1762-96), the sixty-year-old city of St. Petersburg became one of the leading economic and political centers of Europe, while the six-hundred-year-old city of Moscow remained an "overgrown village." How and why this occurred is the subject of George Munro's welcome volume, The Most Intentional City, a sobriquet borrowed from Dostoevsky.
The book begins with an enjoyable progulka through the residential, commercial, industrial, and governmental sections of the city before 1762. Near the end of the book, another progulka, this time in 1796, dramatically underscores the complete transformation of St. Petersburg, both topographically and architecturally. The chapters in between deftly itemize the elements that contributed to its becoming Russia's major city and the seventh largest in Europe.
During Catherine's reign, the citizens who flocked to St. Petersburg nearly tripled its population to roughly 250,000. Perhaps the most interesting cohort consisted of those workers who moved back and forth between peasant life and the urban workplace, making their assimilation and control difficult. The large and varied number of foreigners lent the city am international flavor, with fifteen thousand Englishmen forming the largest and wealthiest contingent.
Munro makes clear that the expansion and social transformations involved in the process of urbanization remained a central concern of the government, which really had to invent a logical, coherent administrative structure for the new capital. To this end, Catherine organized commissions; demanded weekly reports on economic development; personally provided detailed instructions for building the city's first sewers; oversaw the embanking of canals in granite; intervened when crises occurred, and issued a barrage of laws that culminated in the famous Charter to the Towns of 1785.
Munro gives Catherine and her government high marks not only for vigorously enacting legislation regarding the governance of the city but also for effectively enforcing the ordinances. Overall, they kept the peace, held crime in check, and created courts to adjudicate disputes. "Administrative bodies reponded surprisingly well in attempting to solve problems" (p. 147); they removed garbage, lighted and paved streets, established charitable institutions, prevented the calamities that might have resulted from fire, flood, famine, or pestilence, and rebuilt the city in brick and stone.
The provisioning of St. Petersburg required the resources of the huge Russian hinterland and thus "provided a major stimulus to the Russian economy by the end of the eighteenth century" (p.150). No wonder: city dwellers consumed 3.5 million pounds of butter and roughly 10 million eggs. Delicacies - including fruits, cheeses, meats, and wines - were imported from several parts of Europe. Munro presents a vivid picture of the teeming Petersburg waterfront, with ships standing three and four deep, underscoring the city's place as the most important center of trade in the empire. Munro rounds out the economic profile of St. Petersburg with a description of its industrial enterprises, from the huge Admiralty shipyard to the many smaller factories that employed only about five workers each; he also describes the many measures that improved the numbers and position of artisans.
The government cannot claim full credit for Petersburg's brilliance. The city's own dynamism, its exhilaration at change, its attraction of the best and the brightest in every political, economic, and cultural sphere, plus a growth pattern that was unparalleled in Europe assured its ascendency over its stodgy rival, Moscow, even without the favoritism that Catherine displayed. Indeed, the thesis of the book is that while "St. Petersburg bore the imprint of Catherine's rule" nonetheless, "in the final analysis the city took on a life and a will of its own" (pp. 281-82). In fact, one of the marvels of urbanization is how the human elements in a town will defy and run beyond the best intentions of its planners, even in "the most intentional city."
This book might have benfitted from two things - although they are alluded to in various sections: a clearer description of Catherine's passion for building; a clearer statement of the empress's urban policy both in regard to Petersburg as well as to the other four hundred towns that she either created or renovated. But overall, Munro's study is a welcome addition to the literature on one of the great cities of the eighteenth-century world.
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