The timing of George E. Munro's richly detailed study of St. Petersburg, thus, is fortuitous, but it is also highly coincidental. A devotee of the city's historical archives, he began this work many years before the tercentenary. It appears amid all these other works only because he happened to complete his research at an opportune moment. Cognizant of these latest and largely culturally centered works, he nevertheless connects to a different and somewhat older strain of urban historiography, one that examines the city as a material space of work, physical structure, and everyday life. Although he touches on salons, literary life, and education, he does not dwell on them. His focus instead is on neighborhoods, urban landscapes, urban administration, social structure, trade, and provisioning - a combination of its physicality and what he terms "the living, breathing city that was unplanned, but in a sense more authentic" (p.19).
The organizing premise is stated in the title, "the most influential city." Petersburg was built, virtually de novo as a planned urban space, intended from the outset by Peter I as the new capital, far away from Moscow and the Muscovite heartland, to which the government began to move just as soon as enough government buildings were in place for it to do so. The quality of town planning, its limitations, and its unintended consequences constitute recurring themes throughout the book, and thematically connect chapters that are otherwise quite distinct. The picture that Munro sketches is of a city heavily dependent on distant travel for its provisions, building material, and human presence. Located amid swamps, islands, and frozen waters, St. Petersburg relied on the rapid development of roads and barge transportation. Indeed only a tiny proportion of the city's land went toward gardens and grazing, and the immediate outlying fields and forests grew few comestibles.
One of the many admirable features of the book is the ongoing attempt to derive useful information from official statistics, a notoriously vexing challenge for anyone studying imperial Russian society and economics. Munro does not attempt to recalculate or apply independent statistical methods to the available numbers, but he does search widely for information, and he displays a hardheaded skepticism toward the manner in which the imperial state assembled many of its figures, especially regarding the size and social distribution of St. Petersburg's population. He concludes that the figures very unlikely overstated population size early in the century and then understated it at the end, thus obscuring somewhat in the robust growth of the city and its environs. More tellingly, he substitutes occupational data for social rosters compiled from legally ascribed social estates into which everyone was born - and - except for soldiers - typically remained irrespective of one's life trajectory. Russianists are well aware of the disparity between official state classifications and actual work, especially in towns and cities. He is on firm ground in suggesting that a much larger proportion of the capital's population engaged in some sort of trade or commerce that can be surmised from estate-based identities. Even tax guilds, through which merchants registered their capital and tax obligations, almost certainly understated merchant activity, as merchants underreported their level of capitalization to avoid paying higher taxes.
For better or worse, Munro largely eschews the vaunted "big questions," informed as they are by political ideals and sociological prototypes, and instead he concentrates more directly on a thick description of life on the ground.
In his conclusion, Munro gives Catherine the Great relatively high marks for enabling the capital to become a vibrant residential city as well as one of the great cities of Europe. Petersburg, he observes, was less affected by famine, epidemics, and pestilence than other Russian cities. In spite of what he terms its "social flux" and the constant inflow of new residents and migrants, Petersburg saw relatively few riots or public disturbances (p. 84). Munro attributes much of this success to underlying economic forces rather than to administrative design, but here I suspect he understates the state's hand in devoting massive resources to making certain that its new showcase capital shined in the eyes of its prominent citizens and foreign visitors.
Given the richness of Munro's descriptions and the immensity of his research in archival and obscure printed materials, one cannot help but hope that either he or someone else will employ his findings to venture somewhat farther into theory, historiographic controversy, or conceptual frameworks. To be sure, he does challenge some arguments directly, such as his contention that Petersburg exported more finished products and imported more raw materials than is usually assumed. His narrative implicitly challenges Hittle's concept of this service city as Rozman's emphasis on urban networks. Munro's St. Petersburg was an economic center, fundamentally defined as much by the production and flow of goods and labor as by its governmental shadow. This is an important, and somewhat revisionary, profile, the implications of which deserve to be drawn out some more. Similarly, his argument that Petersburg's growth was atypical for Russian towns, that in fact it took place at the expense of other towns, implicitly raises doubts about the model of urban networks, and offers support instead to Boris Mironov's controversial view that urban Russia declined overall during the eighteenth century.
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