The history of eighteenth-century Russia, both Petrine and Catherinean, has long been the captive of the statist school, with primary emphasis on the role of the autocratic state in shaping Russian development. This interpretation also dominates the history of St. Petersburg: Peter lifted it from the swamps; Catherine decorated it with palaces. George E. Munro seeks in his history of St. Petersburg to shift our focus both temporally and socioeconomically. Arguing that previous studies of the city have concentrated on its founding or on either the nineteenth of twentieth centuries (depending on whether the interest was on culture or revolutionary politics), Munro makes the case that it was actually during Catherine's reign that St. Petersburg assumed its vitality, its social and economic strength, and its identity in legend and myth.
Munro is primarily interested in the relationship between government policy and urban dynamics. He writes that "there was a constant tension between the statist conception of the nature and role of urban life and the living, vital city" (17). The source of the city's development, he argues, was not exclusively, even primarily, a result of the effectiveness of state planning. Although Catherine did lavish planning on her capital (with "far more instances of planning not carried through to completion than . . . plans meticulously followed" (40), "the city's vitality was constantly straining the state's ability even to understand the process of urbanization, much less control and direct it through planning" (59).
There was, in fact, a lack of logic in the Catherinean state's approach to cities, St. Petersburg included. The government developed policies and instituted measures that stimulated the urban economy through such acts as aiding in the growth of the urban population and enhancing social and cultural patterns associated with cities while simultaneously failing to provide a conducive climate for growth. Munro proves his case through a meticulous investigation of city administration, with emphasis on the police, the courts, urban services, and planning. But despite the government's reluctance, or inability, to recognize the city as sui generis, Munro concludes that St. Petersburg's city administration functioned better than Ivan Ditiatin and Aleksandr Kizevetter argued: "If one takes responsiveness to stated needs as a better instrument for evaluating St. Petersburg's government than its lack of democratic ideals, it must be admitted that administrative bodies responded suprisingly well in attempting to solve problems" (147).
But if planning, while better than nineteenth-century liberal historians posited, was almost exclusively directed at addressing a crisis, how are we to explain the "vitality" that Munro sees throughout the city? Having investigated commerce and industry in the city, he persuasively argues that rather than the state being directly responsible for the city meeting its commercial needs and the growing commercial and industrial appetites of the empire, a viable market society had developed within St. Petersburg: "Daily needs were provided to a great extent by the market. Hired labor carried out much of the work of transport, supply, and sales. Where a need was perceived to exist, someone attempted to meet it" (172). This expansion of commerce and industry developed in large part because St. Petersburg reality subverted the formal legal categories for subjects of the Russian empire that were proven to be inadequate for the city's dynamic social and economic nexus, allowing opportunities for various social estates to engage in economic initiative: "Catherine the Great certainly seems to have preferred that individual activity be set up in Russia's villages . . . This was her conscious policy, but it was often put to the test by the vitality of economic life in St. Petersburg . . . Much of the industrial activity in the city existed . . . in outright violation of its policy" (259). This economic vitality, Munro demonstrates, had significant positive impact on Russia's development far beyond the bounds of the city.
Munro succeeds in demonstrating that St. Petersburg took on a life and will of its own, undergoing not simply growth but true urbanization, and influencing even rural Russia with new ideas, technology, and economic activities. And this development resulted not primarily from imperial edicts but from the underlying social and economic realities that Munro examines. This well-documented challenge to statist analysis would be beneficial for graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates.
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