Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855(Oxford Studies in Modern European History)

It is a cliché that tsarist Russia had two rival capitals: St. Petersburg, Russia's "window to Europe"; and Moscow, city of palaces and onion domes, the tradition-bound metropolis of the Orthodox heartland. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this cultural myth by examining the tsarist regime's efforts to turn Moscow into a European city. In the eighteenth century, Europeans and even some Russians scorned Moscow as part of Asia, and the tsars themselves thought it a benighted place that endangered both their political security and their effort to Westernize their country and gain respect for Russia abroad. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to remake Moscow on the model of St. Petersburg by reconstructing its buildings and institutions, fostering a Westernized "middle estate" and constructing a new image of Moscow as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the city's urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I? How did these changes affect the everyday lives of the inhabitants, and did a "middle estate" in fact come into being? Did Moscow's urban modernization resemble that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon in 1812? Lastly, how was Moscow's modernization interpreted by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: The Enlightened Metropolis and the Imperial Social Project 2: Space and Time in the Enlightened Metropolis 3: Envisioning the Enlightened Metropolis: Images of Moscow under Catherine II 4: Barbarism, Civility, Luxury: Writing about Moscow in the 1790s-1820s 5: Government, Aristocracy, and the Middling Sort 6: The 1812 War 7: Common Folk in Nicholaevan Moscow 8: Complacency and Anxiety: Representations of Moscow under Nicholas I Conclusion

About the Author :
Alexander M. Martin is associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame (USA). He is the author of Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (1997).

Review :
Enlightened Metropolis offers an important revisionist challenge to Moscow's marginal status in the modernization of the Russian Empire. [a] fine new history of Moscow This work will become and should remain a standard reference point for studies of Moscow and indeed Russia of this period for decades to come. Enlightened Metropolis is a prodigiously researched book ... The reader is amazed by the wealth of sources and statistics and the relentless comparison of Moscow with Russian and other European cities ... [Martin] has significantly advanced the urban, social, institutional, and cultural study of the empire during the watershed period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book will become essential to any course on Russian cities, and would be equally well suited to courses on comparative urban history, or on Russian social history because of its nuanced and original perspective on Russian social hierarchies ... the book offers scholars rich detail on material culture, everyday life, urban personal narratives, the development of Russian urban ethnography, and memory and nostalgia. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of imperial Russia. Alexander Martin's Enlightened Metropolis is important and admirable work, which gives to Moscow its rightful place in a Russian Enlightenment ... masterful an enormously rich account based on extensive historical research ... contextualizing Moscow's history within the wider history of urban Europe, and providing an account illuminating the city's history from a number of competing perspectives -- including those of the rich, poor, and middling, as well as those of foreigners. Martin's is thus a well-rounded history of Moscow as an idea, a built environment, and a lived community.