| The Soviet urbanist project---called city-building (gradostroitel'stvo )---was part of a novel attempt by the state to link the creation and management of human settlements to national regimes of economic and social regulation. The small industrial city in Russia is a distinctive form of urbanism that constitutes an important, pervasive, and exemplary legacy of this effort. At the end of the 1990s, more than sixty million people (over sixty percent of the urban population) lived in cities of this type with populations under 500,000, while, remarkably, thirty million Russians lived in cities of this structural type with a population under 100,000.; With the collapse of national economic coordination and guaranteed regimes of full employment---the sine qua non of Soviet modernity---the future of small cities is in question. Nonetheless, basic characteristics of the social and material reality created by city-building have persisted, including the distribution of population, patterns of habitation, systems of communal infrastructure (heating, for example, a complex, expensive, and critical service in a cold climate), and social goods and services. The persistence of these forms can be understood in terms of the "stuckness" of the nexus of social and economic relationships, materially, spatially, and institutionally inscribed, that make up small cities. The rearticulation of the norms and forms of Soviet city-building has definite implications for the conceptualization of post-Soviet change. Whatever form "market society" ultimately takes in Russia will be inflected---materially, institutionally, and normatively---by Soviet city-building.; The focus on small industrial cities provides a lens on a broader question about the relationship between the institutions involved in economic coordination and adjustment on the one hand, and, on the other, what Karl Polanyi has called the "social fabric." This study proposes an interpretation of neo-liberalism not as equivalent to marketization or "destatization" but as a social technology that attempts to create substantive conditions for formal rationalization of the fulfillment of substantive ends. It examines, on a level of ethnographic detail, how neo-liberalism partially reshapes the way the biological and social life of individuals and populations is constituted as an object of state administration---the problem Foucault called "bio-politics"---in contemporary societies. |
