"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?"
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
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).
Reviews for Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855
Enlightened Metropolis offers an important revisionist challenge to Moscow's marginal status in the modernization of the Russian Empire. Daniel Beer, The Times Literary Supplement [a] fine new history of Moscow James Cracraft, English Historical Review 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. Paul Keenan, History
- Winner of Winner of the 2013 Marc Raeff Book Prize from the Eighteenth Century Russian Studies Association; Co-winner of the 2015 prize of the Urban History Association for the best book of 2013-2014 in non-North American urban history.
