Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
158
urban landscape in specific historical
periods and assess the results of building
activities and their symbolic background.
This is, for instance, the case with the
chapter by Artyom Kosmarski, titled
‘Grandeur and Decay of the “Soviet
Byzantium”:
Spaces,
Peoples
and
Memories of Tashkent, Uzbekistan’. Like
many other authors, Komarski notes a huge
increase of city inhabitants during the
Soviet period, primarily from the 1950s to
1991. The capitals of federal states became
metropolises
with
undergrounds
transportation systems and trams where
several millions of people lived,
predominantly in suburbs. The uniform
suburban architecture mirrored the state
ambition to build a showpiece of the
federal republic. Similar ambitions of the
independent state after 1991 led to similar
results: pompous squares and buildings,
formerly Soviet now national dehumanized
monuments and symbols. People are now
looking for more comfortable places and
are finding them in marketplaces and
streets lined with shops and coffee bars. A
very similar picture is offered by Madlen
Pilz in her chapter on ‘Tbilisi in City
Maps: Symbolic Construction of an Urban
Landscape’. Similar traits are also found in
Tsypylma Darieva’s chapter on ‘A
“Remarkable Gift” in a Postcolonial City:
The Past and Present of the Baku
Promenade’, which also shows how the
new post-socialist governors tried to
oppose some city symbols and places of
entertainments and then, after several
years, returned to use them and under new
slogans renovated at great cost monuments
that were almost completely destroyed.
Paradoxically,
in
many
contributions to this volume, we find
references to lost cosmopolitanism, to the
loss of a multicultural society. It seems
that, though living in an open global world,
many people in the described capital cities
feel more isolated than when living behind
the Iron Curtain but as part of the Soviet
multinational state. They and their national
governments are searching for ways into
the global world with their newly built
image. The chapter by Melanie Krebs,
‘Maiden Tower Goes International?
Representing Baku in a Global World’
speaks about such image-building. A
similar problem is touched upon by Levon
Abrahamian in his chapter on ‘Yerevan
Sacra: Old and New Sacred Centers in the
Urban Space’.
Many anthropological studies on
the newly established states built from the
former Soviet federal republics draw
empirical material collected exclusively in
capitals. Fortunately, this volume includes
also studies of ‘second cities’. In the first
part of the book, there is a study about
Gyumri (formerly Leninakan) in Armenia
which offers reflection on what it means to
be a second city. The last chapter in the
second part of the book is a case study of
the Osh in Kyrgyzstan, discussing a local
youth culture which, highly globalized,
draws norms and values primarily from
Russia.
The second part of the book begins
with views from a ‘second city’. Oleg
Pachenkov studies a flea market in St.
Petersburg. In a well written text he
describes the nostalgia of the poor people
of the new Russia. The interpretation of
their sociability in the flea market
stimulates discussion on the change of
meanings attributed to the Soviet period by
the wider public in present-day Russia.
