Moscow under Construction explores the growth of place-based opposition to destructive redevelopment practices in Moscow and the consequent changes in city’s governance regime. The groups of citizens discussed in this study have struggled to defend homes, neighborhoods, heritage buildings, and historic districts, and in the process they’ve built up civil society and advanced democratization. Heritage preservationists and other aggrieved Muscovites have organized themselves into “initiative groups” and “social associations” to protect specific places in the city and to influence the planning process, and these place-defenders have become more confident and capable as citizens. Their activities also have caused Moscow’s city government to shift along the political spectrum away from highly authoritarian and opaque habits of ruling toward a more open and collaborative governance regime.

Crowded within the insular world of 1988 East Berlin, their lives conducted amid the cracks in the German Democratic Republic's approved social vision, the nine subjects interviewed in this book formed a loose social network. Ten years later and in a different German state, the stories they tell restore subjective experience to our historical grasp of communism and its collapse. The interviewees include Otto Emersleben, Frank Hornigk, Ljuba Kirjuchina, Bernd Wedel, Heike Wedel, Peter Graetz, Christoph Hein, Gerlinde Salomon and Thomas Braun. This work preserves the English expressions verbatim and indicates them with bold-face type. German expressions of particular interest are retained in the text and indicated by italics. At the end of the book there is a comprehensive glossary that includes explanations of geographic, biographical, and historical references made by the interviewees.

"An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper"--

This book, published in 1937, reported on a four week visit to Moscow in 1936 to study the making of Moscow as a showpiece Soviet capital. At its core was the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow but the book was a study of planning in the Soviet rather than the Western sense. Thus it covered many aspects of the city’s social and economic life including industry and finance, education and housing production as well as governance and town planning. Much first hand detail is included, based on the visit and the authors’ meetings with Soviet officials and citizens that illustrate various points, usually in praise. The book made a significant contribution towards the growing arguments in 1930s Britain and other parts of the Anglophone world for a bolder, more comprehensive and more state-led approach to planning. In turn these arguments had an important impact in shaping the policies adopted in the 1940s.

As shopping has been transformed from a chore into a major source of hedonistic pleasure, a specifically Russian consumer culture has begun to emerge that is unlike any other. This book examines the many different facets of consumption in today’s Russia, including retailing, advertising and social networking. Throughout, emphasis is placed on the inherently visual - not to say spectacular - nature both of consumption generally, and of Russian consumer culture in particular. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which brands, both Russian and foreign, construct categories of identity in order to claim legitimacy for themselves. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how consumer culture is being reinvented in Russia today, in a society which has one, nostalgic eye turned towards the past, and the other, utopian eye, set firmly on the future. Borrowing concepts from both marketing and cultural studies, the approach throughout is interdisciplinary, and will be of considerable interest, to researchers, students and practitioners wishing to gain invaluable insights into one of the most lucrative, and exciting, of today’s emerging markets.

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

2011 Updated Reprint. Updated Annually. Russia Economic & Development Strategy Handbook