The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (18 page)

The Russian workers and middle class had ample reason for their rage. As Russia began to industrialize, its municipal institutions and basic physical infrastructure lingered in the feudal past. The ancient capital of Moscow remained a haphazard collection of one-story wooden buildings, often wretchedly constructed and without basic sanitation. The city also lacked a professional police force and adequate medical care.

The chasm between these realities and the luxurious life of the ruling classes was most evident in St. Petersburg, where, as the playwright Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol noted, “everything’s an illusion, everything’s a dream, everything’s not what it seems.” A stone’s throw from the Italianate elegance of the Winter Palace, workers lived in poorly ventilated, fetid slums in what was contemporary Europe’s most disease-ridden city.

St. Petersburg’s industrial structure was dominated by large manufacturing facilities, which inadvertently facilitated the mass organization of workers. After failing in their demands for more food and better working conditions, these workers organized into “soviets,” or self-governing committees, and turned on the regime itself.
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In October 1917, St. Petersburg’s factory laborers, a tiny urban minority in a largely agricultural country, helped put into power a new regime that would create the third, and most long-lasting, alternative to the Anglo-American industrial city.

The triumphant Bolshevik regime turned out to be, if anything, more autocratic than that of the czar. Their rejection of Western materialism was even more far-reaching than that of the Japanese or the Nazis. “Everything was cancelled,” recalled the novelist Aleksey Tolstoi. “Ranks, honors, pensions, officer’s epaulettes, the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, God, private property, and even the right to live as one wished.”
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The Communists embraced Czar Peter’s dream of creating a highly urbanized Russia. Even in 1917, observed one historian, Russian cities were little more than “islands in an ocean of peasants”; only 15 percent of the population lived in urban centers. With their consolidation of power, the Communists determined to reverse history, making these “islands” ever larger and more powerful.
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As the chosen capital of the Soviet revolution, Moscow regained its favored position. Keeping Moscow’s population contented now constituted a key political concern of the Bolshevik leaders. “The salvation of the Moscow workers from starvation,” Lenin noted, “is the salvation of the revolution.” Food was taken, often by force, from the farmers to feed what was deemed the new ruling class, the urban proletariat.
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Moscow’s population fell drastically during the civil war that raged between 1917 and 1921 but began expanding rapidly again in the mid-1920s, reaching over 2 million people by the late 1920s. With the reimposition of order, death rates dropped and birthrates soared. Seeking work in the new center of power, tens of thousands of ambitious, often hungry people migrated every year into the city.
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More cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, renamed Leningrad after the Soviet founder’s death in 1924, fared worse. Well in advance of their counterparts in Japan or Germany, the Communists launched a sweeping assault against Western urban culture. Anyone even receiving letters from abroad, a group most concentrated in the old capital, could be hauled off to the ever expanding gulag. The great purges of the 1930s stripped away much of the city’s intellectual and artistic elite, including some fifty curators at the Hermitage.
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The Soviets had equally little reverence for the role of sacred place or the past in the evolution of cities. In short order, Nizhniy Novgorod became Gorky; Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad; Yekaterinburg, where Czar Nicholas II and his family were liquidated, became Sverdlovsk, after another Soviet leader. In elegant, newly renamed Leningrad, the urban landscape became dominated by massive new housing blocs, office buildings, and commercial spaces designed in what one writer called “a ponderously neoclassical” style.
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Moscow underwent an even more dramatic transition. Joseph Stalin, a provincial from distant Georgia, displayed even less appreciation for urban values than Hitler, who had spent his formative years in Vienna and Munich, or the Japanese nationalists, who still revered aspects of that country’s urban past. To the horror of much of the architectural community, the Soviet dictator ordered the construction of a new Palace of Soviets—a monument to what Stalin called “the idea of the creativity of the multi-million Soviet democracy”—on the site of the city’s magnificent Cathedral of the Savior, a structure built with the pennies of Russia’s faithful.

Nikita Khrushchev, who eventually would follow Stalin as leader of the “Soviet democracy,” shared these less than delicate sensibilities. “In reconstructing Moscow,” he said in 1937, “we should not be afraid to remove a tree, a little church or some cathedral or other.”
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Khrushchev proceeded to destroy much of the old city, including its Triumphal Arch, its old towers, and its walls. When his own architects pleaded with him to spare historic monuments, he replied that his construction crews would continue “sharpening our axes.”
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The Communist drive to expand manufacturing capacity—by the 1930s, the Soviets had surpassed czarist industry by a wide margin— engendered an ambitious surge in town building. Magnitogorsk, rising adjacent to a giant iron and steel factory on the steppe, typified the new Soviet city: no mosques, churches, or free markets, a population of forced laborers driven by legions of zealous Young Communists. Like the victims of Britain’s early capitalist industrialization, the forced workers of the Socialist state endured wretched conditions, subject to epidemics of typhus, typhoid, and other infectious diseases.
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In one respect, Soviet urban policies did succeed: They utterly transformed a predominantly rural country into a largely urban one. By the 1930s, cities such as Moscow and Leningrad ranked among the largest in Europe; other smaller cities, particularly factory towns like Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Stalingrad, and Chelyabinsk, expanded even more rapidly. Between 1939 and 1959, the urban population of the Soviet Union grew by 30 million people, while the rural component dropped by 20 million. By 1960, 50 percent of Soviet citizens were city dwellers.
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There were also some notable accomplishments, such as the Moscow subway and major new electrification systems.

After World War II, urban conditions in the Soviet Union gradually improved. Food became more plentiful and the long acute housing shortage less acute. Nevertheless, as places to live, Communist cities remained gray and cheerless; spontaneous commercial activity was restricted to the occasional farmer’s market or the hidden machinations of a growing underground economy. Social life centered less in the streets or public spaces than among friends crowded into small but often cheerily maintained apartments.

Most telling—particularly given the system’s “materialist” value system—the Soviets failed to create an urban standard of living even remotely comparable to those in the the West. Khrushchev’s boasts as late as 1970 that the USSR would “outstrip” the United States in quality of life must have seemed incongruous, if not painfully comic, to city dwellers whose level of amenities lagged well behind those of not only the West, but also some rising Asian countries.
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As the Communist regime slouched toward its inglorious dénouement in the late 1980s, conditions worsened. The vast complex of high-rise apartments around Moscow and other major cities became increasingly dilapidated. Two-thirds of heavily urbanized European Russia’s water supply no longer met minimal standards; air pollution levels in most large Soviet cities were many times worse than those in any city in the West.
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Born to remedy the failures of the industrial city, Communist urbanism failed in virtually every respect to meet its promise, and nowhere more than in the moral sphere. Communism, Nicolas Berdyaev once noted, sought to develop a “new man” of higher aspirations, but its materialist philosophy ultimately transformed its subject into a “flat two dimensional being.” Robbing cities and individuals of their sacred character and often their history, the Soviet experiment left behind a somber and destitute urban legacy.
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PART SIX

THE MODERN METROPOLIS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE SEARCH FOR A “BETTER CITY”

Like so many who came to Los Angeles in the waning days of the nineteenth century, Dana Bartlett could sense the emergence of “a great city . . . forming by the sunset sea.”
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Los Angeles, then a settlement of fewer than one hundred thousand souls, was abuzz with new construction as developers struggled to keep pace with newcomers streaming in from the East.

The business leaders in the once sleepy Mexican pueblo envisioned a metropolis, in the words of the railroad magnate Henry Huntington, “destined to become the most important city in this country, if not the world.”
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Bartlett, a Protestant minister, heartily shared the booster faith but also yearned for something more—the promise of a healthful and beautiful urban form.

Before arriving in Los Angeles, Bartlett had ministered in St. Louis, where crowded slums and belching factories seemed to scar both souls and the landscape. With its mild climate and spectacular scenery, its clear vistas, ample land, and lightly industrialized economy, Los Angeles, Bartlett hoped, could become “a place of inspiration for nobler living.”
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In his book The Better City, written in 1907, Bartlett laid out a vision for a planned “City Beautiful” that would offer its residents easy access to beaches, meadows, and mountains. Taking advantage of the wide-open landscape, manufacturing plants would be “transferred” to the periphery, and housing for the working class would be spread out to avoid overcrowding. Rather than confined to stifling tenements, workers would live in neat, single-family homes.
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Many in Los Angeles’s political and economic elites embraced this more sprawling notion of urbanism. The city’s form did not develop by happenstance; it was designed to be an intentional paradise. In 1908, for example, Los Angeles created the first comprehensive urban zoning ordinance in the nation, one that encouraged the development of subcenters, single-family homes, and dispersed industrial development.
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Huntington’s sprawling Pacific Electric Railway had set the pattern for the city’s expansive geography. Later, the growing use of the automobile further accelerated Los Angeles’s dispersion. As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the average American and ten times as likely as a Chicago resident. At the same time, in contrast with most contemporary American cities, Los Angeles’s historic downtown was already becoming less important as the region’s economic and social center.
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The usual motivations—the quest for greed and power—motivated these developments. But many among the region’s bureaucrats and developers also believed they were creating a superior, more healthful urban environment. In 1923, the director of city planning proudly proclaimed that Los Angeles had avoided “the mistakes which have happened in the growth of metropolitan areas of the east.” This brash new metropolis of the West, he claimed, would show “how it should be done.”
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The local press, eager for new residents and readers, promoted such notions. The city had laid out its tracts and transit lines, boasted the editor of the
Los Angeles Express,
“in advance of the demands.” The prevalence of single-family residences, with their backyards, would transform the city into “the world’s symbol of all that was beautiful and healthful and inspiring.” Los Angeles, he continued, “will retain the flowers and orchards and lawns, the invigorating free air from the ocean, the bright sunshine and the elbow room.”
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By the 1930s, large elements of this vision had been realized. Single-family residences accounted for 93 percent of the city’s residential buildings, almost twice the rate in Chicago. These houses spread over an area that made Los Angeles the world’s largest city in terms of square miles.
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The city proved markedly less successful in achieving the ideals espoused by Bartlett and his contemporaries. Turning aside a 1930 detailed open-space plan known as the Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan, Los Angeles for all its vastness sadly included only a small amount of park space. Increasingly, the city not only lacked the great public areas of earlier cities, but was also rapidly losing the small-town atmosphere advertised so heavily by the city’s promoters.
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Los Angeles, however, could not be dismissed as a failure. Sprawling from the ocean to the deserts and down the coast to the edge of San Diego, it had provided for its many millions a “better city,” experienced not in great public spaces, but in individual neighborhoods, private homes, and backyards. In the late twentieth century, the ranks of Angelenos swelled with a large number of immigrants, largely from Latin America and Asia. Like earlier generations, they began buying homes, starting businesses, and building new lives in the region.
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