Review of Solomon Volkov's St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996) and Timothy J. Colton's Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Most European countries have a single, unequivocal capital city, the seat of political, economic, and cultural power. It is only when one moves to larger realms outside Europe--to India, China, or the United States--that one starts to see a dispersal of the functions of the capital to more than one location.
Russia, true to its Eurasian schizophrenia, fits into neither pattern. It has always had a single, all-powerful capital--but it has had two of them this century. There is St. Petersburg, the creation of Peter the Great, perched on the western edge of his kingdom. And there is Moscow, sitting squat-like in the center of the European half of the domain. This century has seen power swing with unambiguous force from the former to the latter. St. Petersburg has been left to rot like an ancient Mayan city: a relic of a former civilization, first that of the empire, and then that of Soviet industrialism.
Volkov's St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, is a loving portrait of "the Atlantis on the Neva", the "cosmogonic" city whose ability to create images and ideas far exceeded its practical capabilities. The sheer physical survival of the city is something worthy of somber celebration. Built on a swamp by tens of thousands of forced laborers, it has been repeatedly threatened by massive floods, 1824 and 1924 being the most notable occasions. The tide of human history has been no less alarming. First came the brutality of the czars, then the chaos of revolution, the Stalinist terror, the 900-day blockade imposed by the Nazis, and the Zhdanov purge of 1946.
