Abstract

This paper attempts to look at the city not just as a backdrop of modern life, but as the means and the product of modernity, as it is realized through the city. To do that, it focuses on the space as an analytic category and on the dynamic discrepancies between discourses, spacial practices, and subjectivities in the case of post-Soviet Russia. This paper provides an systematic literature review, aiming at inspiring more theoretical and empirical research on the subject. The post-socialist city is seen as the space of dynamic negotiation of different modernities. Based on extensive research of primary and secondary literature and short-term ethnographies in the summers of 2010 and 2011, two aspects of the city are analyzed: commodities in the city and the street. The paper argues that the city plays a vital part in defining the self, and reconstruction of the Soviet city may be seen as an attempt at “civilizing” post-soviet citizens into Western neo-liberal modernity.