ИСТИНА

This report interrogates conditions governing uneven urban economic restructuring in Russia since the dissolution of state socialism. It reviews relationships between Soviet industrial and spatial legacy, a new spatial political economy, and resultant patterns of interurban disparities. It is argued that the replacement of the Soviet regime of nationwide integration and egalitarian redistribution was a massive moment of the production of uneven development. What is ironic here is that Soviet spatial and economic inheritance has been the single major factor differentiating cities’ economic performance. However, it is made clear that the root causes of the conditions of uneven development must be seen not in ‘the old geography’ and path-dependency but in the new (capitalist) economic relations and attendant institutional practices, which disintegrate and reformat formerly egalitarian spaces into a new uneven spatial order. This argument calls for more critical ontologies in post-socialist urban scholarship than those evident to date.