Urbanisation and the Minority Peoples of the Soviet North

Abstract

In recent years Soviet scholarship has increasingly reinforced the concept of urbanisation as a phenomenon which transcends the growth and development of towns, and is looked upon rather as a complete social process, the context of which is not just the town per se, but society as a whole.¹ On the one hand, towns are regarded as ‘the most important functional element of the social system we call “society”’, where ‘all shifts in the structure of society, in its sociopolitical organisation, in its modes of intercourse and in many other respects, so to speak, “permeate” the town’.² On the other hand, urbanisation is understood as a ‘two-way’ process, at the one pole of which is the concentration of population and activity in the towns; and at the other, the extension of this activity, of ‘urban relations’³ and the urban way of life out into the countryside.⁴

Translated by Alan Wood.