Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)

Recenziók

Abstracts

511

of research since then. Fourthly, it assesses, through past examples, the potential of micro-history studies of local communities and their internal conflicts.

SÁNDOR HORVÁTH

Magnetic mountains and mundanities: socialist towns in the international urban history literature

Since the late 1990s, authors trying to reform the social history of the recent past have made frequent, sometimes almost ritual, references to the Foucaultian conclusions of Stephen Kotkin, with the purpose of marking out new points of reference. Kotkin’s book has been a magnet for authors adapting new cultural-history interpretations, its passages on the use of Bolshevist language being particularly popular. This has increasingly led authors using the new approaches to look on socialist towns as a metaphorical field of investigation. The investigations pursued via these histories have thus focused on the treatment of certain phenomena as facts rather than on the alleged facts themselves. Since the late 1990s, there has been a proliferation of writing which bears the influences of the “linguistic turn”. Kotkin’s book is thus the basic “turning point reference” in recent research into socialist towns, just as it is in the line of historical research which increasingly rejects the totalitarian narrative for the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

This paper looks at how the subject of socialist towns has been used in the international literature, how research into the subject has contributed to the spread of new methods in socialist-era research, and how fruitful this field is for urban history. Research into socialist towns may be viewed as progressing along two main channels in recent years: the new cultural-history approach, which, emerging from behind Kotkin’s cloak and lying close to urban anthropology, has increasingly enabled the making of comparisons; and the social-science school of history, whose analyses draw on the methods of urban sociology, economic history and architectural history.