Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

Demokratizatsiya, Summer 2003 by Solonari, Vladimir

Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka, Blair A. Ruble. Cambridge, UK: Woodrow Wilson Press and Cambridge University Press, 2001. 448 pp. $40.00 hardcover.

The idea of writing a book comparing Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka at the turn of the twentieth century may seem bizarre. The question may arise: What for? What might this comparison tell us about these cities, or anything else for that matter? And, generally, how can one compare such different places, communities, and cultures?

After reading second Metropolis, I believe I have the answers to those questions. In essence, the book is about Russia and contemporary debate on that country in the West, primarily in America. It is about how we should conceptualize Russia's difference from the rest of the world and whether the distance between the Japanese and American political traditions and cultures is bigger or smaller than that between those of America and Russia. It is also about whether the Soviet experience should be seen as part of Russia's movement along the road to modernity or as a detour away from it.

The starting idea is at once simple and subtle. Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka were at the time the second major cities in their respective countries. They were not, however, capitals, and were not under the immediate control of national bureaucracies. They were the fastest-growing cities, the most dazzling, puzzling, innovative, and creative centers-in a word, they were symbols of everything modern and perplexing that existed in the countries concerned before World War I. By comparing Moscow to its closest counterparts in America and Japan, one cannot hope to bring forward the whole of Russia's complexity, but one can gain a better understanding of the part of it that, one might reasonably expect, was the most advanced along the road to modernity.

But what exactly is there to compare? Blair Ruble's approach seems to be the following: Due to the tremendous tempo of economic and social change taking place in the cities, their ruling elites were facing a number of tremendous challenges, namely how to manage ever-increasing cultural diversity and social tension, how to live up to rising expectations, and how to cope with the growing demand for local services. The elites' responses and methods of coping with the challenges each city faced constitute the main theme of second Metropolis. Ruble seems interested in social issues, economic development, and cultural cleavages in Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka, only to the extent that they were addressed by the city elites at the time.

His main analytical category is "pragmatic pluralism," understood not as a doctrine or Weltanschauung, but rather as a practical method of addressing burning problems such as transport development in overcrowded Chicago, education and housing in Moscow, or seaport construction and poverty in Osaka. Pragmatic pluralism presupposes the ability to balance contradictory interests, to keep far from competing ideologies, and to accept compromises, however incongruent, for the sake of stability, peaceful coexistence, and development. It demands outstanding political skills and the ability to adapt constantly to an ever-changing social and cultural environment.

Ruble shows that all three cities at the time were led by exceptionally talented individuals: mayors Carter H. Harrison of Chicago, Nikolai Alekseev of Moscow, and Seki Hajime of Osaka. At the height of their power, each successfully addressed some of the most pressing issues of his time, while failing to tackle others. They and others of their sort were not particularly nice men: Alekseev was notorious for his anti-Semitism, while the Chicago party machines gradually became synonymous with corruption. Still, their achievements in terms of identifying the pressing problems, proposing far-sighted solutions, building coalitions in support of them, and getting jobs done were, in many respects, impressive and lasting.

All this does not, of course, mean that city politics in turn-of-the-century Moscow were in any sense democratic or that the Moscow merchant class did not have a strong anti-Western and traditionalist identity. But all that being so, Moscow still reveals "striking similarities with urban communities [in America and Japan]." And having reminded us that turn-of-the-century Moscow's contribution to world culture was not less significant than those of contemporary Chicago or Osaka, Ruble persuasively suggests, citing the memoirs of Konstantin Stanislavsky-Alekseev, that flourishing culture and arts in Moscow were "due to a great degree to young merchants who were interested not only in their business but also in arts." Needless to say, that was exactly the milieu from which the protagonists of the pragmatic pluralist saga were coming.

The real difference of Russia, Ruble emphasizes, lay in the incompetence of its imperial elite, in the lack of commitment on the part of the Romanovs and their entourage to anything even remotely resembling wholesale modernization and Westernization of the Russian empire, in stark contrast to the vision and policies of the Japanese ruling class at the time (365-366). Whether growing polarization of the Russian polity and the rise of radical currents on the left and right were consequences of this inadequacy of the imperial elite or unrelated phenomena, it was the triumph of totalitarian Bolshevism that effectively brought an end to the burgeoning pluralism of Moscow city policies.