'A Melody, the Bus Was Soaring’: Public Transportation and Urban-Rural Convergence after Stalin

• In Event: Pictures of Villagers in Motion: Technologies of Rural Mobility and Self-Imagination after Stalin

Abstract

The “liquidation of sociocultural and lifestyle differences between the village and city,” one of the most significant undertakings of the late-Soviet state, came to be known informally as the “sblizhenie” (convergence) of village and city. In fact, one of the most impressive and successful vectors of this project was the “sblizhenie” of village and city in a most literal sense, namely the bridging of the physical distance between village and city by means of an expansive network of public transportation. Periurban bus networks, those connecting village and city, registered a ridership of 750 million riders in 1960 and by 1980 6.1 billion, increasing dramatically even as the rural population shrank. This order-of-magnitude increase in intercourse with the city could not help but have tangible effects on the fate of the Soviet village, serving as a conduit for the formal and informal “leadership” of the city over the village and mediating the course of the dramatic outmigration that rendered increasingly futile authorities’ efforts to reinvigorate the agricultural sector.

Author

• Simon Belokowsky, Georgetown U