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Новая жизнь советского города
The authors study the process of social evolution of a large post-Soviet industrial center. The city of Perm can be regarded as a typical product of socialist modernization. Perm (formerly known as Molotov since 1940 and until 1957) is a regional center, which was initially formed through an artificial unification of two separate entities. One of them was a worker settlement Motovilikha (the town of Molotovo). The other was the remnants of a former governor's town, Perm essentially, which until 1917 has been predominantly populated by smaller government officials and merchants. The construction of large factories, which has been started during the first five-year plans, and the evacuation of industrial enterprises in the years of the Second World War have led to an almost three-fold increase of Perm population. The huge agglomeration of barrack village for factory workers during 1930-1950s has almost fully absorbed and transformed the mother-settlements. The outlook and the topology of Perm were non-urban at that time. The opposition between private space and public space, which is quite typical for urban entities, has been completely absent. Almost 300 thousand of'new citizens', who came initially from rural areas, were only nominally so. The chance of becoming citizens in the most true sense of this word has become possible only with Khrushchev's 'housing revolution, i.e. the mass industrial construction of economical, yet more or less comfortable and separate apartments. Precisely in 1960-1970s there forms a single social space within the city of Perm. Due to the rigidness and the difficulty of reforming the relation between state economy and government technologies the total crash of political structure on the background of the economic collapse of the 1990s has led to a severe crisis in the city's development. The contemporary portrait of Perm urban community has been reconstructed based on sociological research and anthropological observation, which has been carried out by a group of researchers of the Chair for Cultural Science at Perm State Technical University.(RSCI:15616007)