Abstract
The article provides with analysis of current state of research on socialist cities and today post-socialist cities as historical phenomenon. Research was based on the material presented during International Conferences on Urban History in years 2006-2014.
The author aims to show up-to-date vision on socialist urbanism as particular type of modernity. This vision was elaborated recently, it is free from the inaccuracies and generalizations that were composed on ideological grounds inherited from the Cold War.
To comprehend socialist and postsocialist city as diverse from capitalist, but sharing many similar traits with it is instructive, possible by using multidisciplinary methodological tools. Urban phenomena and processes are studied asa a range of socio-spatial practices, a complex of society and space, where anthropological view cooperates with contemporary endeavours in Sovietology.
Such themes as promise of happiness made by political power to people, transgressions of norms set from above, and the whole range of interaction between people and regime in everyday spatial routine are shaping the historiography of socialist city nowadays. How technologies of power rule over memory and how masses' imagination contribute to the maintainance of power is studied within the material that urban fabrique gives us.