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Kiev: a portrait, 1800-1917 // Review
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Michael F. Hamm is well known to students of late Imperial Russia for his work on its urban history. He has edited two books and written a number of articles on the Russian city. Now he has produced a major monograph on a major city: Kiev. Kiev (or "Kyiv" as it is currently being written) is, or rather was, a Russian city in a limited sense: it was located within the Russian empire, and Russians and Russian politics and culture played important roles in it, but the city has always been multicultural and today, of course, it is the capital of independent Ukraine. With this monograph Hamm makes a substantial addition to the literature on Imperial Russian cities and also to the literature on specifically Ukrainian urban history. The latter field has been developing quite respectably in recent years. Hamm himself has written on Kharkiv, Patricia Herlihy has produced a solid study of Ukraine's great Black Sea port (Odessa: A History 1794 - 1914, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1986) and an excellent overview of the whole problematic, with contributions by Herlihy, Steven L. Guthier, Roman Szporluk, and Peter Woroby, was included in Rethinking Ukrainian History (edited by Ivan L. Rudnytsky; Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981). This new monograph on the Ukrainian capital makes a fine keystone for the growing literature on Ukrainian cities.
The dates in the title of Hamm's book are suggestive rather than exact. After an overview of Kiev's earlier history, the book really starts with the second partition of Poland in 1793, which made Kiev the primate city of newly incorporated Right - Bank Ukraine and restored in it a Polish and Jewish presence. The book ends with the revolution of 1905, which in fact is the subject of the last three chapters (the period 1907...