ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the history and stages of urbanization in the Soviet Union and in prerevolutionary Russia. The Soviet Union is a country which, from the standpoint of urbanization and the concentration of population in cities, has experienced in a relatively short span exceptionally large changes and which deserves special attention. In the 1950s there were some 700,000 rural communities, nine tenths of them inhabited by fewer than 100 people. At the time about 40% of the entire rural population lived in such places. World War II caused not only the loss of millions of lives but also the destruction of most cities in the western section of the USSR and a drop in urban population. The emphasis on the evolutionary approach to settlement research that marks the Soviet studies inevitably led some writers to consider the future, especially of cities and their agglomerations.
