Bookproject
I am an Assistant Professor of Modern Russian and Soviet History at Princeton University, where my work examines the political and social history of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and his successors. My first book, The City Builders: Plenty, Planning, and Politics in the Soviet Union, is a history of the campaign of mass urban construction that reshaped everyday life across the USSR between 1954 and 1991, arguably the most extensive program of state-directed urbanization undertaken anywhere in the twentieth century.
The book asks how a system organized around scarcity and control came to stake its legitimacy on a promise of abundance, and what happened to Soviet politics as that promise proved impossible to keep. Following planners, bureaucrats, construction workers, and the tenants who eventually occupied the apartment blocks they built, I trace how questions of housing, distribution, and the built environment became central to the relationship between the party-state and its citizens.
While at the ZZF I look forward to finishing the manuscript.
During his stay at ZZF Potsdam Michael Brinley is Visiting Fellow in Dep. I: Communism and Society.
More about Michael Brinley you will read on the Princeton University Website.