SOVIET CITIES AND THEIR INDUSTRIAL-SOCIAL PERFORMANCE

A sample of 221 cities shows mature forms of urban life in all regions of the Soviet Union. The canonical correlations model permits observation of how the legacy of industrialization, in the form of cities' economic profiles in 1970, has affected each regional subset of cities, and how it keeps shaping their socio-cultural performance in the 1980s. Canonical variables were used to sort all cities into four types of urban dynamics. Distinct and simple associations exist between the prevailing dynamics and regional features of urban networks, such as clustering, connectedness, marginality, and rural vitality. This points to structural flaws in regional development, to a durable pathological component in Soviet urbanization. Centers with narrow and outdated functions tend to be clustered, and they frequently are accompanied by ruined agriculture, regional conflicts in land-use, and regional overloads of railroads. A central core of economic regions within the Soviet Union is experiencing the bulk of such problems.