The Projects of Metro in St. Petersburg and in Moscow: from Design to Public Discussions. Late XIXth – Early XXth Centuries

This thesis focuses on the projects of transport infrastructure improvements during the growth of St. Petersburg and Moscow in the late 19th – early 20th century. Researchers characterize this period as the era of social and economic changes in the Russian Empire. This paper analyzes various unfulfilled projects of transformation of urban transport infrastructure. Engineers offered projects for construction of high-speed railways as one of the possible ways of solving main transport problems in the cities of the Russian Empire. The study examined how the projects of urban railways and the historical sources of this period reflected the debates about the necessity of construction of such facilities in cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow. The work with historical sources showed that supporters of construction of high-speed transport systems faced many problems, including the lack of funds for construction and land shortage. The topic of the development and discussions of the first projects of urban railways in the Russian Empire is poorly represented in works of historians. For example, Soviet historiography had a tradition of the representation of the Russian Empire as a technically backward state. This tendency resulted in the unpopularity of subjects related to the technological history before the October revolution.