THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF TOMSK AND VLADIVOSTOK
 
 
 
  
 		 The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1860 resulted in large-scale migration from European Russia overland to the Tomsk region and by ship to Vladivostok, and by the turn of the twentieth century both cities had grown enormously. Tomsk had become the largest and most important city in Siberia’s most densely populated region and its favourable position on the river network and Great Siberian trakt provided easy access to other Siberian cities and enhanced its prosperity through trade and central place functions (Bittner, 1994). Banking prospered and the city consistently ran budget surpluses for over 30 years up until 1902, a situation almost unheard of elsewhere in Russia at that time. The ‘cosmopolitanism’ of Tomsk as a result of the foundation there of Siberia’s first university (1888, Figure 2) helped to increase its sense of well-being which was reflected in the grandeur of both its public and domestic architecture (Figures 3 & 4). 
 
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Figure 2: The University
 
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 Figure 3: The ‘Second’ Building
 
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Figure 4: Wooden Mansion House

Vladivostok came into existance in 1859 when the Russian naval commander Nikolai Muraviev-Amurskii ordered the establishment of a naval post on the shores of the recently acquired bay, and soon afterwards construction began on housing for seamen, workshops for ship construction and repair, facilities for a naval hospital, and warehouses and supply depots (Richardson, 1995). During the course of the next two decades, an increasing number of tsarist administrative offices were moved to Vladivostok from the surrounding region, by virtue of its convenient coastal location, and by 1880 the town had been officially designated a city. The Russian Pacific Fleet set up its headquarters there and the military presence was to dominate the life of the city right up to the end of the Soviet period. By the time that Vladivostok had been declared a city, it already consisted of three districts, the tsentr (centre), the slobodka (officers’ quarter) and the morskoi poselok (sailors’ quarter). There was also a convict settlement north of the city centre which housed Vladivostok’s population of exiles and criminals in transit. These different settlements were linked together by what became the city’s main streets (Belykh, 1960 - Figure 5). 

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Figure 5: Plan of Vladivostok

 

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Figure 6: Kunst and Albers Store

By the end of the 1880s Vladivostok stretched 7km from E to W and was attracting the attention of foreign businessmen and entrepreneurs who began to develop the city’s central area with distinctive commercial buildings. The most famous of these was the Kunst and Albers department store which still survives today as the city’s GUM (Figure 6). Designed at the turn of the century in a mixture of German baroque, Gothic, and Russian moderne, the building was located on the city’s main street and represented the dominant role of foreign investment and trade in the growth of the city at this time. The following chapters will look at how both Tomsk and Vladivostok developed both socially and architecturally during the Tsarist period.  
 

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