Sotsializm bez Politiki: Goroda-Sady Budushchego v Nastoyashchem [Socialism Without Politics: Garden City of the Future and Present].

Early Russian edition about the Garden City movement. The first and only edition of the book. This Urban Planning Concept was devised by the English town planner Ebenezer Howard in 1898. It was a response to the need for improvement in the quality of urban life, which had changed since the Industrial Revolution. Serfdom survived in Russia longer than in any other major European country and was not abolished until 1861. That's why in the years before the First World War, Russia remained slowly modernization nation. Small percentage of the population living in cities was concentrated in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and tripled after 1870. However, the garden city idea attracted the greatest interest and had the most lasting influence exactly in Russia. Early Soviet projects for planned communities show a continuity with prerevolutionary ideas. In 1909, after small party of some Russians toured English Garden cities, first Russian edition of Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow appeared. In 1913 the organization of a Russian garden-city society was established. 'Though its charter required it to stand "outside parties", most of the membership came from the Social Revolutionary party, which, despite its name, was far from radical… A tract published by the Russian Garden City Society in 1913, Socialism Without Politics: Garden Cities of the Future and Present, advocated a nonrevolutionary path to socialism based on municipal land acquisition and housing schemes built by the cooperative movement aided by enlightened capitalists' (Buder, S. Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community. Oxford, 1990). Furthermore, the author suggested to use unemployed workers (mostly freed peasants) in city construction. He called those cities 'an El Dorado for small business' where everyone will find their place and do their bidding. The book contains the concepts of English and German Garden city projects: Letchworth Garden City (the world's first), Hampstead Garden Suburb, Bournville, Hellerau (first garden city in Germany) and Ulm. Russian programs also presented: Russia's first Garden City of Prozorovka (now Kratovo, 40 km. from Moscow), designed for the employees of the Moscow-Kazan railway, and the garden settlement at Khodynka Field (unexecuted). The book illustrated with city plans and rare photos (streets, houses, factories and boulevards).

OCLC locates two copies of this edition only: in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and La Contemporaine Library (Nanterre, France).