This paper is a comparison between Tomsk, western Siberia and Vladivostok, Russian Far East examining both urban development and city planning during the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras, with an emphasis on built form. Unlike Vladivostok, which developed primarily as a naval and military base, the engines of growth in pre-Soviet Tomsk had been its status as a former regional capital with both administration and central place functions; port functions on the River Tom' and its location on the Great Siberian Trakt. 

It will be shown that both these Russian cities have undergone broadly similar processes and share similar prospects; Tomsk deriving its pre-Revolutionary prosperity from commerce and trade and Vladivostok from foreign trade and investment. Although both cities suffered from a poor infrastructure provision until Soviet times, both had a distinctive pre-Soviet urban form; Tomsk a significant built heritage in wood, and Vladivostok a local vernacular style in brick known as kirpichnyi. StalinÆs drive for heavy industry resulted in the neglect of most other aspects of urban development and the subsequent urgency to provide much-needed accommodation for expanding urban populations meant that little attention was paid to quality of build, aesthetics or historical context. 

In the new post-Soviet order, foreign investment in both cities is likely to increase, with new joint commercial ventures resulting in the construction of new office and retail space in their emerging CBDs - and the problems this may cause for the future preservation of the existing built heritage. Today both Tomsk and Vladivostok generally display in their central districts a mixture of old pre-Revolutionary structures interspersed with Soviet period housing blocks and office buildings; these in turn being surrounded by vast expanses of monotonous and often poorly-built residential and industrial developments. 

Key Words: Tomsk; Vladivostok; comparative study; historical urban development; city planning.