2
Railroads, Merchants, and Migrant Cities

In the decades following the Great Reforms the Russian city expanded beyond the activities of tsarist administrators, the civilizing pretensions of Petersburg's neoclassical facades and geometrical spatial order, and the economic leadership of a few wealthy merchants. The differences between the provincial towns and the capitals gradually dwindled. In the latter half of the century the expansion of commerce and manufacturing and the influx of migrants into certain towns enormously enlarged the sphere of economic operations and the diversity of the population. Urban growth appeared to be less and less a product of state activity and increasingly a social creation, the work of an industrious, mobile population that was adapting economic and social practices to their needs and to the opportunities of town life.

Models for a new-style urbanism emerged from industry, science, and technology as well as from new Western concepts of the civilized city. Russian imperial urban plans became anachronistic when the public embodiment of progress took the forms of the steam engine and the municipal sewage system. The promoters of the latter, striving for a Russian variety of the sanitized city, were a part of the civil society that was emerging around municipal government (a subject I discuss in the next chapter); the supporters of technological progress came from new groups of entrepreneurs and professionals. This modernistic image took concrete form in national exhibitions of science and industry, a latter-day capitalist rendering of the imperial urban plans. This version of the city

beautiful had little in common with the lives of the petty artisans, traders, and manufacturers and was far removed from the world of migrant laborers. The gap was readily visible to the visitors to Moscow's All-Russian Industrial Exhibition of 1882 who cared to view the city's notorious labor market and slums of Khitrovka. Russian urban economic development was crucial to the transformation, both idealized and real, of the Russian city.

In historical perspective the conjuncture of commercial and manufacturing activity and urban growth in Russia closely fits the trends usually grouped under the labels of industrialization and urbanization. Machine technology, the intensification of the market economy, and capitalist enterprise were all present in late-century urban areas of Russia, whose rate of population expansion rivaled that of another borderland of the Western world, the United States.

In Russia, however, these trends evolved in a manner that was significantly different than in the United States or other Western lands. First, economic historians generally agree that the industrial revolution did not come to Russia before the mid nineteenth century and perhaps arrived decades later.^[1] For this reason the economic foundations of Russian urbanization were shaped, much more than in the West, by the era of industrialization. Second, the expansion of manufacturing activity in Russia coincided with a rapid intensification of market relations. Previously, these two phenomena had been far more limited in their scope and intensity than in the West, where the so-called commercial revolution of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had deeply penetrated the national and local economies. Olga Crisp has concluded that in the last half of the nineteenth century "the most significant aspect of the [economic] development in Russia was the erosion of the self-sufficiency of peasant households and the growth of a money economy." The characteristic pattern of Western economic growth in modern times was not repeated in Russia, where "the development of a market was part of the process of industrialization.^[2] This belated commercialization placed some towns at the center of national and international markets, while others with little access to markets became "backwaters" in the overall pattern of economic exchange in the late century and in the eyes of their inhabitants. Thus, the creation of the new railroad network fixed the economic fate of towns throughout

[1] See P. G. Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie kapitalizma v Rossii, 1850-1880 (Moscow, 1978), esp. 185-228.

[2] Olga Crisp, "Labor and Industrialization in Russia," The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 7, pt. 2, 350.

the country. It represented the harbinger of progress to its proponents and the pathway to the city for urban migrants.

Railway Journeys and Urban Travelers

By the 1860s business interests in Russia's trading towns spoke of the railroad as an instrument of salvation. The extensive canal-and-river system remained hostage to the forces of nature, but access to rail lines meant freedom from these constraints and for the towns located away from the waterways a chance at last to compete in national and even international markets. The town leaders of Feodosia, in mid century still a minor seaport on the Sea of Azov, wrote in 1861 that the "fate" of their city "depends on whether or not it will be linked by railroad with the interior provinces of Russia."^[3] The grain trade was the prize they sought; they assumed its rewards would benefit the entire town population. The railroad appeared to be the key to both personal profit and town prosperity. An appeal to the Russian state was implicit in their statement; a rail line would only reach them with the encouragement and approval of the government.

An awareness of the importance of this revolutionary new means of transportation to the country's economy and to urban growth came gradually to the tsarist government. The Main Society of Russian Railroads, formed in 1857, looked to railroads "to facilitate foreign exports and to assure transportation for internal production," but it lacked a concrete plan of action and proved incapable of negotiating successful contracts with Western entrepreneurs.^[4] What was missing in the Main Society, in addition to effective action, was strong backing from the government, which was still unpersuaded of the necessity for rapid railroad construction. A forceful and persuasive argument in favor of railroads came in an 1863 report to the imperial cabinet from the minister of state domains, A. Zelenoi. Its subject was "the mapping [nachertanie ] of a network of railroads in Russia." He argued that railroad transportation was the path to progress: "The number of rail lines has become a sort of measure by which one may judge in the most accurate way the wealth of a country, the level of its manufacturing and trade, activity, even its civilization." He judged that the

[3] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del. "Tavricheskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poselenii evropeiskoi Rossii v 1861-1862 g. (St. Petersburg, 1863), 2: 24-25.

[4] Quoted in A. M. Solov'eva. Zheleznodorozhnyi transport vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1975), 66.

new form of transportation was "indispensable not only for the expansion of internal manufacturing and trade in Russia and a more correct and equitable distribution of prices on basic consumer goods but also for the lowering of these prices through more rapid, convenient, and inexpensive distribution of the workforce at those points in the country where the greatest need exists."^[5] These developments implied a profound transformation of urban centers. His emphasis on consumer prices, manpower, and production amounted to an economic plan for the capitalist development of Russia.

Zelenoi made urbanization an integral part of economic growth. His proposed network of lines included "all the most populous and manufacturing cities of Russia" as well as towns "located on the navigable rivers," thus linking railroads with "the steamship lines for passengers and commercial goods." Certain urban centers would become transshipment points for the movement of agricultural products from the south and southeast of the country to seaports; northern cities, "often in need of agricultural produce," would be served by "the shortest lines" to grain-growing regions. Zelenoi's plan incorporated considerations of internal order as well; it ensured that rail lines would reach the "greatest number of provincial capitals."^[6]

Government approval of this network of railroads remade the economic map of the country. From the mid 1860s the state's concessionary policy of railroad construction became an effective means of promoting the rapid emergence in European Russia of a nexus of key rail lines that were owned and operated by private companies that were subsidized by the state through low-interest loans.^[7] Construction proceeded rapidly, with as much if not more profiteering by railroad entrepreneurs as in the United States. By the mid 1870s the basic network emerged, covering a total distance of nearly twelve thousand miles.

The importance of these rail lines to the towns along their path cannot be exaggerated. A certain number of urban areas experienced a transportation and marketing revolution. Mosow became the center of a radial grid of lines opening access to markets and facilitating the influx of agricultural produce and labor throughout central and northern Russia. From north to south and east to west the central regions were linked to seaports and the

[5] "O nachertanii seti zheleznykh dorog v Rossii," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (abbreviated TsGIA), f. 207, op. 3, d. 162 (1861-64), 86-87.

[6] Ibid., 138-40.

[7] A meticulous, detailed account of state railroad policy may be found in I. S. Bliokh, Vliianie zheleznykh dorog na ekonomicheskoe sostoianie Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1878), vol. 1.

West. The southern ports of Odessa and Nikolaev on the Black Sea and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov could tap the produce of the Central Blackearth region through Kharkov. Voronezh became a gathering point for grain to be shipped to the southern port of Rostov-on-Don.

Other major lines cut across the principal river systems to carry goods between eastern and western lands. Rail lines competed with the Volga waterways by offering service from northwestern Russia to the regions around Tsaritsyn, Saratov, Samara, and Kazan, a territory that quickly became one of the principal suppliers of marketed grain the country. The central area received access to the Baltic port of Riga via Orel and Smolensk, and commerce through Kiev reached into the German and Austro-Hungarian empires through Brest. Somewhat later, the Donets line extended across the southern steppes, where high-grade coal and iron ore deposits were located, to lay the foundations for the Ukrainian metallurgical industry. Despite ostensible state controls, the introduction of rail transport occurred in conditions as chaotic as anywhere in the West. Reports in the 1860s and 1870s of remarkably slow, erratic, and often dangerous rail travel added an aura of adventure to travelers' tales and provoked official investigations of incompetent and corrupt management. The spread of railroads opened a new dimension of public life that mingled power and profits, mobility and opportunity in ways never before experienced by Russian townspeople.

Medium-sized and small towns that had once existed largely as administrative centers or as transshipment points between land and waterways found within a few years vast markets for the purchase and sale of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. By the late 1870s railroads occupied the central place in transportation, a fact that drastically altered the practices of Russia's large-scale urban traders. The possibilities for economic opportunity expanded in tandem with railroad construction into promising territories. In a petition similar to many others sent to tsarist authorities, Samara's municipal elite begged at the end of the 1870s for the government to extend the rail lines from their city toward the northeast, where they claimed to behold visions of yet another "new granary" for the empire—and profits for Samara's grain wholesalers. They based their forecast on fact, not fantasy: the new line to the southeast through grain lands to the city of Orenburg, near the Urals, was already carrying twice as much freight as projected in the original plans.^[8] Their eagerness to include still more agricultural territory within the scope of their trading activity was an

[8] "Reviziia senatora Shamshina," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1, d. 23 (1880), 12-13.

affair of entrepreneurial ambition. It placed their city at the hub of a regional commercial economy.

This new perspective on the position of cities in the Russian economy entailed not only calculations of profit and freight movement but also estimates of the economic importance of railroads to towns whose economic livelihood was coming to depend on distant markets. Urban commercial and municipal leaders involved in railroad affairs were prepared to deal with rail companies either directly on their own or indirectly through the state. Rumors that wealthy Berdichev citizens had paid an enormous bribe to bring the Kiev-Brest rail line to their town (far off the most direct route the tracks could have taken) might have resulted from anti-Semitism. But they received credence because of the widely understood value of the railroad to any town's economic livelihood.^[9] When the Southeastern Railroad company threatened to move its headquarters from Kiev unless it received municipal land for new buildings, the municipality gave in with scarcely a fight.^[10]

Administrative reports from the provinces increasingly reflected the importance of railroads to urban growth and to the new economic practices of enterprising townspeople. In turn, new priorities that arose from the economic interests of the state and the population made some impression on the ponderous machinery of tsarist policy-making. Appeals from urban leaders and municipalities for greater access to rail transport, which in mid century had little discernible impact, often received a favorable reply from state officials in later years. In the 1870s governors' reports began to take account of urban economic needs for the first time. An investigation into railroad mismanagement, a serious concern by the late 1870s, appeared necessary to the state not only in response to the complaints of the army but also to satisfy "the interests of entire communities" that were suffering from the inefficiency and chaos that accompanied these early years of Russia's iron age.^[11]

The Baranov commission, appointed to study and rectify these problems, set the issue of rail transportation in the context of national growth and the "numerous interests of the country," including the "interests of entire localities."^[12] Its definition of national interest took the form of a sort of balance sheet of the country's productive wealth that was opened by rail-

[9] Novoe vremia , 14 December 1899.

[10] Michael Hamm, "The Emergence of Modern Kiev," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. M. Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 86.

[11] V. V. Salov, Istoricheskii ocherk uchrezhdeniia Komissii dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnogo dela v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1909), 6-8.

[12] Ibid., 9.

road transportation. In the territories of European Russia that were served by the various rail lines the commission established precise estimates of economic resources, which were expressed as the total agricultural surplus and the value of manufacturing production to which the railroads provided access.^[13] The prospects of commercial growth contained in its statistical tables set urban economic activities in the new context of commerce and productivity. Although the report had little short-term effect on policies, it revealed that the tsarist administration was aware that railroads were having a nationwide impact. In the 1870s the state had begun to use freight rates as a device to influence internal commerce, but only in the 1890s did it implement a policy of satisfying "urban needs" for cheap bread through lowered short-haul rates on grain to northern cities.^[14] Beyond these measures the Baranov commission's vision of productivity under state guidance had no apparent consequences. The state remained a remote presence in the reordering of commercial activities that was being sparked by rail transportation.

Although far less spectacular, the expansion of water transport during these decades also strengthened the ties among urban economies and enlarged the field of activities of migrant laborers and traders. Animal and human motor power was replaced by steam technology on rivers and canals. As on land, the consequences were increased speed for transportation and lowered costs, which together were sufficient to make river transport competitive with—when it was not complementary to—railroad transport. The number of steam boats on Russia's waterways grew from one hundred in 1850 to five hundred in 1866 and reached three thousand in 1898.^[15] The water and rail systems became the channels through which goods poured into and out of key urban centers. Maps prepared by the Ministry of Transportation at the end of the century presented a vivid schematic picture of the flow of raw materials across Russia by rail and water. The Volga remained the most important commercial waterway, accounting in the 1890s for one-half of all water transportation. The paths of water and rail transport marked out by the mapmakers pinpointed certain transport hubs, such as Minsk in the west and Samara in the east, that were vital to

[13] These tables appeared throughout Trudy vysochaishei uchrezhdennoi Komissii dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnogo dela v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1879), vol. 2, pt. 1, 84-104; pt. 2, 134-39, 154-77.

[14] A. L. Shaulov, Zheleznodorozhnaia tarifnaia politika tsarizma v 60-90 godakh XIX veka (Kandidat dissertation, Rostov-on-Don University, 1977), 121; see also T. M. Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii, 1875-1914 gg. (Leningrad, 1978), 181-82.

[15] Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, Aperçu statistique des chemins de fer et des voies navigables de la Russie (St. Petersburg, 1900), 112.

regional, national, and even international trade.^[16] By implication, such schematic renderings of transportation suggested how important marketing had become in the economic affairs of Russia's townspeople. In old port cities and new rail centers the population was increasingly involved in trade; the economies of these places were largely dependent on the income earned from occupations that involved the transshipment of goods.

The transportation revolution diminished the cultural isolation of provincial towns. It brought the capitals and their far-flung commercial hinterlands into close contact and offered more opportunities than ever before for city and countryside to collaborate. The iron rail was a lifeline for rapidly growing urban centers scattered across European Russia. Moscow in many ways was exemplary of the new city emerging in these conditions: its railroad stations were the funnels through which poured goods and people. In a somewhat idealized form it symbolized the new Russia of the late nineteenth century. In the literary imagery of Anton Chekhov the railroad passing near the cherry orchard was an inevitable victor over the gentle ways of landlords and dreamers; it brought the town to the countryside and turned the orchard into a suburban housing development. Rail transportation was crucial to the emergence of the new city. It expanded grain trade, increased the availability of foodstuffs in urban areas, quickened commercial growth, and intensified the movement of migrants into and through certain cities.

The rail lines brought new economic activities to towns in agricultural areas, both by opening up rapid bulk trade with grain growers and by providing access to national and foreign markets. Through the last half of the century the impact of the railroads gradually grew in scope and intensity. In a report written in 1907 local officials from the Volga city of Simbirsk recalled a somber, distant past before the time in the 1890s when "with the completion of the Moscow-Kazan railroad Simbirsk became directly connected with the entire railroad network and with the most distant parts of Russia." Their new town history was a story of commerce because the arrival of the railroad meant that the "grain trade particularly increased."^[17] We know little of the provincial grain traders, many of whom were acting as agents for foreign commercial firms and who followed the rail lines in search of grain for European markets (which accounted for 60

[16] The most grandiose of these visual renderings of Russia's new commercial activities was provided by the mapmakers who were charged with illustrating the volume on transportation that was prepared for the Russian pavilion at the 1900 Paris world's fair; see "Dvizhenie tovarov po zheleznym i vnutrennim vodnym putiam evropeiskoi Rossii," in Ministerstvo putei soobschcheniia, Aperçu statistique , endpages. (See figure 4.)

[17] "Statisticheskie svedeniia po gorodam," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 240 (1907-9), 15.

percent of rail grain shipments in 1889).^[18] Rail connections increased the dependence of Simbirsk's economy on outsiders at the same time that these connections opened new markets. The city's businessmen adjusted their trading practices to fit the new conditions of the railroad era.

In many ways the transportation revolution determined the evolution of the urban economy in the last half of the nineteenth century. Invariably, reports on economic conditions in individual towns and cities referred to the railroad in explaining the fate of the author's local economy. Whether accurate or not, traders, shippers, manufacturers, and even those whose world was limited to a local market believed that their success or failure depended on the presence—or absence—of the railroad. The reason why the town of Kaluga, located south of Moscow, had "lost significance as a central trade point for its region" appeared clear to city officials in 1907. The province's rail line to Moscow had undermined local business because it allowed the rural counties to "obtain all their goods directly from major centers."^[19] The assumption that the urban economy was dependent on transportation appeared in a report that same year from Chernigov, a city in the northern Ukraine. "The absence of a broad-gauge rail line and any suitable means of transportation," the authors noted, was the cause of "poor trade and manufacturing affairs."^[20] Whether accurate or not, the centrality of the railroad in observers' explanations of the economic condition of their towns suggests how crucial rail links to the outside world had become to urban elites throughout Russia.

Where rail connections had expanded and intensified, local assessments of urban affairs sounded a note of general well-being. So great were the opportunities created by the railroad in Minsk, which was located in a poor region of western Russia, that the city was "tranformed from an ordinary provincial town into a fairly strong commercial center," at least in the opinion of one traveler in the 1880s.^[21] A quarter of a century before, the Minsk town fathers, in reply to a query from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had noted glumly that "Minsk is insignificant in trading and manufacturing relations, less important than certain district towns."^[22] The new Minsk was created by the railroad. It was located on the main line between the northern Ukraine and the Baltic, and its operations required supplies

[18] V. A. Zolotov, Khlebnyi eksport Rossii cherez Chernogo i Azovskogo morei v 60-90 godakh XIX veka (Rostov-on-Don, 1966), 40.

[19] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 234 (1907), 143.

[20] Ibid., 272.

[21] A. P. Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti (St. Petersburg, 1888), 1:8.

[22] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Minskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:4.

and labor. "The shipment of grain provides work for very many," and "work is constantly available for suppliers, contractors, people supplying ties, firewood, etc." As a result, the town's population had doubled in the previous quarter century, "developing so quickly" that in the author's opinion its dynamism was comparable "only to [that of] new cities and a few of the railroad junctions in other regions."^[23] This new city was the outcome of a commercial boom, the demand for labor, and a population explosion: its rapid transformation was attributable largely to the railroad.

The railroad was redrawing the map of urban Russia in the last decades of the century. A few cities exerted a power of attraction far beyond their borders, drawing in trade, manufacturing, and labor to expand their economic activities. This shift was apparent to the governor of Saratov province, who in 1897 observed that thanks to its newly developed rail connections and expanded river transport, Tsaritsyn was becoming "the trade center" for a vast southeastern territory.^[24] Many thousands of migrant laborers were lured to such cities by an awareness of economic opportunity; although their labor was indispensable to transport and commerce in this new city, it also appeared to be threatening to high officials. That same year the governor warned the minister of internal affairs of the dangers posed to Tsaritsyn by "migrant laborers, generally undisciplined and extremely inclined to drunkenness and disorder."^[25] His fears of social unrest were as important to his views of the city as were his visions of vast trading hinterlands.

The impact of the railroads was tangible in economic activities and the dynamics of urban growth. The shifting pattern of trade made itself felt by the 1880s at the yearly national fair at Nizhny Novgorod. In the opinion of a Soviet historian the decline of the fair, which began that decade, was primarily the result of "the development of railroad lines," which permitted manufacturers "to send their goods directly to the place of demand."^[26] The speed with which these changes occurred was by contemporary standards extraordinary, particularly in those rural areas where the appearance of the railroad signaled the sudden creation of new towns. This aspect of urbanization was most apparent in the central Ukraine. The Ekaterinoslav railroad, running from the Donets coalfields in the east to the Dnepr river at Ekaterinoslav and, from there, to the Krivoi Rog iron ore fields, began

[23] Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti, 9-10.

[24] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet Saratovskogo gubernatora za 1897," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1898), d. 300, 23-24.

[25] Ibid., 21-22.

[26] V. Ia. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861-1900 (Moscow, 1974), 19.

full operations in the middle of the 1880s. Industrial settlements grew along its line in areas where cattle had recently grazed; the town of Ekaterinoslav, once an administrative town with virtually no economic activity, became a major industrial center with large metallurgical plants and a new community of traders, many of whom were Jews from the Pale of Settlement. This mingling of populations, which exacerbated ethnic tensions and quickly led to anti-Semitic riots, was a direct outcome of urban migration along the rail line.

The railroads also made food supplies available to town populations with greater regularity and more abundance than ever before. The opportunity to hold down urban food costs was politically important as a means to curtail economic hardship and social unrest among the urban laboring population. Thus, it is not surprising that in the early 1890s the state ceased using transport rates to subsidize grain growers in the distant southeastern territories and instead adopted a policy that was intentionally calculated to lower charges on short hauls. The move was a direct benefit to urban populations in European Russia, whose food shipments traveled relatively short distances.^[27] This policy, coupled with increased grain marketing and the transportation revolution, kept the urban cost of living down despite rapid population growth and ensured, even in the famine year of 1891-92, that townspeople had adequate food supplies. These conditions served the needs of employers, who were eager to keep wages low, and reassured tsarist officials, who were anxious to avoid food riots. They also helped to make these cities a magnet for migrants. The railroad became the lifeline of Russia's cities.

The regularization and expansion of shipments along rail lines and waterways were paralleled by increased passenger travel by rail. The custom of the temporary migration of labor (otkhodnichestvo ) turned into mass migration under the pressure of rural hardship, the lure of urban labor markets, and the availability of train travel. Distant destinations became accessible, even if the conditions of travel appeared intolerable to well-to-do Russians, who were accustomed to comfort. As the rail network grew, the number of Russians traveling by train increased even more rapidly. The old roads continued to attract many laborers, especially those whose destinations were the new southern and eastern grain fields. But urban migrants by the last decade of the century were largely train travelers.

The migrants' passage from village to city occurred in the cheap third-class coaches, where wooden benches accommodated an indiscriminate mix-

[27] Quoted in Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia , 191.

ing of social ranks. One traveler judged it "a barbarous means of transporting laborers," which was done "in crowded, dirty, dark coaches."^[28] Disdained by Russians of privilege and rank, third class was a "democratic" place where estates and wealth had little meaning (hence it was welcomed by the repentant aristocratic hero of Leo Tolstoi's novel Resurrection ). It attracted four-fifths of all passengers throughout the late nineteenth century.^[29] According to official statistics, on average passengers traveled relatively short distances—eighty miles at the end of the century—but their numbers grew rapidly. The railroads transported twenty-four million passengers a year in the first years of the 1870s; by 1897 (after a significant fare reduction in 1894) they transported seventy-five million.^[30]

The transition to mechanized travel was made less abrupt by both the notoriously slow pace of Russian trains and the moderate distances that passengers traveled. Still, the cumulative effects of growing numbers of travelers, regularized rail service, and the social promiscuity of travel in the popular third class created a collective experience that had a subversive social and psychological impact on the way that the lower classes, urban and rural, might view the Russia of estates, ranks, and order. The railroad also created among Russian travelers a new sense of space and time and a new measure of speed to compete with a man's pace or a winter sleigh. Traveling from town to town enhanced the notion of an urban Russia identifiable to passengers as their own destination points. In the opinion of a German historian the cultural novelty of a rail journey was to bring departure and arrival points into "immediate vicinity," thereby transforming the "traveling space" perceived by travelers into small, continuous temporal moments.^[31] Although the subjective meaning that Russian travelers gave to their experience is still poorly understood, by the end of the century a rail journey had become a notable part of the cultural imagery and social relations of the urban population.

The impact of the railroad on personal mobility was most visible in the Central Industrial region of the north, where from the railroad's inception the scale of passenger movement was greater than elsewhere. A railroad commission in the late 1870s reported that along the northern lines "di-

[28] A. P. Subbotin, Volga i Volgari: Putevye ocherki (St. Petersburg, 1894), 7.

[29] Such was already the case in southern Russia in the 1870s, as reported in Komissiia dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnykh del, Passazhirnoe dvizhenie: Doklad Khar'kovskoi podkomissii (St. Petersburg, 1880), 3; figures for the entire network at the end of the century are in Maksim Kovalevsky, ed., La Russie à la fin du 19e siècle (Paris, 1900), 861-62.

[30] Aperçu statistique , 27.

[31] The comment, directed to the impact of rail travel in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, appears even more apt to a country as large as Russia. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journal , trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford, 1980), 44.

rectly adjoining centers of manufacturing, a great mass (up to one hundred thousand on the Nizhny Novgorod line) of laborers and craftsmen work in factories in Moscow and the Moscow area." These passengers are "for the most part peasants from . . . the provinces closest to Moscow, to whom the third-class ticket is not a big expense and who very rarely travel on foot."^[32] The scale of this movement reached such proportions that the smaller towns around Moscow such as Serpukhov, through which migrants had previously passed "around the time of holidays and for summer work," saw trade "fall severely" when these laborers turned to the two nearby rail lines to carry them to and from the great metropolis.^[33] The city and the countryside were drawn much closer together for these migrants. The railroad brought a form of modernity into the ordinary experience of the masses of urban laborers from the countryside; it made the move from village life to city existence more rapid than ever before and created a unique transitional experience between rural and urban residence. The intensification of contact between the village and the city was perhaps the most profound human consequence of railroad journeys on Russian urbanism.

Railroad transport and passenger movement changed the very organization of urban space. They were the principal forces freeing urban growth from state tutelage. In the 1860s and 1870s imperial urban plans ceased to be effective guides to urbanization; their disappearance met with little resistance even though civic-minded reformers objected to the destructive effects of the railroad on urban order. One Soviet historian observed with obvious regret that "the location of railroad stations and railroad lines in a city often took place without regard to established urban plans for development." Land speculation and "a sharp reduction in state supervision of private building" rendered planning obsolete and inoperable.^[34] Visions of the utopian city did not disappear from Russian cultural life, but the new forces of urbanization profoundly shaped the configuration of urban models in the late nineteenth century. The railroad station both symbolized and embodied the new urbanism in Russian cities; it did so to the same extent that it did in another continental-sized state, the United States.

The effects of the railroad were particularly dramatic in Russian urban areas because railroad engineers and topographers largely replaced the state in giving shape to the city. Their decisions on the location of rail lines (even

[32] Komissiia dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnykh del, Doklad iugo-vostochnoi podkomissii ob usloviiakh perevozki passazhirov (St. Petersburg, 1880), 43.

[33] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 195 (1903), 139.

[34] M. Il' in and E. Borisova, "Arkhitektura," in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva , ed. I. Grabar (Moscow, 1962), vol. 9, pt. 2, 258.

though subject to political supervision and, perhaps now and then, bribery) had an immediate effect on nearby towns. "The location of the station," concludes a Soviet historian, "determined the further construction of urban areas and produced a concentration of industrial enterprises there." The presence of a station distant from the old center of urban economic life shifted commercial and industrial activities toward the outlying station, creating at times a second town. Even when the stations were nearby, the effect was to "emphasize the contrast between town center and outskirts."^[35]

In Moscow the presence of the railroad terminals of several major railroad lines produced a city "with a completely new appearance" in the eyes of a contemporary observer in the 1870s. "All the areas around the stations, which were constructed on the outskirts of town, acquired new buildings, and endless rows of two-story wooden buildings were constructed to house railroad employees and travelers."^[36] The Khitrovka area, by the 1870s one of the most notorious of Russian urban slums, first appeared as a labor market for migrants, many of whom arrived in Moscow at the nearby train stations. The chaotic urbanization that the railroad brought about made no provision for city plans and public orderliness. If there was any order at all, it was the work of the railroad entrepreneurs and the architects who were responsible for the new railroad stations, the focal point of the new city.

Although distances between cities were increasingly measured in the amount of time it took to travel on the railroad, travel within towns still proceeded at the slow pace of horse and foot power. As in the West, horse-drawn trams were the first improvements in urban transport; by the end of the century they had spread to all major towns and most provincial capitals. Moving scarcely faster than a pedestrian (three miles per hour was the average speed of horse-drawn trams in Moscow), they mostly attracted townspeople of modest means, from clerks to washerwomen; neither the wealthy elements nor the poor laborers used them. Moscow's trams carried forty-five million passengers in 1895, and over two-thirds traveled in first class, where passengers could distance themselves visibly from the less fortunate.^[37] By the turn of the century only a few municipalities had undertaken the construction of electric streetcar lines. The tsarist state intentionally brought them to Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 to exemplify

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid., 260.

[37] "Moskovskie konno-zheleznye dorogi," in Sbornik statei po voprosam otnosiashchikhsia k Zhizni russkikh gorodakh 5 (1897):50-51.

(together with the national exposition) the spread of industrial progress to provincial cities.^[38] Critics blamed short-sighted municipal leaders for the supposed lag throughout Russia in streetcar construction. However, a more general and persuasive reason was inadequate municipal budgets, which were held down by state-imposed expenditures and by the resistance of the mercantilist town elites to higher property taxes.

The lack of cheap urban transportation meant that the neighborhood remained the spatial center of most townspeople's lives, and as a rule housing for workers had to be located within reasonable walking distance from their workplace.^[39]

For townspeople of some means horse-drawn cabs remained the quick means about town. The numbers of such cabs swelled each winter to provide sleight rides down the snowy or icy streets. Many of the drivers were seasonal workers who worked their fields in the growing season and earned supplementary income as teamsters and cabbies in the winter months. Their numbers and visibility reinforced the impression of many observers that peasants were everywhere in the city. The increased movement of people into and within the city heightened the need for cabbies, who were a visible sign of old Russia juxtaposed alongside the new railroad stations. At the end of the century a newspaper correspondent from the western town of Viazma, a "rather large trading city located at the junction of three rail lines," hinted at his dislike of villagers when he warned of the dangers that Viazma's cabbies posed to the townspeople. "There exists no surveillance of cabbies," he complained, "the majority of whom are crude, coarse, and obey no rules while driving."^[40] To many observers the cabbies' undisciplined habits and uncomfortable vehicles were an unavoidable relic of backward city life. According to a journalist in Kiev gynecologists warned their patients never to take a cab.^[41] Thus, those Russians who envisaged orderliness, civility, and efficiency as their ideal of urbanism had one more reason to believe that progress had scarcely touched their cities.

The Merchant City

By tsarist statute and public expectation the economic and social leadership of urban society belonged to the merchant estate. Legal rights and

[38] Information on urban public transportation appears in the 1904 survey of Russian towns. See Goroda Rossii v 1904 g. (St. Petersburg, 1907).

[39] One geographer's graphic concept of this typical "journey" in St. Petersburg of the 1860s is found in James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 123-39.

[40] Moskovskii listok , 23 January 1899.

[41] Kiev v 80-kh godakh: Vospominaniia starozhila (Kiev, 1910), 10.

obligations had been ascribed to this estate since Peter the Great's time, and these regulations underwent only slight modification in Alexander II's reign. As in the past, all trade and manufacturing above a specific level of capitalization belonged to the merchants in the first or second guilds (the difference between these two guilds depended essentially on income). In the opinion of some contemporary observers as well as that of certain historians, the permanence of the merchant estate's legal preeminence in economic affairs contributed to an attitude of social conservatism. Alfred Rieber, in his very thoughtful study of the nineteenth-century merchant estate, argues that in the late 1800s "the bulk" of these traders and manufacturers remained firmly attached to "the old ways." In reaching this conclusion, however, he suggests that the model of social modernity for Russia's middle classes could only have been "the classical bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Europe." In his judgment successful Russian entrepreneurial activity in that period was eccentric and exceptional.^[42] One might object to Rieber's conclusion on the grounds that the socioeconomic evolution of Russia's urban propertied classes was embedded in a cultural context unlike that of Western Europe. Rieber's evaluation of the merchant estate, and other evaluations like it, reveal the extent to which images of the West inform our assessments of Russia's social history. However, such images do not make clear the changes in either the role or the identity of urban traders and manufacturers in the postreform years.

The records of the number of "merchants" (both individuals and, in a very small proportion, joint-stock enterprises) tell a precise but misleading story. By 1898 there were 6,500 first-guild merchants and 138,000 second-guild merchants in the entire country. Many of these individuals had become merchants solely to meet legal requirements for economic activity, remaining at the same time enrolled in their estate of origin (as permitted by the reforms of the 1860s). In Moscow, arguably the city with the greatest entrepreneurial opportunities, over half of the merchants had combined estate titles. For over 20 percent this meant that merchants were also "trading peasants."^[43]

Apparently, by the end of the century merchant status was largely irrelevant as a mark of social standing. In 1899 the great majority of enterprising Russians abandoned their membership in the merchant estate when the opportunity to do so arose. The 1898 revision of trading and manufacturing regulations permitted people from any estate to purchase

[42] Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), xxiv, 83-88, 33-35.

[43] Ibid., 89, table 3.1.

business certificates without enrolling in the merchant estate. The following year the number of second-guild merchants suddenly fell to thirty-eight thousand, and the number of first-guild merchants shrank to four thousand.^[44] The continued visibility of a few conservative merchant families obscured what one might call a flight from merchant identity.

Nonetheless, images of the traditionalist merchant remained pervasive in popular and political discussions of Russia's present and future society. They emerged in debates over the primacy of the nobility, whose supposed paternalistic care of their laborers was contrasted to the cruelty and crudeness of "merchant values." These images were echoed by foreign entrepreneurs in Russia, especially Germans, who disdained their "backward" Russian competitors. They also emerged in contemporary literary and popular writings, including Ostrovsky's plays and the stories of Maxim Gorky, where the merchant and the petty bourgeois (meshchanin ) were equated with the philistine. Writers for the new penny press often used the merchant stereotype to illustrate the confusion of urban social roles that was created by new wealth in the hands of those unfit for preeminence. By the end of the century the old-fashioned merchant appeared primarily in the guise of either a comical character or a "provincial merchant," who was damned by one observer for his "feeble initiative" and "ancestral" economic operations.^[45]

The tenacity of this stereotypical portrait drawn from the Russian past suggests more than a nostalgia for an imagined patriarchal past or a dramatized moral confrontation between the forces of progress and backwardness. The conduct of urban entrepreneurs drew heavily on past experience in confronting difficult economic conditions. The studies of the economic historian Fred Carstensen reveal that there were many substantial reasons—financial, technological, and cultural—for Russian businessmen to be cautious about innovation and to avoid risk-taking, even in circumstances when substantial profits rewarded successful entrepreneurial daring.^[46]

The paths of new economic activity moved in predictable and visible directions across the urban landscape of the country. Those cities with

[44] A. Bokhanov, "Rossiiskoe kupechestvo v kontse XIX-nachale XX veka," Istoriia SSSR (June-August 1985):107.

[45] O.F., "Nashe russkoe kupechestvo," Moskovskii listok , 6 April 1899.

[46] See Fred Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Singer and International Harvester in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), esp. 101; see also Gregory Guroff and Fred Carstensen, eds., Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Princeton, 1983), esp. the essay by Thomas Owen, "Entrepreneurship and the Structure of Enterprise in Russia, 1800-1880," 59-83.

access to agricultural markets and manufacturing opportunities became centers of enterprise, investment, and employment; by contrast those towns isolated from the new economy appeared backward and stagnant. In the public eye Moscow epitomized the former; the latter retained the pejorative title "provincial" and included places like Gorky's fictional creation, "the little town of Okurov," which was a bitter, satirical portrait based on the author's personal experience in exile in a Kazan district town. In these places life seemed to have stopped.

Two traits of the urban economic expansion are of particular importance to Russian urbanization in the late ninteenth century. The first characteristic is the remarkably rapid rise of trade in agricultural produce that moved through the commercial and transportation networks of certain cities. In part this trade fed the urban population, but to a far greater extent it was part of the export market for Russian farm products. The activities associated with these commercial affairs turned an increasing number of urban centers into transshipment points. The sales from agricultural marketing in these cities stimulated the internal market for goods, increasing the demand for essential consumer goods, which were produced in part by the urban manufacturing economy. Although these cities began to thrive on the basis of agricultural trade, they did so at the price of dependence on the vagaries of the Russian harvest. The close links between urban economic well-being and agriculture became a source of concern for tsarist administrators. In 1891 the Moscow provincial governor noted that urban trade suffered that year because "the bad harvest in the grain-growing regions" had "significantly curtailed the buying power of the population."^[47] Although the city had established its distinct and vital role in national economic development, it drew its material wealth largely from the countryside.

The second important characteristic of the urban economy was the multiplication of the number of occupations that were necessary to sustain and enrich urban life. These trades filled the city with a multitude of petty enterprises and laborers—the cabbies already mentioned being among the most visible—whose availability varied with the seasons, the state of the urban economy, and the level of rural hardship.

The urban entrepreneurs and traders who made their livelihood in these new or expanded sectors remain for the most part a scarcely visible segment of the urban population. The most successful left their mark on Russian public life, playing out roles not unlike those of the captains of industry in the United States who moved into the cultural world to become great

[47] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 152 (1892), 8.

patrons of the arts. One such successful industrialist, Savva Mamontov, turned from railroad building to the support of artists and musicians. These activities earned him a condescending accolade from an aristocratic acquaintance: "Merchant, kulak, petty tyrant, and to the fullest extent a self-starter. . . . [Savva Mamontov is] handsomely gifted with mind and talent."^[48] The great majority of Russia's men of affairs could not possibly fit this mold. The traces of their presence are to be found only in the practices that marked their ventures, which most often were modest and liable to failure. These traces are most easily discernible in the domain of trade.

In the early postreform period the rhythm of the annual fairs still set the pattern of urban trade. These gatherings were ephemeral affairs. A few, however, operated at an intense level of activity. Of the total of sixty-five hundred fairs in the 1860s that one Soviet historian counted, thirty-three produced over one million rubles in transactions.^[49] The most illustrious and lucrative fair was the one held each summer along the banks of the Volga in Nizhny Novgorod. In scale and variety it dwarfed all other fairs; its growth through Alexander II's reign suggests the relative unimportance of year-round urban trading at this time. In the early 1860s its business activity entered a period of remarkable prosperity, reaching an average of 116 million rubles by the end of the decade and rising to its greatest level of 243 million rubles in 1881 (in the late 1840s yearly turnover had amounted to only forty-seven million rubles).^[50] Its operations changed during those years in response to industrialization; textiles became the major commodity, and the ease of telegraphic communication made sales increasingly a matter of quick agreements that linked trade representatives and owners at the fair with their enterprises.^[51] But the great days of that fair were passing. Business would never again reach the 1881 level; by the early 1890s the average yearly turnover was down to 150 million rubles. The same decline occurred at the major Ukrainian fair at Poltava.

These fairs scarcely disrupted the daily routine of life in the city because the fair's sellers, clients, and products appeared and disappeared within a few days or weeks. Urban traders traveled regularly about the country to conduct their business whenever and wherever a major fair was held. Their

[48] Khudozhnik ushedshei Rossii (New York, 1955), 39.

[49] P. I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva (Moscow, 1948), 1:483.

[50] "Ekonomicheskoe znachenie Nizhnego Novgoroda," in Sbornik statei po voprosam (1896), 3:225.

[51] An excellent general history of the evolution of the fair in the nineteenth century is found in Anne L. Fitzpatrick, "The Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, 1840-1890" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1980), esp. chap. 2.

residence was located in one or another town; their economic activity was as itinerant and sporadic as the fairs themselves. Despite the growth of the Nizhny fair through the 1870s, this manner of organizing urban economic activity offered fewer opportunities in commercial affairs than year-round business. To those Russians who were persuaded that the economic future belonged to technology and the productive city, the fair symbolized the peculiar customs and narrow horizons that they associated with the stereotypical Russian merchant.

The regularization of trade required a place of central operations. For the bulk of traders this place was a provincial urban center. Warehouses provided a regular supply of wholesale goods; prices increasingly were set by weekly and daily trading; the distribution of goods occurred along the rail lines at urban centers where stores could meet the demand for goods thanks to the telegraph and rail transport. Moscow was the hub of this new network and the epitome of the Russian mercantile city; it was most closely linked to the national market and it was the home of some of the greatest trading houses. Its advantages included its location in the major manufacturing region of the country, its access to most major rail lines, and its proximity to major markets—including its own booming population. In the early twentieth century the statistical office of the Moscow municipality noted a fact of economic life in the previous decades, namely, that Moscow was "the most important center of manufacturing and trade [in the country]. Therefore, the prices on all manufactured goods are set by Moscow, not only for the Nizhny fair but also for the East."^[52] Trade had become a regularized business, and the practices of the Russian traders involved in the national market differed greatly from the personalized, ephemeral routine of the traditional merchant.

Trade in agricultural produce constituted the single most important sector in the new Russian urban economy. By the 1880s the movement of marketed grain, both by rail and water, involved a network of wholesale and transportation firms with links to towns and cities throughout the grain-growing regions and into the northern urban centers that were dependent on food imports from the south and east. Shipments of grain to the international market (roughly half of the total by the 1880s) were in the control of major Western firms such as the French company of Louis Dreyfus; Russian middlemen, who were the links to the grain growers in the countryside, gathered around these foreign firms.

The dominance of large companies in the grain trade was most visible in

[52] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5 (1910), d. 195, 10.

the Black Sea ports, through which passed one-third of Russia's grain exports. In the north, where the internal market was as important as foreign shipments, wholesale firms remained relatively small in size and were dispersed throughout the provincial urban centers. In all parts of Russia inequality between the buyers and the wholesale enterprises was a common characteristic. Because of the large volume of their purchases the major firms passed on to the "buyers" and "agents" (ssypshchiki ) the task of gathering the surplus at small market points and sending it to the regional and national transport centers.^[53] The profits, which were relatively small and dependent on commissions on purchases, represented the difference between ruin and prosperity for these traders.

Operating from international ports such as Odessa and regional centers such as Saratov, small operators fanned out into the countryside. Although written in the early twentieth century, a report from a town in Tambov province suggests that the origins of the pattern of urban commercial operations dated from several decades earlier. The author describes how "forty to fifty buyers, mostly from the petty bourgeoisie, of whom only a very few are well-to-do" worked with two or three employees, who earned on average fifteen to thirty rubles per month, to purchase crops, which were paid for with bank loans.^[54] They conducted their affairs on a slim margin of security and were easy prey to ruin from sudden price movements of the commodities. They and outside traders gathered the produce for shipment to Russian or foreign markets. From one "grain-trade point" in Kazan province a local official reported that these middlemen "store their supplies in warehouses and send it to Rybinsk and St. Petersburg twice a year: in spring as soon as navigation opens and in the fall."^[55]

The volatile grain market, the difficulty of obtaining bank credit, and the slim margin of profit lent an aura of petty profiteering and ruthless greed to the entire operation. The world of speculative trade in food products had little to attract the sympathy of either the intelligent or the tsarist official, each of whom for different reasons was prone to view trade and credit as parasitic. However, by the 1890s even provincial governors had to take note of what the Saratov governor termed the successful commercial operations of "very important firms" with "extensive trade" with Moscow and St. Petersburg.^[56] All along the Volga such activities made trade in agricultural

[53] A good survey of this increasingly complex commercial network is found in Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia , 60-65.

[54] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5 (1910), d. 243, 79-80.

[55] Ibid.

[56] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 176 (1894), 14.

produce a source of wealth for some businessmen and employment for large numbers of laborers and employees.

In the late nineteenth century the dominance of agricultural trade in the urban economy was evident in the southern ports on the Azov and Black Sea, including Odessa, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Mariupol, Feodosia, and the river port of Rostov-on-Don. The traders of Feodosia, whose complaint to the state in 1861 I cited earlier, acquired rail communications with the eastern Ukraine. The sleepy naval port of Nikolaev, with neither railroad nor maritime commerce in the 1860s, became the principal outlet for grain from the southern Ukraine. By the 1870s all these cities possessed port facilities, all had extensive rail links with a productive agricultural hinterland (and several had good river transport as well), and all were the seat of large grain exporting companies, most of which were foreign owned. In Rostov-on-Don, for example, three firms controlled two-thirds of the grain exported in 1898. Odessa remained the center of operations of the major international grain companies in Russia. Between the late 1870s and the late 1890s the average yearly grain shipments from these ports doubled, amounting to over two-thirds of the country's total grain exports.^[57]

The trading operations of the small concessionaires that worked for these companies depended not only on the harvest but also on accessible credit. A Soviet study has shown that funds came from "banks and other credit institutions, the [grain] exporters themselves, and railroad companies."^[58] The speculative nature of these transactions was repugnant to Odessa's city prefect of the mid 1890s: he condemned what he called the compelling desire for "quick profit" among townspeople. His dislike of the city's mercantile character was strongly colored with anti-Semitism. It also revealed his own assumptions regarding urban public life: he blamed business for the absence of "normal civic consciousness."^[59] Competition and profit-seeking determined the difference between wealth and poverty for Odessa's traders, but for the governor these activities represented moral defects.

The volatility of the export market, both in quantity and prices, reflected its dependence on harvests and on international grain markets. Exports of produce, not imports, set the pace of Odessa's economic activity. The ban

[57] An excellent survey of this southern grain trade is Zolotov, Khlebnyi eksport , esp. 185-99.

[58] Ibid., 227-28; the shortage of operating capital, which necessitated these loans, was one of the most debilitating obstacles confronting Russian enterprises, both large and small. See Fred Carstensen, "Numbers and Reality: A Critique of Foreign Investment Estimates in Tsarist Russia," in La position internationale de la France: Aspects économiques et financiers (XIXe-XXe siècles) (Paris, 1975), 281-82.

[59] Cited in Frederick Skinner, "Odessa," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 228.

on grain exports in 1892, which followed the bad harvest and famine in northeastern Russia the previous year, brought hardship to business and labor in Odessa. The city prefect reported a sudden rise in "major bankruptcies" that was accompanied by a rash of fires in business premises to double the normal rate. His suspicion that arson was the cause—and insurance repayment the goal of desperate businessmen—appeared correct after a sudden decline in fires when he warned that arsonists would be tried by military court. The sudden loss of work by dockers and day laborers—the city prefect estimated that thirty thousand lost their jobs—led the authorities to provide municipal soup kitchens and public work for three thousand.^[60] The municipality, seeking to ease the crisis of unemployment among white-collar workers, begged traders to show "'the most elementary sense of moral responsibility' by retaining their employees."^[61] The economic collapse that year represented only the most extreme example of Odessa's dependence on agricultural marketing. In the 1880s, from one year to the next the volume of exports oscillated as much as 50 percent, and prices varied by 10-20 percent.^[62] In the period between the 1870s and 1900 the long-term trends were a gradual fall in grain prices and a remarkable expansion in the volume of grain exports.

Urban commercial operations expanded throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century. Moscow's role as a trade center arose as a result of its position in the national manufacturing and transportation network. The type and scale of its commercial operations reflected this growing activity and diversity of demand. By the late 1880s trading activity was becoming rationalized as a result of the "increased application of modern methods of credit and accounting in both mercantile and banking operations," which were replacing the "traditional habits of trade such as enormous markups on small inventory."^[63] The clothing trade shifted toward the production and sale of ready-made items and one journalist wrote that "in the last ten to fifteen years" the production of these items had concentrated "in Moscow more than in any other city."^[64] Salesmen began to span out from the major urban centers. In the judgment of a Kharkov reporter, by the 1890s traveling salesmen had undermined the trading activity of small shopkeep-

[60] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 180 (1892), 3.

[61] Cited in Lewis Siegelbaum, "The Odessa Grain Trade: A Case Study in Urban Growth and Development in Tsarist Russia," Journal of European Economic History 9 (Spring 1980): 137.

[62] Reports by the Odessa city prefect made specific mention of such oscillations from year to year. See TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 116 (1887), 167 (1888), 156 (1889).

[63] Thomas Gohstand, "The Shaping of Moscow," in The City in Russian History , ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 177.

[64] Moskovskii listok , 18 July 1903.

ers and traders in the area. They "travel around to places in Russia where previously even the police had rarely appeared. . . . [They] carry with them the entire range of goods that rural traders offer and fill orders more cheaply. Also, they offer the same credit as the old general trader."^[65] One consequence of this trend was that trading operations began to be concentrated in urban areas. The city and the countryside were becoming distinct economic spheres.

Agricultural marketing brought manufacturing as well as trading activities into urban economies. The processing of farm products gave a new industrial dimension to urban business. The first census of Kiev, conducted in 1874, found 10 percent of the active population in trade and transportation and 20 percent in manufacturing, and food processing was the principal manufacturing sector.^[66] Twenty years later the provincial governor reported that the city had become "one of the major points for the grain trade . . . in the entire southern region." He also emphasized the emergence of the city's food processing industry, which produced sugar from the region's sugar beet crop and flour from the area's grain.^[67] In these commercial and industrial enterprises the state obtained an important source of new tax revenues and the population found a major source of livelihood.

Industrial production was at the center of urban economic activity only in the older Urals manufacturing towns and in the industrial settlements of northern Russia and the Ukraine. Industrialization, although profoundly altering the country's economic development, remade the urban landscape only in these regions. Mechanized textile factories dominated the skyline of some new towns, but more frequently they created distinct factory communities on the outskirts of older cities. The shift to mechanization had a major impact in urban manufacturing centers. In these cities cottage industry did not have the same marginal advantage it had in rural areas, where it remained a major part of textile manufacturing until the turn of the century. By the early 1880s Moscow's cotton textile industry included fifty-nine enterprises with 11,500 workers, and its machine construction factories employed eight thousand workers; to the northeast the new textile plants of Ivanovo Voznesensk had 13,400 workers. The author of the most thorough study of industrialization in northern Russia estimates that by

[65] Ibid., 26 January 1896.

[66] Cited in "Zapiska Senatora A. Polovtsova o sostoianii obshchestvennogo upravleniia v gorodakh Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova , (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2, pt. 2, 10-25. Michael Hamm offers detailed evidence of this trend in "Change and Continuity in Late Imperial Kiev," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 85.

[67] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 176 (1894), 14.

this time twenty-nine urban areas in this region had become centers of "major factory industry" where almost eight hundred enterprises operated with 170,000 workers. Cotton spinning factories contained twenty-five thousand power looms but also made use of twenty thousand hand looms, a good measure of the intermingling of handicraft and mechanization in and around urban manufacturing at that time.^[68]

Observers reported that the new industrial settlements of the Ukraine resembled urban frontier communities. Areas that were once sparsely settled grazing and grain lands with a few administrative centers were transformed by the appearance of towns along railroad lines that linked coal and iron ore deposits. Important factories emerged around quiet provincial capitals such as Ekaterinoslav, Prince Potemkin's "Athens of southern Russia." In the 1880s this city reemerged as a Ukrainian Pittsburgh: iron foundries began operations, and the population jumped from thirty-two thousand to seventy thousand. In 1890 the provincial governor remarked that "several hundred new houses have been built [in Ekaterinoslav and] new markets have opened." In his opinion these boomtown conditions were the result of the "grandiose iron bridge" just completed over the Dnepr river, the three new iron mills, and the expanded coal mining in the region.^[69] Writing later in the decade, the governor argued that the human impetus for the town's economic development came from a fever of speculation among "all the local inhabitants." With lyrical exaggeration he described a "trading and industrial class" that seeks out "risky enterprises in the hopes of great income—and these hopes often come true . . . ; yesterday's pauper is today's self-supporting individual, sometimes becomes a very wealthy man; land worth nothing today is sold almost on the city streets in anticipation of the construction of a factory or a railroad line."^[70] Where industrial resources and business enterprise—foreign or Russian—met, the face of the city was transformed.

The presence of captains of industry was much less important for urban employment than the activities of small manufacturers. Conditions in the city of Kharkov, for example, were closer to the norm for towns with extensive manufacturing. In 1904 its statistical bureau reported that enterprises with between fifty and two hundred workers constituted the largest category of factory in the city, but workshops (masterovye ) that employed

[68] Vasil'ev, "Formirovanie fabrichno-zavodskogo proletariata tsentral'nogo promyshlennogo raiona Rossii, 1820-1890" (Doctoral dissertation, Novocherkassk Pedagogical Institute, 1972), 2:24, table 6.

[69] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 189 (1891), 3.

[70] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 255 (1899), 7-8.

between five and nine workers were an even more important source of jobs than factories. The total work force in manufacturing was considerably smaller than that in handicrafts (including master artisans and their workers and apprentices), which totaled 22,500, or one-tenth of the entire population of the city.^[71] These quantitative measures of economic activity suggest the extent to which the Russian city remained the domain of small enterprise, even when the character of production gave a gloss of industrialization to the urban economy.^[72]

Large-scale commercial enterprises and manufacturing operations were surrounded by what one historian, referring specifically to Moscow, has termed the "institutions of barter, haggle, and street vending."^[73] Although these "institutions" retained all the color and exotic character of the prereform city, their pervasiveness and middle-class clientele made them an integral part of the new urban economy. The numbers and miserable conditions of the small traders and artisans, many classified by tsarist statute as petty bourgeois, provided tangible evidence of the isolation of wealthy entrepreneurs in the merchant town.

Most trade and handicraft businesses were extremely small in scale, especially in the western towns of the Pale of Settlement. Tiny shops abounded in towns such as Minsk, where there was one store for every twenty inhabitants (the norm for all Russian cities was one store for every one hundred to two hundred inhabitants). Competition in these cities was keen and profits small.^[74] The city of Vilna, one of the largest in the Pale, had three times the number of artisans as distant Saratov even though the two cities were roughly the same size. One economist reported that too many small handicraft enterprises created "fierce competition [that] reduces pay for work to the lowest possible level."^[75] Such conditions perpetuated and even increased the number of families living at subsistence levels.

[71] Cited in D. Bagalei and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Khar'kov, 1912), 2:550-51.

[72] This issue is the subject of a battle of correlation coefficients (based on urban employment statistics) between historical geographers. One side has concluded that a high relationship between urbanization and industrialization did not exist in late-nineteenth-century Russia, but this conclusion is contested by the other side. See Roger Thiede, "Urbanization and Industrialization in Pre-revolutionary Russia," Professional Geographer 25 (February 1973): 16-21; Robert Lewis and Richard Rowland, "A Further "A Further Investigation of Urbanization and Industrialization in Pre-revolutionary Russia," Professional Geographer 26 (May 1974): 177-82.

[73] Joseph Bradley, "Moscow: From Big Village to Metropolis," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 19.

[74] Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti , 1:9-10.

[75] R. M. Blank, Rol' evreiskogo naseleniia v ekonomicheskoi zhizni Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1908), 20-21.

In the opinion of one observer, over half of the population of Berdichev, one of the cities of refuge for Jews who were expelled from villages in the Pale, was living "from day to day."^[76]

The impoverished artisans and traders were numerous throughout Russia and were dependent for survival on the commercial, manufacturing, and administrative fortunes of the new city. In St. Petersburg in the early 1890s the police prefect judged that only one-fourth of its artisans were "more or less prosperous economically."^[77] It is unlikely that the level of wealth in any other city surpassed that of the capital. The poverty among the bulk of the sixteen thousand "hereditary guild artisans" of Moscow was such that it excluded over 90 percent of them from the right (which was defined by a minimum payment of tax on property) to participate in the artisan society's elections.^[78] Little distinction existed between handicraft work and trade: artisans sold their own wares, and traders at times sold goods of their own making as well as those that they bought. Secondhand products were as salable as new ones. Some poor townspeople eked out a miserable income trading used items that had been passed on from hand to hand.^[79] As in the mid 1800s, rural employment remained common for many of the urban poor. Farm labor was an attractive alternative where agricultural estates required hired hands, as in the Saratov region. In 1893 the Saratov governor commented on the decline in the number of artisans in his province, which was caused by a good harvest that made "field labor . . . more profitable than artisanal pursuits."^[80]

Poor townspeople, even those with some skills, were forced by economic necessity to take whatever work was available. Artisans often moved in search of a better place of work; a survey of artisans in several provincial towns in the mid 1890s found that a large majority were born elsewhere. Owners usually employed one or two workers and one apprentice and operated on a very small scale. Their hours were long—twelve to thirteen were the average—and most did not even own their place of work.^[81] This profile was probably typical of what we might loosely term the urban "underclass" of the Russian city at the end of the century.

[76] Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti , 2:121-22.

[77] "Vsepoddanneishi otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 200 (1893), 33.

[78] Moskovskii listok , 25 June 1892.

[79] Two Soviet ethnographers explore this aspect of petty commerce in the town of Kaluga in the late nineteenth century in L. A. Anokhina and M. N. Shmeleva, Byt gorodskogo naseleniia srednei polosy RSFSR v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Moscow, 1977), 72.

[80] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 176 (1894), 46.

[81] This survey, from which I extract data for only a sample of artisans from four towns (Aleksandrovsk, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kremenchug), was never published. The manuscripts are found in TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 37 (1893).

As before, the hereditary estate divisions were virtually meaningless among these petty entrepreneurs. The Saratov Artisan Society, official organ of the hereditary artisan estate, numbered nine hundred masters in 1881 at a time when the municipality counted three thousand artisans, most of whom belonged to the category of "temporary artisan." As in earlier years, a large number of the "master artisans" of the society in fact came from other estates; half were from the petty bourgeoisie, almost 20 percent were peasant, and 3 percent belonged to the nobility.^[82] In Moscow the famous Yaroslavl peasant tavern keepers were one visible reminder of the mobility (and regularity) of movement across estate borders.

One reason that the merchant city of Russia differed substantially from the Western capitalist model was that the Russian network of banks and credit institutions was inadequate and underfuned. Only in the 1860s did a stature appear offering "full freedom of operations in all Russia" to private banks. From that time on they were able to tap private capital funds that had previously had no regular outlet for investment.^[83] Financial opportunities grew as the demand for credit expanded in the second half of the century. By 1875 there were over 350 private and municipal banks in Russia, and private reserves amounted to 1.5 billion rubles, twenty times the credit reserves fifteen years before.^[84] This expansion proved excessive and risky in the unstable economic conditions of the 1870s. According to the provincial governor, in Kiev the commercial banks were "giving out easy but expensive credit," and bad loans and corruption suddenly brought "extemely tense conditions on the money market."^[85] One might rephrase his bureaucratic view by suggesting that inexperience and a precarious urban economy led to the contraction of much-needed credit.

The situation became more threatening in the economic recession of the mid 1880s. Municipal banks were particularly hard hit because they operated with lower reserves and less security than the commercial banks. In the 1860s and 1870s over eighty municipalities had tried their hand at banking. The municipality of Tambov had benefited substantially from the operations of its bank, obtaining several million rubles yearly in profits. Municipal public services had expanded and local businesses had obtained relatively easy access to credit. But agriculture was the basis of the municipality's banking enterprise, and a poor harvest and lower grain prices in

[82] "Otchet po revizii Saratovskogo remeslennogo upravleniia," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1 (1880-81), d. 145, 50-51.

[83] I. I. Levin, Aktsionernye kommercheskie banki v Rossii (Petrograd, 1917), 1:20-21.

[84] Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva , 2:108-9.

[85] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet." TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 69, d. 435 (1877), 3.

1883 brought this golden age to an end. Bankruptcies spread and the bank's risky loans collapsed. Even the secret police paid attention; in his yearly report the provincial gendarme officer noted ominously that "the bank is rocking on its foundations [shataetsia ] and has almost stopped making loans."^[86] Many municipal banks folded in the 1880s as a result of the economic instability of their towns and rural hinterlands. For example, the Moscow provincial governor anticipated that nothing could save two banks in district towns because they had each lost over half of their small reserves and held very "questionable loans."^[87] The instability of the municipal banks was both a cause and an effect of the fragility of the local economy.

The prosperous times in the 1890s proved a boom period for banking as well as for the economy as a whole. The commercial banks increased their provincial branches from 94 in 1893 to 274 in 1900.^[88] By the 1890s a variety of other financial institutions such as credit societies were able to provide small loans to their customers. More numerous facilities and abundant funds created the possibility for more varied financial operations, including a modest boom on the stock market as companies sought public funding. A note of capitalist exuberance was evident in the comment of one banker that "almost all major cities and even small towns" participate in stock trading, some with their own stock exchanges and many more with "little stock exchanges" that are located in "almost all . . . provincial branches and bank offices."^[89] The opportunities for speculative investment also included urban real estate. In some cities municipal officials and landlords worked together to promote land development and quick profits. One reporter for a Kharkov newspaper sounded a well-known Western theme when he complained of housing that was "built only to give a satisfactory return on invested capital, neglecting the basic needs and conveniences of the apartment dwellers."^[90] Landlords and rentiers did not figure alongside the great manufacturers in the pantheon of civic leaders, but they represented an updated counterpart to the traditional merchant in the sense that they sought to find a safe place in the new urban economy.

The shortage of credit remained a serious problem for small-scale producers. Tula metalworking artisans complained in the mid 1890s that the "principal brake on production came from the complete absence of

[86] Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (TsGAOR), f. 102 (tret'e deloproizvodstvo ), d. 89, chast' (chap.) 55 (1884), 5.

[87] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 219 (1890), 52-54.

[88] I. F. Gindin, Gosudarstvennyi bank i ekonomicheskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva, 1861-1892 (Moscow, 1960), 87.

[89] Levin, Aktsionernye kommercheskie banki 1:263-64.

[90] Quoted in Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:77.

credit."^[91] Only in the 1890s did small credit institutions such as mutual credit societies and municipal pawn shops begin to serve petty traders and artisans. Only very small sums were loaned—nine rubles on an average—and demand far exceeded available loans. When it opened in 1891, Kharkov's municipal pawnshop exhausted its fifty thousand ruble loan credits in three months; it had to turn to the municipal bank to obtain a two hundred thousand ruble loan.^[92]

The concentration of wealth in the hands of a very small urban mercantile and propertied elite that lived in the capitals and a few provincial cities was one of the most notable features of Russian urban growth in the postreform years. By one Russian geographer's count, in the early twentieth century nearly one-third of the officially designated cities (227 of 761) did not even produce one hundred thousand rubles yearly from trade and industry.^[93] However, a relatively small number of towns presented their inhabitants with a wide range of economic opportunities and employment.

Thanks to the municipal statute of 1870 we possess an approximate profile of the distribution of propertied and commercial wealth in the cities. The male electorate was divided into three curiae according to taxes on trade, manufacturing, and taxed real estate. Each curia had to contribute an equal share of the total taxes, which divided the three curiae into groups whose members possessed about the same taxable wealth. The overall range in taxes was enormous. The minimal payments (which were primarily made by small artisans and traders) were twenty kopeks in Nizhny Novgorod's third curia in 1890; members of the second curia paid between twenty and two hundred rubles; the highest tax in the third curia that year (presumably the commercial and manufacturing leaders of the city) was seventeen hundred rubles.^[94]

By this crude measure of taxed wealth the elite numbered only a handful. In Kiev in 1879 a total of 120 individuals (3 percent of the city's 4,200 enfranchised male residents) belonged to the first curia, among whom slightly over half were officially classified as merchants; even with the addition of the second curia, well-to-do Kievans totaled only 600. Kiev's third curia had twice as many merchants as the first two curiae combined, but they were intermingled with the more numerous petty bourgeois and

[91] Quoted in Moskovskii listok , 7 January 1896.

[92] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:569-70.

[93] V. P. Semenov-Tianshanskii, "Gorod i derevnia v evropeiskoi Rossii," Zapiski po otdelu statistiki Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 10 (1910):73-77.

[94] N. N. Baidakov, "Vvedenie Gorodovogo polozheniia 1870 g. v Nizhnem Novgorode i vybory v 1870-90-kh gg.," Uchenye zapiski Gor'kovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, seriia gumanitarnykh nauk 105 (1969):77.

"privileged" (noble) electors.^[95] Urban economic growth during the 1870s and 1880s increased the isolation of the wealthy voters in the first two curiae as the middle ranks of the propertied and trading townspeople swelled. In Moscow in 1872, 2,400 voters belonged to the first and second curiae and 15,000 to the third; fifteen years later the numbers of voters in the first two curiae had shrunk to 1,600, and the third curia had grown to 18,000.^[96] Although opportunities for small-scale enterprise abounded in cities such as Moscow, the path to substantial wealth was accessible only to a few.

The array of municipal electoral statistics, although they make no distinction between productive and nonproductive wealth, suggests more clearly than contemporary memoirs and official reports the limits to economic enterprise in what I term the merchant city. To the extent that this label is meaningful it refers not to one but to two spheres of urban economic activity. On the one hand, the typical occupations of propertied townspeople involved both "haggle and barter" urban trade and retail and wholesale commerce that was dependent largely on marketing agricultural produce. This world was one of risky affairs without substantial financial rewards, enterpreneurial glory, or technical sophistication. On the other hand, the captains of Russian trade and industry were a tiny social elite far above the masses of propertied townspeople. Presumably, they embodied a way of life that was respected and admired by the small-scale traders and manufacturers but that was largely unattainable both because of the constraints of the urban economy and the instability of commercial affairs. Thus, the term merchant city should be most closely identified with petty enterprise and a modest level of wealth.

To those who were repelled by the rough-hewn economic traits of the Russian city, the West offered beguiling models of sophisticated and successful enterprise. The English writer Samuel Smiles served up the most highly touted formula for middle class success in his book Self-Help . It turned the Protestant admonition that "God helps those who help themselves" into an ethical prescription that was suitable to the industrial age. Translated into Russian in 1866, it must have found a large audience, for it went through eight printings in the next fifteen years.^[97]

In visual form a model for the ideal city of industry and science was

[95] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," vol. 2, pt. 1, 95, table 41.

[96] E. A. Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie v 70-80-kh godakh XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1956), 49, 57.

[97] The publishing record of the Russian editions of Self-Help is found in the "alphabetical service catalogue" (sluzhebnyi alfavitnyi katalog ) of the Leningrad Saltykov-Shchedrin library.

ready at hand. From the time of the French Revolution, expositions had been used in Western Europe to bring artifacts of national progress to the public eye. Pride in the industrial economy and concern with the prestige of nations found their most spectacular visual forms in the many world's fairs that were held in Western Europe, starting with the London Exposition of 1851 and occurring frequently in subsequent decades. Taken in isolation, each exposition's individual displays and separate pavilions laid out the wares of manufacturers, the resources of nature, and the achievements of science and technology in the Western world. The enormous dimensions and planned activities of these fairs attracted millions of visitors to specially designed buildings, gardens, and walkways that the planners had turned into a sort of utopian city of the future. One anthropologist has argued that nineteenth-century world's fairs created "idealized consumer cities within their walls. They presented a sanitized view of the world with no poverty, no war, no social problems, and very little nature. World's fairs promulgated a whole view of life."^[98] To the Russians who were attracted by the power and prestige of the industrialized nations and by the cultural and economic dynamism of Western cities, these grandiose events represented an encapsulated vision of Russia's path to progress.

Gradually the scope and contents of the Russian expositions took on the shape of miniature cities. Small-scale replicas of Western expositions, monumental in concept but constrained by a lack of vision of the future and by paltry funding, had appeared periodically in St. Petersburg and Moscow from the 1820s. They were attractive principally to manufacturers seeking to promote new products. Sponsored by either the St. Petersburg or the Moscow municipality with some support from the state (particularly the Ministry of Finance), the "expositions of manufacturing" resembled the great fairs in the West only in miniature. Decorated in palatial style and displaying a limited selection of luxury and industrial products, such public gatherings were intended for a small elite. The "luxury and glitter" of the 1861 exposition in St. Petersburg brought the somewhat wistful thought to one visitor that he might be in Paris or London. He reminded his readers and himself that "in Russia people also know how to live, there is a demand for refined, elegant [products], and there are those who can satisfy these needs."^[99] Neither he nor the organizers of the exposition thought of its displays of manufacturing skills and wealth as a unified model of civic progress.

[98] Burton Benedict, "The Anthropology of World's Fairs," in The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition , ed. Burton Benedict (Berkeley, 1983), 5.

[99] M. Ia. Kittary, Obozrenie vystavki 1861 goda (St. Petersburg, 1862), 7.

Twenty years later, however, the Moscow exposition of 1882 assumed the trappings of a major national event and its grounds assumed the form of a minicity. For the first time, land on the outskirts of the city was set aside for a complex of buildings to house the displays. The exposition site was linked to the central city by special transportation—a horse-drawn carriage line—and a railroad spur that permitted passenger coaches from the main lines to reach the edge of the exposition. To emphasize its importance in Russian life the organizers gave the exposition the title "All-Russian Artistic-Manufacturing Exposition" and added agriculture to the fourteen fields they judged to be suitable for display. When completed, its array of buildings bore no resemblance to the pseudopalaces of the earlier Russian manufacturing fairs. Its central hall of metal and glass was an imitation of London's Crystal Palace.

Incongruities in tone between the modern and the traditional appeared to remind the visitors that the exposition represented an unusual event in Russian public life. The festivities on opening day mixed two Russian societies. The Russia of orders and titles was present in the persons of the metropolitan of Moscow, Grand Prince Vladimir Alexandrovich, and the Moscow governor-general. Merchant Russia was represented by the leaders of the Moscow stock exchange and merchant society and the minister of finance, for whom the exposition had a specifically economic purpose. The opening ceremonies included an orchestral performance for the elite that was followed by popular festivities (gulian'e ) for the people. By the time the exposition closed at the end of the summer it had attracted an estimated one million visitors. It offered both an escape from and an alternative to the Moscow of taverns and slums, beggars and migrant laborers, factories and shanties.

The promise of a new city, hinted at rather than proclaimed openly, appeared repeatedly in the evaluations and reports of the fair. In part such documents reflected their authors' public or official positions, but they were also serious efforts to capture the meaning—if not the actual content—of the fair as a major public event. Three aspects of the fair suggested that it presented an idealized urban model. First, for the exhibitors it constituted a sort of giant store that "accurately represented" the achievements of Russian manufacturing and "acquainted the public" with the many items for sale.^[100] In other words, the exposition was a marketplace. Second, the entire organization and disposition of the buildings, the displays (educa-

[100] Soobrazhenie Kievskogo vspomogatel'nogo komiteta po ustroistvu Vserossiiskoi vystavki (Kiev, n.d.), 1.

tional and artistic as well as economic), and the orderly movement of people was an example of a collective endeavor that was intended to be on a par with the best attainments of the West. In the self-serving words of the final report: "The outstanding order reigning at the exposition makes Russia appear to be a fully European country, enlightened and well-ordered [blagoustroenno ]."^[101] The ephemeral city of the exposition brought the borders of Europe to the Russian merchant city.

Third, the very shortcomings of the exposition were noteworthy of the labors remaining to be undertaken. Although the objects on display typified the best Russia could create, in the judgment of one observer the Russian "public" appeared to be on a cultural level far below the exposition itself. He considered the viewers to be typical of "intellectually backward [Russians], who have inadequate means of communication, insufficient awareness [glasnost '], and little precise information about Russia."^[102] Such language could easily have appeared in any educated Russian's description of the typical townsperson. For educated Russians, then, the idealized city of the exposition was not of one piece. The criteria of excellence established by those who constructed the exposition discredited the very population whom it was intended to instruct and enlighten. How could the city be the source of productivity and progress in the face of such obstacles? The organizers had few answers to that question.

The sense of a special urban vocation, embodied in a national exposition, appeared even more prominently in the next (and last) all-Russian fair, held in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. The element of symbolic meaning was obvious to officials and observers, who pointedly commented on the fair's quest to demonstrate the spread of modernity from the capitals to the provinces, and from the core of Westernized Russia to a city located on the borderlands of Asia. A few cities, for example, Kazan and Ekaterinburg, had attempted ambitious expositions on their own in the intervening years, but only the Nizhny Novgorod event received the political patronage and public attention inevitably associated with a national event. For the occasion the city itself became exemplary, installing (at state expense) electric streetcar lines and street lighting. The lighting turned the city, in the words of an exuberant young newspaperman named Maxim Gorky, into "a hill of lights, as though it had been sprinkled with stars from heaven."^[103]

[101] B. P. Bezobrazov, ed., Otchet o Vserossiiskoi khudozhestvenno-promyshlennoi vystavki, 1882 g. (St. Petersburg, 1883), 6:7.

[102] Ibid., 11.

[103] Odesskie novosti , 11 June 1896.

The exposition itself was constructed on land at the junction of the Oka and Volga rivers not far from the site of the traditional annual trading fair. To underline its essential difference from the crowded, ramshackle buildings of the trade fair, it was laid out in a vast "garden city" that was twice the size of the Moscow exposition. Its main pavilions incorporated elements of the latest Western architectural style (labeled by Russians as "style moderne"). They displayed models of modern industry and technology, cultural and educational materials, exhibits of "progressive" municipalities, and even artifacts from the exotic Russian borderlands of Siberia and Central Asia. Nicholas II's much heralded visit to the exposition that summer brought the highest possible imprimatur to the efforts of the modernists (the most important of whom was Minister of Finance Sergei Witte) to make this artificial "city on a hill" the symbol of national economic and cultural progress. It constituted the major public event in Russia that year and attracted nearly one million visitors (despite complaints of poor rail connections and weeks of rain).

Like the Moscow exposition fourteen years before, the Nizhny Novgorod exposition proved an occasion for observers to assess the gap between the ideal and the real city, between technological progress and the old merchant ways. The decision of the organizers to locate the fair in a provincial town was a daring act because it broke with the assumption of the Westernizers that Russia beyond the capitals was uniformly backward, even "Asiatic." The organizers hoped to make clear to the country that European civilization, in its Russian variant, was moving eastward into Asia and that urban modernity had spread far beyond the borders of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The official guide claimed that provincial cities such as Nizhny Novgorod "have acquired 'meaning' as industrial and education centers in Russia."^[104] In their judgment the traditional Nizhny Novgorod fair no longer typified urban economic practices, and the exposition, with the old fairgrounds nearby for contrast, proved the point.

The opinions of the visitors, for whom we have only the words of contemporary journalists and writers, may have been less sanguine. The perfection and glitter of the exhibits contrasted sharply with the poverty of the workers at the exposition; the modernity of the electric lights and street cars in the town did not penetrate the dirty, dark side streets. The exhibits were "extremely visible," one writer remarked sarcastically, "amidst our provincial order where nothing dims their contours" and where "the level of knowledge . . . stands at a point one hundred years behind that repre-

[104] "Ustroistvo vystavki," in Opisanie Vystavki , ed. V. Kovalevsky (Moscow, 1896), 2.

sented" in the exposition.^[105] His culturist view that modernity was a human quality that was largely defined by education and Western learning assigned the typical provincial townsperson to the ranks of the backward and benighted (summed up in the scornful Russian term obyvatel '). More tolerant social critics such as Maxim Gorky, however, took the economic meaning of the fair very seriously. To him the fair was a "fairy-tale" world of "miracles of technology" that served as "publicity" for manufacturers and that masked the "imperfections of human life."^[106] Whether viewed from either the culturist or the technological perspective, the exposition city did not represent a tangible or attainable reality.

The duality of the merchant city in those decades emerges vividly in the visual ambiguity and critical judgments of the Nizhny Novgorod exposition. In one sense the contradictions of Russian urbanism emerged most clearly in the provinces because the livelihood of the expanding economies of provincial Russian towns depended heavily on trade with the countryside and on the harvests. The perfection of modern crafts and industrial machinery, which was the main attraction of the exposition, represented industrial modernity in cities such as St. Petersburg, but it was irrelevant in the lives of the small traders and manufacturers who made up the propertied business groups of the provincial urban centers.

Taken separately, the exhibits had the specific intent of promoting the products of those few entrepreneurs with the incentive, in the form of capital, markets, and skills, to adopt the most advanced industrial and technological tools. Taken altogether, however, the exposition served the larger goal of promoting a rational, productive ordering of public activities in a modern city. From the perspective of Russian urbanization in those years this vision was so unattainable that it was an urban utopia drawn to the measure of the Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte. Although urban economic practices had evolved far beyond those of the mid-century merchant estate and bore little resemblance to the government's formalistic estate regulations, they were also distant from the model of technology and science that the Westernizers proposed in the idealized city of the national exposition.

Urban Migrants and Migrant Cities

Visitors to the Moscow Exposition of 1882 could quickly travel between the fairgrounds and the center of Moscow on a new tramway. If they chose,

[105] N. Iakobson, Chto takoi byla Nizhegorodskaia vystavka? (St. Petersburg, 1897), 3.

[106] Odesskie novosti , 21 June 1896.

they could pass through the notorious slum neighborhood of Khitrovka. The contrast between the fair's images of urban modernity and the misery of the Khitrovka dwellers illustrates another duality embedded in Russian urbanism in those decades: the slum had no place in the dreams of civic leaders, public-spirited intellectuals, and progressive entrepreneurs. It represented a grim reminder of the depths to which any townsperson could fall when misfortune struck. The deeper meaning of the slum, one that applied to all the growing urban centers of the country, lay in the presence of thousands of migrant laborers who congregated there seeking work. Their attire and mannerisms identified them as strangers in the city. Writing at the end of the century, one Moscow journalist identified the arrival each spring of this "enormous mass of laborers" as a sort of invasion. "They fill Khitrov square to overflowing, . . . and drink, eat, and even sleep right on the pavement."^[107] The appearance of crowds of migrants in the city was a visual reminder that the country's urban growth was bringing the countryside to the city.

This trend troubled contemporaries and remains a perplexing issue confronting historians of Russian society in the late tsarist years. Did this migration constitute a sort of "peasantization" of the cities or, on the contrary, were many of the new arrivals rapidly adapting to urban culture? Was the expansion of the urban population an indication of the beginning of a profound process of integration of Russian society or did it mark a trend toward social turmoil that would further accentuate the division between "society" and "the people?" From the urban perspective the experience of the migrants has two historical dimensions: first, the practices of the new and temporary residents in Russia's urban areas; second, the perception of this event by outsiders—tsarist officials, municipal activists, intellectuals—with their own programs for urban development and their own appreciations of the place of the masses in urban society.^[108]

The census of 1897 tells a dramatic tale of the rapid surge of the population of the country's cities. In absolute figures the urban population doubled in size in the last half of the nineteenth century, rising from 5.2 million in 1856 to 12.2 million in 1897.^[109] We can appreciate the human

[107] "Khitrovka i ee obyvateli," Russkoe slovo , 27 May 1897.

[108] In the wide array of studies touching on migration two recent works that look closely at the experience of urban migrants are Robert Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), and Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985). A statistical study based largely on aggregate, provincial-level data is Barbara Anderson, Internal Migration during Modernization in late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton, 1980).

[109] These data are conveniently grouped in the appendix to Thomas Fedor, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1975), 179-216.

dimensions of the urban migration by noting three trends: the increase in city populations came largely from new settlers, it touched a relatively small number of urban areas, and it resulted as much or more from a rapid turnover of migrants as from permanent settlement in the city. First, settled townspeople were responsible for only a small part of urban growth; a decline of birth rates among this segment of urban dwellers is apparent in the last decades of the nineteenth century.^[110] Thus, the impression of contemporary urban observers that they were undergoing an invasion of outsiders is more than a vivid figure of speech. In sheer numbers these strangers were overwhelming the native townspeople.

Second, the destination of most of the new urban dwellers was a limited number of cities scattered across European Russia. The spectacular expansion of the capitals is only the most vivid evidence of the bias the migrants showed in choosing their cities of temporary residence. Their choices played a decisive part in establishing Russia's pattern of urbanization. Unfortunately, only the all-Russian census of 1897 contains the demographic data we need to construct a profile of these cities; even this source gives reliable information only on migrants for cities with a population above twenty thousand.^[111] With these limitations a statistical examination of the census results reveals the outlines of a cluster (or "family") of urban centers so strongly shaped by migration that I have labeled them "migrant cities." These towns constituted the locus of urban growth in the last half of the nineteenth century, and epitomized, both demographically and socially, the "new city" of late tsarist Russia.

The essential features of these new cities are apparent when we examine the urban centers in 1897 where over half the inhabitants were—in the language of the Central Statistical Committee—"born outside their place of residence." Nearly sixty migrant towns of over 15,000 population had emerged in European Russia by the end of the century (see table 1), and on average they had doubled in population since the 1860s. They ranged in size from Moscow, which grew from 350,000 to over one million between 1856 and 1897, to new industrial settlements like Ivanovo Voznesensk, which had expanded from a village of one thousand to a city of 54,000, and

[110] M. B. Kurman, "Vosproizvodstvo naseleniia dorevoliutsionnogo krupnogo goroda (po primera Khar'kova)," in Brachnost', rozhdaemost' i smertnost' v Rossii i v SSSR, ed. A. G. Vishnevskii (Moscow, 1977), 239-40.

[111] B. V. Tikhonov, Pereselenie v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka po materialam perepisi 1897 g. i pasportnoi statistiki (Moscow, 1978), 54-55, table 7; the author discovered that in towns with populations of less than twenty thousand the census takers classified both those born in the city and those born in the surrounding district as urban "local born."

provincial commercial centers like Saratov, which grew from 61,000 to 137,000. The rapid growth of the migrant cities stood in sharp contrast to those towns in which in 1897 over one-half of the inhabitants were locally born. Typically, their populations had declined in the two decades before the census.

Although urban expansion had begun in some areas in the first half of the nineteenth century, it assumed nationwide proportions in the reform era. Kiev, whose experience was probably similar to that of many other migrant cities, reached a population of nearly one hundred thousand by 1874 (the year of its first comprehensive census). In that year only 28 percent of its inhabitants were born in the city. Similarly, nearly three-fourths of Moscow's population in 1882, when its first city census was held, were migrants (that is, born elsewhere), a proportion that was sustained in 1902 when the municipality conducted its second census. In simple demographic terms the migrant city is characterized by the predominance of outsiders.^[112]

In the descriptions of observers the migrant invariably appeared in peasant garb. The 1897 census gave substance to these impressions when it reported that the typical migrant belonged to the peasant estate. The emphasis on the rural laborer, repeated often in contemporary literature and historical studies, is somewhat misleading, however, because it suggests that movement only occurred between town and countryside. The censuses reveal that a substantial proportion of migrants belonged to estates other than the peasantry. The migrant cities were a social magnet for the entire population. Among those who belonged to the urban and privileged estates of Kiev (petty bourgeois, merchant, noble) in 1874, at least half had moved to the city from elsewhere. This proportion appears to have remained relatively constant to the end of the century. Although not as detailed as the Kiev census, the 1897 census suggests that it held true for migrant towns throughout the country (see table 1). Privileged and unprivileged, relatively well-to-do merchants and poor traders and artisans, peasants and petty bourgeois were all engaged in the creation of migrant cities.

Third, the population was remarkably mobile. Migrants came and went from the migrant towns, as did townspeople. The apparent incremental character of urban growth is belied by data that indicate the moves of migrants within and between towns. Seasonal laborers (otkhodniki ) were the most visible new arrivals who soon left for other destinations (in their

[112] "Zapiska o sostoianii Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2, pt. 1, 10-25; on Moscow see also Anderson, Internal Migration , 83, table 4.3.

case, usually back to their villages). Bradley's careful study of the Moscow censuses of 1882 and 1902 shows that at the time of both censuses about one-fifth of the migrants had resided in Moscow for less than two years. In the ten-year period at the turn of the century that separated the two Petersburg city censuses, over half of the locally born dwellers had departed, a situation that James Bater refers to as "itinerant residence." By contrast, slightly over two-fifths of Moscow residents in 1882 and 1902 had lived there for over ten years, long enough perhaps to identify themselves as Muscovites.^[113]

These figures tell us nothing about the subjective meaning of social mobility and stability to urban dwellers. They suggest, however, that we should pay less attention to the peasant as migrant and more attention to the conditions created by urban migration. In mid century urban commissions across the country reported the high rate of temporary migration of the lower urban estates in search of employment (see chapter 1). Decades later, the scale of this population movement had increased dramatically, and a familiar array of practices that linked at least some of the urban laboring population with the peasant migrants remained in existence. For all their shortcomings the census data reveal the extent to which these migrant cities were places that were occupied by and, in some areas, appropriated by a transitory population. The impression that the migrant cities were growing in an absolute sense is based in part on a statistical mirage: the increasing turnover of migrants. This mirage, however, seemed like a reality for contemporary observers. However short and transitory their stay in any one city, the migrants left a strong imprint on the social complexion of Russian urban areas.

Any inquiry into Russian nineteenth-century urbanization needs to pay close attention to the demographic peculiarities of the process, which can be gleaned through a statistical analysis of the 1897 census. Despite its imperfections, this census is the only source with which to construct a picture of the typical migrant city in European Russia.^[114] When the numerical totals compiled by census takers for the populations of Russia's towns

[113] James Bater, "Transience, Residential Persistence, and Mobility in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900-1910," Slavic Review 39 (June 1980):240-42; see also Robert Johnson, "Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century," Slavic Review 35 (December 1976):659; Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 137, table 2.

[114] On the problems of the census see A. Kotelnikov, Istoriia proizvodstva i razrabotki vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia 1897 g . (St. Petersburg, 1907); Barbara Anderson's study of urban migration (Internal Migration during Modernization ) groups census data primarily by provinces, a very different demographic perspective from the one that I have adopted.

(which must be restricted only to those of over twenty thousand inhabitants) are reduced to percent values, they can be used to identify the unique characteristics of the cities of high migration. The method known as "discriminant" analysis, explained in the appendix, identifies a cluster of social traits that are shared by all the migrant cities and, conversely, that are absent from the towns where a majority of the population is locally born. When statistically defined, these traits are historically meaningful and suggest the substantial outlines of the social profile of the migrant city (see appendix, table A-1).

The traits most strongly related to migrant cities fit a pattern one might intuitively have expected to find in a type of city inhabited largely by a transient population, namely: comparatively few large households (defined as those with over five members); a large percentage of adults of working age (twenty to forty years old); a relatively high level of people of the urban and peasant estates from distant regions (beyond the province in which the town was located); and a significant proportion of people living in communal (artel' ) housing. In the abstract terms of statistical values this social profile contains the characteristics of a family of cities whose single outstanding human characteristic is adaptability to sustained labor. Migrants often supported a large, extended family, but it was left behind. Communal living was favored because of its low costs to the laborers, who, in addition to living expenses, had to pay taxes and, often, the expenses of a distant family out of their meager income. The migrants' hopes for employment focused on particular cities that were accessible by railroad, even if they were located far from home. Thus, labor and a way of life that was appropriate to long- or short-term urban employment appear to be the salient qualities that shaped the migrant cities. From the point of view of the incoming population these cities were primarily work places.

Observers of this transformation of the city attempted to make sense of the experience in terms that reflected their own understanding of Russia's social order and economic future. To tsarist provincial administrators and municipal leaders urban migration represented a phenomenon of growing political importance that challenged their sense of social and public order. Seasonal laborers were the most visible of the migrants, and their presence was profoundly disturbing to officials because to them these newcomers personified poverty and disorder. The "thousands of workers" whom a tsarist inspector found in the Volga port town of Samara in 1880 "waiting on the squares to find work" were living "on the edges of the river with only the sky as a roof." He noted that their situation was particularly terrible in bad weather: most were "terribly poor, not even owning a

coat."^[115] He was shocked at the indifference that the municipality displayed toward these migrants, not only because his sense of moral and patriarchal justice demanded that the authorities accept responsibility but also because he, as other officials, feared the presence of the urban mob.

The impersonality of the urban labor market meant that employment was at the mercy of economic cycles and the whim of employers or foremen. This impersonality and the conditions it produced seemed a new and threatening social problem to conservative Russians, and it was one to which tsarist social policies had no easy solution. What sense could the authorities make of situations such as the one reported by a gendarme officer in Rostov-on-Don in 1884, when, as a result of an economic recession, a "mass of local and migrant workers, without any occupation, roam the streets and fill the taverns"?^[116] In the well-ordered estate society these unemployed, even if local workers, were out of place because they had no fixed abode. To tsarist authorities they were a public burden that had to be dealt with by the municipalities and the police. But they could not be contained, both because of their numbers—the reports invariably cited "thousands" or "tens of thousands" of migrants in these commercial centers—and because so many were temporarily uprooted.

The official status of most urban migrants was doubly uncertain. They were not living in their ascribed place of residence (which for the lower ranks, both urban or rural, was fixed as the place of birth and could only be moved with great difficulty) and were often in violation of the regulations on internal travel. In theory the passport system gave legal standing to temporary migration, but it attempted to draw a distinction between short-term travel, regulated by "certificates," and year-long absences requiring special passports. In practice migrants often appear to have dispensed with proper documentation. The challenge that urban migration posed to officials was not simply one of laborers lacking proper documentation. By the 1880s the rising tide of migrants was beyond the capacity of the police to take account of the new arrivals. Official reports continued to claim some awareness of the scope of violations, but they were unconvincingly precise in their descriptions of the problem. For example, Tsaritsyn's police asserted that of the ten thousand seasonal laborers who arrived during the 1887 navigation season, one-fourth lacked passports.^[117] More revealing was

[115] "Reviziia Senatora Shamshina," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1, d. 23, 4.

[116] "Politicheskoe sostoianie Ekaterinoslavksoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 59, ch. 27 (1885), 20.

[117] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223 (1888), d. 168, 18.

the admission of the Nizhny Novgorod governor at the end of the century that the "enormous influx of temporary inhabitants, most of whom belong to the lower classes and find lodging in flophouses, empty municipal lands, and on the piers," was so great that the police could not keep track of the "overflow."^[118]

This flood of migration was not always considered to be inherently threatening to public order. In certain instances officials used their powers with some discretion, replacing the bureaucratic formalism of the tsarist state with a more flexible understanding of the condition of these newcomers. According to one investigation of the capital's "lower depths," the Petersburg police and justices of the peace collaborated in selective law enforcement among the "thousands" of passportless inhabitants whom they captured. They punished only those who were judged "harmful" and permitted the "harmless" ones to stay, even providing some with temporary residence permits until their passports reached them.^[119] This relative flexibility—or laxness—operated within the context of state surveillance of the outsiders: the authorities judged whether they were fit or unfit for residence in the city. The arbitrariness of this process opened the door to bribe taking. There is an abundant record that bribes were taken and that in their own way they made the police accomplices in opening the city to the undocumented migrants. To the extent that this unofficial policy existed in other cities it represented a subtle means to ensure that the laboring population remained available to the urban economy and that it was also reminded of its menial place in urban society.

The human face of the newcomer was easily overlooked, both by the authorities and by the ordinary townspeople. Often the newcomers were greeted by ethnic or social prejudice. Hostility was clearest toward the Jewish migrants, who in the 1860s and 1870s began to move out of the western areas of the Pale of Settlement into the new and expanding towns of the central and eastern Ukraine. In 1880 Kiev's mayor asserted that "the city is overcrowded [perepolen ] with people who lack the right to live here, . . . of whose existence the police know nothing."^[120] He thought that the Jewish settlers were such a menace that, if they continued to pour into the city, they would "end the historical life of Kiev."^[121]

The same view, expressed in similarly threatening language, came from

[118] "Otchet o Nizhegorodskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1902), d. 545, 845.

[119] V. Mikhnevich, Iazvy Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1886), 55.

[120] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova o Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2. pt. 2, 353.

[121] Ibid., pt. 1, 53-54.

the Ekaterinoslav provincial governor a decade later. His fears centered on the influx of "migrants from many areas," who were moving to new industrial settlements in such numbers that there existed "no chance of registration of the population." His principal concern was what he termed the "Jewish invasion." "At first, one or two" Jews settled in places that he called "the most turbulent points," and they were quickly followed "by others even from other provinces."^[122] He was particularly concerned about public order, but his preoccupation with Jewish migration echoes in a mild form the popular anti-Semitic prejudice that was becoming increasingly evident—and violent—in those years.

These threatening images of invasions and floods created an imaginary wall around the city, whose defenses were meager. The authorities recognized that there was a place—and a need—for the migrant worker but often seemed to classify him as a disreputable and immoral type. One governor wrote that the population of southern boomtowns consisted of a "mass of people who were unbelievably hungry for quick wealth."^[123] The array of migrants included "various sorts of speculators and adventurists" alongside "large numbers of working people," who the Odessa police prefect claimed in 1873 were drawn to his city by its "great trade position."^[124] According to Laura Engelstein contemporary medical discussions identified migrants as undesirables, blaming them for the diffusion of certain dangerous diseases. Some doctors, faced with an apparent epidemic of syphilis, speculated that the disease was spread by the male migrant and female prostitute (who was often assumed to be a migrant who had abandoned domestic service). The migrant's marginal position between townsperson and villager supposedly made him a prime candidate for "sexual license and the propagation of sexually defined disease."^[125]

Another trait of the migrant as a threatening outsider was drunkenness. Warnings about its ominous role in the outbreak of urban riots revealed growing concern about the ill effects of vodka and a profound unease at the presence of transient workers on the fringes of urban life. In this view migrant practices were a combination of "indiscipline, drunkenness, and riotousness [buistvo ]," terms that the Saratov provincial governor used in

[122] "Otchet o sostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii za 1895 g.," TsGIA, f. 1263, op. 2, d. 49 (1896), 10-12.

[123] "Otchet o sostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii za 1898 g.," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1899), d. 3255, 7.

[124] "Otchet gradonachal'nika," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 69 (1874), d. 150, 10-11.

[125] Laura Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890-1905," Representations , no. 14 (Spring 1986):181-83.

the mid 1890s to describe the laborers in Volga port cities.^[126] The stereotypical migrant was drunken, diseased, disorderly, and without legal papers. It is not surprise that many thought him to be a menace to public order.

Although we have many descriptions of migrants in the reports of tsarist officials, the migrants' experience is much more difficult to understand in their own terms. Historians have written extensively about the movement in recent centuries of populations from country to country and from countryside to city because these phenomena are some of the fundamental features of modernity and the emergence of industrial economies. These studies usually make commonsense assumptions about the economic motivation of migrants, who are most often portrayed as disadvantaged or impoverished peasants seeking refuge in the city. The experience of the Russian migrants, however, should be viewed in the context of their own cultural background.

Mobility, labor, and urban residence formed the central features of the migrants' collective and personal histories. With few firsthand accounts to counterbalance those of officials and educated observers, the historian who seeks to analyze urban migration from "within" must rely on fragmentary information that suggests rather than makes explicit the actors' views and behavior. The conclusions can only be tentative. Not surprisingly, historical studies explain the migrant experience from both an economic and a social perspective. One debate has centered on the polarities of peasant and worker and asks whether to place the migrant close to one or the other pole. Another line of inquiry has focused on the life cycle of the migrants in terms of their age, family, and social ties.^[127] These approaches are complementary, not exclusive, and tend to emphasize narrowly defined dimensions of the migrants' experiences.

To move the issue of migration into the context of urbanization shifts the perspective from structure or process to social context. The central issue that I propose to address is the manner in which migrants occupied urban space for their own purposes, and used, in the words of the French writer Michel de Certeau, "spatial practices" to become, however briefly, a part of

[126] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 20 (1898), 21-22 (the specific context of his remarks was the thirty thousand seasonal workers in the port city of Tsaritsyn).

[127] A recent study by P. G. Ryndziunskii gave new life to the Soviet investigation of this subject: see Krest'iane i gorod v kapitalisticheskoi Rossii vtoroi poloving XIX veka (Moscow, 1983). In the West, Robert Johnson has undertaken a thorough examination of the problem in Peasant and Proletarian . The implications of migration for women and the family have been explored in Barbara Engel, "The Woman's Side: Male Out-Migration and the Family Economy in Kostroma Province," Slavic Review 45 (Summer 1986): 257-71.

that alien urban territory where they chose to reside.^[128] This approach assumes that even if these migrants were urban outsiders in terms of their cultural background, social bonds, and skills, they were nonetheless aware of their new surroundings and were capable of inventing behavioral skills to deal with the strangeness of the city.^[129] The urban experience of the migrants represents a third approach to the problem of urban migration. It separates the migrants from both the communities they had left—and to which many were still bound and to which they would probably return—and the urban community to which they found themselves.

This separation bears some similarities to the cultural condition that the anthropologist Victor Turner has defined as a "liminal period."^[130] Although it is usually associated with tribal rites of passage and symbolic rituals of departure and return to the group, the concept of the liminal period has been applied to other collective human experiences of dramatic separation and cultural discontinuity and provides a fruitful perspective on the experience of Russian migrants. In the context of Russian urbanization it appears particularly helpful in studying the condition of the temporary migrants, the otkhodniki , who were separated from their village and who worked in one or more urban centers during that time. As I noted before, the temporary migrants made the most forceful impression on observers, although we should keep in mind that migration also included other towns-people. In the case of the petty bourgeoisie the pattern of temporary migration strongly resembled that of the peasantry: it included separation from family, the move to distant centers in search of work, and periodic return to the place of birth and legal residence.

The issues pertinent to the concept of liminality are similar to those that are often addressed in other studies of migration: separation, companionship, status, cultural adaptation, and vulnerability. However, these issues assume a new meaning when the key problem is the emergence of new urban communities in migrant cities. The historical issues raised by the presence of the migrants focus on cultural discontinuity and its effect on the migrants' sense of identity.

The questions of who the migrants were and where they came from are

[128] M. de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 93.

[129] In the lexicon of geographers this manner of making cultural sense of a geographical place is termed "environmental perception" and entails the processes by which "people form images of other places" and "how these images influence decisions" (Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps [Baltimore, 1974], 17).

[130] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, 1969), 94-97; see also A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1972), 39, 177-78.

usually approached through the documentation that they were in theory required to obtain. As with so many other tsarist tabulations, however, these figures are only useful for comparative purposes. In the 1880s one zemstvo study of peasants who left their villages in search of work made every effort to avoid the appearance of an official inquiry but was still incomplete because the population feared unpleasantness with the police. One of the zemstvo workers noted that the reason the peasants feared the police was that "a majority [of the migrants] are without passports; they only have a travel certificate and some lack even that."^[131] The figures on the issuance of passports, which the state required of both petty bourgeois and peasants when they moved, give only a very approximate notion of the scale and rate of growth of population movement, and they provide no indication of destination. These figures do, however, suggest an extraordinary surge of internal migration, which more than tripled between the 1860s and 1880s (reaching 3.5 million at the end of this period). Short-term certificates, which were in far greater demand than the passports, grew at a similar rate. By the last decade of the century they were issued at the rate of 177 per thousand population in the northern provinces, and 74 per thousand in the southern lands (the Ukraine, the blackearth region, and the middle Volga).^[132] According to the Soviet historian P. G. Ryndziunskii, by the last years of the century the combined totals of all travel documents for nonblackearth and blackearth provinces had attained 450 per thousand.^[133] The impact of this massive movement on the communities from which migrants departed (and to which they periodically returned in most cases) is a key and little explored issue in Russian social history.

The very existence of a city under these conditions seemed problematical in the late century. The educated elite used the term "village" to indicate their dismay at the pervasive presence of a population of rural origins in the city. But language and practice also revealed the importance of the sense of community that the migrants carried into the city from their places of birth. Once the most visible form of village migrant association, the cooperative work gang (artel' ), dwindled in importance in the cities as the century came to a close, but it endured as a sort of semicommunal living and eating arrangement and provided an effective means for builders to organize construction gangs.^[134]

[131] Quoted in Ryndziunskii, Krest'iane i gorod , 92.

[132] Boris Tikhonov, Pereselenie v Rossii , 211-12, tables 12 and 13.

[133] Ryndziunskii, Krest'iane i gorod , 105-6 (including a discussion of the dangers of reading these statistical aggregates as if they told life histories).

[134] Ibid., 119-20.

The ties of village or regional "fellowship" conveyed by the term zemliak were a powerful and enduring bond that was practiced and understood within urban migrant groups. Robert Johnson points out that migrants expected to establish themselves in their new place with the help of earlier arrivals from their home territory, who would aid them in finding work and a bed in which to sleep and who would offer companionship in an alien environment.^[135] The zemliachestvo established the close ties that sociologists have found at work in other countries, ties that "establish a relationship between the migrant and the receiving community."^[136] The migrants assisted in this manner were not likely to experience the anomie that urban sociologists once thought accompanied the shift from rural community to urban society. Still, the migrants' entrance into the zemliachestvo , as transient in its composition as was their own stay in the city, was an indication of their distance from both their villages and the urban communities surrounding them.

This state of social discontinuity of the urban migrants became integrated into their everyday practices. It appeared in the modest family ritual that marked the departure of a youth on his first trip, for example, the "small ceremony" of a father's prayers, blessing, and moral exhortation that marked one sixteen-year-old's day of departure for work as an apprentice in Moscow.^[137] It emerged over a period of months or years in the changed appearance of the migrants: they were proud of their city clothes and manners, and on returning home the young women of the village singled them out from those they had left behind, at least if the observations of one village doctor on life in Kostroma province are typical.^[138] Social discontinuity was also embodied in the gender isolation of the lives of the migrants. Boys and men left their families and entered a largely male community of laborers. We know little of the women migrants. Their conditions of work—most often they were domestic servants—largely determined their place in the city. Their remoteness from their homes was probably even greater than that of the men.^[139]

However, the migrants brought with them, or quickly acquired, an array of practices that they could share with the urban laboring population.

[135] Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian , 67-75.

[136] C. Tilly and C. Brown, "On Uprooting, Kinship, and the Auspices of Migration," in An Urban World , ed. C. Tilly (Boston, 1973), 111.

[137] S. I. Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov , trans. and ed. Reginald Zelnik (Stanford, 1986), 6.

[138] D. N. Zhbankov, Bab'ia storona (Kostroma, 1891), 15, 27.

[139] The issue of gender among Moscow migrants is examined in Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 134-38.

Vodka had a privileged place in their rituals of work and leisure. Collective fistfights brought men and boys from factories or neighborhoods together in a common and bloody form of leisure time activity. Neither of these bonds was unique to migrants. At neither end of the migrant's path were the social boundaries impenetrable. A large proportion of temporary migrants ultimately reestablished village residence; others found satisfying work and joined the ranks of the townspeople. The instability of employment that most migrants confronted represented a deeply unsettling element in their lives. Municipalities offered only occasional, short-term aid for the unemployed. The sudden loss of work meant a return home or, at its worst, a descent into the marginal life of beggars in the cities.

Home ties were a substantial obstacle to establishing urban residence. One Moscow-based artisan, bringing suit in court in the 1880s against his home community (rodina , presumably a village), argued that he had "no ties [osedlosti ] whatsoever [to his community] and no place to return." Even so, he was still bound to pay an exorbitant sum to that community for his passport. He believed himself to be a Muscovite, but the records do not reveal whether the court agreed.^[140] For reasons presumably of both financial interest and personal identity, he chose to consider himself a townsman who was being unjustly obstructed by greedy rural officials. These officials probably believed that they were defending their "closed corporate community," in Ben Eklof's words, and its fiscal needs.^[141]

The marginality of the migrants was a temporary affair, and liminality was a problematic condition, one that perhaps best characterizes a period in the life of migrants. Even in these terms, however, the growing size of the migrant population through the last decades of the nineteenth century meant that this marginal group always constituted a substantial presence within migrant cities.

Was the migrants' experience accompanied by an awareness of separateness within the urban community? The evidence is meager but sufficiently compelling to give a tentative answer to the question. The discontinuity between the old home and the future place of reenty—whether a new city or the old community—was a function of the distance, real and perceived, separating the migrants from their places of origin and of the social borders of the urban community within which they found themselves. Factory employment was the goal of some urban migrants, but the data collected by Johnson reveal that in Moscow (and undoubtedly in other migrant towns as

[140] Cited in Tikhonov, Pereselenie , 119.

[141] Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy 1861-1914 (Berkeley, 1986), 15-16.

well) only a small proportion (15 percent) of the migrants found factory employment.^[142] The migrants in the city were not stationary, either in work or in residence (although the newly constructed outskirts tended to house a high proportion of migrants). They were physically inseparable from the city, but in most cases they were without a fixed place of residence. Their sense of transience made the city a place of passage, both literally for transitory migrants and figuratively for those living on the margins between the city and their distant home.

The separate identity of the migrant, as perceived by educated observers and perhaps by many of the migrants themselves, took on specific shape and color in Moscow's Khitrovka slum. With the help of journalists like Giliarovsky and publicists like Lev Tolstoi, Muscovites tended to view Khitrovka as a place so alien that it resembled "darkest Africa." To incoming laborers it was a refuge—a place of hire and perhaps a gathering point for comrades from home. In a literal sense it was a place of passage from which workers might leave for better quarters, go to other towns, or return to their home communities. Its tangible, harsh, yet ephemeral place in their lives suggests that what most marked the migrant identity in urban communities was not its "savagery," as authorities readily assumed, but its very marginality. It offered some hope of employment and security, but it also threatened hunger, cold, and even death to the unfortunate. The "lower depths" that Maxim Gorky imagined to be both the physical and moral abyss of the urban poor were close to, but not a part of, the migrant's existence. Khitrovka was both a "skid row" and a labor market, and these two aspects of its identity were easily confused by outsiders. To the migrants, crossing the imaginary line separating the two represented, perhaps even more than returning to their village or town empty-handed, the failure of their endeavor.

The new city of railroads, merchants, and migrants was both a physical place and a cultural creation. These three elements are key to the processes of urbanization of late imperial Russia; they also present three distinct faces of the image of Russian urbanism in those years. The economic dynamism that distinguished urban Russia from earlier times owed its existence in large measure to the pattern of economic exchange between city and countryside and to the facilities of transportation, both of which largely depended on the railroad. The economic hinterlands of the commercial centers expanded enormously, and the territory from which migrants could travel to seek urban employment also expanded. The new vistas of prosperity and

[142] Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian , 34.

progress, which were given ideal form in the national expositions of Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, emerged as much from this new urban economic life as from the flights of fancy of Westernized bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance.

Although wealthy townspeople were a very small group within the city, their stereotypical embodiment—the merchant—enjoyed a place of prominence, whether derided or proclaimed a hero of Russian enterprise. His presence was inseparable from that of the other stereotypical member of the new city, the migrant. The migrants came from diverse origins, worked in many different occupations, and stayed in the city for various lengths of time, but they had a place there and an identity of their own. I argue that we should think of the migrants not only as protoworkers or transplanted peasants but also as urban outsiders. Their humble condition and poverty placed them among the urban poor, and their cultural condition between town and country and their transitory situation located them on the margins of the city. In taking the form of the migrant city Russian urbanism defied the very concept of the city as a place of settled townspeople.