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.