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.