Introduction

This history of Russian cities examines the transformation of urban life in the late tsarist period. Specifically, it looks at the changes under way in European Russia in the decades between the reforms of Alexander II and the Revolution of 1905. These years saw innovations in all areas of Russian life, but they also saw debate over the desirability and pace of these trends. Russian urban society was a key part of both developments; it was an arena of reform and a symbol of both the promises and the dangers of reform. The inhabitants of the capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, could not longer lay claim to live in the only civilized cities in the land. Provincial towns were becoming centers of trade, manufacturing, education, and print culture. The past and the future served as points of reference by which urban progress could be measured—from ignorance in the past to enlightenment in the future, from poverty to wealth, backwardness to civilization, and, in very muted tones, servility to freedom. These standards of change were judgmental and inspirational in intent. They were pervasive among educated townspeople and are as important to this history as are the indicators of population growth, economic development, the municipal statutes, and the police regulations. In other words, my study is as much about the changing ideas of the Russian city as it is about the processes of institutional and social change in Russian urban life.

My approach to these topics is informed by what might loosely be termed "the methodology of urban history." Although the city has frequently provided a background for the analysis of particular political, social,

and economic topics, the methodology of urban history is of recent origin. It is best understood not as a distinct discipline but rather as "a strategy for illuminating historical understanding" that is particularly relevant for modern history.^[1] The modesty of this claim to scholarly identity is owing to the multiple historical perspectives on the city and to the complex patterns of change occurring in urban centers in modern times. The concept of urbanization, that is, the process of population concentration, is especially popular among scholars who are attracted by the apparent precision and interdependence of the data on the geographical location of towns, population movements, and urban economic activities. It relies heavily on this quantitative material to uncover distinct urban "systems."^[2] I use urbanization to refer specifically to the patterns created by changes in urban location, population movements, and the production and distribution of economic resources.

Although useful in defining the demographic and social context of urban history, this particular methodology of urban history neglects topics that are related to the practices and attitudes by which populations give meaning to their urban experience. In an anthropological perspective the city is a cultural creation that is put together through efforts to implement political and social objectives and ideals. The city is also the product of the particular practices, that is, the meaningful actions, by which urban inhabitants make the city in some measure their own place. This cultural approach assumes that urban dwellers understand and shape the city in ways that the American historian Sam Bass Warner has called "multiple urban images."^[3] These images are found in policies and plans, in fiction and the urban press, in discourse, and in practices. In my opinion they represent a significant and rewarding manner of understanding the Russian city.

The interplay of urban perceptions and practices defines the concept of urbanism as I employ it in this study. This concept is not a predictive model because it makes no assumptions about the structural determinants that control urban images and functions. As I already suggested, it serves to "illuminate our understanding" of the key actors in the transformation of the Russian city in the nineteenth century. Russian cities included merchants and migrants, the two social types who appeared to typify the

[1] Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, Introduction, to The Pursuit of Urban History , ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London, 1983), 1.

[2] See, for example, Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

[3] Sam Bass Warner, "Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology," in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences , ed. L. Rodwin and R. Hollister (New York, 1984), 183.

industrious population and whose activities gave special meaning to the city as a workplace. Russian cities included medical personnel and educators, for whom Western models of the progressive city were the standard by which they judged—usually unfavorably—the qualities of their own towns. And Russian cities also housed tsarist administrators and civic leaders, who assumed in differing degrees power over the urban population and sought to impose public order on the chaotic processes of city building.

In a larger sense urbanism was present as an assumption, which was shared by many educated Russians as well as by officials, that the city ought to develop according to an ideal model. This objective guided tsarist administrators, who elaborated city plans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The character of the ideal model changed in later years but not the intent. Ideal models were also present in other parts of the Western world. A very precise definition and declaration of purpose came from a French colonial administrator who proclaimed "urbanism" to be "the art and science of developing human agglomerations."^[4] His belief in the malleability of the city, which was drawn from his work in a colonial territory, is equally applicable to the activities of urban leaders in Russia, many of whom considered their country to be a borderland of Europe.

The European core of nineteenth-century Western civilization plays an important supporting role in the story of Russian urbanism. It was present in the form of markets for Russian goods, whose sale enriched and expanded Russian urban commerce. European standards of sanitation, public health, cleanliness, and hygiene in the cities offered a tangible model for civic leaders in Russia to emulate. Generalized elementary schooling and nearly universal literacy among the urban population were goals for educators in Russian cities. For some, however, the Western city also represented forces of decadence and disorder; depending on the point of view of the observer, these forces ranged from the capitalist factory to the rebellious proletariat, from bourgeois materialism to the urban mob. Whether progressive or destructive, European urban centers epitomized the city of the future and, as such, served as a useful device by which to condemn any conditions in Russian towns that observers found intolerable. Contemporary attitudes toward Russian urbanism reflected, explicitly or implicitly, the positions adopted by Russians toward both the idealized future, or "modernity," and the imaginary past, or "tradition." The bitter conflicts provoked by Russian urbanism revealed how profound this dichotomy was.

[4] Cited by Paul Rabinow, "Representations Are Social Facts," in Writing Culture , ed. J. Clifford (Berkeley, 1986), 260.

In a formal sense the city had a clearly defined place in the laws and regulations of the tsarist state. Its juridical form emerged in statutes that defined the responsibilities and leadership of the municipalities. Its population received rank and status in the system of legal estates (sosloviia ) that was in existence (although somewhat reformed) until the 1917 revolution. Its economic activities were taxed and regulated by the state, and according to tsarist regulations its migrant population had to possess the proper travel documents and to register with the police. In other words, the state's extensive powers created an "official city" of institutions, residents, and activities.

Tsarist statutes and administrative reports reveal official assumptions and expectations toward the city. However, these documents must be used with caution. They give voice to a statist view of urbanism, and this view is as distant from the practices of the population as are other idealized versions of the city. Gregory Freeze has argued that in the mid nineteenth century the "soslovie system" was "amorphous, plastic, and complex."^[5] This observation is a warning that the estates may not be a meaningful way to describe the social identity of the urban population. The questions of whether well-to-do manufacturers and traders viewed themselves as "merchants"—as required by state decrees—and whether urban migrants remained "peasants," as their passports indicated, raise complex issues of social relations and cultural values that cannot be resolved by reference to either formal documentation or the observations of intellectuals. In the same way, municipal statutes reveal only one small part of the civic practices that shaped the public sphere of the city. A struggle over order and domination was an integral part of Russian urban history, and although the state was an important player in this struggle, it was not the only one.

In many respects this study is a work of synthesis. It incorporates economic, political, social, and cultural perspectives on the Russian city and attempts an interdisciplinary interpretation of the history of Russia in those years. Few such broad studies in the field of social history have as yet appeared. My findings are thus necessarily tentative and the chapters that follow might best be read as essays in Russian urban history. In my search for meaningful generalizations I have relied on the abundant tsarist archival and published materials on the cities. In particular, I use the imperial census of 1897 to construct a model of the migrant city, a

[5] Gregory Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91 (February 1986): 24.

composite portrait based on the similarities of social configuration of the populations in nearly sixty urban centers. My profile is a statistical abstraction but one that finds confirmation in an impressionistic analysis of the evidence on migration and the laboring population in the expanding urban centers. Thus, my use of the term "Russian city" is more than a figure of speech: I seek to enlarge our understanding of social change in late imperial Russia by including the urban population as a whole. My model of the migrant city defines the social profile of the typical city and focuses attention on those urban areas that most closely conform to the pattern uncovered by statistical analysis.

My synthesis of late imperial urban history draws heavily on developments in particular cities in European Russia for which evidence is readily available. But these individual urban histories are significant here only to the extent that they are tied to the trends at work in the country at large. The efforts of the tsarist regime to regulate urban life through statutes and the positioning of administrative units and forces of order—police and army garrisons—made the state a pervasive presence in provincial cities and, to a lesser extent, in industrial settlements and district towns. The development of regional, national, and international markets that were serviced by waterways and rail lines leading to urban centers caused these towns to expand both economically and demographically. A print culture that included commercial newspapers encompassed a growing reading population in the cities and helped to give new meaning to urban life. Common forces were at work in all major urban centers. And at a basic level of intellectual discourse the idea of the city captured the imagination of influential townspeople, intellectuals, and officials.

In recent years a number of valuable studies have appeared on Russian urban history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[6] Most have focused on the growth of individual cities. As urban biographies, they offer the clarity of well-defined borders and a precise center of historical events. The questions they address are inspired partly by the principal issues of Russian historiography, partly by the conceptual perspectives suggested by urban history. They have enriched our knowledge of the complexity and diversity of prerevolutionary Russian social history, which—thanks to these and other studies—has begun to emerge from beneath what Michael

[6] Particularly noteworthy among these studies are Michael Hamm, ed., The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1986); Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985); Robert Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906-1914 (New York, 1987); James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976); J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

Confino calls the "long shadow of the October Revolution."^[7] The limitation of these studies, inherent in their approach, is their particularism. If my synthesis of Russian urban history is to prove of value, its contribution will probably be at the middle level of historical generalization, where Russian urban history occupies a place of importance equal to that of rural history and where the city is an essential feature in our understanding of Russia's unique historical experience.

[7] Michael Confino, Issues and Nonissues in Russian Social History and Historiography , Kennan Institute occasional paper no. 165 (Washington, D.C., 1983), 7.