Local Needs and the Sanitized City

The municipalities experienced the migrant city as an ever expanding territory that generated imperative and increasingly complex local needs. The perception of these needs, however, varied greatly from the merchant to the activist factions. The response of the so-called merchant group to the problems associated with migration was to define their city as a workplace whose public areas required municipal investment to facilitate commercial and manufacturing operations. In effect, the merchant party delimited the borders of their city around the places of economic activity. The activists defined their city borders to include all inhabited places that required attention to health, housing, education, and welfare. From both perspectives the lower urban classes needed to acquire orderly habits that were suitable to a civilized, Western-type city. By the end of the century the activist agenda was increasingly the rule among migrant cities.

Among the concerns of the activists public health seems to have been paramount. By identifying and condemning insalubrious urban conditions, medical experts promoted expectations of a healthy, "sanitized" city that was far different from the reality of poor water, filth, and stench. Although many townspeople still referred to "God's will" in order to explain endemic contagious diseases and high mortality, public health officials, state bureaucrats, and an increasingly influential group of civic leaders insisted that major public works projects that focused on preventive measures were absolutely necessary.

The potential improvements to urban life included far more than short-term benefits such as a reduction in mortality rates. The introduction of public health measures removed Russian urban areas from the category of "Asian" city, where epidemics raged uncontrolled, as Koch had reminded the leaders of Hamburg. Public lighting brought the Russian city closer to the "cities of light" of Western Europe. Street paving promised the efficient transportation of goods as well as better health conditions. Municipal public works, in other words, were part of a progressive agenda shaped by Western models of the city. In addition, municipal actions on problems such as clean water, education, and sanitation were the substance and meaning of the "widening circle of activities" that filled the civic public sphere of the city.

The heightened concern for local needs was the product of a new awareness of the public interest, increasing respect for scientific discoveries in areas such as public health, and the threat that mass urbanization posed to

public order. In the reform years, visions of urban progress in Russia emerged from this new understanding of environmental, health, and public needs. Tsarist officials were increasingly concerned about conditions in their provincial towns. In 1869 the governor-general of Orenburg province explained that "paved streets, sidewalks, and a water main" had become "real and unavoidable requirements." The recent economic growth and sudden population expansion of the provincial capital had created "needs" that had been "impossible to anticipate several years ago."^[84] He omitted any mention of facade planning; rather, he redefined public orderliness [blagoustroistvo ] to mean vital urban services. His redefinition greatly enlarged the possible array of municipal activities.

In this perspective Russia's urban centers were even less worthy of comparison with Western cities than in the earlier period of facade planning. By the new standards the civilized city was noteworthy not by its public monuments and ceremonies or neoclassical facades and geometrical street plans but by its infrastructure of services for everyday life—paved streets, lighting, water, etc. Any comparison with Europe on those terms could only be invidious. Even more emphatically than before, contemporary judgments condemned the miserable conditions of Russia's cities in the postreform decades. A municipal agenda for remedial action was imposed by the desire for a better future. Public discussions about the backwardness of Russian cities appeared in municipal and state reports, and by late in the century they even appeared in newspaper accounts of urban life. This new manner of writing about Russian urban history in order to criticize contemporary shortcomings to some extent offered an excuse for the inadequacies of public services. For example, Kharkov's governor-general, lamenting the city's meager accomplishments at the end of the century, admitted that "everything possessed by the cities in the form of basic property . . . was created by the efforts and sacrifice of the last two to three generations."^[85] Even so, the contrast between past and present cast a somber light on what municipal activists and observers considered to be Russia's intolerable urban conditions.

These woes became a kind of litany that many observers used in reference to "the provinces," a vast and ill-defined territory beyond the pale of progressive (that is, Western-inspired) municipal self-rule. The provincial gendarme commander of the northern province of Vladimir decried the "terrible desolation" of his provincial capital, where streets were "always

[84] "Otchet za 1869 g." TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2139, 299-300.

[85] "Otchet Khar'kovskoi gubernii za 1900," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 444, 4.

covered with dirt or deep in mud, depending on the time of the year," a "terrible stench" overwhelmed passersby near any courtyard, and "filth" fouled the city's drinking water. The conditions to which he objected were all very tangible: they could be smelled, seen, touched, and tasted. Yet he claimed to be alone in his distress: "The people treat the needs of the city with indifference."^[86]

In his awareness of these problems he was a product of the "perceptual revolution" that the French historian Alain Corbin argues had appeared in early nineteenth-century France. In Corbin's opinion the standards by which one judged the "intolerable" in cities were redefined in those years to incorporate "noxious" smells, which ranged from putrid drains and stagnant water to body odors. These criteria of acceptable and unacceptable odors were part of a process by which the authorities circumscribed those places and people for which remedial action was required. Typically, these areas were inhabited by the poor laboring population. In medical debates over public health, the cause of the spread of contagious disease was thought by one influential school to be "miasma," which was easily recognizable by its foul smell.^[87] Corbin's theory of the essential changes in the "social imagination" of odors fits well with the judgments of Russian officials and urban leaders and makes clear one underlying reason for the importance attached in the late century to the issue of local needs in the cities. For example, newsworthy information in the Moscow popular press included the lament of one special correspondent from the central Russian town of Voronezh that in summer "an enormous cloud of white dust hangs constantly over the city." Blown up from the roads, the dust impeded breathing and irritated the eyes.^[88] The condition was not new, but the implication that something ought to be done about it was.

The agenda for municipal public services potentially involved all aspects of Russian urban life in those decades. Commerce became an important inducement for paving when goods could not be moved through towns in fall and spring because mud made the streets impassable. Walking through ankle-deep mud in areas where sidewalks could easily be built offended the proprieties of educated townspeople; travel in winter by sleigh or on foot across mounds of unswept snow that resembled small hills was equally offensive. An urban outdoors whose only lighting at night consisted of moonlight, tavern signs, and a few faint kerosene streetlights was a threatening place, especially when crowds of migrants filled the city. Most urgent

[86] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 89, ch. 43 (1888), 11.

[87] Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 55-57.

[88] Moskovskii listok , 17 June 1896.

of all, the dangers of overcrowding and the lack of sanitation stirred concern about health.

It is tempting to attribute the pressures for public services to the members of the new urban middle classes. They were in a good position, both through their reading the urban press and in their daily lives, to become critical of conditions in their cities and to be aware of Western models of progressive urbanism. Their public-spirited leaders had access to civic forums where they could demand that their municipalities create the public services that were imperative for a clean, sanitized city. However, they were not the only townspeople to be aware of and offended by noxious sights and smells and, to judge by their rate of electoral abstention, many of them were indifferent to reform. Although the views of the town poor were missing in such discussions, it is fair to assume that they too had at least some stake in turning urban public space into a useful and healthy place to live and work.

The voices advocating public health reforms spoke for the entire population and did so with the authority of scientific analysis. The public health movement had emerged in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century. It combined new measures by government administrators for the struggle against epidemic diseases, particularly cholera, which first spread across Europe in the 1830s, and medical expertise that could be applied to infectious diseases and to the social conditions that scientists judged were responsible for the spread of these epidemics. The new science of statistics strengthened the claims of these authorities to extensive knowledge of the city. Statisticians applied quantitative measures to compile comprehensive information on urban living conditions (especially in the slums), birth and death rates, and the spread of disease.^[89]

By mid century a body of Western literature and an array of policies had come into existence that made public health a new mark of social progress. When examined by educated Russians in the reform years, the writings and official policies in Europe provided models for both analysis and action. In the 1870s Russian medical specialists formed the Society for the Protection of Public Health, and one of its sections specifically focused on urban sanitation. At about the same time Russian medical societies began to appear in provincial cities.^[90] Public health officials in the Ministry of In-

[89] See, for example, R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement (London, 1952); Catherine Kudlick, "Disease, Public Health, and Urban Social Relations: Perceptions of Cholera and the Paris Environment, 1830-1850" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988).

[90] E. I. Lotova, Russkaia intelligentsiia i voprosy obshchestvennoi gigeny (Moscow, 1962), 11-13.

ternal Affairs were particularly influential because of their work in compiling a comprehensive picture of the most serious threats to public health in Russian cities. Their observations, together with those of municipal health officials, uniformly damned urban health conditions.

Their reports drew a detailed picture of the insalubrious city: polluted lakes and streams were sources of drinking water; winter accumulations of filth rotted in the streets and courtyards each spring; stagnant ponds collected the water from uncleaned streets and unemptied cesspools and gave off an "intolerable stench"; public squares filled with the refuse that accumulated over periods of months; butcher shops and private slaughter houses dumped their garbage into the streets. In 1880 the medical inspector of Voronezh province recorded a conversation with the mayor of a district town, who "naively explained that the cleanliness of his town was maintained by pigs devouring all the piles of filth." The two parties to this conversation were divided by a cultural gulf. The mayor viewed his town as a villagelike place where acts of nature and the "will of God" decided the conditions of life; the inspector expected civic leaders to take action to enforce sanitary standards that would ensure cleanliness and public health. Using some literary license, a tsarist official summed up the case against the municipalities by concluding that "all the cities of the province are drowning in filth."^[91] He very likely shared the judgment of Paul Koch (cited in chapter 1) that such befouled places did not belong within the borders of civilized Europe.

That polluted water, unremoved filth, stench, and dirt were related to infectious diseases and high urban mortality rates was an essential truth among public health specialists and their followers. The government assiduously collected death rates and although the statistics were of dubious precision, they nonetheless reveal great divergences in mortality rates between the better maintained central areas of towns and the dirtier—and poorer—outskirts, between the laboring people and the well-to-do, between infants and adults. Gendarme and gubernatorial reports began to assume a connection between the municipal neglect of local needs and disease, citing medical data to back up their demands for action. Where did the source of this appalling backwardness lie? In the mid 1890s St. Petersburg's so-called medical police compiled a comprehensive list of the ills of the capital. The authors started their analysis by discussing the absence of clean water and sewage removal and proceeded to the topics of overcrowded

[91] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Voronezhskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 3:10.

housing and poor food for the "mass of working people," whom they specifically distinguished from the "educated [intelligentnye ] strata." They concluded that a number of "artificial factors resulting from the necessity for an enormous number of people to gather in a disproportionately small territory distort all the conditions of existence of the individual."^[92]

Such descriptions established an agenda for social reform. They raised issues that were debated with particular vehemence in the Society for the Protection of Public Health in the 1880s and 1890s when its members confronted the implications of the "bacteriological revolution." Pointing to the evidence on water-carried germs, some specialists argued for immediate measures to filter drinking water rigorously. The "localist" school argued that public health was attainable only through extensive social welfare. The localist program implicitly pointed to the reform of the tsarist regime itself, which it judged to be ultimately responsible for these ills.^[93] On one side of this debate, then, the sanitized city was a sort of metaphor for political revolution.

Within the confines of municipal action, however, the larger implications that these debates over local needs raised never emerged in public view, in part because of tsarist surveillance but, more important, because most civic leaders had a much narrower conception of public needs and responsibilities. To judge by the comments of tsarist officials, many municipalities had no conception of a public sphere of action. The benign neglect espoused by the mayor of the district town in Voronezh province that I cited earlier had its counterpart all across the country. The police chief of Kuznets claimed, probably with considerable inventiveness, that the elders of his minor Volga trading center shared the opinion that "sanitary-hygienic qualities [svoistva —i.e., public works] were simply an unnecessary, frivolous distraction that disrupted the normal quiet conditions of life." On a more sober note, he observed that the principal objection to bringing clean water to town by building a water main was that it represented "an unnecessary, unproductive expense."^[94] Where the prevalent attitude assumed that a city was a collection of families and private enterprise, this argument carried great weight.

The police chief's observations omitted one vital consideration, namely, the miniscule income of these small municipalities. The pervasive poverty

[92] I. Eremev, ed., Gorod Sanktpeterburg s tochki zreniia meditsinskoi politsii (St. Petersburg, 1897), i, iii.

[93] Lotova, Russkaia intelligentsiia , 64-66, 76-77; for a general view of the politics of the Russian medical profession at the turn of the century see Nancy Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856-1905 (Princeton, N.J., 1981), esp. chaps. 7-8.

[94] TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 238, 104.

of the trading and laboring populations was a general condition throughout the country. Saratov's campaign in 1880 against tax dodgers collapsed when it discovered that 90 percent of the miscreants "for the most part proved to be artisans in extreme misery and without work," so needy that the municipality had to arrange charitable contributions.^[95] When a relatively prosperous property-owning and business community is absent, one senatorial survey into provincial life concluded, urban centers "do not have, and will not have in the foreseeable future, the possibility to improve their public services."^[96] Officials and other critics from the outside tended to discount provincial claims of hardship as self-serving, a point underlined by the Saratov governor when he noted in 1895 that duma deputies "may be accused of stinginess but not wastefulness."^[97] Municipal parsimony owed its attractiveness as a policy not only to ignorance, superstition, and sloth but also to the slender margin of livelihood of the large majority of townspeople.

Although forceful and persuasive voices in provincial centers and migrant cities spoke out in favor of municipal activism, they confronted another major obstacle to the realization of extensive public services: the tsarist state placed a considerable financial burden on cities to contribute to state operations. Since Peter the Great's time Russia's vast, underadministered empire had turned local self-government into a device for obligatory assistance in administering, and more often simply financing, state-ordered functions. For major towns and cities the most onerous of these in the mid nineteenth century were the quartering of military garrisons and paying for municipal police. Other responsibilities were gradually added in later years. Part of the tsarist reaction to political terrorism in the late 1870s entailed the expansion of the municipal police forces, the cost of which fell, as in the past, on the municipalities. Kiev's mayor complained to the senatorial investigators that his townspeople believed the new municipal self-government meant more taxes and fewer benefits because the "taxes are increasing not for the welfare of the city but for the payment of those state functions that are obligatory and increasing in scope."^[98]

The complaint echoed similar hostile comments of earlier decades, and the evidence suggests that the tsarist regime was making the cities pay heavily. Kiev's cost for the municipal police force doubled in the period

[95] Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 4 (1880):91.

[96] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Saratovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 4:544.

[97] "Otchet Saratovskoi gubernii za 1895," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 23, d. 28, 18.

[98] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2, pt. 2, 293.

from the mid 1860s to the early 1880s. Moscow's obligatory expenses, which had declined from one-half to one-quarter of the budget between 1860 and 1878 rose again in the following years, with police expenses mounting to 20 percent of its total expenses.^[99] Under these circumstances attacks from tsarist administrators on the municipalities' neglect of public services appeared at best hypocritical and at worst a device to shift responsibility onto powerless and impecunious civic leaders.

The principal improvements in municipal finances came about as a result of the economic expansion of certain cities or through the inventiveness of civic leaders. In both cases the locus was the migrant cities. Although the ingenuity of particular leaders was an affair of talent as well as circumstances, increased taxes were the result of urban economic growth. New financial sources included the development, beginning in the 1870s, of revenue-earning municipal enterprises—somewhat on the model of German "municipal socialism" of that period—ranging from slaughterhouses to banks and public transportation. All such enterprises entailed serious financial risks, especially in the depression years of the 1880s. In cities such as Odessa and Moscow they began to return substantial profits by the 1890s. A second innovation was extensive borrowing. Like municipal enterprises, it was largely the prerogative of the provincial capitals and migrant towns, presumably because these cities were both better risks and better governed. By the end of the century the level of municipal debt in those cities averaged 7,000 rubles per capita. In the small towns per capita debt was far lower—2,500 rubles.^[100] Municipal borrowing aroused bitter criticism from frugal deputies and townspeople. Moscow's conservative "public opinion," as reported from a tavern gathering in 1892 by one journalist, complained that "future generations will have to answer" for mayor Alekseev's years of heavy borrowing. In an editorial rebuttal the newspaper pointed to Alekseev's program of municipal improvements. "He who hasn't seen the city in fifteen years," the editor boasted, "will not recognize it now."^[101]

The editor's civic boosterism suggests that an urban constituency was taking shape behind the activist municipal leadership. By the 1890s many

[99] Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe uprovlenie," 180.

[100] These figures are drawn from the comprehensive statistical survey Goroda Rossii v 1904 g . (St. Petersburg, 1907); "small" towns are defined as all those without appreciable population growth, that is, with more than half of its residents locally born.

[101] Moskovskii listok , 3 May 1892; a very different point of view came from a state duma survey in 1907 that concluded that municipal indebtedness in Russian towns (measured as a proportion of annual revenues) was less than half that of Western European municipalities; see Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State , 47.

municipalities were enjoying a substantial increase in available revenues. Even taking their rapidly expanding population into account, by the end of the century they disposed of twice the per capita income of the small towns.^[102] The increase in revenues also outpaced the rise in obligatory expenses, which in Moscow fell to 18 percent of the budget by 1900.^[103] However, to say that revenues in these cities were increasing is only to suggest that the needs of the local population could be addressed in part and that the vision of a "civilized" city, whatever this term was understood to mean by competing factions, could be realized in some small measure. Throughout the last decades of the century complaints continued to echo the observation of senators inspecting provincial affairs in 1880, namely, that "all the towns complain of the paucity of their income by comparison with the rapidly growing needs brought out by the spirit of the times."^[104] The bitterness of civic debates involved the issue of who was to enjoy the benefits of public services.

By the turn of the century one answer to the question of who would benefit from municipal expenditures was that the urban elite cared for the needs of its own constituency. A map of the location of public services coincided to a remarkable extent with the residential distribution of the well-to-do and entrepreneurial townspeople. A special correspondent for a Moscow paper reported that in the Volga town of Rybinsk the "conveniences from municipal services" were far more accessible to the "owners of brick houses located in the central streets of town . . . than to house-owners whose [wooden] buildings are located on the outskirts." Among these "conveniences" were "more or less acceptable street lighting, relatively decent [paved] streets and sidewalks, [and] more or less vigilant police surveillance." As for the poor inhabitants on the edges of the town, they experienced "impassable mud in the streets and complete darkness after sunset."^[105] This physical ordering of the city gave tangible form to central areas, but there was little in the underrepresented (and unrepresented) urban fringes that, by contemporary (ideal) standards, deserved the name of "civilized" urban life.

The reasons for the inequitable distribution of municipal benefits lay in part in the conscious priorities of municipal deputies and councils. But it

[102] The source and method of calculation are identical to those used in footnote 100.

[103] L. Pisar'kova, "Deiatel'nost' Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy v oblasti meditsiny, narodnogo obrazovaniia i obshchestvennogo prizreniia posle 1862," Problemy istorii SSSR 7 (1978):130.

[104] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Voronezhskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:1.

[105] Moskovskii listok , 20 April 1899.

was also the result of the very dynamism of these migrant cities, which were constantly enlarging their settled areas and pushing their outskirts further and further away. Voices from the town center were heard much more easily than those from the urban fringes (with the exception of the occasional factory owner). For example, Tambov's mayor could count on a sympathetic hearing from his trading constituency when he warned in the late 1870s that the central streets in his "swampy" town were "absolutely impassable in fall and spring." Paving these streets was a business necessity in a city where commerce in agricultural commodities was becoming increasingly important.^[106] In 1893 Kharkov's merchant party demonstrated no reluctance to spend municipal funds on a major program of street construction, the paving of all town squares, and lighting as far as the outlying districts.^[107] These investments brought tangible benefits to the "solid citizens" and to vital urban economic activities.

Such programs were also visible evidence of substantial civic achievement. Both economic and cultural considerations were probably behind the Ministry of Finance's decision in the mid-1890s to subsidize an extensive program of paving, electric lighting, and electric streetcar construction in central Nizhny Novgorod. The city was on display for the national exposition of 1896 and that urban "hill of light," which so impressed Maxim Gorky, was a part of the ministry's proselytizing effort as well as a convenience for the visitors to the exposition. The town's back streets, however, still belonged to the migrants and the poor and were a territory that, to urban activists, was as much in need of public works as the center.

The less visible services that were needed for public health and sanitation required more sophisticated justifications. Public health publications presented arguments about the connection between infectious diseases and tainted water, filth, and stench; they relied on reason and scientific authority to challenge the received wisdom of traditional practices. In this area in particular activist reformers were critical of their "illiterate" and "half-educated" opponents who were less prepared to accept the major expenses that capital improvements like municipal water mains and sewage systems required.

In Moscow the principal political leader pushing for major investment in water mains was the mayor, Nikolai Alekseev, who held impeccable merchant credentials. He won the fervent backing of the editor of Moscow's first penny press, N. Pastukhov (himself a former tavern keeper), who

[106] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Tambovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:68.

[107] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:307-8.

foresaw that a beautiful city would emerge "when the sewer is built . . . and the river water becomes clean." He promised that "instead of the stench from filth Moscow's inhabitants will breathe fresh, clean air, and half the infectious disease will disappear."^[108] Such arguments proved sufficiently persuasive to win municipal backing in most migrant cities and provincial capitals by the end of the century. An official medical report of the early 1890s found that sixty cities possessed water mains providing "good water, judging by appearance and taste."^[109] In these cities a substantial part of the population enjoyed in their daily lives the benefits of their municipalities' "widening circle of activities."

The mortality records of these cities indicate that the investments in sanitation produced tangible improvements in public health. The reliability of the urban mortality figures is dubious for reasons that involve both population turnover and imperfect data collection, but comparisons of data over time provide a fairly reliable picture of the overall trend. When filtration of public water began in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the death rates in the areas served by the mains suddenly dropped; by contrast, in the newer districts inhabited mainly by the laboring population the rate remained unchanged.^[110] Similar changes occurred in other cities that were provided with water mains. The figures for death caused by typhus had declined sharply by the 1890s, and the major urban centers were spared the cholera epidemic early in that decade.

In the outlying, newly settled areas of these cities and in towns lacking these sanitary services epidemics remained a critical problem. Public medical care became more widespread through the construction of municipal hospitals, but it was never adequate to the demand (in either the countryside or the city). Critics of municipal public health measures pointed to the inequalities in mortality figures between the central districts and the city outskirts and to the evidence suggesting that mortality in Russian cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, remained higher than in the countryside.^[111] The point is not that some cities suddenly became sanitized islands in a sea of infectious diseases. By the end of the century municipal politics in the migrant cities had created a consensus on policies of public

[108] Moskovskii listok , 3 April 1982.

[109] "Otchet Meditsinskogo departamenta za 1892 g.," Vrach' 24 (1896):10.

[110] Sanitarnoe sostoianie gorodov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1899), 40-42.

[111] The story of St. Petersburg's "deadly districts" is described in James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 342-52; Moscow's improved conditions are discussed in Thomas McGivney, "The Lower Classes in the City of Moscow, 1870-1905" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978), 185-86. The most searching statistical inquiry into urban and rural mortality rates is S. A. Novosel'skii, O raslichiiakh v smertnosti gorodskogo i sel'skogo naseleniia Evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1911).

health reform; their impact and the visible improvements that these reforms made to the urban environment gave civic leaders tangible evidence of their own substantial contribution to the construction of a modern city.

The Russian city was also becoming a place of care for the needy. Venerable religious tradition sanctioned private charity. The idea of public responsibility for alleviating the effects of poverty, however, encountered open hostility from frugal civic leaders, who argued that such efforts confronted an endless stream of poor migrants. Housing was the most acute problem in the growing cities: many migrants moved in and out of urban areas depending on the season and lived on an extremely low income that provided for only the most miserable housing or, in some cases, no housing at all. Many municipal leaders, however, approached the housing problem with the attitude that it was entirely the affair of the workers themselves. For example, when a government inspector charged the municipality of Samara with being derelict in caring for the housing needs of its seasonal dock workers, its mayor, after blaming inadequate revenues and insufficient help from the district zemstvo , added that the stevedors "usually work loading grain and, receiving a very substantial income, have every possibility to rent lodgings in apartments."^[112] His roseate assessment was a convenient justification for municipal inaction.

The issue of welfare raised questions about the social role of the city that were as central as the issues posed by public health. Were the conditions of daily life the affair of individuals only? Should the industrious and enterprising be accorded, and the lazy and incompetent be deprived of, such items as adequate food and housing on the basis of individual competition? Were measures to alleviate social inequities a moral imperative for civic leaders or did public order only require minimal efforts to provide palliatives and then only when hardships threatened social unrest? Such questions were asked in cities throughout the West as well, but the scale of the problem in Russia was arguably greater than elsewhere. Poverty was acute, the resources to address the problem very meager, and municipal leaders and provincial officials were deeply divided on the issues. The various ways of addressing the problem rested on different assumptions of urban life and, by extension, of the nascent civil public sphere.

The tsarist administration gave its own authoritative answer to these questions. It conceived of the problem of urban welfare from the point of view of public order. In the early 1870s Odessa's police prefect, adopting a policy typical of other officials, took the problem of unhoused migrants

[112] "Reviziia komissii Kakhanova," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1, d. 23, 4.

very seriously. He ordered the police to open four public shelters to house six hundred people "at the expense of private charity." He justified his arbitrary intervention in municipal affairs by citing the "disease and depravity" allegedly rampant in private flophouses and the ease of "police surveillance" of public shelters.^[113] In this disciplinary perspective housing regulation and assistance were inseparable from control of the laboring population. In the mid 1860s the Moscow police chief recommended that the municipality provide lodging for the poor and close slum housing. A municipal commission replied to this advice by asserting that his real intent was to enhance police "vigilance" against "idleness, vagrancy, pauperism, depravity, theft, and other crimes in the city."^[114] Tsarist paternalism supported urban public welfare but with a strong element of administrative control. In this respect the municipalities were expected to do part of the work of the police.

Although municipal leaders also viewed the laboring masses from a great distance, they did so from a different perspective than tsarist officials. The concept of civil society is particularly useful in interpreting the welfare policies of Russian municipalities because the presence of a small commercial and manufacturing electorate created a cultural and social barrier between the municipal elite and the urban poor. Arguably, this barrier was even stronger in Russia than in Western countries. Party machines did not mobilize the poor to exchange favors for votes, as in cities in the United States; and no socialist parties could force a social welfare agenda on municipalities, as in German cities. Both Russian municipal statutes of the late nineteenth century identified social welfare as a "facultative" municipal activity and the dumas placed it very low on their agendas. One Russian doctor accused the dumas of failing to "hear the voice of the needy" who were for him a substantial collective presence in the city.^[115] The response of dumas to poverty suggests that instead of hearing the "voice" of the masses, they continued in the style of the Samara mayor to view the migrants as laborers who were fit to earn their keep; they relegated the needy poor to charitable institutions. Seen in this light, poverty was essentially a social disorder and a private philanthropic concern. Supporters of public welfare, seeking to win municipal support, at times even presented the problem in terms of "dangerous classes." One appeal for municipal action argued that "hundreds of thousands become corrupted by begging, commit crimes, threaten public safety, and ultimately land in prison and

[113] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 67, d. 165 (1875), 9.

[114] Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 282.

[115] Quoted in Frieden, Russian Physicians , 237.

cost several times more than the most expensive cases of relief."^[116] The argument was ingenious but could make converts only where poverty assumed mass proportions in the migrant cities.

The appeal for public welfare, whether understood in terms of public order, parsimony, or spiritual duty, brought some action. Moscow's aid, which has been studied by Joseph Bradley, was the most extensive, but it failed to cope with the influx of migrants. In its regulated approach to "misery" it could not make a serious impact on the world of the poor. Characteristically, Khitrovka remained essentially untouched at the end of the century.^[117] Short-term crises caused by recession or sudden increases in food prices produced ad hoc measures such as soup kitchens and temporary shelters. In the 1880s and 1890s an increasing number of municipal pawnshops competed successfully with loan sharks by offering inexpensive credit to those with items to pawn.^[118] This type of municipal self-help was compatible with the idea of the city as workplace, which was part of the agenda of the merchant parties as well as the economic practices of townspeople. However, the array of policies to cope with widespread urban poverty remained insignificant in comparison with the obvious need.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that municipal leadership lacked real vision and failed to occupy a major role in the public life of the country. What is impressive is that despite the serious political and administrative obstacles, municipal public life came to occupy a substantial place in the Russian city. Its importance was primarily a result of the activities that grew in response to local needs. The significance attributed to these activities in public debates was grounded partly in an idealized vision of the city as a civilized place and partly in a practical sense of the economic role of the city as a workplace. The factions that coalesced in municipal politics articulated these competing views, neither of which directly challenged autocratic power and neither of which widened civic life beyond the narrow constituency of a municipal elite. Although the accomplishments of the municipalities in the last decades of the nineteenth century fell far short of the goals of the activists, they were nonetheless both substantial and tangible.

Observers tended to describe the urban elite in disparaging terms of

[116] E. Maksimov, "Statisticheskie i finansovye voprosy obshchestvennogo prizreniia," Novoe slovo (April 1896):8, cited in Adele Lindenmyer, "Why Did They Give? Social Influences on the Motives of Russian Philanthropists" (Paper presented at the AAASS national convention, November 1986), 15.

[117] Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , chaps. 6-7.

[118] "Lombardy russkikh gorodov," Isvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 10 (October 1891), pt. 4, 1-4.

patriarchy or oligarchy. Still, the actual autonomy of Russian urban civic leadership supports the view that municipal politics in the postreform period supported the emergence of a civic public sphere in the cities of the land. The world of the municipalities was small because it was confined by both tsarist authoritarianism and the social conditions of the very migrant city within which it emerged. Although urban "society" and the "people" shared a common territory that was delimited by city outskirts and the urban environment, the two groups were separate communities divided by social practices and cultural perceptions. Civic life and municipal services appeared unable to bridge this social gulf, which the growth of the migrant cities made increasingly visible.

Figure 1.
The bucolic planned city: The Town Square of a Russian Provincial City,
approx. 1850. E. Krendovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar
(Moscow, 1964), vol. 8, pt. 2, 238.

Figure 2.
A mid century Volga river port: Kostroma, approx. 1850. Unknown artist.
Hoover Institution; Russian Pictorial Collection.

Figure 3.
Railroads and Russian cities: "Carte des voies de communications de la Russie."
Aperçu statistique des chemins de fer et des voies navigables de la Russie
(St. Petersburg, 1900), endpiece.

Figure 4.
Schematic flow chart of river and rail shipments of goods, 1897. "Mouvements
des marchandises par chemins de fer et voies navigables de la Russie d'Europe
en connexion avec l'importation et l'exportation par les ports et douanes
frontières d'après les données de 1897." Aperçu statistique des chemin de fer
et des voies navigables de la Russie (St. Petersburg, 1900), endpiece.

Figure 5.
The imperial planned city: "Modern Plan of Iaroslavl." Iaroslavl' v ego proshlom
i nastoiashchem:{nbIstoricheskii ocherk. Putevoditel' (Iaroslavl, 1913), endpiece.

Figure 6.
The fair as planned city :"Plan of All-Russian Industrial-Artistic
Exhibition." Ukazatel' vserossiiskoi promyshlenno-khudozhestvennoi
vystavki 1882 goda v Moskve (Moscow, 1882), following 160.

Figure 7.
The migrant laborer and his sweetheart: On the Boulevard, 1886-87. V.
Makovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964),
vol. 9, pt. 1, 345.

Figure 8.
The lower depths: The Flophouse, 1889. V. Makovskii. Istoriia russkogo
iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 9. pt. 1, 341.

Figure 9.
The metropolis: Nevskii prospekt, 1887. I. Repin. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva,
ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 9, pt. 1, 554.

Figure 10.
The city of popular entertainment: Mardi Gras Carnival on Admiralty Square
in St. petersburg. 1869. K. Makovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed.
E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 8, pt. 2, 256.

Figure 11.
Popular images of the city (1): "The Return of the Son, Waiter in the City, to His Peasant Family,"
1875. Chapbook illustration. Print Collection, Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library, Leningrad.

Figure 12.
Popular images of the city (2): "Two Migrant Workers in a Tavern," 1878. Chapbook illustration.
Print Collection, Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library, Leningrad.