1
Facade Cities and Fugitive Populations

In the mid nineteenth century Russian cities were located on the fringes of European civilization. Occasional neoclassical building facades and formal street plans told of imperial ambitions to impose a Western model of the city on townspeople, most of whom lived in log cabins along muddy, smelly alleys. The shortcomings of tsarist city plans provided one visible measure of the disparity between the ideal and the real city. Throughout this history of Russian urbanism the various idealized visions of the West offer an important perspective on the contradictions and conflicts attendant on rapid urbanization in Russia, where the life of the urban population was a far cry from the plans laid for the city by various urban elites. These plans make clear the European origins of the efforts to control and guide urban development.

Europe was a potent cultural invention that suggested measures of progress (by invidious comparison) by which to judge conditions in Russian cities and to devise plans of action. This device, never openly acknowledged as such, operated elsewhere too. The bacteriologist Paul Koch, called in 1892 to witness the misery and filth of the Hamburg slums, where a cholera epidemic had broken out, summed up for the press his disgust by proclaiming: "Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe!"^[1] His concern for public health turned a geographical expression into a con-

[1] Cited in Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (New York, 1985), 303.

demnation of the neglect of the urban poor. In a similar sense, tsarist officials and educated Russians in the mid century possessed cultural maps on which they located the border separating civilized Europe and backward Asia within their own country. Its location fluctuated and so too did their sense of urgency to push that border eastward. Catherine II's urban policies resembled a sort of cultural crusade to bring civilization to her empire. Although Nicholas I's reign was a period of relative inaction, it carried forth Catherine's policies and proved to be a time of preparation for another wave of urban reform.

In the tsarist law code a juridical statute gave precise definition to official "cities," no matter what their size, by granting municipal government to their inhabitants. Almost all these official cities were provincial and district centers of tsarist administration because the well-ordered state that Catherine the Great and her successors sought presupposed the collaboration of townspeople in matters of imperial interests. An imposing array of duties and responsibilities were placed on townspeople in these "service cities" by a state that, as J. Michael Hittle reminds us, had great need of their assistance.^[2] The empire's efforts to create orderly cities extended throughout European Russia. These efforts constituted a coherent urban strategy that left its mark on the landscape of the city and the activities of the townspeople.

But Russian urbanism also took other forms in those years—as later—and these forms escaped the control of tsarist officials. Behind the facade of imperial might bureaucratic agents of the state coped poorly with the multiple tasks that had been assigned to them, and townspeople conducted their affairs in a manner best calculated to shelter their private lives from public view. The institutional power of Nicholas I's state could ensure the submission of the population, but it could not impose its ideals of public behavior and social practices in municipal and economic affairs on the inhabitants. Resistance to the state largely took the form of passivity and inaction, a practice that I refer to as "fugitive." The conduct of urban daily life escaped tsarist control to such an extent that a few "enlightened bureaucrats" perceived it as a condemnation of Nicholaevan autocracy. The inadequacies of Nicholas's reign appeared in many areas, and the real city that was depicted in the bureaucratic inspections of the 1840s and 1850s contributed to the sense of crisis that was so pervasive among reformers at the beginning of Alexander II's reign. In the decades that followed, the

[2] J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 240.

fugitive practices of the townspeople became an integral part of the life of urban migrants.

This study of Russian urbanism is in part the history of the visions and plans that sought to mold a city that would be worthy, in one way or another, of belonging to the Western world. However, it is also an inquiry into the practices of the urban population. These practices would shape a very different city, a city of migrants.

Cities in the lmperial Style

Although overly ambitious, Catherine II's plans for Russian cities set the framework for urbanism in the following half century. She assumed, as Robert Jones makes clear, that rigorous planning and Western architectural models would turn backward Russian towns into "centers of civilization."^[3] Her extravagant rhetorical flourishes proclaimed that cities could be made—or remade—according to ideals that were adopted from the West. Her model exerted an abiding attraction among educated Russians for the nineteenth century. She prophesied that the "glories" (znamenitosti ) of the architectural and street plan for one town would attract new inhabitants, and that the entire region would acquire a new life and take on a new appearance."^[4] In this imperial rendering of the theme of city versus countryside, social progress followed automatically from the implementation of a rational urban plan.

As best we can assess them, the consequences of Catherine's plans in the Russian provinces were unspectacular but substantial. Administrative offices spread to provincial and district centers; garrisons gathered in the central town of each military district; archbishoprics and bishoprics brought the presence of high church dignitaries and the periodic practice of great public ceremonies into urban public life; architectural monuments glorified patriotic achievements; the facades of public and private buildings in town centers imitated the Palladian and baroque styles, albeit in plaster, of the great cities of the West. These elements of imperial urbanism were part of the panoply of autocratic power, a power that used the material and human resources of the empire to construct outposts of a peculiarly autocratic vision of civilization.

[3] Robert Jones, Provincial Development in Russia: Catherine II and Jacob Sievers (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984), 97-98.

[4] Quoted in I. I. Ditiatin, "Russkii doreformennyi gorod," in Stat'i po istorii russkogo prava , by I. I. Ditiatin (St. Petersburg, 1895), 14.

From this imperial perspective the city became synonymous with public order, and urban public space became the visual manifestation of this ideal. The official policy of "public orderliness" (blagoustroistvo ) gave an autocratic character to public functions. The general supervision of urban affairs lay in the hands of provincial governors, who had the responsibility to ensure that "publicly useful measures" encouraged the "improvement in the well-being" of the townspeople who were placed under their "protection."^[5] By Nicholas I's time municipal institutions had become part of the authoritarian ordering of the Russian city. For example, the governor of Vladimir province explained in the early 1840s that municipal rule had to be introduced in the new textile center of Ivanovo "for the strict enforcement of order and submission" among the town's fifteen thousand workers, who, "more than others, [are] prone to disorder."^[6] The governor was little concerned with self-rule; rather, he focused on the expansion of the urban police force and the creation of municipal institutions through which the state would exercise direct control over the turbulent laboring populations of the settlement.

The visible manifestations of tsarist urbanism were embodied in city plans and in the regulations governing urban construction and public activities. The responsibilities of governors—and of the police—extended to the "orderliness and cleanliness of the streets, squares, and markets," the good condition of public buildings, street paving, and the enforcement of "the approved [city] plan and rules for building facades."^[7] Architecture was to be the symbolic representation of public order, and St. Petersburg was the superlative embodiment of this urban vision. In the solemn eighteenth-century language of His Majesty's Imperial Building Commission, the architecture of St. Petersburg was to convey "a dignified appearance and grandeur [paradnost' ]."^[8] This directive was subsequently implemented using a variety of architectural styles; the last stage came in the 1840s when the railroad intruded on the capital's public space. Again following the model provided by Western Europe, the tsarist authorities hid the railroad station behind a neo-Renaissance facade. Unlike the West, however, the Petersburg version of facade planning was inserted within the larger polit-

[5] Ibid., 22.

[6] Quoted in P. G. Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo v doreformennoi Rossii (Moscow, 1958), 498.

[7] Ibid., 23.

[8] Iu. Egorov, "Zastroika Peterburga," in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva , ed. I. Grabar (Moscow, 1962), vol. 1, pt. 1, 49; see also V. V. Kirillov, "Russkii gorod epokhi barokko (kul'turnyi i esteticheskii aspekt)," Russkii gorod , ed. V. Ianin (Moscow, 1983), 6:127-62.

ical project of tsarist urbanism throughout the empire and was the centerpiece of this policy.

Although the planned development of St. Petersburg was the model for the provinces, this model usually appeared in a diluted form. In new cities in frontier areas on the fringes of the empire tsarist urban objectives and plans succeeded, at least in appearance, in creating the ideal city. In recently settled areas, such as the southern Ukraine, towns like Ekaterinoslav, Potemkin's "Athens of southern Russia," retained its urban character in the mid nineteenth century "thanks solely to its importance as the major administrative point in the province," at least in the opinion of the town leaders.^[9] The array of administrative offices was extensive in border cities such as Astrakhan, whose town elders listed with some pride the following governmental entities: "the port authority and admiralty of the Caspian fleet, Customs, the Salt Administration, the Committee for the Transportation of State Supplies, the Commission on Fisheries, the Military Administration of the Astrakhan Cossacks, and provincial educational institutions such as the gymnasium [and] the boys' and girls' district schools."^[10] In the imperial urban vision state functions merged with the social order: symmetrical, harmonious building facades fronted on streets laid out with geometrical precision, usually radiating out from central squares, where troops from the garrison paraded and around which were located the imperial administrative buildings, the Orthodox cathedral, and the central market place. Whether on the borders or in the hinterland, these cities were frontier posts of autocratic power and European civilization.

Frequently, however, the plan of a particular city remained a paper project that was filed away with the elaborate documentation required by the ministry. Established towns, whose central areas were filled with older buildings and narrow, often tortuous streets, defied the ambitious planners and were never completely remade in the imperial style. The reconstruction of streets and reordering of building facades entailed enormous capital expenditures, to which neither the state nor the municipalities consented unless forced to do so by exceptional circumstances. Fires proved a useful tool of urban renewal: Moscow was substantially rebuilt following the

[9] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Ekaterinoslavskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poselenii evropeiskoi Rossii v 1861-1862 g. , (St. Petersburg, 1863), 1: 4-6; these summaries of urban economic conditions were part of reports compiled by committees of local notables in 1862 in response to the request by the Ministry of Internal Affairs for information that would be used to consider municipal reform.

[10] "Soobrazhenie," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv [abbreviated TsGIA], fond [abbreviated f.] 1287, opis' [abbreviated op.] 37 (1862), delo [abbreviated d.] 2131, 10-11; these "Considerations" contain the complete reports of the committees discussed in n. 9.

devastating fire of 1812. The Moscow Building Commission received specific orders to be "guided by the plan of 1775 and carefully to ensure that all the streets and sidestreets preserve their legal dimensions."^[11] The destruction of Kostroma by fire in 1773 was so complete that this old Volga trading town reemerged in the following decades in the new imperial style, an outpost of orderly, baroque city planning, standing as Catherine had intended like a "beacon of civilization" on the bluffs overlooking the river.

When not aided by natural catastrophes, the plans lost much of their force. Their implementation confronted urban poverty and the unwillingness of municipal officials to undertake any measures outside the narrow economic interests and needs of town traders and manufacturers. They had substantial justification for their lack of cooperation. One state report of 1853 warned that "expenses for upkeep and construction of public buildings" were impoverishing town budgets.^[12] As required by the state, the municipality of Nizhny Novgorod devoted 10 percent of its total yearly funds to keep the six hundred oil street lamps functioning ten months of the year (and then only eighteen nights a month). Neither paving nor lighting existed in the city outskirts.^[13] In these conditions public buildings, whose upkeep was a municipal responsibility, often fell into disrepair, and streets conceived on a grand scale became grandiose eyesores. Plaster fell off imitation granite walls, revealing the plain bricks beneath; in rainy weather mud rendered unpaved central squares and streets virtually impassable.

In these circumstances imperial urbanism depended on the broad authority that was granted to provincial governors both by custom and by statute. When inspired to do so, they could make the implementation of the city plan a matter of great urgency. The governor-general of the Kharkov region, S. A. Kokoshkin, an official cut to the authoritarian model so favored by Nicholas I, assumed his position in the early 1850s after a long military career. On his arrival Kharkov was a city with an expanding economy and a rapidly growing population. Its city plan, approved in 1837, had remained a dead letter until that time. Kokoshkin used his authority to rapidly construct several monumental public buildings. He kept within the letter of the law by setting out on street inspections but went far beyond the spirit of the law when he ordered wooden shanties in the town center to be torn down regardless of the fate of the inhabitants. Brick buildings with suitable classical facades appeared, and, in the place of the shanties, here and

[11] I. Grabar, "Arkhitektura Moskvy," in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva , vol. 8, pt. 1, 188.

[12] "Doklad," TsGIA, f. 869, op. 1, d. 308, 2.

[13] "Soobrazhenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 264, 1-2.

there even sidewalks were constructed. Kokoshkin exiled the mayor for daring to oppose his plan to construct a new trading center, but even the governor's powers had limits.^[14] The mayor became a hero to the townspeople and the number of brick buildings remained relatively few. Most important, Kharkov's expansion beyond the central area was creating a new city that Kokoshkin's imperial plan and political authority were powerless to contain.

By mid century the strict ordering given to buildings, streets, and urban space in general was doomed because the success of such plans depended on social stability and demographic stagnation. The imperial planners envisioned an urban world of order, not growth. Louis Mumford, an unsympathetic critic of all baroque planners, suggests that the spirit of such work excluded a sense of time, which proved to be detrimental to their ideal of "uniformity and standardization."^[15] In the Russian plans this frame of mind led to town limits appearing on official city maps two-and-a-half miles apart as a rule. The Russian planners took little heed of local conditions or future expansion.^[16] Outside the town centers the use of urban space was largely in the hands of the townspeople. When the population remained stable, enforcement posed few problems, but any rapid influx of migrants or expansion of business overwhelmed the meager resources for enforcing the regulations, and the regulations ceased to have any meaning.

In the mid nineteenth century most provincial capitals remained small, but here and there rapid population growth was already occurring. The capitals set the pace: Moscow had grown by 50 percent in the previous quarter century. A few other towns such as Saratov and Odessa expanded even more rapidly.^[17] A trip in the 1840s from the center of Moscow to the newer wards quickly left behind the well-ordered city center to reach, in the words of one contemporary writer, "the area of simple, ideal existence—no paving, nothing resembling luxurious urban living, no trading enterprise. The little houses are entirely made of wood, one-story, and built according to the rules of free [i.e., unplanned] architecture."^[18] The same conditions

[14] D. Bagalei and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Kharkov, 1912), 2:50-51, 284-85.

[15] Louis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), 104, 127.

[16] Robert Jones, "Urban Planning and the Development of Provincial Towns in Russia, 1762-1796," in The Eighteenth Century in Russia , ed. J. G. Garrard (Oxford, 1973), 325; the plans, it should be noted, were compiled largely by provincial and local authorities, who followed "generally accepted and representative concepts" laid down by the St. Petersburg Commission. See R. M. Gariaev, "Iz istorii pereplanirovki russkikh gorodov," Istoriia SSSR (November-December 1986):146.

[17] Population figures are found in Thomas Fedor, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1975), 183-202.

[18] I. T. Kokorev, Moskva sorokovykh godov (Moscow, 1958), 176-77.

were evident wherever urban populations had begun to swell because of migration. The resulting jumble of houses, gardens, and streets, which "nowhere take the direct businesslike direction," turned Moscow into a vast "suburb or village," in the opinion of one Westerner. Unable except in the very center of the city to find "an assembly of human dwellings pressed closely together," he concluded that "Moscow is not a city."^[19] His bewilderment provides a useful perspective from which to evaluate the state's urban plans. These plans relied on Western architectural models and imposed little coherence on the layout of Russian towns. Yet the depiction of Moscow as a "big village" is a disparaging exaggeration, drawn as it was (as in the above testimony) from the scornful views of outsiders, both officials and foreigners, for whom the life of the lower orders was alien and exotic. Urbanization in Russia bore little resemblance to preconceived notions of either Westerners or tsarist urban planners.

The maintenance of public order in the cities was in the hands of the tsarist police and the military. In mid century the state had not yet designated a special state agency to police urban centers. An edict of 1802 created a state police force, organized by district (uezd ) units, that was responsible for both urban and rural areas. The state police were incorporated directly into the tsarist administration: they were subordinated to provincial governors but not to the municipalities. Nonetheless, municipalities had to rely on the district force to implement their statutes as well as to maintain public order, and they were obligated to fund the police assigned to their territory.^[20]

The presence of two internal military forces, the Corps of Internal Guard and the gendarmerie, identified particular provincial cities as tsarist outposts. The Internal Guard, numbering nearly 150,000 soldiers in the 1840s, was distributed among eleven regional command centers and charged with "putting down acts of insubordination and riotous behavior." Peasant revolts were the unstated but obvious target of this internal army. The gendarmerie was small and active principally in surveillance, although it also operated a small cavalry force.^[21] Despite the existence of these two internal forces, disorders among the urban population did not loom large in tsarist concerns. With the major exceptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow,

[19] J. G. Kohl, Russia-St. Petersburg and the Interior of the Empire (London, 1844), 213.

[20] E. Anychin, Istoricheskii obzor razvitiia administrativno-politseiskikh uchrezhdenii v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1872), 224-25.

[21] John Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874 (Oxford, 1985), 313-14.

policing the cities was an incidental affair within the broad tsarist concept of public order.

The police had originally received a somewhat paternalistic mandate toward the urban population. In her well-ordered city Catherine II conceived a universalistic role for her police: they would encourage the husband to "care for and protect his wife, the wife to be faithful in love and obedience to her husband, the parent to be imperious [vlastitelen ] toward [his or her] children, and children to be submissive toward [their] parents."^[22] However, her Germanic sense of police paternalism failed in subsequent decades to set the tone of police supervision, which was increasingly drawn to administrative duties.

In the mid nineteenth century urban police were largely concerned with enforcing the facade regulations of the city plans and looking out for their own livelihood. Their responsibilities were as broad and as ill-defined as those of the governors. They were charged with ensuring that all regulations on building construction, trade, and manufacturing were obeyed, that the streets were kept clean and passable, that temporary migrants possessed the proper documents, that army conscripts were called up when their time came, and so on. One physician serving in a provincial town recalled that the police enjoyed discretionary powers to enforce or neglect "a mass of various kinds of laws and regulations, unknown to almost everyone" and in doing so were able to hold the townspeople "in complete dependence."^[23] His testimony, like that of many educated Russians in those years, was strongly colored by an abiding suspicion of all police action. For such witnesses autocratic rule and police power in the cities went hand in hand.

In mid century urban police forces were both small and poorly paid. They were woefully understaffed for the multitude of tasks that were assigned them. Understaffing was particularly acute in growing cities such as Kharkov, which had a population of nearly fifty thousand at mid century but a police force of only fifty men. Underadministered in this domain as in most others, the state continued to require that the urban population assume such petty police duties as that of night watchman. With the exception of the police chiefs (or captains in small towns) the police received miserly levels of pay. Because of their low salaries they often took advantage of their considerable powers to ensure themselves immediate personal profit. They used requests for temporary travel permits, navigation permits to boats on rivers and canals, the right to open taverns, and similar trans-

[22] Ditiatin, "Russkii doreformennyi gorod," 15-16.

[23] A. A. Sinitsyn, "Iz vospominanii starogo vracha," Russkaia starina 154 (June 1913): 498.

actions as occasions for accepting bribes. The physician previously cited observed that town traders and artisans, surrounded by administrative "unpleasantness that can trap them at every step," had the habit of "bribing everyone who shouts at them."^[24]

As defined by police practices, public order in the cities was both capricious and selective. To critics of the tsarist system, it appeared to be yet another manifestation of that arbitrariness (proizvol ) so characteristic of the autocratic regime. Nikolai Gogol included the town police chief among the inner circle of corrupt administrators in his play "The Inspector General"; the brutal policeman Derzhimorda ("the strangler," in a loose translation) belonged to the outer circle. In the more elegant language of the Voronezh municipal commission of 1862, the police "violate the urban peace and order that it is their duty to enforce."^[25]

In these circumstances complaints about police behavior came from both tsarist authorities and municipal activists. Even the most zealous provincial officials could not overcome the inadequacies of the police. Similarly, municipalities objected not only to police abuses but also to insufficient policing of economic activities. The commerce of the port town of Rostovon-Don was increasing rapidly in the mid 1800s, and its 1862 town commission judged its police work "far below the needs of the urban population and the business that they conduct."^[26] Although state officials and civic leaders had differing priorities and assumptions about public order, they both agreed that the police were incapable of controlling the turbulent laboring population that was arriving in increasing numbers to search for work. Thus, limitations of tsarist urban planning were paralleled by the inadequacies in the ways the police enforced urban regulations.

Both the ambitious objective of creating public orderliness in the cities and the inadequacies of tsarist provincial institutions led the state to rely on the assistance of the urban population. Catherine II's Charter of Rights and Privileges Granted the Cities, issued in 1785, was conceived in a style similar to the city plans: "rights and privileges" were obligations placed on the urban electorate, designated the "city society," who were expected to participate actively in municipal affairs. Hittle's sanguine reading of this reform attributes the formation of a "new corporate basis for city society" to the charter.^[27] Citizenship was determined by urban residence. The char-

[24] Ibid., 498.

[25] "Soobrazhenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2146, 25.

[26] Ibid., d. 2152, 212.

[27] Hittle, The Service City , 228.

ter grouped the population into six separate categories (on the basis of estates, property, and occupation) for representation on the municipal council and included in the city society all propertied adult males over twenty-five, who were responsible for electing the mayor. However, the municipality fell directly under the authority of the tsarist provincial administration and its responsibilities were only those local tasks that the regime itself could not undertake, which included the regulation of commerce, building inspection, lodging garrisons, sanitation, and street paving.^[28] The charter remained in effect until 1870, but the actual conduct of municipal affairs bore little resemblance to its regulations.

Until the period of the Great Reforms the role of municipalities in the urban communities was dominated by two related trends. On the one hand, the electorate, together with the pool of municipal leaders, shrank to minute proportions. On the other hand, the tsarist administration intervened increasingly in municipal affairs, undercutting the very notion of municipal autonomy and "privileges," both of which had been problematical from the start. Tsarist intervention was stimulated by the apathy of townsmen, who were discouraged by authoritarian practices from seeking to improve urban conditions. When local initiative received semiofficial sanction in the 1860s, civic activism quickly emerged in many cities. Until then municipal government operated primarily to fulfill, in the words of a nineteenth-century historian of municipal politics, "the specific demands, needs, and requirements emanating from state administrative institutions."^[29] The failure of municipal governments to do so successfully created the crisis of mid-century urban rule.

The urban electorate that was to constitute the basis for corporate municipal life never came into existence. As a result, the city society itself atrophied, disappearing from municipal activities and leaving no at-large voting procedure. Of the six groups designated for representation, only three took any part at all in elections—the merchantry, the artisanry, and the petty bourgeoisie. Each sent representatives to the municipal councils in an apparently haphazard manner to fill the six seats specified in the charter. Other groups avoided participation altogether. Having no recognized place in municipal affairs, nobles and state bureaucrats boycotted elections (and also avoided municipal service), which had the effect of removing from urban affairs groups that some urban reformers of the 1860s would refer to wistfully as "the best and most honored members" of the urban

[28] The provisions of the charter are examined in Hittle, The Service City , 220-29.

[29] Ditiatin, "Russkii doreformennyi gorod," 23.

community.^[30] At the other end of the social ladder peasants with legal urban residence refused to be registered in the city society. Representatives to town councils were chosen by meetings of the three urban estates, among whom only a handful of members bothered to participate. For example, when Yaroslavl chose a new council in 1842, only 100 of the 1,500 members of the town's bourgeoisie appeared at the elections.^[31] An even smaller proportion of Moscow's merchants (120 out of 4,000) joined in elections in 1860.^[32] Elections for mayor took place most often within the merchantry, the one estate society with some influence in town affairs. In 1840 the merchant elders in Kharkov invited members of the lower estates to join in choosing a new mayor but only twenty-four appeared.^[33] The "well-ordered police state" of the Germanic monarchies of Central Europe relied on corporate and municipal collaboration in urban police affairs, but neither element was apparent in the autocratic state of Nicholas I.

The missing town citizenry had little reason to come forth in those years. Municipal affairs provided no inducement for civic endeavor because they consisted exclusively of obligations imposed by provincial administrators. The notion of a "self-governing community," which the reformers of the 1860s would glorify, had no place in the authoritarian political world of the preceding decades. One of these aspiring activists, examining the miserable state of public urban life on the eve of what he hoped would be a new era, complained bitterly that "the majority of the inhabitants of our cities have no consciousness of social needs," by which he meant public service. He provided, albeit disapprovingly, a key reason for their woeful failing when he added that they "consider these [public] affairs to be something completely alien to them that do not affect their personal interests, a burdensome pastime that takes them away from their own affairs."^[34] Their urban world was a private, not public (obshchestvennyi ), place. The civic duties that called for public participation were fulfilled in a chaotic, haphazard manner by tsarist fiat and private initiative. Imperial decrees regulated town affairs, and by this standard all municipalities managed their policies in an extralegal, if not illegal, manner.

Municipal politics made a mockery of Catherine's vision of city society,

[30] "O dozvolenii dvorian," October 5, 1862, TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2004 (1859-65), 61.

[31] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 406, table 50.

[32] B. V. Zlatoustavskii, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v period reformy 60-kh godov XIX veka." (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1953), 147.

[33] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:252.

[34] "Mnenie Komissii naznachennoi Permskim gorodskim obshchestvom," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2171, 5.

turning orderly procedures into a caricature of self-rule. In the absence of large numbers of voters, electoral methods bore no resemblance to free choice and majority rule. Either voters had to be rounded up without regard to proper electoral procedures or meetings turned into brawls between small groups seeking to dominate the elections. In either case elections were manipulated affairs. The reformist critic cited in the preceding paragraph painted a cruel portrait of the citizenry, "brought in almost by force," voting "as though they were carrying out a formality they could easily do without and that had been dreamed up only Heaven knows why."^[35] The chaos was most apparent among the lower urban orders. The petty bourgeois society in Saratov appeared to one inspector in 1842 to be in a state of "complete disorder" where "the most important affairs" were in the hands of a few individuals.^[36] Throughout the country tsarist provincial administrators and emissaries from St. Petersburg noted that only a small number of townspeople carried out the provisions of the charter, and these people did so reluctantly.

Municipal leaders came primarily from the merchant estate, the members of which were most visible and therefore most vulnerable to tsarist pressures to participate in public service. For merchants municipal office appears to have been an onerous duty that was avoided by whatever means possible. One governor from central Russia noted in 1842 that "the lack of benefits from service" leads merchants to "decline election to office . . . in almost all cities.^[37] In theory some public service was obligatory, but the facade of regulations hid another world of devious private stratagems to subvert the rules. One merchant wrote that municipal service was a "trap" for his colleagues, who judged it "extremely unpleasant and dangerous" and were prepared "to pay up in order not to be elected to any sort of duties." A sufficient bribe would ensure that "a person with power could bypass all laws and regulations so that [he] would not be disturbed and would not be called to serve."^[38] Merchants of the lower ranks (the second and third guilds) lacked the wealth and influence necessary to buy favors and seem to have provided the bulk of the recruits for town offices.

One consequence of this distortion of the ideal of public service was the use of municipal office for private profit. The incidence of corruption in

[35] Ibid., 6.

[36] "Po obozreniiu Saratova," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39 (1843), d. 78, 93.

[37] "Po otchetam i zapiskam nachal'nikov gubernii o nedostatkakh nyneishnego ustroistva," ibid., op. 37, d. 120, 8.

[38] N. Vishniakov, Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh (Moscow, 1911) 3:93; a history of Kharkov recounts a similar situation; see Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova , 2:255.

urban administration was notorious; for example, it was the key satirical element in Gogol's play The Inspector General , which Nicholas I himself applauded. From the perspective of reluctant public servants the opportunities for personal profit through corruption were the only tangible reward for their onerous duty. Venality and favoritism were widespread, reflecting the private interests of officials and their "families" of supporters and protectors. Although trading fees and property taxes were insignificant affairs from the point of view of outsiders, they represented important economic considerations to local traders, artisans, and manufacturers.

The tenacity and skill of petty officials in manipulating these responsibilities were impressive to judge by the reports of the inspectors sent by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the early 1840s. For example, by controlling fees on stalls for traders in the Tambov city market, the municipality favored local traders at the expense of peasants seeking to penetrate the urban commercial network. The inspector complained that the peasants "suffered real oppression at the hands of these middlemen" and added that the higher prices on produce" made the townspeople suffer as well." The governor sought to equalize the fees, and the police chief "tried several times to stop the abusive action of the middlemen and to establish order at the market." Both failed, however, because they were blocked by the skillful actions of the mayor and his backers. According to the inspector the mayor, who was a local miller, proved his unfitness for his position by diverting a stream running through town in order to provide water for his mill. His spirit of enterprise left "a swamp to form where the river previously ran."^[39] Such actions were commonplace. Saratov's tax on commerce was set by the traders themselves, who, according to another inspector, declared "very low prices on their products" when fixing the tax rate.^[40]

Property taxes, the principal source of municipal revenues, became a focal point of conflict. Tsarist officials demanded that municipalities pay various obligatory expenses, which necessitated higher tax rates, but propertied townspeople sought to keep tax rates at the lowest possible level. To avoid bitter conflict, municipalities sought as their "sole aim . . . to collect as quickly and as painlessly as possible the maximum amount of money. They consider all means to this end to be acceptable."^[41] The inspectors, who brought to these affairs their "enlightened" sense of order and rational method, were deeply offended by the officials' proizvol; for their part they appeared intruders and trouble-makers to the protective family circles of

[39] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39 (1843), d. 43, 58-61.

[40] Ibid., d. 78, 159.

[41] Ibid., d. 72, 103.

the municipal officials. The gulf between these two groups was as great as the disparity between the orderly city plans and the run-down, sprawling appearance of most towns, the grandiose vision of the civilizing city and the reality of the poor townspeople.

The gap between municipal duties and municipal deeds originated not only in the absence of "civic consciousness" but also in the prevalent perception among private interests in the towns that they received no benefits from their burdensome tax assessments. The need to fulfill obligatory tsarist tasks pushed municipal revenues up by 50 percent between 1840 and 1853.^[42] Complaints by the townspeople that their taxes were excessively burdensome cannot be dismissed as self-serving. Ministry inspectors recognized the validity of excessive taxation. The Voronezh property tax, raised to 2 percent to cover growing expenses, exceeded the means of so many townspeople that "municipal officials went without their salaries for several months."^[43] Once the state-imposed expenses for police, billeting troops, maintaining official buildings, and so on, were covered, very little was left over for the needs of the towns themselves. Street lighting and paving existed only in town centers, if at all. Bridges consisted of little more than logs. One tsarist inspector reported that in Tambov the bridges were so hazardous that they constituted a peril to travelers: carriages fall into the river or mud and there are "so many drowned horses [that] they are impossible to count."^[44] Even allowing for some exaggeration, his lurid picture appears to have captured the condition of public services in provincial centers. Only in the capitals was there extensive paving and gas lighting along the streets. When residents of the capitals or Western visitors ventured outside St. Petersburg and Moscow, they quickly concluded that they were beyond the pale of European modernity. In terms of public life they certainly were.

Lacking both the means and the incentives to deal with urban needs, the municipalities operated primarily as inferior branches of state administration. Looking back on the prereform years, a Petersburg mayor observed that municipal officials "for many decades were free from responsibility," and, as a result, "they had long since acquired the habit of waiting for initiative and aid from the state administration, whose supervision and approval preceded every step in the activities of municipal government."^[45]

[42] "Obzor svedeniia," ibid., f. 869, op. 1 (1858), d. 262, 1.

[43] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39, d. 65, 77.

[44] Ibid., d. 43, 65-66.

[45] M. M. Stasiulevich, Desiat' let Sanktpeterburgskogo obshchestvennogo upravleniia (St. Petersburg, 1884), v.

This situation was compatible with the authoritarian style of many tsarist officials, who were accustomed to assuming all important initiatives and who suspected insubordination in the initiatives of lower-ranking officials and citizens. In the mid 1870s P. P. Durnovo, the governor of Moscow province, deeply regretted the passing of the time when the Moscow municipality was "completely subordinated to the provincial authorities, who supervised all [of the municipality's] actions and without whose permission [the municipality] had no right to either lower or raise municipal expenses." To him effective urban public administration required that municipal officials should be "obligated carry out unquestioningly all orders from the provincial administration."^[46]

The disorder of Russian municipal rule had deeper roots in the privatization of urban life in the prereform period. An official report on Moscow municipal activities pointed to "the multitude of ancient customs and institutions that bring profits and privileges to various estates and that hide illegal actions and violations by city officials" and "block state authorities at every step."^[47] In other words, a clandestine network of local officials functioned in the shadow of, and as a sort of mirror image of, tsarist authoritarianism and rationalist public order. Its purpose was to serve economic interests but these interests cannot be defined solely as "merchant" interests because the wealthy members of that estate zealously avoided any entanglement in town affairs. Merchant factions might occasionally compete for control of municipal institutions because profits were a reward for ingenious political stratagems. Family circles flourished in this environment. They provided valuable protection from higher powers and created a privatized context within which public affairs were transformed into private interests.

The Fugitive Urban Society

Tsarist policies to turn the city into the image of state power had their parallel in the social sphere in the decrees regulating rank and privileges among urban estates. The influence of tsarist officialdom, the respect accorded the hereditary nobility, and the wealth of the few first-guild merchants ensured that these groups would be preeminent within mid-century urban society. The pattern of urban social relations in the mid nineteenth century bears out Gregory Freeze's argument that in those years the "sos-

[46] "Vsepoddaneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1281, op. 7, d. 82 (1875), 19.

[47] Quoted in Zlatoustavskii, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie," 107.

lovie system" had reached its peak of "group identity" and "social cohesion."^[48]

Public life in the provincial capitals provided a stage for the display of uniforms and medals, the visual marks of standing within the small urban elite. The dignity and privileges associated with the merchantry (and the far smaller group of professionals who were recognized as "honorary citizens") were the autocratic model of productive, orderly, and loyal townspeople. Although the state's efforts to impose a well-defined, coherent, and stable hierarchy of power and prestige were somewhat successful, the state could not regulate the lives of the poor townspeople, much less the migrants who were beginning to swell the populations of various cities. The analogy between the state's social scheme and the tsarist urban political order can be carried one step further. In both cases the superficial appearance of compliance hid an extraordinary degree of disarray and disregard for both legal norms and state-imposed regulations. The social history of nineteenth-century Russian urbanism encompasses both a caste-like hierarchical order and disorder.

A social profile of the mid-century Russian city must rely largely on official reports, which attempted to take account of urban activities within the context of tsarist regulations on residence, estate membership, and so on. The apparent precision of the information in these reports is misleading: too often they offered the fallacious precision of Chichikov's "dead souls." Police reports contributed to the appearance of social order by providing precise figures for individual estates and total population in each town. They constitute the sole measure of urban population trends until the imperial census of 1897. At best these police reports are crude approximations, but their demographic data are useful in suggesting the modest level of mid-century urbanization. Only three cities had populations of over one hundred thousand (St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa) and only fifty (of the six hundred urban areas officially classified as cities) were over twenty thousand.^[49] Because almost all of the towns in the latter group were provincial capitals one can conclude that in the preindustrial era city size was largely a function of proximity to tsarist administrative activities, on which much of the population depended directly or indirectly for their livelihood. With respect to population size as well as other characteristics, then, the Russian city of that time was a tsarist outpost.

Official reports included figures for both "permanent" residents, en-

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

[49] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 369, table 43.

rolled in the proper corporate organization ("society") of their estate, and the "temporary" residents, primarily peasants but also townspeople of the lower orders (artisans and the petty bourgeoisie) who were born outside the town limits. The mobility of the lower orders in the cities defied accurate police supervision. Moscow's passport office registered 142,000 temporary residents in 1859, nearly two-thirds of whom were peasants.^[50] Most temporary residents were otkhodniki , migrants seeking short-term jobs. In 1859 otkhodniki made up over one-fourth of the total recorded population of Moscow, and by the 1870s they increased to nearly two-thirds of the city's inhabitants. The apparent precision of these police reports, however, did not signify that the entire population was properly registered. Occasional official complaints tell another story of missing "souls" who lived beyond the pale of tsarist regulations.

Black Sea ports, in growing need of stevedores for loading grain shipments, constituted a vast area of meager surveillance. The lure of work created a chaotic labor market where, even in conditions of serfdom, extralegal migration often occurred. Odessa police reported capturing 4,500 "fugitives" between 1849 and 1852, but one may assume that many more went undiscovered. The police prefect (gradonachal'nik ) of Taganrog, on the sea of Azov, complained about the poor work of his police in this area. He was aware that illegal migration was a problem of large dimensions but unimpressed by the figures supplied by his police, whose "catch" (ulov ) of unregistered migrants was far too low in his judgment. His solution was to request more police.^[51] I assume that other areas such as Moscow and St. Petersburg had a similar hidden migrant society. In Moscow one uncontrolled migrant community existed thanks to the ingenuity of the Fedoseevtsy, an Old Believer group whose bonds were forged over generations of persecution. They cared for needy, undocumented brethren by making use of the "dead souls" that Nikolai Gogol found so intriguing. Purchasing the documents of dead petty bourgeois Muscovites, they transferred the names to their own fugitives, who automatically enrolled in that estate corporation.^[52] Thus, ingenuity combined with venality and insufficient staffing to create another hidden dimension to the supposedly orderly cities of statutes and plans.

The motive for the risky violation of police regulations was uniformly

[50] B. N. Kazantsev, Rabochie Moskvy i Moskovskoi gubernii v seredine XIX veka (Moscow, 1976), 61.

[51] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 357-58.

[52] P. G. Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie kapitalizma v Rossii, 1850-1880 (Moscow, 1978), 472-74.

similar: the desperate search for work on the part of the mass of poor laborers, both urban and rural. Urban impoverishment was general throughout European Russia, although it was probably most acute in the cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement. During Nicholas I's reign the contraction of the boundaries of the Pale and the restrictions placed on Jewish employment in rural areas put enormous pressures on the urban labor market and led Jewish townspeople to avoid registration by all possible means. Official documentation meant fees and taxes, and to avoid making these payments an unknown number of Jewish families preferred legal nonexistence.

The absurdities of the police regulations were apparent to observers outside the Jewish community. When census time came, apartments and houses were missing their Jewish residents, whose presence the police conveniently overlooked in return for suitable bribes. Birth records in the 1850s reveal a sudden fall in Jewish births after a thirty-kopek registration fee was introduced. As a result of this fee, in Vilna almost twice as many Jews officially died in the following years as were born. One tsarist official commented ironically that "if, God forbid, this [trend] should continue, in 1875 Vilna will have no Jews." On a more serious note another official complained in 1861 that "it is no less difficult to ascertain the number of Jews today than in the time of King David."^[53]

In these conditions the legal precision of legally defined urban estates and functions bore little resemblance to social reality. In the opinion of one historian the lowest merchants' guild appeared large only because so many traders falsified their figures of working capital to meet the criterion for admission. Merchant honors were not what mattered; rather, they were making a desperate effort to spare their sons twenty-five years of military service, which was not imposed on merchants. When this law was changed in the 1860s, the sudden fall in merchant membership suggested to one historian that perhaps two hundred thousand individuals had paid their merchant fees solely for this purpose.^[54]

Among the lower orders the petty bourgeoisie (the approximate translation of the Russian term meshchanstvo ) acquired a reputation among educated Russians for servility and obscurantism; its members were thought to be the epitome of all that defied the hopes of educated Russians for a civilized city that would be a beacon of Western culture. In the opinion of one critic of the autocratic system the petty bourgeoisie was the refuge

[53] Quoted in Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia, 1983), 161-62.

[54] I. I. Ditiatin, Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii (Iaroslavl, 1877), 2:228-29.

of retired soldiers, beggars, bankrupt merchants, and all others "for whom there was no assigned place in that cursed caste society [v zakoldovannom soslovnom gosudarstve ].^[55] The disdain he showed for this estate was shared by tsarist administrators, who were empowered to apply to them "all the restrictions on mobility from place to place that applied to peasants."^[56] The members of the petty bourgeoisie, which also included those who belonged to the smaller artisan estate, constituted about one-half of the population of provincial towns, and the "typical" townsperson of mid-century Russia was from this estate.

The salient characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie were the constant struggle with poverty and the desperate search for work. In certain respects it closely resembled the peasantry. Its members, placed in a semiservile status in terms of taxes, conscription, and passport requirements, took whatever trades or employment they could find to keep body and soul together, including working as farm laborers. Unlike the enserfed peasantry, its members might hope to escape by economic enterprise or state service, but in reality these opportunities were open to very few. Their lives were given over to work, and from the perspective of their practices the city was a work place, a pattern that was reinforced later by the massive influx of peasant migrants. The readiness of the members of the petty bourgeoisie to move in search of work was obvious to the urban leaders, who repeatedly cited the official figures of migration out of their towns to illustrate the impoverishment of their populations. The city commission of the upper-Volga town of Tver noted that in 1862 over one thousand petty bourgeois residents took out passports, which permitted absences of six months to a year. This massive departure, they explained laconically, was "indispensable even though the petty bourgeois [migrants] earn no more than thirty rubles a year" because "the petty bourgeois [residents] here live in extreme poverty and cannot even pay their taxes."^[57]

Despite their appearance of castelike rigidity, estate regulations did not define precise limits to the activities of these lowly townspeople. The efforts of the state to isolate the artisanry as a separate corporate unit proved futile. The restrictions failed to control handicraft operations or to ensure proper employment to artisans. When a state inspector visited the town of Tula, he found such "absurd" variations in the registered number of guild

[55] S. V. Bakrushin, Maloletnie nishchie i brodiagi v Moskve: Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1913), 17.

[56] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 23.

[57] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Tverskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:4-5.

masters from one year to the next (variations of over 100 percent) that he concluded that a "conspiracy [zlonamerenie ] to hide the truth" must exist.^[58] In less moralistic terms his findings suggest that urban artisans functioned in large measure outside the purview of the legal corporations. This phenomenon was most evident in the cities of the Pale. In Minsk the president of the artisan society complained that "affairs are such that any Jew hardly knowing his business calls himself a master, taking on work and apprentices." Adopting the official tone of a tsarist official, he warned that "disorder is spreading, for no one trusts anyone else."^[59] Thus, tsarist efforts to construct their cities on the foundation of public orderliness could not overcome the human obstacles put in their way by the working population.

Poverty was the overriding concern of the petty bourgeoisie, and tsarist regulations could not contain their struggle for livelihood. Estate regulations on artisan activities were largely irrelevant. Many handicrafts were operated by "temporary artisans," that is, people from other estates. Few hereditary guild members actually practiced a trade. Three-fourths of the 12,600 artisans registered in the corporate society of St. Petersburg worked "as a rule in domestic service, as guards, errand boys, dispatch boys, etc."^[60] In the quieter provincial centers any work at hand constituted the daily life of the urban poor.

In these circumstances the official barrier separating rural and urban estates dissolved at the level of daily life. Peasants sought employment legally and illegally in the city, competing as traders as well as laborers, and poor townspeople sought work in the fields on either private land around towns or estates. The reports from the 1862 urban commissions frequently noted the importance of rural labor as a source of livelihood for urban workers. The tsarist administration itself recognized the vital role that cultivated lands around provincial towns played in sustaining the urban population. The city of Saratov had an abundance of surrounding farm land, and the poor townspeople turned to agricultural work by choice because in the words of one observer, they judged their legal right to trade and artisanry a "burden" and valued land as their best income.^[61] In other, less fortunate urban centers, members of the petty bourgeoisie relied even

[58] "Po revizii," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39 (1945), d. 72, 39-40.

[59] Cited in A. F. Vishnevskii, "Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe razvitie gorodov Belorussii v period krizisa feodal'izma" (Kandidat dissertation, State University of Minsk, 1973), 67.

[60] K. A. Pazhitnov, Problema remeslennykh tsekhov v zakonodatel'stve russkogo absoliutizma (Moscow, 1952), 125-26.

[61] I. A. Gan, O nastoiashchem byte meshchan Saratovskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg, 1860), 27.

more heavily on farming. In the opinion in 1842 of the minister of finance, without access to city land, "they would die from hunger."^[62]

Poverty was only one explanation that the authorities used to explain the existence of the fugitive urban community. Outsiders who ventured into the provinces or even into the poorer neighborhoods of the major cities claimed to be overwhelmed by the stench (zlovonie ) and the squalor (griazn' ) that assailed their senses in streets and courtyards. Encouraged by the contemporary medical theory of "miasma," officials and observers easily associated these peculiar and repugnant qualities of poor townspeople with the prevalence among the population of infectious diseases. St. Petersburg itself, whose official death rate in those years was forty-seven per thousand, had the reputation of being one of the most unhealthy cities of Europe.^[63] Most frightening to contemporaries were the cholera epidemics, the first of which occurred in 1830-31, the second in 1848. These epidemics struck the urban areas with special virulence, attacking, in the words of an English physician, "the lower classes of people, the ill-fed, ill-clothed, living in low and damp houses."^[64] This description, which was drawn from his observations in Moscow, fit any of the mid-century towns.

The differences in social standing between the well-to-do and the poor townspeople appeared not only in official discrimination between privileged and unprivileged but also in a cultural language of disorder, disease, and misery that located the urban poor beyond the limits of Western urban civilization. These townspeople were absent from urban public life, without voice in municipal elections, and beyond the borders of the meager print culture of these towns. Urban disorder and poverty were important indicators of backwardness to educated Russian contemporaries, who judged their cities by Western cultural standards. Their awareness of the squalor and stench of the living conditions of the urban poor was typical of contemporary Western thought on the danger posed by urbanization.^[65] Their manner of explaining these dismaying conditions, however, was peculiarly Russian. Heeding Western comments and their own admiration for Western civilization, they concluded that conditions among the urban population in their country were so inferior to those in the West that these places ought not—except for formal police and administrative reasons—to be labeled cities. One tsarist report of the early 1860s examining the statutes

[62] Cited in Ditiatin, Ustroistvo , 340.

[63] Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Sanktpeterburga (St. Petersburg, 1888), 130.

[64] F. B. Hawkins, History of the Epidemic Spasmodic Cholera of Russia (London, 1831), 215.

[65] See Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), esp. chap. 9.

governing the artisans in the country concluded that "in our country cities are distinguished from villages purely by formal, official differences."^[66] This oft-quoted judgment, which was intended to spur reforms for urban development, used the image of the village both to criticize facade planning and to lament the level of urban life in the empire.

Although the association of towns with villages proved a tenacious rhetorical device among educated Russians, it ignored the practices that made mid-century towns distinctly urban places on the country's social map. Urban life contained its peculiar type of misery. The pervasive instability of everyday life permeated economic and social relations. One Russian author of the 1840s, seeking to give his fiction a suitably realistic tone, plunges his readers into the world of the laboring population in his hometown, Saratov. In his grim inversion of estate privileges poverty is "hereditary." The tale centers on a petty bourgeois family living in "the poorest section of town filled with little houses, hovels, and cabins scattered here and there" in an atmosphere of "stench and foul gases." Their cottage, which resembles a decrepit log cabin, houses the father, an unskilled laborer working as a stevedore at the port, the mother, who finds summer work in the truck gardens, and six children. Their furnishings consist of a stove, benches, and wooden chairs. The family's story turns into a tragedy when the father drowns while working at the port, and, shortly thereafter, the mother and five children die in the cholera epidemic. At the end of the story the one surviving son confronts a future as bleak as the one his parents faced before him.^[67] This author's imaginary city is a timeless place of labor; property, privileges, and estate honors belong to another world.

From this perspective the best the city could offer was a slight measure of personal security, embodied in personal possessions and property. Vissarion Belinsky captured the tangible immediacy of this private world when he wrote of his native Moscow that "the dream of every Muscovite is to have his own house, even if it is only one with three windows [i.e., the poorest dwelling]. It may be poor, but it is his own, and with a courtyard he may be able to raise chickens and even a calf. But the most important thing is that under this little house is a cellar—what more could he wish for?"^[68] Belinsky's picture fits any town in European Russia. For the townspeople this dream embodied the essence of their idealized city. They rele-

[66] Quoted in P. G. Ryndziunskii, Krest'ianskaia promyshlennost' v poreformennoi Rossii (Moscow, 1966), 70.

[67] S. A. Makashin, "Nasledstvennaia bednost'," in Rasskazy o starom Saratove , by S. A. Makashin (Saratov, 1937), 165-79.

[68] V. Belinskii, "Peterburg i Moskva," in Fiziologiia Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1845), 1:40-41.

gated grandiose palaces and public orderliness to the domain of state power and privilege. The satisfaction of immediate needs and a modest level of private wealth were the limits of their hopes for the future.

The ownership of a hut or cottage represented an element of stability but was beyond the means of about half the urban population. The official records of housing, which were compiled for tax purposes, suggest that even those who owned a humble dwelling were privileged. In the early 1860s the city of Saratov counted six thousand houses for a population of about sixty-five thousand. Of these six thousand houses, one-third were too poor to be included in the tax roles.^[69] The remaining four thousand housed the town's relatively well-to-do traders, manufacturers, and privileged townspeople. Below the house owners was a laboring population with so few abiding ties to the orderly society of estates that they formed a separate, fugitive city. This picture fits one characterization of petty bourgeois society in Shuia, a textile town in northern Russia: its "very poor" petty bourgeois population lived in families of "five to seven members," most of whom were "without their own home."^[70]

The prevalence of such conditions, however, did not turn these areas into large villages masquerading as towns; the lives of these townspeople were focused on their own private concerns and local affairs. In mid century the outer limits of the urban world of the lower classes followed the contours of the neighborhood; in the neighborhoods the figures of authority were the parish priest and the police. Activities there revolved around the market, the tavern, the church, and the public bath (which by mid century had become accessible to the common people).^[71] The carnival gatherings of holidays (gulian'ia ) offered simple but tangible images of other lives both within and beyond the city.

By comparison with the countryside literacy was relatively high in the city. Lacking direct data, our conclusions depend on estimates based on the 1897 census. By these calculations probably half of the men and one-fourth of the women in mid-century towns could read and write.^[72] Although literacy levels were far below those of Western cities, literacy had a definite place in the functional and liturgical practices of Russian townspeople. For

[69] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Saratovskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:4.

[70] Cited in B. N. Vasil'ev, "Formirovanie fabrichno-zavodskogo proletariata tsentral'nogo promyshlennogo raiona Rossii, 1820-1890" (Doctoral dissertation, Novocherkassk Pedagogical Institute, 1972), 1:161-62.

[71] M. G. Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda: Gorozhane, ikh obshchestvennyi i domashnii byt (Moscow, 1978), 131-32.

[72] B. N. Mironov, "Gramotnost' v Rossii, 1797-1917 gg.," Istoriia SSSR (July-August 1983):149.

all but the small group of officials and intellectuals print culture consisted of the practical affairs of commerce and the spiritual matters of faith. The need for education could not be met by the state's network of district elementary schools, which consisted of only one or two small schools in the provincial capitals. Rather, education was achieved informally through a network of schools that owed nothing to the regime. For example, although the district school in the Volga town of Rybinsk taught only a handful of boys, almost all the town's merchant and petty bourgeois adult men were literate.^[73] Presumably, their skills were acquired through informal instruction by priests or, more often, deacons in the so-called free schools, which taught reading, the prayers, the Psalter, numeracy, and writing.^[74] Literacy was useful in urban commerce and reassuring to the faithful. Its role in city life did not extend beyond the narrow horizons of work and Christian dogma, or so we may presume, for example, from Gorky's portrait of his grandfather, who was born in the 1820s or 1830s. Although lettered in the Orthodox prayers, the old man appeared to Gorky to be incapable of even understanding their meaning.^[75] No penny press existed in the mid century to provide townspeople with lurid stories of urban adventures, tragic or comic. Chapbooks on religious themes remained the predominant reading besides the Bible. In this respect urban practices bore some resemblance to those of the villages, where far fewer adults (perhaps one in ten) were literate. But the readiness of townspeople to create their own system of instruction, which was indicated by their higher literacy rates, was a special mark of the city. Town dwellers developed what one sociologist has termed a "scriptural economy," adapting learning to their own perceived needs and daily lives without regard to either the state's criteria of public education or the standards of enlightenment propounded by the "thick journals" of the intellectuals.^[76]

The criteria by which one might define what was uniquely urban in the practices and conditions that were prevalent in mid-century Russian towns are varied and complex. Facile references to administrative decrees on civic duties only repeat the wishful thinking of the tsarist administrators; equally simplistic references to towns as "villages" make an invidious comparison between Russia and a somewhat idealized West, which is also mis-

[73] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 405.

[74] Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda , 274.

[75] Maxim Gorky, Autobiography , trans. I. Schneider (New York, 1949), esp. 11-22, 69-73.

[76] The concept of distinct "scriptural economies" is contrasted to the general category of "culture" in M. de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 131-33.

placed. Both standards are based on the experience and perceptions of an elite for whom the fugitive city of the mid century was an alien territory. Although we should not accept either of these elite views of the Russian city in their entirety, neither should we reject them out of hand. The preoccupation of intellectuals and administrators with Western models set a standard for urban cultural and civic development, and their own activities helped to spread these ideals. St. Petersburg and Moscow provided a refuge for people like Belinsky, and in small ways the provincial capitals felt the influence of the national capitals.

Similarly, one should not ignore the impact of tsarist activities and investments on urban life because both brought the power and resources of the autocracy to the urbanism of facade planning. For example, the state's capital investments in transportation were a key part of the commercial life of the urban population. These expansionist policies operated within strict limits. Nicholas's finance minister, Count Kankrin, had serious reservations regarding the disruptive social impact of railroads, warning at one point of the dangers of increasing "the mobility of an already insufficiently settled population" and thereby undermining the "indispensable social hierarchy."^[77] His argument was intended to restrain state spending, but also revealed his awareness that social stability and economic development were incompatible objectives.

State policies and Western models were still feeble in the face of obstacles that in some respects resembled those that characterize so-called Third World cities in the twentieth century. Private capital was in short supply, and the skills associated with industrial enterprise were rare. Labor was overabundant, which led to endemic underemployment among the urban workforce. The life of the laboring population was extremely insecure. Also, the meager educational system contributed to the creation of many formidable cultural barriers. These conditions confounded tsarist efforts to impose its rigid estate system on urban society. Industriousness and enterprise were present, but they were constrained by the instability and insecurity of daily life. Work of whatever sort, wherever it might be located, found many ready laborers, who accepted employment at a pittance. The need for minimal literacy was met by the services of clerics in free schools (or by the Jewish elders among the Yiddish-speaking population in the Pale). Traditional religious beliefs, mixed with popular superstition, held sway over the fugitive population; deference to the powerful and

[77] Cited in A. M. Solov'eva, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1975), 39.

wealthy was the rule. "Squalor" and "stench" marked recognizable barriers, as effective as estate regulations on rank and honor in separating the laboring population from the elite.

Although urban misery was ever-present in mid century, the city was not a static world of unrelieved despair. The movement of migrants from village to town and from city to city pointed to the potential opportunities that the urban labor market presented. The economic historian Olga Crisp has emphasized the importance of the role, despite serfdom and state mercantilist regulations, of enterprise and innovation in the mid-century Russian economy.^[78] Her observation applies particularly to urban Russia. The mobility of the population was becoming increasingly important to the economic livelihood of the country's urban centers and in certain areas had created an established network. The 1862 commission in the upper Volga city of Yaroslavl noted that "as many or more townspeople leave for work elsewhere as there are migrants arriving, and almost all who leave know what [occupations] are needed in one or another part of Russia." One-tenth of the town's adult men had obtained travel documents the previous year.^[79] A similar trend was apparent among the province's peasants, who were already making a name for themselves as innkeepers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The regularity in the moves of the fugitive population suggests that ambition as well as desperation were responsible for the migration. Although limited in scope, economic expansion was causing cities to grow.

Commerce was the principal motor of economic life in urban areas, and to the end of the century it remained the sector that was most responsible for the expansion of the Russian urban economy. Its importance was apparent in the findings of the first tsarist survey of urban conditions, which was launched in the early 1840s. One inspector in the upper Volga region calculated that in the town of Yaroslavl "local manufacturing and 'local handicrafts' account for only one-tenth of the income of the residents." His dubious efforts at statistical precision aside, his findings suggest that regional commerce was crucial to the economic livelihood of the city.^[80] In 1857 a correspondent for the Imperial Geographical Society noted that in Orel "most city dwellers engage in petty trade, buying up from peasants farm goods and rural handicraft products for sale at a small profit to the

[78] Olga Crisp, Studies in Russian Economic History (London, 1976), esp. 70-72, 92-95.

[79] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Iaroslavskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:6-7.

[80] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 228, table 18.

local inhabitants."^[81] However, competition was keen with peasant traders, who, if one can believe the bitter report of the Briansk commission of 1862, were "wealthier than third-guild merchants."^[82] This complaint hints at the substantial rewards open to enterprising traders, for whom estate regulations were apparently largely irrelevant.

Although small-scale trade and manufacturing provided work for most urban inhabitants, the expansion of urban economic activity depended above all on regional and national opportunities. By mid century urban leaders were already thinking of their towns in the context of the potential national transportation network, which if inaccessible to their traders, condemned their economic affairs to stagnation. The 1862 reports on urban economic conditions repeatedly lamented inadequate transportation links to national markets. This factor was the explanation the Voronezh commission used to explain their town's miserable level of trade despite the area's richness "in grain products and, generally, in agricultural production." The report noted that the Moscow road, "begun thirty years ago, is still not completed," and the town's exclusion from the "proposed network of railroads" promises "unfortunate effects on the future."^[83] The Voronezh commission's perception of economic needs was clearly changing, and at the heart of their vision of the future was the necessity to forge links between the city and larger markets in their country and beyond its borders.

In mid century the routes to the distant emporiums were the country's waterways. A growing network of canals provided key connections among rivers and with bordering seas. The sole important rail line in operation in the early 1860s was the Moscow-Petersburg railroad. Railroad construction represented a major capital investment, one that the state could ill afford, particularly at a time when it was already engaged in important investments in water transportation. The major south-to-north shipping route in Russia passed from the Volga through a series of canals and locks to St. Petersburg. An earlier waterway through Tver had become obsolete and inadequate for commercial needs. Count Kankrin financed a new route, the Mariinsky system, which linked Rybinsk on the Volga with the Neva below Lake Ladoga. This system was capable of accommodating deep-water barges.^[84] Even though it quickly proved insufficient, when it opened in

[81] Quoted in Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda , 40.

[82] "Soobrazhenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37 (1863), d. 1267, 121.

[83] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Voronezhskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:4.

[84] F. M. Listengurt, "Rol' ekonomichesko-geograficheskogo polozheniia v istoricheskom razvitii gorodov Iaroslavlia, Kalinina i Rybinska" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow Pedagogical Institute, 1960), 115-20.

1852 it represented a substantial incentive to commerce and opened new opportunities in bulk trade to ambitious traders.

The new trends in urban commercial activity were apparent principally in a few towns along the southern seaports and the Volga river. By mid century the grain trade in these places was beginning to take on a magnitude that promised a great future to the urban business elite. The enthusiastic tone of the 1862 Saratov commission's report cannot be explained simply as boosterism; the report claimed that "everyone trades here who has the money to pay the fee for a market stall or for a boat or who has strong arms and some rubles to spend." The authors, aware of a basic change in economic relations, explained that this trade was not the product of periodical local fairs, whose revenues "over the past twenty years" had been "diminishing regularly."^[85] Rather, Europe was the key factor in the increased grain trade. The market for agricultural produce was spreading far beyond the confines of urban Europe. It reached as far as the traders in cities such as Saratov and held out the lure of commercial operations and profits that were far beyond their previous experience. In ports such as Odessa major Western grain firms had already founded their own offices; further inland Russian dealers assumed the role of middlemen for this international market. On a note of capitalist modernity Saratov's town leaders claimed in 1862 that their city was entering "the ranks of those cities that constitute the links in a vast network uniting all the important manufacturing areas in a European-wide trade network."

The basis of this economy was grain, which was brought in from the surrounding hinterlands in winter and milled in the town's fifty flour mills or stored in over three hundred grain warehouses, then either shipped upstream to the capitals or, more commonly, south to the Sea of Azov.^[86] Saratov's scale of trade was exceptional among inland cities in those years, but the expansion of national trade was already notable. The best indicator of this trend is the turnover of goods at the yearly fair in Nizhny Novgorod, whose total revenues in 1862 exceeded one hundred million rubles, a record level and over four million rubles greater than the previous year.^[87] The economies of cities scattered over European Russia were on the verge of rapid expansion and diversification, and the principal force for this

[85] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Saratovskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:6, 8.

[86] Ibid., 4-6.

[87] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Nizhegorodskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:5.

event was commercial exchange such as that moving up and down the Volga.

Trade still came to most towns on a seasonal basis; in the summertime it brought traders, boatmen, and laborers in great numbers throughout the river network. Key transshipment points such as Rybinsk on the upper Volga were for a few months transformed by the arrival of so many boats that, as the town's 1862 commission claimed, the river is "almost entirely covered with ships from one side to the other, and at times it is possible without much trouble to cross the Volga as though across a bridge." A small town of eleven thousand permanent inhabitants, its population swelled each year with the arrival of forty thousand migrants, principally seasonal dock workers but also merchants. Traders and shippers conducted their affairs in the local taverns, not in the new commodity exchange building. The laborers were not provided any facilities for living by the town, so they formed a fugitive port city of their own.^[88] Observers did not recognize that these temporary urban dwellers and their activities belonged to an urban way of life. The summertime presence of these workers had none of the permanence that was attached to the corporate city; rather, it resembled the encampments of nomads gathered briefly before dispersing again across the steppes.

Largely missing from mid-century Russian urban economic activity were industry and a factory labor force. A few industrial settlements that resembled European textile towns had begun to emerge in Moscow province, where over half of the country's textile factory workers lived. In Vladimir province, northeast of Moscow, the new factory settlement of Ivanovo Voznesensk had forty-five textile factories in 1850, and nearby Shuia possessed seventeen factories and 4,300 workers.^[89] These centers, which were important to the early process of industrialization, were exceptional among the empire's towns. At this time (as later) commerce, not industry, was the most powerful motor in reshaping economic relations and the social dynamics of Russian urban expansion.

By mid century the ranks of merchants had grown; enrollment in this estate was a business necessity as well as a mark of standing within the community. A few entrepreneurs in Moscow and elsewhere had succeeded in amassing fortunes in the textile industry, creating family dynasties (for example, the Krestovnikov, Guchkov, Khludov, and Morozov families)

[88] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Iaroslavskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie , 2:34-35.

[89] Vasil'ev, "Formirovanie," 280, table 32; see also Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Vladimirskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:64-66.

whose rise to wealth is emblematic of Russia's early capitalist class. Alfred Rieber suggests that they were not representative of the merchant class, which in those years remained "trapped in traditional patterns of behavior."^[90] His judgment makes "tradition" a form of invidious comparison between Russian merchants and Western bourgeois and reiterates the social stereotype of the Russian merchant that was shared by Russian nobles and intellectuals. One may better understand trading and manufacturing practices by examining the economic and social constraints and obstacles that confronted the protoindustrialists.

The condemnation of the merchant represented a manner of judging the shortcomings of the mid-century city that implicitly took a Western and elitist perspective. The memoirs of the Moscow nobleman V. Golitsyn stressed the barriers dividing Muscovites. His most abiding image of the prereform era was one of the "isolation" of the noble and merchant elite and their disdain for the "lower" ranks of the petty bourgeoisie and the artisans. Speaking from his perspective as a nobleman, he explained that the estates were divided by "mutual distrust, diffidence, a certain envy of one another, and fear of compromising oneself by familiar relations with people from another estate."^[91] A similar judgment appeared in literary form from Vissarion Belinsky, who suggested that the most appropriate image of the Moscow merchant was a house with a walled courtyard "similar to a fortress, ready to withstand a long siege." Behind those walls "family solidarity [semeistvo ]" mattered most. "Nowhere," he concluded, "is the city visible."^[92] Looking for a literary and civic society, he judged the mid-century Russian city by Western standards of urbanism.

Social barriers were perhaps less impenetrable, but no less perceptible, among the lesser urban ranks. Although estate rank meant little in everyday urban life among the laboring population, it retained the full force of tsarist statute and constituted a formidable barrier to legal advancement in society. The admission into Moscow's petty bourgeois corporate society of six thousand peasants in a fifteen-year period in the mid century suggests that even this lowly estate was attractive to peasants.^[93] Similarly, a small measure of status and economic security was accessible to the few townspeople who were successful in entering the state bureaucracy. In those years the principal importance of urban public schools appeared to be as

[90] Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 24.

[91] V. Golitsyn, "Moskva v semidesiatykh godakh," Golos minuvshego (May-December 1919): 119-20.

[92] Belinskii, "Peterburg i Moskva," 45.

[93] Zlatoustavskii, Moskovskoe gorodskoe samouprovlenie , 147.

paths into state service. One correspondent for the Imperial Geographical Society remarked, somewhat disdainfully, that "a certain group of townspeople put their children in schools because the boys from these schools sometimes become clerks in state offices and thereby receive without examination the lowest administrative rank."^[94] Social exclusiveness operated even within the schools. The two Voronezh district schools catered to two distinct publics. In one, the sons of merchants and petty bourgeois predominated in a student body of forty-seven; in the other, one-half of the sixteen pupils were sons of state bureaucrats.^[95] The small number of youth enrolled in these schools was typical for most district schools. It reminds us that the opportunities for advancement were insignificant and that any expectations for an escape from the poverty and insecurity that were typical of urban life were largely illusory.

The idea of another city of equality of conditions and opportunity only existed in the dreams—or nightmares—of a few visionary Russians such as Belinsky. The potential impact of the expansion of schooling and of business interests on social rank was profoundly unsettling. This prospect filled one observer with dismay. A participant in the urban survey of 1862 in his Belorussian town of Mogilev, he prepared a separate report that warned of dire consequences if conditions in the Russian city became such that "wealth and education give greater rights than [official] privilege. Presently, we see many merchants and petty bourgeois who enjoy greater advantages and esteem from society than nobles. We see nobles placed in the midst of poor petty bourgeois and other ranks; [the nobles are] in no way superior to them and [they are] denied any honors."^[96] His fears of the subversive influence of "wealth and education" were in large measure a projection of the Western trend toward a democratic society (a term not used in his essay but arguably one that was very much on his mind) in which estate ranks would no longer segregate privileged from unprivileged townspeople. The presence of déclassé nobles living among the urban "rabble" was deeply offensive to conservatives, for whom the social disorder and administrative chaos evident in the towns of the empire represented isolated failings of a valid autocratic system.

This inconsistency, however, was an affair of great importance to critics

[94] Cited in Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda , 280.

[95] "Obozreniia obshchestvennogo khoziaistva goroda Voronezha," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39. d. 65, 62-63.

[96] "Mnenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1262, 60; excerpts were included in the Ministry of Interior's compilation of provincial reports: Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Materialy otnosiashcheisia do novogo obshchestvennogo ustroistva v gorodakh imperii (St. Petersburg, 1877), 1:42-43.

of the old order such as the inspectors from the Urban Affairs Section of the Ministery of the Interior. The vision of the idealized city implicit in their reports assumed that municipal governance and urban economic expansion, if undertaken by men of talent and reason (regardless of rank), would make the Russian city the center of progress in the country. While shifting the criteria of public orderliness from the implementation of facade planning to the provision of extensive urban services, they also turned the specter of the mingling of ranks into a call for reform. These critics were certainly not aware of the full extent of economic growth and social upheaval that lay ahead. They understood urbanism in terms of culture and public service, but economic expansion was creating a very different pattern of urban relations. The history of Russian urbanism in the last half of the nineteenth century is a story of conflicting urban ideals and the social and economic transformation of urban life.