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.