Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Russian society, law and economy

the legal profession remained so small and the liberal judicial reforms only

partially implemented?

An answer can be found in traditional forms of advocacy which effectively

absorbed Russia’s new legal profession. Prior to the Great Reforms, any sub-

ject of the empire, not expressly forbidden to do so by law, had the right to

represent clients in court. The unofﬁcial ‘street advocates’ who operated in the

post-reform period thus belonged to a tradition of legal practitioners dating

back to the reign of Peter the Great. Generally of low birth, the street advocates

nevertheless included in their ranks nobles with higher education and, after

1864, qualiﬁed attorneys who chose not to join the bar.

In 1874 the govern-

ment adopted measures that should have eliminated the illicit practitioners.

‘Private attorneys’, regardless of education, became eligible to practise law by

purchasing licenses and registering with local courts; however, lax enforce-

ment meant that registered attorneys continued to work with unregistered

street advocates. Private and sworn attorneys pleaded cases in court for the

street advocates and relied on them in return to refer clients. Although accused

of corruption and incompetence, the street advocates not only survived but

also provided a crucial link between formal judicial institutions and ordinary

people.

In the ﬁelds of education and medicine, uncertiﬁed specialists performed

a similar social function. The central government and local elites did not

commit signiﬁcant resources to universal primary education before the mid-

1890s, yet already in the seventeenth century and continuing throughout the

imperial period, unofﬁcial schools taught basic literacy to ordinary people.

In 1882, limited funding, a shortage of teachers and the tendency of peas-

ants to leave school after acquiring minimal literacy and numeracy led to

the legalisation of village schools where uncertiﬁed teachers taught reading,

writing and counting.

By adapting education to the needs and expectations

of peasant parents, less-educated rural schoolteachers, many of whom came

from the peasantry, provided a meaningful link between the countryside and

translocal civil society. Medical orderlies (fel’dshery) did likewise by working

with traditional village healers to deliver methods of treatment acceptable to

peasants. In the process, they also carried scientiﬁc knowledge to the country-

side. Although formally trained physicians denounced the orderlies and other

41 W. E. Pomeranz, ‘Justice from the Underground: The History of the Underground

Advokatura’, RR 52 (1993): 321–40.

42 J. Brooks, ‘The Zemstvo and the Education of the People’, in Emmons and Vucinich,

The Zemstvo in Russia,pp.243–78;B.Eklof,Russian Peasant Schools: Ofﬁcialdom, Village

Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals

practitioners for performing illegal operations and prescribing inappropriate

treatments – services for which they were not properly trained – they nonethe-

less relied on their less-educated associates to offset shortages of funding and

certiﬁed personnel.

Once again, the much-maligned protoprofessionals and

paraprofessionals connected the general population to the elite world of Rus-

sia’s modern professions.

Of course, qualiﬁed professionals became dismayed when labouring people

failed to distinguish street advocates from registered attorneys or physicians

from witches, sorcerers and faith healers. They were likewise angered by the

lack of political and organisational freedom before 1905 and by continuing

governmental hostility and bureaucratic interference after the introduction

of constitutional monarchy in 1906. Their frustrations, their dual alienation

from the people and the government, pushed an activist minority into political

opposition and identiﬁcation with the intelligentsia. It was not, however, the

ideologically articulate professional elites who represented the development

of a politically effective Russian civil society. In contrast to the intelligentsia,

whose condescension toward ‘the people’ and identiﬁcation with the methods,

if not the policies, of the state continues to this day, rank-and-ﬁle profession-

als together with their paraprofessional and uncertiﬁed associates served the

everyday needs of real Russians.

Aside from the obvious practical beneﬁts

that accrued, their relationships with ordinary people linked local commu-

nities to translocal society without the mediation of government. In these

independent relationships and in the independent relationships of the cap-

italist market economy, not in the identities and ideological movements of

the intelligentsia, a Russian civil society distinct from ofﬁcial society came to

life.

43 S. C. Ramer, ‘The Zemstvo and Public Health’, in Emmons and Vucinich, The Zemstvo

in Russia,pp.280–95; S. C. Ramer, ‘The Transformation of the Russian Feldsher’, in E.

Mendelsohn and M. S. Shatz (eds.), Imperial Russia, 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition.

Essaysin Honor of Marc Raeff (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 136–60.

44 For a recent account that stresses the necessity of intelligentsia and state leadership,

see B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII–nachalo XX v.): Genezis

lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols.

(St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), vol. II, pp. 196–373.

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Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth

century: portrait of a city

catherine evtuhov

To the present-day observer, standing on the mansion-lined embankment

overlooking the conﬂuence of the Volga and Oka rivers, or wandering through

the restored and freshly painted central streets of the city, Nizhnii Novgorod

does not look so different from the provincial town it was a century ago. The

massive automobile factory, the military installations and large-scale industry

of the Soviet city of Gorky – all of which closed the area to foreigners until

1991 – sprouted around the edges while leaving the city centre intact. Only

the cupolas which once studded the streets like points of gold have vanished,

victims of the 1929 eradication of churches. Nizhnii Novgorod boasts all the

features of the most lovely of Russian provincial towns: perched picturesquely

atop a network of ravines, it nevertheless follows a strictly Petersburgian layout

with the three straight avenues radiating from the central kremlin. The above-

mentioned observer can walk to the edge of the promenade to look out over

the Oka at the old fairgrounds and the massive nineteenth-century Alexander

Nevsky cathedral on the promontory. Across the Volga, in the meantime,

forests still stretch north as far as one can see, past the pilgrimage site of Lake

Svetloiar, whose depths conceal the lost city of Kitezh, and the historical refuge

of the Old Belief.

Topography

The comfortable provincial ease with which Nizhnii Novgorod straddles bluffs

and ravines was in fact the product of a concerted effort involving the central

government, local authorities and the town population itself. The history of

urban planning for Nizhnii Novgorod as for many Russian cities begins with

Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter to the Towns, which not only bestowed

certain privileges upon town dwellers, but converted frontier outposts and

administrative centres into ‘proper’ imperial cities with regular street plans

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and municipal institutions.

Yet Catherine’s quest for the well-ordered city had

achieved only partial realisation at the time of Nicholas I’s visit to Nizhnii

Novgorod in 1834 – an event that immediately entered local lore and whose

story continues to be told to this day. Stopping in Nizhnii on his tour of the

realm, the tsar expressed horror and dismay at how little it resembled a real

city. In deﬁance of the regularised city plan on paper, the buildings along even

the main streets jutted out unevenly and at irregular intervals, resembling an

assemblage of manors (usad’by) merely more tightly spaced than they would

have been in the countryside. Not only had residents obliviously built their

houses along the lovely Volga embankment with their backs to the river, but

they used the gentle slope of the bluff itself as a garbage dump. Nicholas’s

solution both typiﬁed his mania for discipline (one of his passions was the

planning of prison buildings) and his desire to bring the vast imperial reaches

under central control.

An 1836 decree gave property owners three years to

erect a wooden house on any vacant lots in the city centre, or ﬁve for a

stone one, under the supervision of an architectural commission that was in

turn subject to the Department of Military Colonies in St Petersburg. Non-

compliance meant simply that the empty lot would be auctioned off.

The

riverbank houses were turned around. In this fashion the central government

enlisted the co-operation of the town residents, twisting their arms into con-

forming to its vision.

At the end of the nineteenth century, though, a glance

at detailed street plans reveals that Nizhnii’s streets remained lined not with

single buildings as in a European or American city, but with whole manors: a

main house and several outbuildings grouped around a courtyard – much as

Belinsky had described Moscow at mid-century.

The regular city plan required a victory not only over the undisciplined res-

idents, but over nature itself. The meandering, slow-ﬂowing Russian rivers

1 See Albert J. Schmidt, ‘A New Face for Provincial Russia: Classical Planning and Building

under Catherine II and Alexander I’, forthcoming.

2 V. Kostkin, ‘Poseshchenie Nizhnego Novgoroda Imperatorom Nikolaem I i ego zaboty po

blagoustroistvu goroda’, in Deistviia nizhegorodskoi gubernskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi kommissii

(NGUAK) (Nizhnii Novgorod (henceforth NN): Tip. gubernskogo pravleniia, 1994), vol.

XVII:1,pp.1–14.

3 ‘Polozhenie ob ustroistve gubernskogo goroda’, PSZ, 2nd series, 55 vols. (St Petersburg:

1830–84), 1836 no. 9149. Parallel decrees were issued, in this period, for many other cities,

including Elizavetgrad, Kaluga, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Kharkov, Vladimir, Archangel, Tver,

Kazan, Orel, Tiﬂis, Uman.

4 For particular cases, see RGVIA, Fond 405,op.4 (1826–59): Departament voennykh poselenii:

khoziaistvennoe otdelenie (1835–1843); otdelenie voennykh poselenii (1843–1857).

5 B. Belinsky, ‘Peterburg i Moskva’, repr. in D. K. Burlak (ed.), Moskva-Peterburg: pro et contra

(St Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2000), pp. 185–214,

p. 190.

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almost inevitably have one high bank (the right) and one low one; the

nineteenth-century naturalist Karl Baehr explained this phenomenon by relat-

ing the current of longitudinal rivers to the earth’s rotation. The central part of

Nizhnii Novgorod was located on the quite substantial hill that was created by

the intersecting currents of the Oka and the Volga. Yet another feature of cen-

tral Eurasian ecology, however, was the fragility and volatility of the topsoils –

once upon a time ground down and eroded by the great Scandinavian-Russian

glacier. Provincial residents were tormented by ravines, which a single rainfall

could initiate, and which had been known to traverse paved roads, or agricul-

tural plots, entirely within the space of a year. The construction of Nizhnii

Novgorod involved a combination of careful coexistence with, and struggle

against, the ravines: some were preserved and lined with houses, while others,

including in the very centre of the city, had to be ﬁlled in or bridged with dams.

In about 1860, Nizhnii Novgorod was divided into four sections, each with a

distinctive ﬂavour and way of life. Atop the bluff lay the two Kremlin Sections,

radiating out from the ﬁfteenth-century kremlin situated exactly at the inter-

section of the two rivers. The formidable fortress, constructed as Muscovy’s

defence against the Tatars, eventually served as the jumping-off point for the

conquest of Kazan in 1551. Nizhnii Novgorod witnessed military action only

once, when a stray Tatar murza’s bullet aimed at the walls landed along the

Oka embankment and was commemorated by the construction of a small

church which, curiously, the Soviet era merely concealed behind a prestigious

apartment building bearing the slogan, ‘Peace to the World!’ (Miru – mir!). The

expansive square around the kremlin accommodated the city’s most majestic

institutions: the Church of the Annunciation (currently a park), the Theologi-

cal Seminary, the city duma (representative assembly, council) and, just behind,

the Alexander Boys’ High School.

Pokrovskaia street, universally known as Pokrovka, was Nizhnii’s answer

to Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect. Walking up the busy shop-lined thorough-

fare from the kremlin, one would pass the houses of the most distinguished

citizens, soon reaching the city theatre – for many years the sole focus of

local cultural life, the governor’s residence, and the National Bank. Perhaps

more intriguing was the quieter Pecherskaia street, or Pechorka, just behind

the Volga embankment. In the 1840s, the ethnographer and lexicographer

Vladimir Dal’ and Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, who immortalised the Nizhnii

Novgorod region in his magisterial diptych, In the Forests and On the Hills,

lived next door to each other. Dal’ drew heavily on local materials for the Dic-

tionary, while Melnikov’s pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii was taken from the

street name. The pedantic record-keeping of the nineteenth century makes

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it possible to trace owners of every house until 1917. The documents show that,

on the one hand, the social status of residents declined with distance from the

centre; on the other, the social composition of the street gradually shifted from

primarily gentry inhabitants in 1850 to a greater mix, including merchants and

meshchane (urban lower-middle class), by 1900.

The richest merchants built

their elaborate stucco-embellished mansions just in front of Pechorka, over-

looking the Volga. A third, radial, street, Il’inka, attracted well-to-do merchants

and housed the stock exchange. The city’s limits were symbolically marked by

the whitewashed building, rather charming to the contemporary eye, of the

municipal prison.

Yet, while the typical provincial town would stop there, multifaceted Nizh-

nii Novgorod boasted two more neighbourhoods. The Makariev Section

was perhaps the most dynamic part of the city. Nestled under the Oka

bluff, it was Nizhnii’s true commercial heart: here was the wharf, where

goods from ships and barges coming from as far as Astrakhan or as close as

Rybinsk or Kostroma were unloaded; here was a second ‘main street’ with its

wholesale warehouses and commercial enterprises; here was the fantastically

ornate eighteenth-century Rozhdestvenskaia church, a remarkable example

of Naryshkin baroque. Finally, the Fair Section across the river – there was

no permanent bridge until the 1890s – displayed the immense permanent

Fair House, constructed in the 1820s, the temporary ‘rows’ (riady) of retail

outlets and the exquisite Alexandrine Fair Cathedral (now serving as Nizhnii’s

primary house of worship), which, replete with Grail motifs, pyramids with all-

seeing eyes, and a Pantheon-like vault, resembles a Masonic temple as much

as a church. The Kunavino suburb outside the fairgrounds completed the

ensemble.

Rhythms

Nizhnii Novgorod was the capital of a province quite diverse in its ecology and

economy. In the northern districts beyond the Volga, agriculture was virtually

non-existent; the sparse population farmed the rivers and the abundant forests

instead of the sandy, rocky soil, exporting ﬁsh, timber and the famed Semenov

wooden spoons. The black soil of the south-east corner provided the rest of

the province with the grain it could not produce itself. The districts around the

city itself – Nizhnii Novgorod, Gorbatov, Balakhna, Arzamas, Ardatov – had

a mixed economy, combining agriculture with industrial production. Boris

6 GANO (Gos. arkhiv nizhegorodskoi oblasti), Fond. 27,op.638,d.1046, 1332, 3158, 3888.

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Mironov has recently suggested that the separation between city and country-

side in Russia remained partial even up to the early nineteenth century.

Life

in Nizhnii Novgorod pulsed to the rhythms of the surrounding countryside,

as well as the rhythms of commercial enterprise and those created by the

religious calendar. In a climate that school geography textbooks described as

‘sharply continental’, trade, transport, agriculture and industrial production

were all subject to dramatic seasonal variations. The last days of winter wit-

nessed an inﬂux of migrants in search of work on the steamships and barges

that plied the Volga. Carpenters and masons followed in springtime, hiring

themselves out as collectives to do the building that could only be accom-

plished in the summer months. Stevedores and porters were in high demand

throughout the ice-free season. The onset of winter in October, and the ﬁrst

sleigh-roads in the snow, brought droves of izvozchiki (cobmen); as many as

800 operated out of the city.

Nizhnii Novgorod functioned as a magnet for the

thousands of artisans, most of them doubling as farmers, working throughout

the province: the leather manufacturers of Bol’shoe Murashkino came here

to buy their sheepskins; farmers from the distant district of Sergach came to

market their grain and tobacco; and the city provided the ﬁrst major market

for such locally renowned goods as Kniaginin caps and Vorsma locks. Still, it

is interesting to note that much local or internal trade bypassed the city itself:

the major river ports for grain exchange, for example, were located down-

river at Lyskovo, upriver at Gorodets, and at Vorotyn. Nor did the city have a

monopoly on factory production. Its two shipbuilding factories (one owned

by a merchant, the other by a British citizen), salt-processing plant, sawmill

and tobacco factory did well but ceded ﬁrst place to establishments such as

the renowned steel and iron manufacturers at Pavlovo (nicknamed the ‘Rus-

sian Shefﬁeld’), the enormous Sormovo ship-building plant, or the venerable

leather producers in Arzamas.

For two months every summer, Nizhnii Novgorod metamorphosed from a

relatively quiet provincial town into a major international centre – the largest

trade fair in Europe (bigger than Leipzig), and a unique meeting place of East

and West, where traders from China, Persia, Bukhara and Armenia rubbed

shoulders with Astrakhan ﬁshmongers, Moscow entrepreneurs, Baltic mer-

chants and itinerant Old Believer icon peddlers. The fair had a yearly turnover

7 B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999),

vol. I, p. 299.

8 Pamiatnaia knizhka nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1865 god (NN: Izdanie nizhegorodskogo

gubernskogo statisticheskogo komiteta, 1864), p. 48.

9 NB these data are from the 1860s.

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of 200 million roubles, and an attendance of 1.5 million;

the greatest volume

of trade was in tea, cotton, ﬁsh and metal.

But aggregate trade statistics

capture only a fraction of the life of the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, which had

moved upriver from its old site at Makariev following a ﬁre there in 1817.

No stock exchange existed until late in the century, so that – in stark contrast

to the commodities market in Chicago, for example (in some ways Nizhnii

Novgorod’s American equivalent) – goods had to be physically transported in

order to be saleable.

Transactions took place, again until a new generation

took over, through an elaborate informal network of friendships, marriages

and deals sealed in smoky riverfront taverns. In his history of the daily life of

the Fair, A. P. Melnikov describes the Madeira-lubricated rituals by which a

debtor, unable to meet his obligations, appeases his creditor.

An 1877 guide-

book directs the visitor towards the Siberian wharf, where he can sample

teas for hours; the multi million rouble Iron Line; the odorous Greben’ wharf,

piled high with dried ﬁsh; and the Grain wharf. Paperweights made from Urals

minerals, silver pistols from the Caucasus, exquisite Ferghana and Khorasan

rugs, Tula samovars, books typeset in Old Russian, icons, crosses, ginger-

bread, sheepskin coats, felt boots, lace and Tatar soap vied for the visitor’s

attention. Equally usefully, the guidebook counsels him to avoid the pseudo-

Asian ornamentation of the Chinese Row, where no one from China had

ever traded; the Fashion Lane housing a number of brand-name establish-

ments including the ‘inevitable’ Salzﬁsch; and the variety of theatres, circuses,

zoos and freak shows that held no surprises for the sophisticated Western

traveller.

The Nizhnii Novgorod Fair functioned as an irreplaceable stimulus to the

local economy as well. Where else could local sheepskin processors have

bought Persian merlushka (lambskin) and Riga ovchina (sheepskin) – the top of

the line for sheepskin manufacture

; local spoon-makers have bought palm

10 A. P. Melnikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii nizhegorodskoi iarmarki (1817–1917) (repr. NN: Izd.

AO ‘Nizhegorodskii komp’iuternyi tsentr pol’zovatelei’, 1993), p. 108.

11 Vsepoddanneishii otchet Nachal’nika Nizhegorodskoi gubernii za 1871 god (manuscript), Rossi-

iskaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, Moscow.

12 Rumours of arson abounded.

13 Melnikov, Ocherki,p.64.

14 Melnikov, Ocherki,pp.97–101. His father, Melnikov-Pecherskii, imparts a similar ﬂavour

in the negotiations between Smolokurov and the ﬁsh merchants, in Na gorakh,asthe

former, privy to information from St Petersburg on seal prices, tries to outwit his

colleagues.

15 A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka (NN: Tip. gubernskogo pravleniia, 1877), pp. 190–5.

16 ‘Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina’, in ‘Kustarnye promysly nizhegorodskoi gubernii:

Kniaginskii uezd,’ Nizhegorodskii sbornik (NN: Tip. nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo

pravleniia, 1890), vol. IX, pp. 242–3.

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Russian society, law and economy

and maple to make the most exquisite spoons

; or Kniaginin hat-makers

have bought Popov, Singer or Blok sewing machines?

Conversely, Pavlovo

locks, knives, razors and surgical instruments, ﬁne ‘Russia-leather’ gloves from

Krasnaia Ramen’ and even local jams (known inexplicably as ‘Kievan’) and

pickles found their way to Moscow, Petersburg and European consumers via

the fair.

Residents of Kunavino by the fairgrounds made good money by

renting out their property for use as hotels, restaurants and taverns.

Economic and religious rhythms overlapped to a large extent, as must be

the case where the church calendar is the most reliable tool for calculating

the passage of time. The two major trade congresses in Nizhnii Novgorod –

one for the wood products which were one of the province’s staples, and the

other a big horse fair – were timed to coincide with Epiphany (6–7 January)

and St John’s (24 June), respectively. Artisans’ work seasons often began and

ended on religious holidays; wheel-makers, for example, ended their labours

on the Feast of the Protection, when they returned to the land. The seven-week

Lenten season regularly wreaked disaster in the lives of small-scale producers

and factory workers, leaving them without employ and thus severing the ﬁne

thread that linked them to solvency.

No major event, from the yearly open-

ing of the Fair to visits of royalty, was conceivable without the presence of

the local hierarchy, with the bishop at its head. The actual moment of peasant

emancipation, as everywhere throughout the empire, was as much a religious

as a social phenomenon. The townspeople experienced Emancipation day, for

Nizhnii Novgorod 12 March 1861, as one big religious procession: responding to

pealing church-bells at ten o‘clock in the morning, the gentry, merchantry and

honorary citizenry gathered in the diocesan cathedral to hear, together with

the crowd packing the kremlin grounds, the ﬁrst words of the manifesto as read

by the proto-deacon in full ceremonial dress. A liturgy of thanksgiving, led by

Bishop Nektarii, was followed by the reading of the manifesto itself outside,

on the central square, by Chief of Police Khval’kovskii, accompanied by Gov-

ernor Muravev and Prince Shakhovskoi who had brought the manifesto from

St Petersburg, as well as by the vice-governor, marshal of the nobility and

others.

17 L. Borisovskii, ‘Lozhkarstvo v Semenovskom uezde’, Trudy kommissii po issledovaniiu

kustarnoi promyshlennosti v Rossii, issue 2 (St Petersburg: Tip. V. Kirshbauma, 1897), p. 14.

18 ‘Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly v g. Kniaginine i okruzhaiushchikh ego slobodakh,’

in ‘Kustarnye promysly nizhegorodskoi gubernii: Kniagininskii uezd’, p. 185.

19 Pamiatnaia knizhka 1865,pp.63, 52, 49.

20 Pamiatnaia knizhka 1865,p.48.

21 ‘Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina’, p. 234.

22 A. I. Zvezdin, ‘K 50-letiiu ob’iavleniia manifesta 19 fevralia 1861 goda v Nizhegorodskoi

gubernii’, in Deistviia NGUAK, vol. X, p. 66.

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Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century

Not all religious celebrations, of course, were linked to economic or social

events. Nizhnii Novgorod counted ﬁfteen major processions every year, on

holidays. Religious feasts and even the Sunday liturgy had an unusual intensity

in Nizhnii Novgorod: the bishop’s reports, submitted annually to the Holy

Synod, complained if anything of the excessive piety of local parishioners,

who celebrated fervently and constantly (church attendance records were very

high), while at the same time refusing to take communion even the obligatory

one time a year, at Easter.

The bishops attributed this reluctance to make a

deﬁnitive commitment to the Orthodox Church to ‘infection’ with the Old

Belief.

People

At mid-century, Nizhnii Novgorod boasted a population of 41,543. The number

included 5,085 gentry (1,838 of them hereditary), 1,627 clergy, 16,014 townspeo-

ple (merchants, honorary citizens, meshchane), 7,431 peasants, 10,397 military,

207 foreigners and 782 others.

The ethnic composition of the province as a

whole was, characteristically for the Middle Volga region, quite diverse, and

included Tatars, Mordvinians and Cheremis. However, it was mostly the Old

Believers whogave the region its distinctive character. In the 1840s P. I. Melnikov

counted 170,506 (as opposed to the mere 20,000 in the ofﬁcial governor’sreport)

Old Believers in the province.

A breakdown of the town’s residents by reli-

gion yields the following picture: 39,784 Orthodox, 136 edinovertsy (members of

Edinoverie, a group which combined aspects of Orthodoxy and Old Belief ), 260

Old Believers, 1 Armenian-Gregorian, 471 Catholic, 364 Protestant, 354 Jewish,

173 Muslim. They worshiped at forty-seven Orthodox churches and chapels;

two major monasteries, Pecherskii and Blagoveshchenskii, both dating back

to the thirteenth century, provided an important focal point for local religious

life. Two edinovercheskie churches and one each Armenian-Gregorian, Catholic

and Protestant, and one mosque, brought the total number of houses of wor-

ship to ﬁfty-ﬁve.

At fairtime, the population swelled to at least double its

normal size, placing Nizhnii Novgorod temporarily in the ranks of the most

populous of Russian cities. By the time of the 1897 census, the town’s year-

round population had risen to 95,000, and proportions had shifted: the petty

bourgeoisie (33 per cent) and peasants (48 per cent) together constituted the

23 RGIA, Fond 796,d.60,l.8, 15.

24 Pamiatnaia knizhka 1865, Statistical table #1,p.116. Both genders are included in the count.

25 P. I. Melnikov, Otchet o sovremennom sostoianii raskola P. I. Melnikova, 1854 goda,inDeistviia

NGUAK, vol. IX, p. 3.

26 Pamiatnaia knizhka 1865, Statistical table #8,p.158.

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