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13
Towns and commerce
denis j. b. shaw
‘It remaineth that a larger discourse be made of Moscow, the principal city of
that country. – Our men say that in bigness it is as great as the city of London
with the suburbs thereof. There are many and great buildings in it, but for
beauty and fairness nothing comparable to ours. There are many towns and
villages also, but built out of order and with no handsomeness: their streets
and ways are not paved with stone as ours are, the walls of their houses are of
wood, the roofs for the most part are covered with shingle boards.’
1
RichardChancellor’ssomewhat disdainfuldescriptionofthe cityofMoscow,
which he first visited in 1553, fairly reflected European reactions to that and
other Russian towns in the period before Peter the Great. Russian towns
were different from, and much inferior to, the towns of Europe. This is a
tradition which has endured down to our own day. Both pre-1917 Russian
and modern Western scholars have contrasted the commercial dynamism and
politicallibertiesenjoyed by European townsin the medievalandearlymodern
periodswiththelimitedandrestrictedcommercial development and politically
repressed character of Russian towns at that time.
2
Few if any Russian towns
developed the ‘urban community’ described for the medieval European city
by Max Weber.
3
Such an emphasis, needless to say, ultimately stems from a
1 Richard Chancellor, ‘The First Voyage to Russia’, in Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crum-
mey (eds.), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English
Voy agers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 23.
2 I. I. Ditiatin, Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Merkul’eva,
1875); P. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury. Chast’ pervaia: naselenie, ekonomicheskii,
gosudarstvennyi i soslovnyi stroi (St Petersburg: Mir Bozhii, 1896); Samuel H. Baron, ‘The
Town in “Feudal” Russia’, SR 28 (1969): 116–22; Samuel H. Baron, ‘The Weber Thesis and
the Failure of Capitalist Development in “Early Modern” Russia’, JGO 18 (1970): 320–36;V.
Murvar, ‘Max Weber’s Urban Typology and Russia’, Sociological Quarterly 8 (1967): 481–
94; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977),
pp. 191–211.
3 Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York:
TheFreePress,1958); Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London: Methuen,
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much broader issue: to what extent has Russia ever been, or could it hope to
become, European?
Whilst specialists on Russia thus focused on the extent to which Russian
towns exhibited fully urban characteristics, students of comparative urbanism
increasingly challenged some of the assumptions lying behind such debates.
Thus the meaning of concepts like Weber’s ‘urban community’ or the distinc-
tive ‘urban civilisation’ which supposedly characterised medieval and early
modern European cities has been questioned with particular reference to
their empirical applicability and the degree of generalisation involved.
4
Marx-
ists have argued that, far from being islands of freedom in a sea of serfdom
as many earlier scholars had asserted, towns were in fact important bolsters
of the feudal nexus.
5
Furthermore, the assumption that European cities (and
European modernity more generally) should be regarded as the standard
against which cities (and modernities) elsewhere should be measured has
been widely challenged.
6
Some scholars urge that what should be compared
is not cities as separate units but the evolution of urban networks and hier-
archies acting as integrators of entire societies and thus as measures of social
development.
7
This chapter will refrain from entering the debate about the ‘essential’
nature of urbanism and approach Russian towns less as individuals than as
interconnected nodes within a network having complex interlinkages with
society, economy and government.
8
The emphasis, in other words, will be less
on towns as commercial foci and more on their multifunctional character. But
their significance as commercial centres will also be highlighted before the
chapter opens out into a broader discussion of commerce in this period.
1984), pp. 3–13; Don Martindale, ‘Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City’, in Weber,
The City,pp.9–62; Murvar, ‘Max Weber’s Urban Typology’.
4 Paul Wheatley, ‘The Concept of Urbanism’, in P. Ucko, R. Tringham and G. W. Dimbleby
(eds.), Man, Settlement and Urbanism (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 601–37; Christopher
R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 3–15.
5 J. Merrington, ‘Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism’, in R. Hilton (ed.),
The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 170–95; R. H. Hilton,
‘Towns in English Feudal Society’, in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Collected
Essays of R.H. Hilton (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 175–86.
6 V. Liebermann, ‘Transcending East–West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in
Six Ostensibly Different Areas’, in V. Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Reimagining
Eurasiatoc.1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 19–102; G. Rozman,
Urban Networks in Russia, 1750–1800 and Pre-Modern Periodization (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976).
7 Ibid.;deVries, EuropeanUrbanization,pp.3–13; G.WilliamSkinner,‘Regional Urbanization
in Nineteenth-Century China’, in G. William Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 211–49.
8 de Vries, European Urbanization,p.9.
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The urban network
The number and relative importance of Russian towns in this period is a
matter of uncertainty, a reflection of the patchy and ambiguous nature of the
sources. The Russian term for ‘town’ (gorod) meant little more than a fortified
settlement.Inthesixteenthcenturythe officialsourcesgenerallyusedtheword
to refer to a place having some administrative and military significance. There
is no definitive list of towns in the sources, and scholars of Russian urbanism
have been forced to scour such records as cadastres (pistsovye knigi), military
rolls and accounts, decrees, chancellery documents, charters and patents to
try to construct a definitive list.
9
It is on the basis of such sources that scholars
such as Nevolin, Chechulin, Smirnov and more recently French and others
have calculated the number of towns.
10
French argues that there were at least
130 towns in the Russian network at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and
implies that Chechulin’stotal of 218 townsexistingat some point in the century
(not counting Siberian towns) may be slightly too low for the century’s end.
However, the absence of agreement on how many of these constituted ‘real’
towns (for example, how many had genuine commercial functions) leaves
plenty of scope for dispute.
The unification of the Russian state led to the decline or disappearance of
many fortress towns located along the boundaries between the different prin-
cipalities.But these losses weremore than compensated by the addition of new
towns to the network as suggested by the totals given above. Some of the gains
came from the acquisition of already existing towns in newly conquered terri-
tories along the western border and down the Volga (Kazan’, 1552; Astrakhan’,
1556). In the west, in addition to towns in the Russian principalities annexed
by Muscovy (Novgorod, 1478; Tver’, 1485; Pskov, 1510), significant territories
were taken from Lithuania and Livonia including the towns of Viaz’ma (1494),
Toropets, Chernigov and others (1503), Smolensk (1514) and Narva (1558–81).
In 1492 Ivan III built the fortress of Ivangorod on the opposite bank of the
River Narva to try to overawe the latter city and entice away its trade. Other
forts were built further south along the border. In the north few new towns
appeared in this period, but important foundations included Pustozersk, at
9 See e.g. A. A. Zimin, ‘Sostav russkikh gorodov XVI v.’, IZ 52 (1955): 336–47.
10 K. A. Nevolin, ‘Obshchii spisok russkikh gorodov’, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. vi
(St Petersburg, 1859), pp. 27–96; N. D. Chechulin, Goroda Moskovskogo gosudarstva v XVI
veke (St Petersburg:Tipografiia I. N.Skorokhodova, 1889), pp. 14–23; P. P. Smirnov, Goroda
Moskovskogo gosudarstva v pervoi polovine XVII veke, vol. i, pt. 2 (Kiev:A. I. Grossman, 1919);
R. A. French, ‘The Early and Medieval Russian Town’, in J. H. Bater and R. A. French
(eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (London: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 263–4.
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the mouth of the Pechora (1499) and Archangel at that of the Northern Dvina
(1583–4).
By far the most significant town founding in the period occurred as a conse-
quence of the Russian occupation of the Volga valley. Upstream from Kazan’
several new towns (Vasil’sursk, Sviiazhsk, probably Cheboksary) had been
founded before the former’s capture in 1552. The occupation of the valley
down to Astrakhan’ was secured by the establishment of fortress towns at
Samara (1586), Tsaritsyn (1588) and Saratov (1590). Meanwhile further west,
and following the devastating Tatar raid on Moscow in 1571, the government
decided to try to overawe the principal Tatar tracks or invasion routes from
the open steppe grasslands by building new military towns at Livny, Voronezh
(both 1585), Elets (1592), Kursk, Belgorod (both 1596) and several other places.
11
East of the Volga, new territories were also now open to Russian occupation
as a result of the fall of Kazan’. In 1586, in the same year that they built Samara,
the Russians established Ufa, and also Tiumen’ in western Siberia, followed by
Tobol’sk a year later. Verkhotur’e was founded in the Urals in 1598, and Turiisk
two years after. Several towns were constructed along the Ob, culminating in
the founding of Tomsk nearby in 1604.
12
The sixteenth century was thus a dynamic period for the founding of new
towns, and especially the latter half. Thesame cannotbe said of thecommercial
life of towns for which the second half of the century was to prove particularly
difficult. Unfortunately the available statistics make tracing the expansion and
contraction of towns over this period especially problematic and there are
severe uncertainties about urban population levels and the character of the
urban hierarchy. There can, however, be no doubt that the pinnacle of the
urban hierarchy was Moscow. In the absence of cadastres and census books
for the city, population estimates rely upon crude guesses by travellers like
Herberstein, who related the tale that a recent official count had recorded
41,500 houses in the city.
13
This has been interpretedas referring more correctly
to the number of adult males in the city. For the end of the century a total
population of 80,000–100,000 has been suggested.
14
If this is accurate, it means
that Moscow was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time (only nine
11 D. J. B. Shaw, ‘Southern Frontiers of Muscovy, 1550–1700’, in J. H. Bater and R. A. French
(eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (London: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 117–42.
12 V. I. Kochedatov, Pervye russkie goroda Sibiri (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1978), pp. 20–1.
13 Sigismund von Herberstein, Description of Moscow and Muscovy, 1557, ed. B. Picard,
(London: J. M. Dent, 1969), p. 20.
14 M. N. Tikhomirov, Rossiia v XVI veke (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 66; Istoriia Moskvy,
vol. i, Period feodalizma, XII – XVII vv. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1952), p. 179; Ocherki istorii
SSSR, period feodalizma, konets XVv. – nachalo XVIIv. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1955), p. 266.
Herberstein’s visits were made in 1517–18 and 1526–7.
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West European cities had populations in excess of 80,000 in 1600: London,
Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Rome, Palermo, Seville and Lisbon).
15
Moscow
was, of course, the seat of the tsar and government with all the activities which
these implied. It was also a major commercial and trading centre, a pivot of
military and religious activity and much besides. In other words, it was the
geographical focus of the realm.
By comparison with Moscow, other Russian cities paled in size and impor-
tance, though the evidence on population sizes is extremely patchy. Nov-
gorod, for example, was no longer the leading commercial centre it had been
before its annexation by Moscow in 1478 but nevertheless retained a signifi-
cant role at least down to its sacking by Ivan IV’s oprichniki in 1570. According
to Chechulin’s calculations, Novgorod had over 5,000 households in the late
1540s which, he believed, indicated a population of over 20,000.
16
Kazan’ on
the newly annexed south-eastern frontier had considerable commercial and
military significance when it was described in a cadastre in the late 1560s. From
this source Chechulin estimated a population of up to 15,000.
17
Other size-
able towns included Smolensk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Pskov, Kaluga, Kolomna,
Vologda, Kostroma and Kholmogory. All appear to have contained at least
500 households at various points in the sixteenth century.
18
Iaroslavl’, which
was to become a major centre in the seventeenth century, may also have
been in their number but the sources are uncertain.
19
Apart from the capital,
therefore, Russia’s larger towns included the centres of formerly and recently
independent states or principalities (Kazan’, Novgorod and Pskov), provincial
centres (Nizhnii Novgorod, Kaluga, Kolomna, Vologda and Kostroma), and
peripheral or border towns whose populations reflected the size of their com-
merce and/or of their garrisons (Novgorod, Smolensk, Kazan’, Pskov and
possibly Nizhnii Novgorod). Compared to Western Europe, Russian towns
were relatively small at this time, with the important exception of Moscow.
Russia lacked sizeable regional centres compared to Western Europe (though
it was not unlike England and Scotland in this respect).
20
However, Gilbert
Rozman argues that the settlement hierarchy reflected a society which was
moving beyond a process of purely administrative integration to a stage where
15 de Vries, European Urbanization,pp.270–8.
16 Chechulin, Goroda,p.52.
17 Ibid., p. 206.
18 Tikhomirov, Rossiia v XVI veke; Henry L. Eaton, ‘Decline and Recovery of the Russian
Cities from 1500 to 1700’, CASS 11 (1977): 220–52.
19 Tikhomirov, Rossiia v XVI veke,pp.217–18. Astrakhan’ was probably a significant centre
also, but the sources are imprecise.
20 de Vries, European Urbanization,pp.269–87.
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commercial integration was becoming more significant. In his view, Russia
had thus reached a stage of development at which countries like England and
France had arrived 100–150 years previously.
21
While cadastres, census books and similar materials can give us an idea of
a town’s relative size at a particular point, very rarely are they frequent or
comparable enough to allow growth or decline to be accurately gauged in this
period. Other kinds of evidence can, however, give some notion of general
trends. The issue of to what extent Russian towns flourished or declined has
been debated, with Soviet historians inclined to take an optimistic view as
towns participated in the move towards the ‘all-Russian market’ postulated by
Lenin for the seventeenth century. Clearly, in and of itself, the proliferation in
the number of towns described above does seem to point towards some degree
of urban dynamism. At the same time, from at least the middle of the sixteenth
century, many towns appear to have suffered, especially in central and north-
western Russia.Various kindsof evidence seem to point to the viewthat Russia
shared in the economic upswing which apparently affected much of Europe
from the latter part of the fifteenth century. But from the middle of the next
century conditions in Russia, unlike Europe, seem to have deteriorated. The
most frequently cited reason for this situation is the policies of Ivan IV.
22
Ivan’s
plunging of the country into the long and disastrous Livonian war(1558–83) and
his reign of terror known as the oprichnina (1565–72) both brought destruction
on a large scale with few areas escaping completely. The sacking of Novgorod
and Pskov (1570), the Crimean Tatar attack on Moscow (1571), the devastation
of large areas of the countryside, and the large-scale migrations of peasants are
some of the more memorable episodes in this grim period. Then, following
Ivan’s death (1584) and a brief period of recovery, the 1590s witnessed further
warculminating in the disasters of Boris Godunov’sreign (1598–1605) including
famine in 1601–3, and the period of anarchy and warfare known as the Time
of Troubles (1604–13).
Giles Fletcher, who visited Russia in 1588–9, was a witness of some of the
depredations which resulted from the troubles of Ivan IV’s reign. In Moscow,
for example, he noted that ‘there lieth waste a great breadth of ground which
before was well set and planted with buildings –’, the after-effects of the Tatar
raid of 1571. Having mentioned a handful of other places, he asserts that ‘the
other towns have nothing that is greatly memorable save many ruins within
their walls, which showeth the decrease of the Russe people under this govern-
ment’. In the same vein he notes the desertion of many villages and towns, for
21 Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia,pp.33–42, 56–66.
22 Richard Hellie, ‘Foundations of Russian Capitalism’, SR 26 (1967), 148–54.
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example between Vologda and Iaroslavl’, where ‘there are in sight fifty derevni
or villages at the least, some half a mile, some a mile long, that stand vacant
and desolate without any inhabitant’. According to Fletcher, his informants,
some better travelled than he, assured him that ‘the like is in all other places
of the realm’.
23
Whether or not Fletcher exaggerated, other evidence confirms his general
picture of economic and social depression in the latter part of the sixteenth
century. Thus Eaton has estimated that the average number of urban taxpaying
households per town declined from 231 to 151,orby35 per cent, between about
1550 and the 1580s; in 25 towns for which household data are available for both
periods he calculates an overall decline of 61 per cent.
24
Kolomna, which is
believed to have had a population of up to 3,000 in the 1570s, had only 12 urban
taxpaying households whilst 54 dwellings were recorded as empty and there
were 249 vacant lots. Serpukhov in 1552 had 623 taxpaying households and 143
vacant lots; Murom in 1566 recorded 587 and 151 respectively, and by 1574 only
111 taxpaying households, 157 empty dwellings, and 520 vacant lots.
25
Economic
depression is believed to have struck the north-west especially hard, since this
wasthe regionwhere muchofthe warfare and disorderoccurred.But there can
also be little doubt that matters varied regionally and that the losses incurred
in the centre and the north-west were to some degree balanced by gains on the
new peripheries. Voronezh, for example, was founded in 1585 and by the time
of its first cadastre in 1615 it had a population of over 800 households including
those of 76 urban taxpayers and 87 monastic dependents, most of the latter
engaged in trade and crafts.The town had 63 trading stalls (lavki)and half stalls,
23 of whichwere run by state servitors.
26
Clearly many of the inhabitants of the
town had migrated from further north, perhaps in part fleeing from economic
difficulties being experienced elsewhere in the country.
Urban society and administration
In much the same way that de Vries regards early modern European cities as
points of co-ordination for a whole range of social activities,
27
Russian towns
23 GilesFletcher,‘Ofthe RusseCommonwealth’,inLloyd E.Berry andRobert O. Crummey
(eds.), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English
Voy agers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 125, 170.
24 Eaton, ‘Decline and Recovery’, p. 229.
25 Chechulin, Goroda,pp.156–9, 173; Ocherki istorii SSSR,p.263.
26 L. B. Veinberg and A. A. Poltoratskaia, Materialy dlia istorii Voronezhskoi i sosednikh
gubernii, vol. ii (Voronezh, 1891), pp. 1–26.
27 de Vries, European Urbanization,p.12.
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Towns and commerce
(other than the most insignificant) were multifunctional nodes performing a
series of vital tasks in the developing and expanding state. Thus they were
administrative centres, points of control over the surrounding territory. They
were military and defensive nodes, directed against both internal and external
foes.They werecommercial foci at various scales. Most of them had handicraft
and manufacturing activities. All had a religious role. And not a few had
intensive gardening and even agrarian functions. Towns were not only vital
to the needs of the state but they also had a significant part to play in wealth
creation. They were thus places in which many social actors were keenly
interested.
The multifunctional character of the town was reflected in its physical mor-
phology.
28
The typical sixteenth-century Russian town had a fortified core,
usually called the kremlin (kreml’)orgorod, which contained the major admin-
istrative and military offices and sometimes the residences of the elite or even
of a portion of the population. Outside this was the commercial suburb or
posad, often again walled and sometimes subdivided by walls into various
sections. Beyond the posad, and either adjacent to it or at times separated
from it by open space, there might be other suburbs (fortified or not, and
sometimes referred to by the term slobody). Occasionally the whole settle-
ment or a major part of it might be contained within a single wall which
was sometimes described as the ostrog.
29
The typical town therefore had a
cellular structure. The morphology of the town will be further explored in
Chapter 25.
Urban social structure was usually complex. Towns with any degree of
commercial life generally had a population of ‘taxpaying’ or posad people. This
part of the population earned its basic livelihood from handicrafts, trade and
similaractivitiesand, fortheprivilege of being allowedtopursuetheseactivities
in towns, theywere subject to a tax burden(tiaglo)imposed bythe state. As well
as paying taxes, the tiaglo might include the obligation of performing various
services, such as acting as customs officials, guards, watchmen and the like,
which obligations could be exceedingly troublesome. The tiaglo was generally
imposed on the taxpaying community as a group (sometimes structured into
several groups) who were then obliged, by means of an assembly (skhod)
or other mechanism to elect officials to administer the burden. The posad
community, however, was by no means a group of equals. Rather members
were differentiated according to their wealth. At one extreme, in Moscow,
28 French, ‘The Early and Medieval Russian Town’, pp. 268–74; L. M. Tverskoi, Russkoe
gradostroitel’stvo do kontsa XVII veka (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1953).
29 As at Voronezh in 1615; see Veinberg and Poltoratskaia, Materialy,pp.1–26.
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were the gosti, the richest and most significant merchants in the realm who
were engaged in state service at the highest level. Also wealthy and performing
important tasksforthegovernmentweremembersoftheMoscow‘hundreds’–
by the late sixteenth century, the gostinaia sotnia (merchants’ hundred) and the
sukonnaia sotnia (cloth hundred). Most members of the posad were divided
into three ranks (stati) according to their wealth, but the details seem to
have varied from town to town. Also resident in the posad in many cases were
cottars (bobyli), labourers and others whoseem to have earned a living through
lowly trading activities, acting as yard keepers, through casual labour and by
other means. These people do not appear to have been full members of the
posad community but paid a quit-rent (obrok) to the state. Posad people were
most common in towns of the north-west, north and centre although, as we
have seen, many in the centre had fled south by the latter part of the sixteenth
century. There, however, they often joined the service ranks, a social transition
made much easier by the fluid life of the frontier.
Members of the posad, and the land that they occupied, were designated
‘black’, meaning that such persons were liable to the tiaglo. But not all traders
and craftspeople in the sixteenth-century townwere designated ‘black’. Others
were ‘white’, meaning that they lived in suburbs owned by members of the
higher nobility, middle-ranking servicemen, the Church, monasteries and oth-
ers. Such people were relieved of the tiaglo on the grounds that they owed their
obligations not to the state but to their lords. Many towns had such ‘white’
suburbs (often called slobody), which were in many ways the remnants of past
political subdivisions in Russia when princes, monasteries, high churchmen
and otherscustomarily derived income from their urban possessions.From the
time of Ivan III the tsars had been trying to eradicate them on the grounds that
they denied important revenues to the state, while the ‘black’ people generally
resented them because of their tax privileges and the unfair competition which
they consequently promoted. Also a problem for the tsars were the private
towns, often situated on monastic or patrimonial estates. Smirnov calculated
that there were about fifteen fortified private towns in the sixteenth century,
reduced to about ten in the first half of the seventeenth.
30
An important element in the populations of many towns (and also des-
ignated ‘white’) were the military men, for the most part members of the
lower-ranking service contingents, including musketeers (strel’tsy), cossacks
and others. Unlike middle-ranking servitors (deti boiarskie and others), the
30 Smirnov, Goroda,p.110.
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lower ranks either had no land and were paid in cash or kind, or they held
land in communal fields with others in the same group. Few had serfs or
other dependents. Moscow had a large element of service people in its popu-
lation. They were less common in the north and parts of the north-west, but
very common in the southern frontier towns where they often constituted
the biggest element of the urban population. Here, in addition to their mili-
tary duties, servicemen engaged in agriculture with their families, and many
engaged in trades and crafts as well. They settled in their own suburbs close
by the fortified towns where they were administered by their own regimental
structures and communal organisations.
Towns also had other groups in their populations. Members of the clergy,
monks, monastic and church servitors were an important element, in addi-
tion to the already-mentioned monastic dependents living in ‘white places’.
Moscow naturally contained all social ranks, from the tsar downwards. The
social elite tended to live in the capital where they maintained their homes but
also held estates elsewhere. Their life in the city was eased by the ministra-
tions of dependents – serfs, slaves and others. Some other towns, Kazan’ for
example, also had members of the middle-ranking service class living in town
where they had services to perform. It was more common, however, for such
groups to live on their country estates, but they were generally required to
maintain dwellings (‘siege dwellings’) in town, officially for occupation during
times of disturbance or conflict. The dwellings were usually cared for in the
absence of the owner by a housekeeper (dvornik), often a slave or other depen-
dent who frequently engaged in commercial activity. Other groups included
non-Russians (European soldiers, ambassadors, merchants and some others
in Moscow; European merchants in some other places, notably Archangel
and Vologda; Tatar and other minority representatives and groups in Moscow,
Kazan’, Astrakhan’ and other towns), and non-official elements (runaways,
beggars, criminal groups).
There is no sense in which the disparate members of the urban population
constituted an ‘urban citizenry’ or could provide any unified political voice or
identity for the town. Each group was administered separately, with different
interests, and the only unity was provided by the town governor who repre-
sented the tsar and whose remit extended over the nearby region as well as the
town. In this sense, then, the town barely represented a separate entity from
its surrounding milieu, was disunited within itself and fell very much under
the aegis of the state. Liberal scholars of the past thus lamented the lack of
commercial opportunity, entrepreneurial spirit and civic freedom which, they
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