Russia under the Old regime

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cities much as their Muscovite predecessors had done, that is, as outposts of royal authority in the countryside. Catherine prided herself that in a single decade (17 75-85) she had doubled the number of cities in the empire. Investigation of her new cities reveals, however, that the increase was accomplished by the simple procedure of reclassifying villages as urban centres. Shaken by the ease with which Pugachev and his rebels had taken over vast stretches of Russia, Catherine decided in 1775 to tighten her control over the countryside. The provinces (gubernii) now were cut down to more manageable size, and subdivided further into districts (uezdy), each with its capital. How this reform was carried out can be gathered from the activities of Count R.L.Vorontsov who in 1778 was placed in charge of the reorganization of the Vladimir region. On the completion of his assignment, Vorontsov reported to the Empress that he had 'designated' (naznachil) thirteen cities to serve as capitals of as many districts: of this number, seven had had the status of cities already; the remaining six he picked from among villages favoured by a convenient location and good access to transport.*18 Haxthausen aptly observes that Catherine 'designated' cities as she promoted officers. She also demoted them, for subsequently several dozen cities were punished by being deprived of their urban status.

It may be noted that at the time when she transformed villages into cities, Catherine allowed many large commercial and manufacturing centres to retain their rural status. This was done as a favour to dvoriane and had the effect of exempting their trading and manufacturing serfs from all taxes save the soul tax. An outstanding example was Ivanovo, a property of the Sheremetevs, which at the height of its economic development in the 1840s employed thousands of industrial workers, and yet still remained technically a 'village'. The administrative relabelling of the population clearly had not the slightest effect on the quality of life in the cities or on the mentality of its inhabitants, which (except for Moscow and St Petersburg) remained indistinguishable from the rural. The tripling of urban inhabitants, allegedly accomplished between 1769 and 1796, was a figment of the bureaucratic imagination.

There is no indication that in the eighteenth century Russian cities gained in economic importance. Leading authorities on urban history believe that the extremely low level of urban activity, characteristic of Muscovite Russia did not change in the eighteenth century, largely owing to the steady shift of trade and industry from town to village.19 Nor did the population structure of the cities change. In Moscow in 1805, there were still three times as many peasant serfs as merchants.

* Sometimes the status of a village was elevated by a change of name. Thus in the Full Collection of Laws (PSZ, No. 14,359) 'here is an edict of 1775 changing the name of the village Black Muck (Chernaia Griaz) to Imperial City (Tsaritsyn).

Despite die monarchy's earnest efforts to stabilize it, the merchant class was in constant flux. Well-to-do merchants - kuptsy of the first and second guilds - liked to marry their children to dvoriane because in this way they assured them of superior social status, access to government jobs and the right to buy serfs. Once ennobled, they and their capital were lost to the middle class, although they did not necessarily cease to offer competition to their less fortunate brethren, for if they wished they could continue to trade by buying temporary licences. Merchants unable to raise the annual certificate fee required of guild members, sunk to the level of meshchane, lower-class urban inhabitants subject (until 1863) to the soul tax. Peasant-entrepreneurs, on acquiring the minimum capital necessary, immediately joined the ranks of the merchant class by enrolling in the third guild, and once in there were able to float upwards; their grandchildren often entered the ranks of dvoriane. The middle estate thus became a kind of half-way house for those moving up and down the social ladder. At the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of Moscow's twenty or so leading business families were of rural origin; 'one half had risen from the peasantry within the last three generations, while the other half looked back to an ancestry of small artisans and merchants who had come to Moscow in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.20 The gosti of Muscovite Russia disappeared as tracelessly as did most of the ancient boyar families.

In the historical and belletristic literature one occasionally encounters a Russian merchant who meets the bourgeois ideal. But these are rare exceptions. The nineteenth-century Russian merchant is much more frequently depicted as a conceited boor interested only in money, devoid of any sense of personal calling or public responsibility, both ignorant and scornful of learning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries he had to conceal his wealth; but once the monarchy introduced legislation protecting private property, he became vulgarly ostentatious in his private habits, overeating and overdrinking, and overfurnishing his home. He cultivated chinovniki, whose favours were important for him. As a rule, he kept one son at home to help out with the business and sent the others into the service. The thought that a son may know more than his father offended the patriarchal spirit of the Russian merchant class, for which reason children were not allowed to educate themselves. The author of an important study of the Moscow merchant class, and himself a descendant of one of its more prominent families, says that in all Russian literature written by the 'intelligentsia' he knows only of one place where a private entrepreneur is treated in a favourable light.21

This prevalent view of the merchant was undeniably unfair. Towards the end of the nineteenth century some of the leading merchant and industrial families attained a high level of cultivation. But even that