The Russian Empire 1450–1801

estates, when the law demanded that state courts control criminal justice. Landlords could cynically emancipate serfs when they ...

punishment and exile. When peasants did manage to complain, they were rarely heeded by local authorities. In one case in the 172 ...

produced“a viable way of life”for peasants; Dennison concurs that serfdom produced“a more open, dynamic society than that usuall ...

percent of the grain harvest was exported, Riga being the primary port until Black Sea ports got going at the end of the century ...

co-opted enough of regional elites and power structures, they would help control the lower classes. Fewer options for accommodat ...

Kazakhs defending lands, nomadic life, and status. As the rebels moved into the Middle Volga and forested steppe, they were join ...

Inspired by populationism and natural law, in principle she considered revising serfdom, in an attempt to create a prosperous an ...

subordination to a skeletal administrative network. Otherwise, this was an imperial society of“difference.” ***** Gregory Freeze ...

Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910– 1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Onod ...

18 Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform Russia’s rulers in the eighteenth century believed cities and middling estates to be essent ...

Muscovite society had always known people who escapedfixed social statuses despite the state’s efforts to record and tax them; s ...

Astrakhan, where he was educated in a Catholic school. His move to Moscow, where he studied at the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy, ...

towns in the empire were larger than 20,000 in population and Moscow and St. Petersburg exceeding 100,000. But overall the empir ...

realm requested that their courts be more empowered, while the nobility (like their seventeenth-century counterparts) complained ...

Urban space in Russia’s magistrate towns, then, was not a single municipal arena, as is well exemplified by the challenges of da ...

sustained their own corporate organization and standards of production; they continued to pay tax and recruitment. Catherine’s g ...

addressed the needs of widows and children.) In his day Betskoi’s two immense homes in the capitals took a path that had proven ...

enough capital. Most peasants in towns, however, simply stayed peasants and worked in trade. Understandably, in 1767 merchants a ...

communities (often many), religions, and political structures of their regions. A few examples demonstrate the empire’s urban di ...

where the eleventh-century Sophia Cathedral and St. Michael Golden-Domed Monastery stood in semi-ruins. With the creation of the ...