The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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 ...

neighborhoods ripe for unrest. In fact, Moscow had rioted during the 1771– 2 plague, giving the empress yet more incentive for u ...

courts, neighborhood courts, church courts, the Main Magistrate court, social estate courts, and the neighborhood council. Mosco ...

the 1790s consisted of about 14 percent nobles, clerics, and elite, 15 percent townsmen, 4 percent soldiers (as opposed to St. P ...

population and, in sharp contrast to Moscow, only half of a percentage were clergy. The city had a major convent and monastery a ...

efficient approaches to governance, such as instituting taxes on residents in the 1760s to pay for trash collection and to buy o ...

young Edward Wilbraham-Bootle on the Grand Tour in 1792–4. St. Petersburg was an international city with sizeable European and A ...

THE CULTURE OF MERCHANTS As noted, Moscow’s merchants faced a lot of competition—from state peasants and serfs, noble investors, ...

property and bankruptcy law, insurance, banks and credit, communication sys- tems. But they did enjoy legal protections through ...