Muscovy’s towns and townsmen from taxpayers togostirepresent in microcosm
the diversity of an empire of“difference.”Towns were patchwork quilts of divided
jurisdictions; townsmen had no esprit de corps as“citizens”since they were
virtually as enserfed as peasants. They were urban taxpayers, constrained in amass-
ing capital and innovating. Muscovy’s petty and larger merchants faced the same
constraints on growth. But the expanding empire continually opened up oppor-
tunity for transit trade, and state protectionist policies carved out a sphere of
opportunity for the bold. Shorin’s and Nikitin’s careers exemplify the dynamism
of the empire’s trade.
*****
On Muscovite towns: J. Michael Hittle,The Service City. State and Townsmen in Russia,
1600 – 1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979); Denis J. B. Shaw,“Towns and
Commerce”and“Urban Developments,”in Maureen Perrie,The Cambridge History of
Russia, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 298–316, 579–99. On
the phenomenon of small towns: Vera Bácskai,“Small Towns in East Central Europe,”in
P. Clark, ed.,Small Towns in Early Modern Europe(Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995); Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw,Landscape and
Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613– 1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Among Samuel H. Baron’s many important articles on the Muscovite economy and
merchants are“The Town in‘Feudal’Russia’,”“The Weber Thesis and the Failure of
Capitalist Development in‘Early Modern’Russia,”“Who Were the Gosti?,”“The
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Russia: A Major Soviet Historiographical
Controversy,”and“Vasilii Shorin,”in hisMuscovite Russia: Collected Essays(London:
Variorum Reprints, 1980) andExplorations in Muscovite History(Hampshire: Variorum,
1991). See also Paul Bushkovitch,The Merchants of Moscow, 1580– 1650 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Profiles of Shorin and Nikitin: Baron,“Vasilii Shorin”; Erika Monahan,“Gavril Romano-
vich Nikitin (?–1698),”in S. M Norris and W. Sunderland, eds.,Russia’s People of Empire
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 46–56. On Cossacks and others as
traders in Siberia, see Erika Monahan,The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern
Eurasia(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) and Christoph Witzenrath,Cossacks
and the Russian Empire. 1598– 1725 (London: Routledge, 2007).Towns and Townsmen 243