towns in the empire were larger than 20,000 in population and Moscow and
St. Petersburg exceeding 100,000. But overall the empire did not become much
more urbanized in this century. As we saw in Chapter 11, by the late seventeenth
century only 2 percent of the empire’s total population was living in towns,
compared to 40 percent of the Dutch Republic’s population and 20 percent in
England. As before, towns were sprawling settlements of homes with courtyards of
gardens and livestock. Boris Mironov points out that 54 percent of all towns of any
size in European Russia in the eighteenth century were farming towns, with the
majority of the population doing agriculture rather than manufacturing or trade. As
in eastern Europe, small towns dominated: in 1678 93 percent of towns had fewer
than 5,000 in population, and in 1782, 72 percent. Many towns were much
smaller, but here eighteenth-century demographic growth shows its mark: in
1678 35.5 percent of the population lived in towns with fewer than 1,000 people,
but that number had fallen to 12.9 percent by 1782.
Statistically speaking, Russia developed more cities over the century, but not
always by economic growth. By 1727, Russia had around 340 towns and cities;
conquest added more, as did the provincial reform of 1775, in a paradoxical way.
The reform more than doubled the number of gubernii (from 19 to 50), increased
the number of districts (uezdy) from 513 to 585, and mandated that gubernii and
districts each should have a capital city. Where such a center did not already exist, it
was appointed by government committee, often transforming a village into district
capital overnight and its peasant residents into townsmen. Between 1775 and
1785, 216 new towns were founded, primarily district seats, constituting nearly
40 percent of all recognized cities in the empire in the 1780s. By 1800, with
territorial increases in the partitions of Poland and reforms of Paul I, Russia had 46
gubernii with about 550 district seats; most new towns survived to become modest
regional centers of trade and administration.
As before, towns were patchwork quilts of many jurisdictions; European-type
autonomous urban space was non-existent, save for Magdeburg Law towns in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Baltics that Russia conquered. Reforms
across the century struggled to create such urban and bourgeois autonomy. After
two unsuccessful initiatives on city government (1699, 1708), in the early 1720s
the Magistracy reform created the urban model that lasted until the 1775 reforms.
City government became parallel to, and separate from, the rural network of
governors (with the exception of 1727–43, when the Main Magistracy was abol-
ished and governors resumed oversight over towns). Magistrate government was
defined narrowly, with jurisdiction only over merchants and urban taxpayers; it
consisted of a council ofburgomistryandratmanyelected from the highest mer-
chantry by assemblies of taxpaying townsmen. Service as a magistrate was both a
burden and an opportunity to cultivate business interests from the inside. The
council’s size was proportionate to the urban taxpaying populace.
Juridically town councils maintained a commercial court for disputes over
contracts, promissory notes, bankruptcy, and the like; a Main Magistracy in
St. Petersburg provided an appeals court. These were among their most successful
enterprises. In 1767 reports to the Legislative Commission, merchants across the
378 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801