addressed the needs of widows and children.) In his day Betskoi’s two immense
homes in the capitals took a path that had proven perilous in European experience,
that of large homes supported by private and state endowments instead of by local
taxation with more local oversight and care on a smaller scale. As David Ransel has
chronicled, they failed miserably both in keeping infants alive (over theirfirst 36
years, they experienced only a 13 percent survival rate among over 42,000 admitted
children) and in educating them as useful, middle class citizens. Reformed in the
nineteenth century to foster infants in villages and to raise and educate only a
limited number in the homes, they achieved greater success.
St. Petersburg and Moscow were not the only urban centers struggling with
social problems; Betskoi attempted to create foundling homes in thirty provincial
towns, but, lacking private endowment, they failed. The 1775 administrative
reforms addressed this issue anew; it created boards of social welfare in each
gubernia capital to create hospitals, workhouses, schools, and other charitable
organizations. Here, success varied according to the energy and resources of each
gubernia.
Despite progress towards defining urban society as an autonomous entity, in
practice through the eighteenth century Russian towns remained social pastiches.
Cities were still embedded in the centralized, bureaucratic structures of the empire.
Police powers in most towns according to the 1775 reform, for example, were in the
hands of an appointed official (gorodnichii), usually a nobleman; towns were
nominally under the oversight of provincial governors. Most noblemen and clergy
with residences in towns did not take part in urban self-government, continuing to
identify with their own estate institutions, such as newly created noble assemblies.
But the upper merchant ranks of townsmen had been emancipated from the
commune, freed of poll tax and conscription. Even more significantly, throughout
the century the ability of townsmen to own property steadily grew. In 1700 they
were in effect granted ownership of their homes in towns, as well as of shops,
workshops, and other enterprises. These property rights were affirmed in the 1785
Charter. In 1801 town citizens received the right to purchase rural land without
serfs, which opened up de facto practical ownership because throughout the
century merchants had been buying land and serfs through intermediaries.
VARIETIES OF URBAN LIFE AND GOVERNANCE
Bursting beyond the magistracy’s framework governing“city people,”Russia’s cities
in the eighteenth century were teeming assemblages of the empire’s diversity.
Government service brought nobility, officialdom, and bureaucrats; soldiers and
officers were stationed in towns, in great numbers in the capitals. Common laborers
filled crowded neighborhoods, doing the hauling, cartage, and construction. Peas-
ants that their village could spare worked seasonally as day labor, factory labor,
stevedores, and even barge haulers on the river and canal networks. Some peasants
found their way into the legal status of taxpaying townsmen; after Catherinian
reforms entrepreneurial peasants could enroll in merchant guilds if they possessed
382 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801