where the eleventh-century Sophia Cathedral and St. Michael Golden-Domed
Monastery stood in semi-ruins.
With the creation of the Hetmanate, Poles, Armenians, Catholics, and Jews
were expelled, but the city’s multi-ethnic character quickly rebounded. Over the
eighteenth century Greek and Armenian merchants took up residence in Podil; the
city featured a settlement of Serbs engaged in viticulture and the silk industry, a
regiment of Montenegrin hussars, and Germans arriving in Catherine II’s settle-
ment project. The city’s bustling merchant center and administrative center, Podil,
harbored the Magistrates’rococo Town Hall (built in the 1690s), more than half
of the city’s Orthodox churches as well as afifteenth-century Armenian Orthodox
church and shops and markets galore. So teeming with humanity, prone to
flooding, disease, and disorder was it that Catherinian city planners in 1787
proposed to raze the neighborhood and move it to higher ground. This never
happened, and others commented on the urbanity and prosperity of the neigh-
borhood, with shops offering thefinest in fashion, furnishings, china, and luxury
goods. Always a major trade center, the neighborhood hosted at least six major
markets across the year, bringing merchants from all around the Pontic steppe to
the city. Kyiv became a major international trade hub when the important
Contract Fair was moved there from Dubno in 1797. A cattle auction and
universal emporium, this annual January fair brought Jews, Poles and Russians,
Armenians and Greeks, Tatars, Bukharans and Turks, Persians and Indians,
landlords and merchants, peddlers and peasants, Gypsies and minstrels. Russian,
Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, Greek, German, Yiddish, and Persian echoed in the
market’s alleys and shops.
Administratively, through the eighteenth century Kyiv’s burghers fought ten-
aciously to preserve their political privileges against Cossack officials, merchants,
and Russian officials. Magdeburg Law, affirmed repeatedly by tsars (in 1654, 1700,
1710, 1802) included exclusive access to lucrative city offices for burghers, the right
to maintain a town militia (although a Russian garrison generally took over this
role), freedom from some taxation, service, and billeting obligations, and most
importantly a monopoly over distilling and selling alcohol (a principal component
of city income). These privileges were constantly under attack, none more vor-
aciously than the alcohol monopoly: Cossacks, monasteries, and peasant villages all
got into the business. Catherine II’s era significantly cut into the city’s autonomies;
with the abolition of the Hetmanate in 1764, a governor-general oversaw the city;
the 1785 Charter to the Towns introduced a new form of town council, but the city
fathers managed to maintain control of offices and townfinances, and after Paul I’s
retrenchment of some of these reforms, the city’s Magdeburg Law privileges were
affirmed in 1802. After the last partitions (1793, 1795), when neighboring Right
Bank Ukraine joined the Russian empire, significant numbers of Poles moved into
the city and into city government.
Finally, the empire’s two capitals, each different in history and visage, but each in
the eighteenth century shaped by prosperity, social change, and urban planning.
Catherine II vocally preferred St. Petersburg to Moscow, but was critical of each
town’s disorder, unpaved and filthy streets, polluted waterways, and crowded
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 385