neighborhoods ripe for unrest. In fact, Moscow had rioted during the 1771– 2
plague, giving the empress yet more incentive for urban reforms and Enlighten-
ment improvements.
Moscow in the eighteenth century hardly suited Catherine’s Enlightenment
model of a modern city. Not only was it disorderly, smelly, and muddy, it had
continued to grow in its medieval circular shape, radiating out from the Kremlin on
the high bank of the river. Winding and narrow streets were packed with wooden
houses, relieved only by walls and firebreaks separating the city’s main
neighborhoods—the Kremlin, Kitaigorod (home to nobility and location of
many government buildings), Belyi gorod (a residential area for elite and mer-
chants), and Earthen (Zemlianyi) gorod (home to artisans and taxpayers). A trading
area across the river and suburbs for musketeers, postal workers, and others ringed
the town. In the eighteenth century the city grew exponentially; numbering about
200,000 in 1763, the population rebounded from the loss of up to 70,000 in the
1771 – 2 plague to at least 300,000 in the 1790s (swelling to an estimated 400,000
in the winter with market, political, and social activity). Geographically the city
absorbed suburban villages, reaching a sprawling size and semi-rural composition
that foreigners commented on. The city and its surrounding region boomed as the
center of the empire’s main textile-producing region; in the city textile workshops
and factories (silk, linen) particularly clustered in the northeastern neighborhoods
of Pokrovskoe, Preobrazhenskoe, and Semeonovskoe. In 1787 Moscow hosted over
300 manufactories and heavier factories; by the end of the century the number had
risen to 500. Industry was supported by a huge influx of peasants: about 54,000
peasants were registered in Moscow in the 1730s, but over 115,000 in the 1780s,
constituting more than 60 percent of the city’s population.
Governing Moscow seemed to a rational thinker like Catherine II a nightmare,
but in actual fact its overt diversity masked a basic governing order that functioned
well through most of the eighteenth century. The magistrate government had
authority over the taxpaying and merchant populace, offering a helpful court but
otherwise had little governing impact. Central offices had jurisdiction over discrete
groups of population or activities, and the governor oversaw the police force for
Moscow, which divided the city into eighteen police districts in which police
recruited neighbors to take care of lighting, roads, bridges, cleanliness,fire safety,
and basic law and order. But fundamentally, before Catherine II’s reforms, the city
was governed from within by the more than 150 subdivisions (slobodyandsotni)
of the city’s districts. Some of these neighborhoods were officially assigned to
chanceries—Iamskaia for postal workers, Main Court Chancery for people and
crafts associated with the court—while the rest were nominally under the gover-
nor’s oversight, but they self-governed in the age-old tradition of communal
cooperation, selecting councils of elders to manage policing, public works, and
tax collection. They set up night watch on gates and ovens, they distributed the tax
burden, they repaired municipal buildings and roads, they resolved petty conflicts.
For the residents, this system worked. As Lindsey Martin has shown, it provided
face-to-face, responsive government in line with community norms. Meanwhile
residents had a wide array of networks to turn to for conflict resolution—chancery
386 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801