young Edward Wilbraham-Bootle on the Grand Tour in 1792–4. St. Petersburg
was an international city with sizeable European and Asian foreign communities.
The city hosted German, Finnish, English, Swedish, Polish, and Armenian
churches; in Catherine’s time the city saw a German-language newspaper and
German- and English-speaking theaters.
Finally, Catherine II’s Commission on urban planning shaped Russia’s urban
environment around the realm. From the time of Peter I, Russian rulers had
understood the importance of rational order in towns, if only forfire safety
purposes. Peter I had ordered that towns should be rebuilt afterfires with wider
and straighter streets, stone homes and tile roofs, for safety and utility. Catherine
wanted to bring Enlightenment rationalism, morality, and civilization to Russia’s
urban environment, but the occasion offire gave her an early opportunity to
implement her vision.
Fire that devastated the city of Tver’in 1763 prompted the newly founded
(1762) Commission for the Masonry Construction of St. Petersburg and
Moscow to apply its standards empire-wide; based on its plans for Tver’,it
created a standard planning document that, like contemporary European urban
reform, disrupted old towns’concentric pattern. It proposed razing walls and
creating broad boulevards and radial streets connecting the whole. Parts of
neighborhoods, particularly wooden buildings, were to be razed where necessary
to open up a municipal focal point, often a landmark like a medieval cathedral
that would be set off with a square, connecting by a radial street to another square
with government offices and an enclosed marketplace (gostinnyi dvor). Where
possible, towns were to develop neighborhoods distinguished by wealth and class
and marked as such architecturally. The center would be densely packed with
impressive public buildings and churches, and wealthy merchants and noblemen,
each in their own new neighborhood, were to build new homes on the new
arteries using a prescribed, two-storey stone style (their old property having been
razed). Beyond the center, less prosperous people were to settle with single-storey
wooden homes; polluting factories, state stables, cemeteries, and the like were
pushed to the outskirts.
The Commission’s plan of socially segregated neighborhoods did not come to
fruition, but many towns were rebuilt in these modes. Tver’, for example, was
rebuilt with a neoclassical palace and Ascension church. Iaroslavl’s lovely park for
strolling on the high embankment over the Volga and the spacious square opening
up the seventeenth-century Church of Elijah (Figure 18.1) epitomize Catherine’s
vision. When plans for redesign were executed afterfire had ravaged a town, the
process was relatively orderly; when it was ordered from on high, endless foot-
dragging and lawsuits over lost land and property ensued. Many towns were only
partially transformed for lack of funds and administrative commitment; the gover-
nors of Dmitrov, for example, received plans in 1782 to impose a grid of new streets
on its medieval town center, but it took the forceful will of a new governor-general
of the province in 1790 to start the process. All in all, however, plans were
developed and implemented to one degree or another for 416 towns around the
realm as well as in the two capitals.
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 391