18
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform
Russia’s rulers in the eighteenth century believed cities and middling estates to be
essential for aflourishing economy. Peter I returned from hisfirst embassy to
Europe (1697–8) convinced that Russia needed the sorts of urban autonomies and
bourgeoisie that he had seen there. His advisors’conceptual framework of a“well-
ordered police state”explicitly mandated intermediary social bodies to promote the
state’s vision. Catherine II personally wrote the section in herInstructionof 1767
extolling the benefits of the“middling people,”a group“founded upon Virtue and
Industry, and productive of them,”encompassing“neither Nobles, nor Peasants
[who] are employed in Arts, Sciences, Navigation, Trade and Manufacture.”
Russia’s rulers tried to create more energized cities and bourgeoisies because of an
Enlightenment appreciation of the Third Estate and pragmatically because of their
constant search for better tax structures for productive entities such as towns.
Russian political and economic reality made it difficult to achieve these goals.
Traditionally the empire’s population was regarded as a collection of discrete social
groups: peasants were to farm the land; townsmen and merchants had exclusive
right to trade; landed serf owners were military servitors; native peoples paidiasak
and carried on traditional lifestyles. As noted in Chapter 17, social change in the
eighteenth century undermined these categories, producing a whole new social
category (raznochintsy, or people of various social status). Nevertheless, a strong
middle class and dense urbanization did not evolve, in part because Russian rulers
granted the nobility rights once exclusive to the merchantry—trade, industry,
monopolies. The empire’s cities were cacophonies of different social, ethnic, and
legal groups, all engaging in trade or civic society, but not combining to create true
municipalities.
RAZNOCHINTSY
One of the most striking developments in eighteenth-century Russia was the
generation of skilled experts to serve as international and empire-wide merchants,
entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, cartographers, teachers, and intellectuals. Mili-
tary and naval reform, mining, metallurgy, and other industry, village-centered
manufacturing, bureaucratic expansion, cultural Europeanization—all generated
people with specialized skills who transcended old categories. Catherine II’s policy
navigated a tension between controlling taxpaying groups and encouraging the
emergence of new social energy.