sustained their own corporate organization and standards of production; they
continued to pay tax and recruitment. Catherine’s goal was to differentiate the
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie from small traders and artisans, and in this she suc-
ceeded: only 11 percent of those who had been previously listed in the“merchant”
guilds actually qualified as“merchants”according to declared capital. Mobility in
and out of the merchant group became dynamic: men who accumulated the capital
to qualify as a“merchant”rose, others who fell on hard times sank to taxed status;
wealthy entrepreneurial peasants declared merchant status, bypassing guilds for
which they lacked technical skills. These reforms, however, still left large portions
of most cities’populations in different estate categories.
The reforms created a Town Council composed of representatives from the
merchant and artisan propertied classes that handled day-to-day governance; the
gubernia governor had general supervision over the administrative,finance, and
judicial organs mandated by the reform. Following up the administrative reform,
the Police Ordinance of 1782 intensified and regulated policing in towns around
the realm, mandating that towns be divided by population into uniform police
districts and within them wards, all overseen by a governing Board of Good
Order. More policemen in small wards were to provide a wide range of services
from courts for dispute resolution to street patrols and public welfare. An
assembly of citizens met once every three years to elect officials such as judges
and councilors for the Police board; each city’s Town Council was to oversee and
fund the Board of Good Order.
The 1785 Charter to the Towns created a unified urban society populace by
recognizing all urban residents as citizens, grouped into six groups by wealth and
role in a way that potentially cut across estate identity (noble, clergy, etc.). Each
group—owners of real estate; merchants; artisans; foreign merchants; distinguished
citizens; unskilled workers, traders—was to have its own corporate organization,
with the highest groups freed from corporate punishment. All these citizens elected
a municipal council from the most propertied strata; executive authority was in the
hands of a six-man board that oversaw everything fromfiscal affairs to adjudication
to law and order to regulating the marketplace. Thus, Catherine’s vision was of the
city as an island of urban citizenship and autonomy.
Catherine also took up the unsolved issue of the urban needy which had become
only more exacerbated by social change over the century. Mass recruitment into the
army often left soldiers’wives and children adrift; moving thousands of peasants as
ascripted labor also disrupted social ties and contributed to vagrancy. Although
magistracies and governors were enjoined to care for the needy, and monasteries
and parish churches continued to provide alms and care, nothing systematic had
been done. As part of a broad-reaching vision to educate Russia’s youth in
Enlightenment values and civic responsibility, Catherine II commissioned Ivan I.
Betskoi to create a variety of educational institutions—schools for daughters of
nobility and of townsmen and for sons of merchants, preparatory schools for the
Arts and Military Academies, and foundling homes in each of the capitals intended
to educated a new middle class. (Betskoi’s homes also supported themselves with
successful investments in savings banks and insurance companies that specifically
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 381