communities (often many), religions, and political structures of their regions. A few
examples demonstrate the empire’s urban diversity. Riga and Reval/Tallinn, for
example, were old Baltic ports: Reval on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland
and Riga at the confluence of the Riga and Dvina Rivers. Ancient settlements, each
had been ruled by various sovereign powers from medieval times (the Livonian
Order until 1561, Poland-Lithuania 1581–1621, Sweden 1621–1710, Russia
thereafter), but each endured as an island of urban self-government, their privileges
affirmed by each successive sovereign.
Riga and Reval were German trading towns that had joined the Hansa in the
1280s; they exported hemp, linen, butter, beeswax, lumber, and furs. The sur-
rounding rural areas were governed by German Junker nobility, the towns by
German merchants using German law. Riga used Magdeburg Law, the predomin-
ant code across central and east European trading cities, while Reval used Lübeck
Law, somewhat more oriented towards coastal, maritime cities. Each code provided
the framework for autonomous, self-governing municipalities, ruled by a city
council elected from among propertied merchants. Reval’s early modern town
council numbered aboutfifteen, plus four burgomeisters with specific authority
over areas such as budget andfinances, court records, tax collection, and real estate
records. The council’s authority was broad: it arranged the town’s defense (a militia,
a hired prince in medieval times) and its foreign policy; it held civil and criminal
court, with particular emphasis on property and commercial law; it maintained real
estate records and attended to maintenance of roads, public hygiene, and the like.
In the Russian empire since 1710 (Peter I affirmed each city’s charter), these two
centersflourished, Riga becoming the state’s major export port for much of the
century. Riga was a heady center of art and culture in the eighteenth century, with a
German-language theater, opera and symphony companies, and a natural history
museum, as well as major sugar and textile manufacturing sites. For ten years
(1786–96) these cities’long tradition of urban self-government was replaced with
the Russian Charter to the Towns, but Paul I reverted to tradition in 1796. In the
1840s Russia included the German legal codes for Baltic noblemen and towns in
the codification of laws of the Russian empire, and the monopoly of German-
speaking elites in these town governments was eroded only in 1877, culminating in
abolition of their town councils in 1889.
Kyiv, unlike Riga and Reval in history and ethnicity, resembles in some ways
their autonomous self-government, stemming from a common heritage of Euro-
pean urban development. Awarded Magdeburg Law privileges by Polish kings in
thefifteenth century, the city’s Orthodox burghers ruled themselves with an elected
town council. In the eighteenth century Kyivflourished as the political and trade
center it had always been and also as an important outpost for Russia’s expansion
towards the Crimea and Ottoman empire. It was small by European standards,
with a population of about 15,000 in three neighborhoods: the merchant lowland
of Podil (with about 8,000 inhabitants); upland from the Dnieper river the
Pechersk district (about 6,000 population), home to the Cossack government
(until 1782), a Russian fortress and garrison dating to the time of Peter I and the
ancient and prosperous Caves Monastery; and the somewhat deserted Old Town
384 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801