efficient approaches to governance, such as instituting taxes on residents in the
1760s to pay for trash collection and to buy out billeting and neighborhood service
obligations. The reforms of the 1770s introduced more coherentfiscal, urban, and
judicial organs, and intensified urban policing. The city’sfive police districts were
expanded to ten with a city-wide total of forty wards within them, each staffed by
ward supervisors, chimneysweeps, and contractors for neighborhood streets and
lights (selected by a mixture of appointment and neighborhood approval).
St. Petersburg benefited directly from Catherine II’s personal involvement in
modernizing her beloved capital. After ravagingfires andfloods early in Catherine II’s
reign, the city imposed intensivefire-fighting responsibilities on each neighborhood
and individual households, and createdflood warning and rescue services in the
lowlands. The Commission for Masonry Construction in St. Petersburg and
Moscow (1762) focused intensely on St. Petersburg; by the early 1770s it had
produced at least four urban plans that achieved impressive results. They straight-
ened streets that had meandered from original Petrine plans andfilled in residential
space to accommodate the city’s burgeoning population and make the city less
rural. For aesthetic and functional reasons the plans mandated that the new
structures front on streets,fit height standards, and be constructed in brick or
stone with sheet metal roofs to reducefire hazard. By the end of Catherine’s reign
the city had increased its masonry houses from about 460 in 1765 to about 1,800,
with only a small increase in wooden structures.
Another impressive achievement of Catherine II’s reign beautified and improved
the city: for aesthetic and hygiene improvement the Neva River and major canals
were fronted with granite and adorned with distinctive wrought-iron railings. Some
canals were widened, deepened, or straightened and many wooden canal bridges
were rebuilt in graceful granite. Better pontoon bridges traversed the Neva, and
permanent bridges linked Vasilii Island to the Vyborg and St. Petersburg sides
across narrower Neva offshoots. Hygiene was a principal concern: canals and rivers
were cleaned, underground and surface sewage and drainage systems were intro-
duced in the 1770s along with trash and manure removal services. Decrees steadily
imposed order on congested canal traffic in this beehive of trade. Across the city the
number of streetlights was doubled to over 3,000 and a system of paid lamplighters
was created. Paving the city streets posed such a challenge in this humid climate and
boggy terrain that in 1792 the Free Economic Society proposed a contest to
identify the most durable paving material; nothing satisfactory was found, but
massive paving projects (constantly renewed) from the 1770s steadily improved
travel around the city.
Over the century St. Petersburg developed into a glittering political center,
studded with opulent tsarist and noble palaces and surrounded by impressive tsarist
summer residences, all extensively built or remodeled in Empress Elizabeth’s
preferred rococo or Catherine’sII’s beloved neoclassicism: Peterhof, the Catherine
Palace (named by Elizabeth I in honor of her mother Catherine I but a favorite of
Catherine II), Oranienbaum, and Pavlovsk. European visitors found the city
familiar, a place where they could make the rounds of fashionable salons and
balls as if they were home, as John Parkinson attests in his memoir of shepherding
390 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801