Towns and commerce
DENIS J. B. SHAW
'It remaineth that a larger discourse be made of Moscow, the principal city of that country - Our men say that in bigness it is as great as the city of London with the suburbs thereof. There are many and great buildings in it, but for beauty and fairness nothing comparable to ours. There are many towns and villages also, but built out of order and with no handsomeness: their streets and ways are not paved with stone as ours are, the walls of their houses are of wood, the roofs for the most part are covered with shingle boards.'[69]
Richard Chancellor's somewhat disdainful description ofthe city of Moscow, which he first visited in 1553, fairly reflected European reactions to that and other Russian towns in the period before Peter the Great. Russian towns were different from, and much inferior to, the towns of Europe. This is a tradition which has endured down to our own day Both pre-1917 Russian and modern Western scholars have contrasted the commercial dynamism and political liberties enjoyed by European towns in the medieval and early modern periods with the limited and restricted commercial development and politically repressed character of Russian towns at that time.[70] Few if any Russian towns developed the 'urban community' described for the medieval European city by Max Weber.[71] Such an emphasis, needless to say, ultimately stems from a much broader issue: to what extent has Russia ever been, or could it hope to become, European?
Whilst specialists on Russia thus focused on the extent to which Russian towns exhibited fully urban characteristics, students of comparative urbanism increasingly challenged some of the assumptions lying behind such debates. Thus the meaning of concepts like Weber's 'urban community' or the distinctive 'urban civilisation' which supposedly characterised medieval and early modern European cities has been questioned with particular reference to their empirical applicability and the degree of generalisation involved.4 Marxists have argued that, far from being islands of freedom in a sea of serfdom as many earlier scholars had asserted, towns were in fact important bolsters of the feudal nexus.5 Furthermore, the assumption that European cities (and European modernity more generally) should be regarded as the standard against which cities (and modernities) elsewhere should be measured has been widely challenged.6 Some scholars urge that what should be compared is not cities as separate units but the evolution of urban networks and hierarchies acting as integrators of entire societies and thus as measures of social development.7
This chapter will refrain from entering the debate about the 'essential' nature of urbanism and approach Russian towns less as individuals than as interconnected nodes within a network having complex interlinkages with society, economy and government.8 The emphasis, in other words, will be less on towns as commercial foci and more on their multifunctional character. But their significance as commercial centres will also be highlighted before the chapter opens out into a broader discussion of commerce in this period.
1984), pp. 3-13; Don Martindale, 'Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City', in Weber, The City, pp. 9-62; Murvar, 'Max Weber's Urban Typology'.
4 Paul Wheatley 'The Concept of Urbanism', in P. Ucko, R. Tringham and G. W Dimbleby (eds.), Man, Settlement and Urbanism (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 601-37; Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 3-15.
5 J. Merrington, 'Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism', in R. Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 170-95; R. H. Hilton, 'Towns in English Feudal Society', in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Collected Essays ofR.H. Hilton (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 175-86.
6 V Liebermann, 'Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Different Areas', in V Lieberman (ed.), BeyondBinary Histories: Reimagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 19-102; G. Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia, 1750-1800 and Pre-Modern Periodization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
7 Ibid.; deVries, European Urbanization,^^. 3-13; G.William Skinner, 'Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China', in G. William Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 211-49.
8 de Vries, European Urbanization, p. 9.
The urban network
The number and relative importance of Russian towns in this period is a matter of uncertainty, a reflection of the patchy and ambiguous nature of the sources. The Russian term for 'town' (gorod) meant little more than a fortified settlement. In the sixteenth century the official sources generally used the word to refer to a place having some administrative and military significance. There is no definitive list of towns in the sources, and scholars of Russian urbanism have been forced to scour such records as cadastres (pistsovye knigi), military rolls and accounts, decrees, chancellery documents, charters and patents to try to construct a definitive list.[72] It is on the basis of such sources that scholars such as Nevolin, Chechulin, Smirnov and more recently French and others have calculated the number of towns.[73] French argues that there were at least 130 towns in the Russian network at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and implies that Chechulin's total of 218 towns existing at some point in the century (not counting Siberian towns) may be slightly too low for the century's end. However, the absence of agreement on how many of these constituted 'real' towns (for example, how many had genuine commercial functions) leaves plenty of scope for dispute.
The unification of the Russian state led to the decline or disappearance of many fortress towns located along the boundaries between the different principalities. But these losses were more than compensated by the addition of new towns to the network as suggested by the totals given above. Some of the gains came from the acquisition of already existing towns in newly conquered territories along the western border and down the Volga (Kazan', 1552; Astrakhan', 1556). In the west, in addition to towns in the Russian principalities annexed by Muscovy (Novgorod, 1478; Tver', 1485; Pskov, 1510), significant territories were taken from Lithuania and Livonia including the towns ofViaz'ma (1494), Toropets, Chernigov and others (1503), Smolensk (1514) and Narva (1558-81). In 1492 Ivan III built the fortress of Ivangorod on the opposite bank of the River Narva to try to overawe the latter city and entice away its trade. Other forts were built further south along the border. In the north few new towns appeared in this period, but important foundations included Pustozersk, at
the mouth of the Pechora (1499) and Archangel at that of the Northern Dvina
(1583-4).
By far the most significant town founding in the period occurred as a consequence of the Russian occupation of the Volga valley. Upstream from Kazan' several new towns (Vasil'sursk, Sviiazhsk, probably Cheboksary) had been founded before the former's capture in 1552. The occupation of the valley down to Astrakhan' was secured by the establishment of fortress towns at Samara (1586), Tsaritsyn (1588) and Saratov (1590). Meanwhile further west, and following the devastating Tatar raid on Moscow in 1571, the government decided to try to overawe the principal Tatar tracks or invasion routes from the open steppe grasslands by building new military towns at Livny, Voronezh (both 1585), Elets (1592), Kursk, Belgorod (both 1596) and several other places.11 East of the Volga, new territories were also now open to Russian occupation as a result of the fall of Kazan'. In 1586, in the same year that they built Samara, the Russians established Ufa, and also Tiumen' in western Siberia, followed by Tobol'sk a year later. Verkhotur'e was founded in the Urals in 1598, and Turiisk two years after. Several towns were constructed along the Ob, culminating in the founding of Tomsk nearby in 1604.12
69
Richard Chancellor, 'The First Voyage to Russia', in Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crum- mey (eds.),
70
1.1. Ditiatin,
71
Max Weber,
73
K. A. Nevolin, 'Obshchii spisok russkikh gorodov', in his