From a distance Russian towns typically made a great impression on foreigners. Thus, encountering Plesko (Pskov) in I66I, the Scottish mercenary Patrick Gordon noted that it 'had a glorious show, being environed with a stone wall, with many towers. Here are many churches and monasteries, some whereof have three, some five steeples or towers, whereon are round globes of six, eight or ten fathoms circumference, which - make a great and pleasant show.' On closer acquaintance, however, Gordon was much less impressed. 'Having lodged in the town', he noted that it 'stunk with nastiness, and was no wise answerable to the glorious show it hath afar off, and our expectations -'.[226]To foreigners Russia's towns seemed dirty, unplanned, badly maintained and primitive. Only the churches called forth praise, but even they were vitiated by superstition and their strange architecture. Other buildings were predominantly wooden and seemed quite unimpressive when compared to those common in the West.
The towns, of course, suffered from severe disadvantages. Most of the building, as noted already, was in wood, which had the great advantage of being cheap and readily available but the supreme disadvantage of being vulnerable to fire. In fact so frequent and so devastating did urban fires tend to be that rebuilding had to be done as quickly as possible and at minimum expense, paying little attention to aesthetics or to style. No wonder the results failed to inspire admiration. But the towns were not in fact quite as disordered as they often appeared to foreign observers, particularly in the case of Moscow. From the time of Ivan III, for example, measures were taken to provide fire patrols and also to uphold law and order through forms of policing and controls over traffic, especially at night. From the sixteenth century the tsars gave encouragement to building in stone. Some attention was paid to drainage and to the planking of unpaved and often barely passable streets. From the early seventeenth century concerted efforts were made to widen and straighten certain important streets, especially in the city centre, and to prevent infringements of the building line. This was partly as a fire protection measure.[227] Wells were constructed to give easy access to water in cases of fire. The security and well- being of the capital, where the tsar himself resided, was naturally of crucial importance to the government. Much less seems to have been done in other towns.
Moscow and other towns remained quite 'medieval' in appearance down to the end of the century. The typical house or 'court' (dvor), for example, consisted of a wooden structure, perhaps accompanied by outbuildings, and the whole surrounded by a high wooden fence. A gate gave access to the street. But Moscow had begun to change its appearance to some degree by the mid-century when new stone and brick homes and mansions of some of the wealthier were noted by the visiting Paul of Aleppo.[228] According to some scholars, the stone and brick houses and mansions which began to appear in the latter part of the century reflected evidence of an interest in new architectural forms and a departure from those based on traditional wooden construction.[229] By European standards Russian towns spread over enormous areas, necessitating the construction of very lengthy walls in order to encompass them. Towns typically included considerable areas of open space between their built-up areas, used for growing food and pasturing livestock. They also tended to sprawl beyond their walls into the countryside beyond and many activities, especially some of those involving fire, were confined to those regions.
There has been considerable debate among scholars over the extent to which Russian towns were subject to planning. L. M. Tverskoi, for example, argued for a degree of regularity in street patterns and suggested that towns were generally planned even when their street patterns seemed irregular.[230]Regularity is particularly noticeable in the layout of some of the southern military towns. Other scholars have spoken of the 'spontaneous' development of towns.[231] A somewhat original argument has been advanced by G. V Alferova.[232] According to her, towns were planned, but the planning took a different form from the regular, geometrically based system of much Western planning from medieval times onwards which ultimately derived from the Greek conceptions of Hippodamus. Alferova believed that Russian ideas on planning took their origin from Byzantine laws and practices which were translated and appeared in Russian legal anthologies and similar texts from an early period. The latter were used in princely law courts, but it is unclear how far the laws applying to urban affairs were applied, at least before the seventeenth century (there is a faint echo of Byzantine urban conceptions in the Ulozhenie).[233] The argument is that the Byzantine tradition paid less heed to regularity of form than to such matters as heights of and distances between buildings (views, ventilation, effects of shadow), the width of streets, property boundaries, hygiene, vegetation, drainage and water supply. There was, according to Alferova, overall concern with the profile of the townscape. After about the fourteenth century, she avers, towns were founded and developed according to a well-regulated procedure which included proper documentation and adherence to ritual practice. The problem is that there appears to be only limited documentary evidence to support some of these assertions. What may or may not have appeared in legal texts may tell us little or nothing about actual practice. Moreover, some of Alferova's claims almost amount to a belief in a sophisticated form of landscape architecture long before such a thing was possible. Clearly this is an area which demands more research. It may be that Alferova's study points the way to a deeper understanding of the symbolism enshrined in townscape than has been usual to date. But whether what she writes about is 'planning' is quite a different matter.
Conclusion
Whereas a traditional approach to the study of Russian towns has emphasised their sluggish development and particularly their backwardness relative to European towns of the period, this chapter has emphasised another angle, following the thought of Jan de Vries.[234] This is to view towns as elements in a network and to consider their role as co-ordinators of a growing series of activities across the state. By the seventeenth century most Russian towns were multifunctional and acted as important nodes (albeit varying in their individual importance) for the organisation of commercial, administrative, military, cultural and sacred space. This process of growing nodal significance is termed by de Vries 'structural urbanisation'.[235] To view the towns only in terms of their commercial role, in other words, is to miss one of the most important things about them. And it is to overlook the vital role they played in the building of the Russian state.
26
Popular revolts
MAUREEN PERRIE
The election of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613 is conventionally seen as marking the end of the Time of Troubles, but social unrest continued for some time. The cossack leader Ivan Zarutskii based himself in Astrakhan' in 1613-14 with his mistress Marina Mniszech, the widow of the First and Second False Dmitriis, and promoted the claim to the throne of her infant son, 'Tsarevich' Ivan Dmitrievich. Zarutskii and the little pretender were executed in the summer of 1614 and, although the cossacks continued to create problems for the government in 1614-15, subsequent protests against the new regime were only sporadic. The conclusion of peace with Sweden in 1617 and with Poland in 1618 brought an end to foreign intervention, and the next decade and a half was a period of relative stability for Russia, both internally and externally.
226
229
A. V Ikonnikov
230
L. N. Tverskoi,
231
V A. Shkvarikov,