Russia's cities constituted less of the entire population than elsewhere. In 1678 there were only 185,000 male city residents in the entire realm, about 2 percent of the total population, while in western Europe in the late 1600s the overall urban population was 12.4 percent of the total. Russia's cities were also relatively young. While cities in the Ottoman empire boasted pedigrees to antiquity and many in western Europe to medieval centuries, in the Russian center the oldest towns dated to the twelfth century and new towns were being founded constantly. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, there were about 130 towns in Muscovite possessions; by the end of the century, over eighty new towns had been established in the wake of conquests of Kazan, Astrakhan, and western Siberia. All began as fortress outposts, but most gradually acquired local trading significance as well, with artisans and markets. Urban growth intensified after the disruptions of the
Time of Troubles, such that by the end of the seventeenth century another 110 towns had been created or acquired in territorial expansion, in Siberia and particularly on the southern and southwestern steppe frontiers.
Such a pattern of development meant that the Russian empire was a realm of small towns (under 5,000 in population); none (other than Moscow) larger than 15,000 in population by the late seventeenth century. Serfdom contributed to this, as peasant villages produced for the landlord and their own needs and created relatively little demand for urban market goods. Most of Russia's towns were more military than commercial. All towns served administrative functions for the state; they were headed by governors to collect tax and oversee defense and the criminal law. Otherwise, most cities performed military functions for the state; trade and handicrafts were minimal and often were in the hands of military men (musketeers, Cossacks, artillery), not a specifically urban populace. Towns on Russia's western border in the seventeenth century, as J. M. Hittle has shown, were composed of as much as 71.2 percent military servitors; the percentages were even higher on the southern (85.3 percent) and eastern (87.3 percent) borders. Other towns, located in the more densely settled center or on key trade connections, were commercial-administrative centers, with fewer military residents: in the north, only 23.6 percent of town households were military servitors, in central Russia only 13.9 percent.
Commercial towns were full of shops selling produce purchased wholesale from the countryside by petty merchants or manufactured items produced in the town itself. Early modern Russian towns differed from their European counterparts in that they tended not to develop large-scale industry; substantive manufacture grew up in rural settings, near the sources of raw materials and peasant labor and often under the auspices of landlords. In towns artisan work was done in small-scale workshops in many specialties, including carpentry, tailoring, leatherwork, candle and soap production, pottery, and weaving. Goods were usually presented in "rows" organized by specialty: in 1583 Novgorod had 1,800 shops in 42 rows, while in 1586 Pskov had 1,230 shops in 35 rows; at the end of the century Kazan had 368 shops and 240 smaller trade operations. The biggest trade centers by the mid-seventeenth century supported great emporia: in 1638 Moscow had 2,367 artisans and Novgorod about 2,000; in the 1670s the upper Volga customs depot of Iaroslavl' also had about 2,000 artisan households. Most towns, however, were more modest—Nizhnii Novgorod, Viatka, Kostroma, and Vologda all had 1,000 or more, while the iron production center of Serpukhov had only 331 artisan households.
Most Russian towns were founded on key river junctions for trade; a geographical peculiarity of Eurasia made them easily defensible. Major rivers from central Europe to Siberia characteristically have a high bank (the Vltava, Danube, Dnieper, Volkhov, Moskva, Dniester, Don, Volga, Ob, Irtysh, Lena, Enesei), where a citadel might be placed and defended. The other bank is usually low and flat, easily accessible to river transport, historically developing as a town's trading emporium, as in Prague, Budapest, and Novgorod. In other towns the trading district developed outside the fortress walls, and the city grew in concentric circles from the fortress center. Moscow (Figure 11.1) is the classic example of such a circular city,
Figure 11.1 Adam Olearius' map of Moscow depicts its circular growth out from the Kremlin, with city neighborhoods (Kremlin, Kitaigorod, Belyi gorod) separated by wide firebreaks. From the 1727 Amsterdam edition. With permission of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
with walls and wide firebreaks separating the town into neighborhoods: first the Kremlin, then the "Kitaigorod" trading neighborhood, beyond that the "White Town," and beyond that, already by the end of the sixteenth century, the "Earthen" town. Whole neighborhoods could be dedicated to a particular craft, such as those of the "armorers" (bronnaia), smiths (kuznetskaia), and leather workers (kozhevni- cheskaia). Moscow fortified the walls between these sections for defense in the sixteenth century, turning earthen ramparts into brick edifices: the Kitaigorod wall received twenty-nine towers and eleven gates in a 1584-91 renovation, while the Earthen (zemlianyi) wall had no fewer than fifty towers. Some borderland towns took a simple rectangular orientation with four walls of a wooden fort.
The citadel of a major town was surrounded by a powerful wall that enclosed at least one church or cathedral, state offices, palaces and homes for secular rulers, dignitaries, hierarchs, and bureaucrats. From such a center radial streets often led out to the major highways. Moscow had several gates, each labeled for the towns towards which its road led (Smolensk, Tver'-Novgorod, Dmitrov, Iaroslavl',
Vladimir, Kolomna-Riazan'). Otherwise, streets were narrow and winding; homes were built inside a wooden fenced courtyard, not facing out as in contemporary Europe.
Physical characteristics alone, however, did not define Russian towns. Perhaps their most interesting aspect was invisible, in their legal make-up. In the modern world we are familiar with a type of city that was actually a rarity in world history, namely the city as independent municipality. This type arose in Europe in the medieval era on the model of the ancient Greek "polis"; over time cities negotiated themselves out of the control of their owners, be they church hierarchs, local nobles, or the king. The European "polis" was an autonomous legal and physical urban sphere, separate juridically and politically from private overlordship, acting as an independent subject in relation to monarchical administration. Towns governed themselves with councils, generally elected from the propertied citizenry (although in practice civic government often fell into the hands of a merchant oligarchy). Citizens were free to work, invest, and prosper as they might. Towns of this sort developed in the Polish kingdom and Grand Duchy of Lithuania over the medieval and early modern centuries, receiving privileges of self-governance under Magdeburg or other German lawcodes. Such cities paid taxes to the king, but their town councils and burgher population were independent of the king's administration. When Russia took over a Magdeburg-law city—Smolensk (1514-1618, 1667), numerous western border towns (Thirteen Years War 1654-67), and many during the partitions of Poland (1772-95)—as a rule it honored these urban institutions and privileges, even though they resembled nothing in the Muscovite past.