Historically most cities have been legally private entities, that is, they belong to private owners, be they landlords, bishops, princes, or kings. Their inhabitants were personal dependents ofthe owner, and the profits ofthe city went to him. That was the sort of town that early modern Russia had until late in the eighteenth century; they were private, and very complexly so. All their inhabitants were dependents of private owners and owed their service and income to them, just as peasants owed work and service to their owners. Russian towns were patchwork quilts of physical and/or virtual neighborhoods belonging to different landlords. What we might think of as the city per se—the artisans and traders of the urban commune (posadskie liudi)—were only about half the population and were juridically the equivalent of state peasants. They owed direct taxes (tiaglo), as well as sales taxes on their trade and rent on their shops (obrok). They also owed public services that included not only upkeep of city infrastructure (streets, wells, gates, bridges), but also specialized services such as accounting, book-keeping, tax collection, helping in customs houses, and the like.
Myriad other communities completed the urban landscape, each with a different "deal" and virtually all of them allowed to trade on terms more advantageous than those of the townsmen. Some of the city population might be musketeers working as city police and/or garrison troops; other military people as appropriate to a given locale could live there (engineers, artillery). They often inhabited their own suburbs and paid no direct taxes, although they might pay tax on trade. Other urban residents were serfs and townsmen who belonged to private owners—landed gentry, monasteries, bishops, and other hierarchs—and their "white" neighborhoods enjoyed freedom from taxation. Some urban residents did specialized services for the ruler, such as coachmen with tax-free status, or expert weavers who served the Kremlin court in Moscow (kadashevtsy). Some were foreigners, who were overseen by the relevant chancery, whether merchants, engineers, or military officers. Many of these groups lived collectively—musketeers and Cossacks, coachmen, court weavers, often foreigners; others lived throughout the town.
Seventeenth-century Moscow provides a good example of this urban legal diversity. It is estimated that half the population was military (musketeers and other servitors). A quarter of the rest was the posad or urban commune (divided into twenty-five neighborhood communes for self-government). Gentry and boyar households made up another 10 percent, clergy 5 percent (in about twenty-six small settlements) and government officials another 4 percent. The rest were palace settlements, foreigners, and other groups. The only specifically city government applied to the taxed city people: paralleling villages, they organized themselves as communes and a town assembly met to consider petty crime, apportionment and collection ofthe tax burden, and other common concerns. They were subordinate to a centrally appointed governor, or in Moscow to the Land Administration Chancery, and had no independent executive or fiscal authority. The greatest bane in the life of early modern townsmen was unfair competition from other town residents: Cossacks, musketeers, and secular and ecclesiastical serfs could produce crafts or bring in goods from the countryside and undercut the townsmen on the market.
From at least the difficult last decades of the sixteenth century, townsmen abandoned their statuses just as did peasants; they fled to other places or they sold themselves into debt slavery. The state tried to prop up the urban commune in coercive and supportive ways. In the 1580s townsmen were forbidden to sell themselves into slavery to escape taxes; in 1591, like peasants, they were forbidden to leave their communities. From this time into the seventeenth century the government impressed into city taxpaying service any non-peasant, non-noble vagrant who barely qualified for the role. Meanwhile, townsmen repeatedly (1627, 1629, 1637, 1646, and 1649) petitioned the government for relief from unfair competition by foreign merchants and locals and from unbearable tax burdens created by flight from the commune. In 1637 Moscow townsmen complained that a third of their commune had fled; in the next decade some successful efforts were made to track down and return runaway townsmen to their communes and to their taxpaying roles within them.
The Lawcode of 1649 tried to answer some of these complaints in a way that created a more cohesive urban social estate. It abolished the privileged neighborhoods of non-taxpaying artisans and declared that urban artisans had exclusive right to manufacture and sell in Muscovy. But that was difficult to enforce as the economy and population continued to grow and, as foreign travelers often remarked, "everyone was a trader." Furthermore, the Lawcode also de facto enserfed the townsmen with the peasants, in that it required townsmen to remain in the towns where they were registered in 1649. Their mobility was cut off, but little else had been done to bolster their economic prospects.
Some Russian towns in these centuries had even less of a "municipal" presence, with very fewposadskie and everyone in town engaged in trade. International transit trade in Siberia was in the hands of Central Asian "Bukharan" merchants, and major merchants from Moscow, Novgorod, and Iaroslavl' regularly bought and sold goods in Siberian towns. Siberian towns were rustic outposts: Erika Monahan finds the following panoply of traders listed in Siberian customs books: soldiers, musketeers, coachmen, Cossacks, vagrants, Kalmyks, peasants, priests, with not a single townsman (posadskii) among them. Garrison Cossacks were particularly heavily engaged in trade, even acting as the tsar's representatives in China trade in the 1680s; they dominated the populations of many Siberian towns. Thus, in these centuries Russia had very little social capital from which an indigenous "middle class" might have developed.
Those who did constitute a potential middle class were merchants and artisans who managed to build up capital for intra-city trade. But they, too, faced challenges in managing their wealth for their own benefit. As national and international trade developed, the state coercively recruited merchants into its service for high-level trade. The wealthiest among them were called gosti and are cited in the 1550 Lawcode; by the 1590s two groups of lesser merchants are also cited, the "merchant hundred" and the "cloth weaver's hundred." These three groups of merchants served as the tsar's factors, called upon to leave their successful businesses to serve once every five or so years. The ranks of these groups were replenished from successful townsmen, which promotions, of course, deprived the taxpaying commune of some of its most able-to-pay members.
The highest ofthese merchant groups, the gosti, served as ambassadors on foreign trade missions, collectors of customs in the port cities or alcohol taxes around the realm, buyers of goods on which the tsar claimed first right of refusal, and sellers of goods claimed as a state monopoly. In return for such service, they received significant privileges: freedom from direct taxes, exemption from many tariffs and customs, until 1666 the right to own land and serfs, and adjudication by the Chancery of the State Treasury rather than by the Moscow Administrative Chancery to which the normal townsman was subject. They also could personally benefit from the access and trade opportunities the work exposed them to. The number of such privileged merchants was limited—fifteen to thirty in Moscow in the seventeenth century. Those based in Moscow outnumbered those of other towns, and dominated in wealth and volume of trade, but there were gosti in several other active trading centers, such as Ustiug Velikii, Iaroslavl', Smolensk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Novgorod, and Pskov. The merchants of the lesser hundreds did similar but less responsible jobs (collecting taxes and customs) and enjoyed similar exemption from direct taxes and from the administration of the Moscow Administrative Chancery. In the seventeenth century some foreigners became gosti, including the Dutch entrepreneurs Marcus Vogelaer and Andrei Vinius. In 1649 the government expanded all these ranks to more than 25 gosti and 274 in the two hundreds in Moscow; by the end of the century gosti had reached about 40 in number.