Estate and Land Structure of Nizhny Novgorod According to the Owners Catalog of the General Land Survey Period of the Late 18th Century

Abstract

The study raises the problem of analyzing the class structure of the city of Nizhny Novgorod according to the General Land Survey of 1784. Based on the materials of the Catalog of Owners in the citywide plan, the distribution of urban citizenship, nobility, clergy, and military is studied in comparison with the all-Russian data on the class status of the cities at the end of the 18th century. A relational database was developed for the analysis. The conclusion is made about the flourishing of merchants and philistines, who made up 80 % of the population and an extremely small number of peasants-land owners (3 %). The novelty of the study, among other things, is to establish the fact of the predominance of private small-scale land ownership, which represented 95 % of the land ownership of the city. It was found that despite the leading industrial and commercial function of Nizhny Novgorod and strong citizenship, 53 % of land plots were associated with agriculture (commercial gardening), which confirms the well-known phenomenon of “vegetable gardens in the city” in the pre-reform period.