On the So-Called Agrarian Towns of Eighteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

Soviet historians long ago abandoned the simplistic approach to study of the Russian town characteristic of bourgeois historiography. In contrast to the approach taken in the writings of someone like I. Ditiatin — who considered Rus' to have had few real towns but rather (in the majority of cases) strange settlements bearing the name ‘town’ due to some sort of misunderstanding (1) — contemporary historiography is characterized by a more multifaceted approach to the town — an identification of towns with a variety of socioeconomic functions (industrial centers, centers of transit trade, administrative centers of internal colonization, and so forth). Yet, at the same time one still encounters in writings on the history of the Russian town a not entirely successful definition of types of urban communities and a classification of towns reminiscent of the earlier approach. In particular, in the literature there is a special category of the undeveloped or agrarian type of town. (2) To this very large group ...