Stagecoaches on Russian roads in the 19th century: from design to production

Abstract

Long-distance public transportation via regular stagecoach services between the cities of the Russian Empire from the 1820s to the 1850s is studied as a social institution that structured people’s everyday lives, forming a set of rules, practices, and models of behaviour. In contrast with the traditional view that transport services and ‘passengers’ as a socio-cultural phenomenon came into being with the development of railway communication and urban public transport, this article presents a different point of view. An analysis of a variety of materials reflecting the operations of transportation companies (regulations, schedules, bureaucratic correspondence, etc.), along with periodicals, memoirs, diaries, private correspondence, and works of fiction, has helped us to reconstruct how public transport came into being in Russia in the first half of the 19th century and how the public became accustomed to the new service.