Governing the City: St Petersburg and Catherine II’s Reforms

Abstract

St Petersburg was unique. As far as administration is concerned, it was the unique composition of the population of the city which was most significant. The most obvious point of distinctiveness of St Petersburg compared with other Russian towns was the presence of the following: the court and courtiers; large numbers of bureaucrats, officials and clerical staff who were employed in the offices of state; the wealthiest nobles and their serf retinues; army and naval officers resident in the city between campaigns or employed in ministries; foreigners in many professions; the scholars, scientists and artists associated with the academies; a small number of very wealthy merchants. Contemporary statistical information on city population in late eighteenth-century Russia has to be treated with caution but it at least demonstrates something of the oddity of St Petersburg. In 1801 it has been estimated that the ‘townspeople’ of the city (the merchants and the artisans, the meshchane) numbered some 38,000 persons, but they were collectively outnumbered by 13,200 members of the nobility, 26,100 servants, 39,100 soldiers and officers and over 50,000 peasants.¹ In addition, the transience of the population of the city was also distinctive, not only in the number of wealthy nobles who retired for the summer months to their country estates, and in the movement of foreign and Russian merchants back and forth from the city but also the army of transient peasants and workers who supplied a city without a natural economic hinterland with foodstuffs, hand-made goods and labour.