The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800

In 1829 the Russian thinker Peter Chaadaev wrote: 'In our cities we appear to be nomads, more so than the real nomads who graze their flocks in our steppes, for they are more attached to their desert than we are to our towns'. A similar attitude is shared by many historians; by and large, the significance of the pre-industrial Russian town and its inhabitants has been minimised, especially when patterns of western European urban development have been accepted as the norm, and the topic neglected in favour of studies of the apparently more crucial peasantry, nobility and state bureaucracy.