Gosti ind persons enrolled in these two 'hundreds' performed the most divrse functions; they collected customs and liquor duties, appraisec the goods which the tsar had an interest in buying, sold them on his acount, supervised some manufactures and minted money. They constitutd a kind of pool of businessmen whose members the monarchy in characteristic fashion never allowed to specialize because it did not wish to bcome overly dependent on them. They made their profits on handlinggovernment goods as well as on their private undertakings. In legal thory, gosti belonged with the tiaglo-bearing population; but thanks tcprivileges, confirmed in personal charters, they were peers of the noblet servitors. The most valuable of these privileges were exemptions fron tariffs and taxes, and immunities from the detested voevoda courts; fireign gosti were tried by the Office of Ambassadors, while native ores went before a boyar designated by the tsar. They had the right to prchase votchiny, and, on certain conditions, to travel abroad. The menbers of the gostinaia and sukonnaia sotni were somewhat less generousk rewarded.
With al his wealth and privileges, however, the gost was a very different crature from the western bourgeois. He fawned on authority, in the presevation of whose absolute power he had an abiding interest. He bore heay responsibilities to the state. He was an enemy of free trade. His assocation with royal authority and support of its monopolies made him an "bject of hatred of the mass of ordinary traders. The richest businessmen in Muscovy never became spokesmen of the trading community a large. Apart rom gosti and the two 'hundreds' the only merchants favoured
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by the crown were westerners. In 1553 an English ship in search of a northern passage to China touched Russian soil not far from what later became the port city of Archangel. Its crew was escorted to Moscow where Ivan iv greeted them warmly, and offered them privileges if they would open a regular trade route between the two countries. Two years later, the Muscovy Company was formed in London for this purpose, the first of the great chartered companies of merchant adventurers. It obtained from Ivan iv the exclusive right to the northern route which its members had discovered, exemptions from tariffs and taxes, and the right to maintain in several cities its own warehouses. Although forbidden to carry on retail business, the Company did so anyway, employing for the purpose Russian front men. Later on, somewhat less generous privileges were granted to the Dutch, Swedes, Germans and other westerners. The Muscovite elite strenuously opposed the crown's policies favouring foreigners, but it could do little about them because the crown derived great profit from trade in western merchandise.
The Muscovite state made its presence felt in trade and manufacture in such an overpowering manner that even without additional evidence it should be apparent how difficult were the conditions under which the ordinary Muscovite merchant had to operate. He was barred by the crown more or less permanently from trading in the most lucrative commodities. As soon as he discovered on his own some new line of business, the crown was certain to take it away from him by declaring it a state monopoly. Gosti, members of the merchant sotni, and foreigners, all of them trading tax free, offered unfair competition. Manufacturing and mining, for which he had neither capital nor the know-how, were controlled by the crown and its foreign managers. The trading and artisan class therefore had left to itself nothing but scraps from the table of the tsar and his servitors; and even this little, as we shall see, it was not allowed to enjoy in peace. To a western reader, the words 'trade and industry' used in a pre-modern context automatically evoke the image of the city; protective walls within which the commercial and manufacturing classes go about their affairs free and secure from arbitrary authority. In dealing with Russia, it is well at once to divest oneself of such associations. There, the centre of trade and manufacture lay not in the city but in the countryside; the commercial and industrial classes did not constitute the bulk of the urban population; and residence in the city guaranteed neither security nor freedom, even in the limited sense in which these terms were applicable to Russia.
Max Weber noted that in its fully matured form the city was five things: 1. a fortress with a military garrison, 2. a market-place, 3. the
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seat of anautonomms court, 4. a corporation with legal status, and 5. a centre of self-goveriment.6 Populated centres satisfying the first two elements of this defintion can be found from the beginning of recorded history in every ana of the world; wherever there is organized human life of some kind, ttere are market places, and wherever there is political authoritythere arealso fortified places near by. But it is only in western Europe aid areas olonized by its immigrants that one meets with cities which, in addition, render their inhabitants special legal and administrative services. Tk city as a body of men enjoying rights not shared by the rural populati"n is a phenomenon peculiar to the civilization of western Europe. A so much else, it came into being in the Middle Ages as a by-pioduct of feudalism. The city originally constituted itself into a communiy by virtie of a grant from the feudal lord authorizing a place to be set iside for rade and crafts. Then, as the result of its members undertakhg joint"usiness ventures, the burghers acquired corporate status. As their weilth and power grew, the burghers challenged their feudal loids, transforming their corporate status into self-rule by winning spedal urban laws and courts, separate systems of taxation, and organs of city-govirnment. Essentially, the urban population of continental vestern Eirope gained its rights and transformed itself into a bourgeoisie in the tourse of conflict with the feudal nobility and at this nobility's expense.
The city of the wstern European kind did emerge between die twelfth and fifteenth centiries in north-western Russia, most notably in Novgorod and Pskov vhich were in close contact with the German city-states anc imitatec their institutions. They could also be found on the territory of the Polih-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose urban inhabitants enjoyed autaiomy based on the law of the Hanseatic town of Magdeburg. But tiese were short-lived exceptions. Moscow could not tolerate privileged sanctuaries from which a genuine urban civilization might ha^e developed because they violated the kingdom's patrimonial constitutbn. Mosctw deprived Novgorod and Pskov of their liberties as soon as it had conqiered them, and it promptly curtailed the guarantees of the burghers of Poland-Lithuania when this area fell under Russian control, long beftre the devastations of the Second World War such once proud metroplitan centres as Novgorod, Pskov and Smolensk de-generatec into see"y large villages; and die city of Moscow owes whatever grandeur it tan lay claim to not to its commercial but to its autocratie and aristocratic heritages.
Although quite inlike its western counterpart, the Russian city was still an institution if considerable complexity in whose history administrative, taatory;nd economic elements overlapped in bewildering fashion.
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As far as the monarchy was concerned, a city (gorod) was any locality, regardless of size or economic function, which had in residence a voe-voda (see above, p. 96). From its point of view, the city was a military-administrative outpost par excellence. Muscovite Russia, and even more so imperial Russia had many centres larger, more populous, and even economically more productive than those officially designated as cities which nevertheless did not qualify as such because they lacked a voevoda or his equivalent, and therefore could not perform tie functions which the state required of its cities.