In their internal structure, Muscovite cities did not differ from populated places in the countryside. All were the property of the crown, privately held cities having been liquidated concurrently with alodial land tenure. There was in the cities no private property in land; it was all held conditionally, for which reason there could be no commerce in urban real estate. In all cities large tracts were set aside for the benefit of the servitors who garrisoned them; these were held on the same terms as rural pomestia. Side by side with them, lay properties of the crown and lots inhabited by 'black' people. The tax-paying population was organized, exactly as its rural counterpart, into communities which were held collectively responsible for the fulfilment of state obligations.
Muscovite cities were few and far between, and their populations were small. If one adopts a very formal criterion and counts as cities only places with a resident voevoda, the figure is 63 cities under Ivan m, 68 under Ivan iv and 138 in 1610. If one broadens the definition to include every fortified place maintained at government expense, then the figure in the mid-seventeenth century is 226 cities containing an estimated 107,400 households or 537,000 inhabitants. Moscow at that time had between 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, Novgorod and Pskov 30,000 each, and of the remainder none exceeded 10,000; many so-called cities, especially on the frontier, were small fortified places manned by a few hundred soldiers. The typical Russian city in the middle of the seventeenth century had 430 households with an average of 5 inhabitants each." It was a rambling agglomeration of low wooden residential buildings, churches, monasteries and bazaars, set in the midst of vegetable patches and meadows. The streets were wide and un-paved, the river banks unregulated. They always seemed more impressive from a distance than on closer inspection because due to their low population density they were disproportionately large. Olearius wrote that on the outside a Russian city looked like Jerusalem, but on the inside like Bethlehem.
Artisans and shopkeepers constituted only a minority of Muscovy's minuscule urban population. In Muscovy the terms 'urban' and 'artisan-trading' were far from coterminous. Because cities served primarily administrative and military purpose, their inhabitants were mostly service personnel with their families, doendents and serfs, as well as clergy. It is estimated that in the middleof the seventeenth century tiaglo people comprised only 31-7 per centof the inhabitants of Russian cities, while 6o-i per cent were service peronnel, and 8-2 per cent proprietary serfs. In the central provinces, the tiglo people were in a majority; but in the frontier towns to the west, ea; and south, their proportion of the total urban population was anywhee from 85 to 23-5 per cent.7
The traders and artisans were fomed into:ommunities like those in which the majority of farmers werethen living. These were called the 'posad community' (posadskaia obshchia) to distinguish it from the agricultural community called sel'skaia or rest'ianskctia obshchina. In the earlier period, the posad was often a sepaute city quarter, adjoining the fortress, called kreml' or gorod. But by handing out in the mercantile quarters properties to persons "empt from taxation and therefore not part of the posad community th government confused the picture. In the late Muscovite and early imprial periods the posad was more a legal than a territorial entity. It hd no intrinsic connection with the city. Nearly one out of every thre cities in Muscovy was without a posad; conversely, there were posd settlements in the countryside, especially near monasteries. At the:lose of tie sixteenth century, only sixteen cities had five hundred or mre posad households.
In the eyes of the law, the posad onstitutec a legal entity because its members, like those of a rural commnity, bore collective responsibility for the fulfilment of their tiaglo obliations. However, it was in no sense a privileged corporation, as was thi urban ccmmune in the west. The posad bore extremely heavy tiaglo bligations, and if anything, the lot of its members was inferior to thz of rural serfs. These obligations included ordinary and extraordinar taxes, work on fortifications, and (for the more affluent) assisting the uthorities in the collection of taxes and tariffs. An historian of the eightendi-century posad lists its various possible obligations on three pages nd warns that the catalogue is not complete.8 The status of a person blonging to a posad was hereditary and he and his descendants were forldden to have it. As noted, the land on which urban residences stood blonged to the tsar and therefore could not be sold. Except that they lied trade and crafts as dieir vocation and agriculture as an avocationwhereas the black peasants did the opposite, the two groups were bare! distinguishable.
Since 1649 members of posad cormunities enjoyed (along with gosti and members of the two 'hundrec') the exclusive right to produce articles for sale and maintain shop: but the right had little value because all the estates took advantage^ it without bearing their share of the tiaglo. Some groups - e.g. the Sreltsy and Cossacks - were legally
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entitled to do so. But the posad also faced competition from serfs of the service people and the clergy. Peasants living on 'white' properties of lay and clerical landlords set up in most cities and in many rural localities regular markets known as slobody (a corruption ofsvoboda, meaning freedom) where they traded without bearing their share of tiaglo. In some localities the posad was a mere nucleus surrounded by slobody and occasionally a prosperous sloboda turned into a large market town, How significant such competition was may be gathered from the situation in Tula where at the end of the sixteenth century the posad people owned only a fifth of the stalls, while the remainder belonged to soldiers and peasants.8 Competition from this quarter caused great bitterness and bred constant conflicts in the Muscovite city. From time to time the government took steps to placate the posad population, but without success. The posad never succeeded in shaking off the deadly rivalry of tiaglo-exempt groups.
Given these circumstances, no one stood much to gain from membership in the posad, and all the prohibitions notwithstanding, posad people in droves fled their communities. The best chance of making good their escape lay in finding a landlord or a monastery willing to take them under its wings and thus enable them to trade without bearing tiaglo. How desperate the situation of the posad community must have been may be gathered from the not uncommon practice of their members bonding themselves as slaves. Apparently the status of a slave (which carried with it exemption from all state obligations) was preferable to that of a shopkeeper or artisan - a telling commentary on the conditions of the Russian middle class. The government had to take drastic measures to stop the exodus of such people, imposing heavy penalties for unauthorized separation from the posad. To help the posad communities fulfil their responsibilities, it pressed into their depleted ranks vagabonds, impoverished dvoriane and anyone else whom it caught living outside the service-tiaglo structure. But the effect was minimal and the exodus continued. The modest growth in the number of cities during the seventeenth century was due to the expansion of Russia and the construction of military-administrative outposts along the eastern and southern frontiers.