It may be noted that at the time when she transformed villages into cities, Catherine allowed many large commercial and manufacturing centres to retain their rural status. This was done as a favour to dvoriane and had the effect of exempting their trading and manufacturing serfs from all taxes save the soul tax. An outstanding example was Ivanovo, a property of the Sheremetevs, which at the height of its economic development in the 1840s employed thousands of industrial workers, and yet still remained technically a 'village'. The administrative relabelling of the population clearly had not the slightest effect on the quality of life in the cities or on the mentality of its inhabitants, which (except for Moscow and St Petersburg) remained indistinguishable from the rural. The tripling of urban inhabitants, allegedly accomplished between 1769 and 1796, was a figment of the bureaucratic imagination.
There is no indication that in the eighteenth century Russian cities gained in economic importance. Leading authorities on urban history believe that the extremely low level of urban activity, characteristic of Muscovite Russia did not change in the eighteenth century, largely owing to the steady shift of trade and industry from town to village.19 Nor did the population structure of the cities change. In Moscow in 1805, there were still three times as many peasant serfs as merchants.
* Sometimes the status of a village was elevated by a change of name. Thus in the Full Collection of Laws (PSZ, No. 14,359) 'here is an edict of 1775 changing the name of the village Black Muck (Chernaia Griaz) to Imperial City (Tsaritsyn).
Despite die monarchy's earnest efforts to stabilize it, the merchant class was in constant flux. Well-to-do merchants - kuptsy of the first and second guilds - liked to marry their children to dvoriane because in this way they assured them of superior social status, access to government jobs and the right to buy serfs. Once ennobled, they and their capital were lost to the middle class, although they did not necessarily cease to offer competition to their less fortunate brethren, for if they wished they could continue to trade by buying temporary licences. Merchants unable to raise the annual certificate fee required of guild members, sunk to the level of meshchane, lower-class urban inhabitants subject (until 1863) to the soul tax. Peasant-entrepreneurs, on acquiring the minimum capital necessary, immediately joined the ranks of the merchant class by enrolling in the third guild, and once in there were able to float upwards; their grandchildren often entered the ranks of dvoriane. The middle estate thus became a kind of half-way house for those moving up and down the social ladder. At the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of Moscow's twenty or so leading business families were of rural origin; 'one half had risen from the peasantry within the last three generations, while the other half looked back to an ancestry of small artisans and merchants who had come to Moscow in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.20 The gosti of Muscovite Russia disappeared as tracelessly as did most of the ancient boyar families.
In the historical and belletristic literature one occasionally encounters a Russian merchant who meets the bourgeois ideal. But these are rare exceptions. The nineteenth-century Russian merchant is much more frequently depicted as a conceited boor interested only in money, devoid of any sense of personal calling or public responsibility, both ignorant and scornful of learning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries he had to conceal his wealth; but once the monarchy introduced legislation protecting private property, he became vulgarly ostentatious in his private habits, overeating and overdrinking, and overfurnishing his home. He cultivated chinovniki, whose favours were important for him. As a rule, he kept one son at home to help out with the business and sent the others into the service. The thought that a son may know more than his father offended the patriarchal spirit of the Russian merchant class, for which reason children were not allowed to educate themselves. The author of an important study of the Moscow merchant class, and himself a descendant of one of its more prominent families, says that in all Russian literature written by the 'intelligentsia' he knows only of one place where a private entrepreneur is treated in a favourable light.21
This prevalent view of the merchant was undeniably unfair. Towards the end of the nineteenth century some of the leading merchant and industrial families attained a high level of cultivation. But even that
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cultivated minority evinced little interest in public affairs, shying away from all politics and the limelight which politics brought with it. Its noncommercial energies were directed primarily towards cultural patronage, in which towards the end of the nineteenth century businessmen displaced the impoverished landed class. The widow of a self-made railway magnate discreetly subsidized Tchaikovsky; another railway builder, Sawa Mamontov, founded the first opera company in Russia, and helped support Mussorgskii and Rimskii-Korsakov. Chekhov's Moscow Art Theatre was financed with merchant money. The best collection of the Russian school of painting was assembled by the Moscow merchant Tretiakov. It was the descendants of two serf entrepreneurs, Morozov and Shchukin, who put together Russia's outstanding collection of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist art.
These were die visible upper echelons. The rank and file continued to live in a world of its own, isolated and self-contained - a world which the critic Dobroliubov called the 'Kingdom of Darkness'. Its outstanding characteristics were an intense nationalism coupled! with fear of western influences, and deep loyalty to autocracy whose protective tariff policy enabled this class to withstand foreign competition. When in the 1880s, the Ministry of Finance begain to promote large-scale industrial development, native entreprenteurship once again showed little inclination to commit itself. The situation resembled that familiar from the seventeenth century: state initiative, foreign money and management. The second phase of Russia's industrialism, involving the development of steel, coal, petrol, chemical and electrical industries, found Russia's middle class unprepared and unwilling. Russia had missed the chance to create a bourgeoisie at a time when that had been possible, that is on the basis of manufacture and private capitalism; it was too late to do so in an age of mechanized industry dominated by joint-stock corporations and banks. Without experience in die simpler forms of capitalist finance and production, the Russian middle class lacked the capacity to participate in economic aictivity involving its more sophisticated forms.
It is enough to survey the leading branches of heavy industry created in Russia in the late nineteenth century to see the: decisive role which foreigners played in their development. The modeirn coal and steel industries located in the Donets-Krivoi Rog region (of the Ukraine were founded by the English and financed by a combination of English, French and Belgian capital. The Caucasian oilfieldis were developed by English and Swedish interests. Germans and Belgiams launched Russia's electrical and chemical industries. Indeed, the texctile mills of central Russia, founded by serf entrepreneurs, were the only truly modern indus-