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Transience, Residential Persistence, and Mobility in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900-1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

James H. Bater
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Extract

A sizable literature on the temporal and spatial dimensions of urbanization in Russia has appeared during the past decade, and it is probably fair to say that we now have a reasonable understanding of the process in general terms. What is needed is much closer scrutiny of the impact of the gathering of people into towns. Urbanization inevitably brought change to social organizations, institutions, behavior patterns, and perceptions; in short, to the social geography of the city. But prerequisite to understanding how quickly and with what consequences such social changes took place is an understanding of the dynamics of urban population growth itself.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 239 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1980

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References

1. See, for example, Gilbert, Rozman, Urban Nehvorks in Russia 1750-1800 and Premodern P eriodization (Princeton, 1976)Google Scholar ; Fedor, Thomas Stanley, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire (Chicago, 1975).Google Scholar

2. What few empirical data there are simply serve to underscore the importance of the topic. A noteworthy example in this regard is Robert Johnson's recent study of peasant migration to Moscow during the late nineteenth century. Though not dealt with in the same manner as in this paper, the role of transience is nonetheless central to Johnson's argument that the peasant retained strong ties to the countryside, and that this had a retarding effect on the rate at which peasant workers were “proletarianized” (see Johnson, Robert Eugene, “Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Reviczv, 35, no. 4 [December 1976]: 652–64).Google Scholar The basic argument is developed further in Johnson, Robert Eugene, “Strikes in Moscow, 1880-1900,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, 5, part 1 (1978): 24–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For a discussion of some facets of the machinery of superintendency, see Zelnik, Reginald E., Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (Stanford, 1971), p. 17–21.Google Scholar

4. Granville, A. B., St. Petersburgh, vol. 1 (London, 1828), p. 505.Google Scholar For a number of interesting insights into the seasonal pattern of urban and rural residence in a later era, see The Tolstoy Home: Diaries of Tatiana Sukhotin-Tolstoy, trans. Alec Brown (London, 1950).

5. Kopanev, A. I., Naselenie Peterburga v pervoi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1947), p. 15.Google Scholar

6. For the urban area as a whole, the net loss was diminished a little owing to the influx of about thirty-five thousand seasonal workers into the outlying suburbs (see “Ischislenie naseleniia S. Peterburga IS iiulia i 15 dekabria 1888 goda,” Statisticheskii eshegodnik S. Peterburga [St. Petersburg, 1888], pp. 7-59; and Statisticheskii ezhegodnik S. Peterburga [St. Petersburg, 1889], pp. 6-25).

7. Perepis’ Moskvy 1902 goda, part 1: Naselenie (Moscow, 1904), p. 4.

8. Ibid., p. 11.

9. For a related comment, see Johnson, “Peasant Migration,” p. 659.

10. Petrograd po perepisi 15 dekabria 1910 goda, part 1 (Petrograd, 1914), section 2, pp. 290-93.

11. Ibid., pp. 302-5.

12. See, for example, Ukasatel’ shilishch’ i zdanii v Moskve Hi adresnaia kniga sH planom (Moscow, 1826), p. i; Vseobshchaia adresnaia kniga S. Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1867-68), p. viii.

13. Vsia Mcskva: Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga (Moscow, 1910), p. i; Ves’ Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1909), p. iii.

14. For Boston in 1840 and Montreal in 1871, for example, roughly 68 and 60 percent, respectively, of sample populations drawn from the census could be traced in the city directory (see Peter R., Knights, “City Directories as Aids to Ante-Bellum Urban Studies: A Research Note,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 2, no. 4 [September 1969]: 1–10Google Scholar; D. S., Cross and J. G., Dudley, “Comparative Study of Street Directories and Census Returns for 1871,” Urban History Review, no. 3 [November 1972], p. 13).Google Scholar For additional comments on directory usage, see Sidney, Goldstein, Patterns of Mobility, 1910-1950: The Norristown Study. A Method for Measuring Migration and Occupational Mobility in the Community (Philadelphia, 1958), p. 61–79.Google Scholar

15. Petrov, N. N., “Naselenie i territoriia Moskvy v kontse XIX v. i nachale XX v.,” Istoriia Moskvy, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1955), p. 16.Google Scholar

16. The sampling procedure was as follows: For the 1909 St. Petersburg directory (934 pages of alphabetical listings), the first full listing of a male at the top of the righthand column for each odd-numbered page was taken. To complete the sample of five hundred, the remainder was drawn in the same way from the beginning of the evennumbered pages. For the 1910 Moscow directory (507 pages of alphabetical listings), the first full listing of a male at the top of the right-hand column of each page was taken until L the sample was complete. The manner of listing in alphabetical order is clearly unrelated to the issue of transience. Hence, the sample populations may be considered randomly dis- ’ tributed. In this case, the systematic sample is equivalent to a simple random sample. The problem of determining what constitutes an adequate sample size in a study for which I there are no known equivalents in the same cultural and historical context is not easily repolved. In an ideal situation several samples should be drawn in order to establish the Jdegree of variability within the total population. Given the scale of the task, this was not laeasible. Thus, what I offer here are the raw data, which, as I contend, are equivalent to a liimple random sample and which may serve as a referent for further research (see Mendenhall, William, Ott, Lyman, and Scheaffer, Richard L., Elementary Survey Sampling [Belmont, EMass., 1971], pp. 150–56).Google Scholar

17. In St. Petersburg in 1900, for example, nearly 90 percent of the 1.275 million inhabitants lived in apartments or rooms located in fewer than sixteen thousand buildings. The number of property owners was actually smaller than the number of buildings (see 5” . Peterburg po perepisi 15 dekabria 1900 goda, part 3 [St. Petersburg, 1905], section 2, p. 677).

18. See Bater, James H., St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London and Montreal, 1976).Google Scholar

19. See, for example, Almedingen, E. M., Remember St. Petersburg (London and Harlow, 1969), pp. 28, 44, 66.Google Scholar

20. Supplementary information for individuals was available for 70 percent of both the Moscow and the St. Petersburg samples.

21. A. G., Rashin, “Dinamika chislennosti i protsessy formirovaniia gorodskogo naseleniia Rossii v XlX-nachale XX vv.,” Istoricheskie sapiski, 39 (1950): 45–46.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., p. 77. For cartographic evidence of migration fields of the six major European Russian cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Riga, Kiev, and Odessa), based on the 1897 census, see Statisticheskii atlas goroda Moskvy (Moscow, 1911), plate 15.

23. Oliunina, E. A., Portnovskii promysel v Moskve i v dcrevniakh Moskovskoi i Riazanskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1914), p. 174.Google Scholar

24. Also see the discussion in Johnson, “Peasant Migration,” pp. 655-56.

25. Bernshtein-Kogan, S.(Chislennost', sostav i polozhenie Peterburgskikh rabochikh (St. Petersburg, 1910), pp. 27–28.Google Scholar

26. The one-day censuses of the urban population in Russia, though infrequent, are still of enormous value. St. Petersburg was enumerated most often: in 1864, 1869, 1881, 1890, 1900, and 1910. Comparable censuses for Moscow were published for 1871, 1882, and 1902.

27. Petrov, “Naselenie i territoriia Moskvy,” p. 16.

28. Weber, Adna Ferrin, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1899), pp. 285–300.Google Scholar

29. Semanov, S. N., “Proletariat Peterburga na rubezhe XIX-XX vv.,” in Valk, S. N., ed., Istoriia rabochikh Leningrada, vol. 1 (Leningrad, 1972), p. 184.Google Scholar

30. For a related discussion, see Ransel, David L., “Abandonment and Fostering of Unwanted Children: Women of the Foundling System,” in Ransel, David L., ed., The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research (Urbana, III., 1978), pp. 189–217.Google Scholar

31. V. M. Lebedev, “Ocherk deiatel'nosti Moskovskogo vospitatel'nogo doma (1764— 1896 gg.),” Isvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy, July-August 1898, p. 64.

32. Entsiklopedieheskii slovar', ed. I. E. Andreevskii, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg, 1891), pp. 227-28.

33. See, for example, E. E., Kruze and D. G., Kutsentov, “Naselenie Peterburga,” Ocherki istorii Leningrada, vol. 3 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1956), p. 105.Google Scholar

34. James H., Bater, “The Development of Public Transportation in St. Petersburg,” Journal of Transport History, n.s., 2, no. 2 (1973): 85–102.Google Scholar

35. Bater, St. Petersburg, pp. 373-80.

36. Walter, Hanchett, “Tsarist Statutory Regulation of Municipal Government in the Nineteenth Century,” in Hamm, Michael F., ed., The City in Russian History (Lexington, Ky., 1976), pp. 99–107.Google Scholar

37. For details, see James H., Bater, “Some Dimensions of Urbanization and the Response of Municipal Government: Moscow and St. Petersburg,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, 5, part 1 (1978): 53–55.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., pp. 60-63.

39. It is of interest in this context that Leopold Haimson's oft-quoted papers on social stability in urban Russia do not explicitly address this topic (see Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” in two parts, in Slavic Review, 23, no. 4 [December 1964]: 619-42 and Slavic Review, 24, no. 1 [March 1965]: 1-22).

40. Michael, Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), p. 42.Google Scholar See also Katz, Michael B., The People oj Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. See, for example, Allan, Pred, The External Relations of Cities During “Industrial Revolution” (Chicago, 1962), p. 57–68.Google Scholar

42. Czap, Peter Jr., “Russian History from a Demographic Perspective,” in Kosinski, Leszek A., ed., Demographic Developments in Eastern Europe (New York, 1977), p. 129.Google Scholar