Legal status the urban population, as a special class, began to be determined at the end of the 17th century. Then the creation of city governments under Peter I and the establishment of certain benefits for the top of the urban population strengthened this process. The further development of the trade and finance industries required the issuance of new legal acts regulating these areas of activity.
The original name was citizens (“Regulations of the Chief Magistrate”), then, following the model of Poland and Lithuania, they began to be called petty bourgeois. The estate was created gradually, as Peter I introduced European models of the middle class (third estate).
The final registration of the estate of the townspeople took place in 1785 according to the “Charter on the rights and benefits of the cities of the Russian Empire” of Catherine II. By this time, the entrepreneurial stratum in the cities was noticeably stronger, in order to stimulate trade, customs barriers and duties, monopolies and other restrictions were eliminated, freedom to establish industrial enterprises (that is, freedom of entrepreneurship) was announced, and peasant crafts were legalized.
In 1785 The population of cities was finally divided according to the property principle into 6 categories:
1) “real city dwellers” who have a house and other real estate in the city (i.e. owners of real estate within the city);
2) merchants registered in the guild (guild I - with a capital of 10 to 50 thousand rubles, II - from 5 to 10 thousand rubles, III - from 1 to 5 thousand rubles);
3) artisans who were in the workshops;
4) foreign and out-of-town merchants;
5) eminent citizens (capitalists and bankers who had a capital of at least fifty thousand rubles, wholesalers, ship owners, members of the city administration, scientists, artists, musicians);
6) other townspeople.
Belonging to the estate was fixed by entering into the city philistine book.
The rights of the bourgeois class:
1. Exclusive right: craft and trade.
2. Corporate law: creation of associations and self-government bodies.
3. Judicial rights were envisaged: the right to inviolability of the person until the end of the trial, to defense in court.
4. The personal rights of the townspeople included: the right to protect honor and dignity, personality and life, the right to move and travel abroad.
5. Property rights: the right to own property (acquisition, use, inheritance), the right to own industrial enterprises, crafts, the right to trade.
6. Duties included taxes and recruitment. True, there were many exceptions. Already in 1775, Catherine II freed the inhabitants of the settlements, who had a capital of more than 500 rubles, from the poll tax, replacing it with a one percent tax on the declared capital. In 1766, merchants were released from recruitment. Instead of each recruit, they paid first 360, and then 500 rubles. They were also exempt from corporal punishment. Merchants, especially those of the First Guild, were granted certain honorary rights (rides in carriages and carriages).
7. Philistines were exempted from public works, they were forbidden to be transferred to serfdom. They had the right to free resettlement, movement and departure to other states, the right to their own intra-estate court, to equipping them with houses, the right to put up a replacement for themselves in a recruiting set. The philistines had the right to own city and country houses, had an unlimited right of ownership to their property, an unlimited right of inheritance. They received the right to own industrial establishments (limiting their size and the number of people working on them), to organize banks, offices, etc.
According to the “Charter of Complaint”, city dwellers who had reached the age of 25 and had a certain income (capital, the percentage fee on which was not less than 50 rubles), united in a city society. The assembly of its members elected the mayor and vowels (deputies) of city dumas. All six ranks of the urban population sent their elected representatives to the General Duma, and 6 representatives of each rank elected by the General Duma worked in the six-member Duma to carry out current affairs. Elections took place every 3 years. The main field of activity was the urban economy and everything that "serves for the benefit and need of the city." The competence of the city duma included: ensuring silence, harmony and deanery in the city, resolving intra-class disputes, monitoring urban construction. Unlike town halls and magistrates, court cases were not under the jurisdiction of the city duma - they were decided by the judiciary.
The deprivation of petty-bourgeois rights and class privileges could be carried out on the same grounds as the deprivation of class rights of a nobleman (a complete list of acts was also given).
§ 33-34. PEOPLES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Multinational country. The population of the Russian Empire in the XVIII century. constantly grew. If in 1720 15.7 million people lived in the country, then in 1795 - 37.4 million people. High population growth rates were associated with both an increase in the birth rate and an increase in the territory of the Russian Empire.
The expansion of the borders of Russia went at the expense of the lands inhabited by Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Poles, Finns, Jews and other peoples. In 1795, the share of Russians in the total population of the country was 49%, Ukrainians - about 20, Belarusians - 8, Poles - 6, Finns - 2, Lithuanians - 1.9, Tatars - 1.9, Latvians - 1.7, Jews - 1.4%, Estonians - 1.1%. Moldavians, Nenets, Udmurts, Karelians, Komi, Mari, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Chuvashs and many other nationalities made up 1% of the population of the Russian Empire.
Many peoples were freed from the heavy burden of recruitment. They also did not know serfdom, which became the lot of only Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and the peoples of the Baltic states.
Many moved to Russia colonists: Germans, Moldavians, Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, Bulgarians. The process of settling and developing new lands on the outskirts of the country continued, in which Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Mordovians, Chuvashs, and Mari actively participated.
A special position was occupied by Jews who lived in the territory that became part of the country after the divisions of the Commonwealth, as well as in New Russia, on the Left-Bank Ukraine and partly in the Baltic states. Laws passed in the 1790s defined the boundaries of the territories in which they were allowed to permanently reside - the line of settledness. The introduction of the Pale of Settlement infringed on the rights of the Jewish people.
Russians. In the XVIII century. their number increased from 11 to 20 million people, but their share in the country's population decreased. Russians mainly lived in the central and northwestern regions of the country. Here their share in the total population exceeded 90%. In the 1780s Russian settlers appeared in the North Caucasus, and their number grew in Siberia. The Russians moved to Novorossia and to the lands of the Don Cossacks, to the Ekaterinoslav and Tauride provinces.
Life of the bulk rural population changed slightly: the same everyday work on the ground, where adults and children worked for a significant part of the year, the same taxes and duties in favor of the treasury and the landowner. Along with this, the development of market relations led to the stratification of the peasants into rich and poor. The prosperous peasantry sought to imitate the townspeople in the planning of houses, food and clothing.
Peasant life, in turn, influenced the life of the townspeople. Countryside started just outside the city limits. The development of otkhodnichestvo, study, recruitment, visiting churches and monasteries (pilgrims), the joint participation of townspeople and peasants in numerous wars - these and other forms of communication contributed to the mutual enrichment of peasant and urban culture.
In the XVIII century. Most of the townspeople lived in wooden houses. Stone residential buildings were not uncommon only in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The interior of the house was decorated with wooden carvings, mirrors and curtains, expensive furniture and utensils. Garden trees were planted around the house. Usually the houses of the townspeople were one-story or two-story. Three- and four-story houses built in the Western European style appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg. At night, the windows were closed with shutters.
Unknown woman in Russian costume. Artist I. Argunov
Peasant lunch. Artist M. Shibanov
City dwellers used European-style items in everyday life. In the houses of the nobility, forks, knives and spoons were made of silver (hence the expression “table silver”), plates and cups were made of porcelain, glasses, glasses and decanters were made of crystal. The bulk of the townspeople had simple utensils. AT peasant family usually ate from common dishes. However, both the poor and the rich were careful with household items.
Wall game. Artist E. Korneev
Since Peter's time, the clothes of the townspeople have changed. Employees were required to appear in public places in a foreign or, as it was called, "German" dress and wig, with the introduction of civilian uniforms - in uniform. The military wore a uniform of bright, elegant colors, with high headdresses and decorations.
Ukrainians. In the middle of the XVIII century. Left-bank Ukraine with Kyiv and Zaporozhye was part of the Russian Empire, Right-bank Ukraine (from the middle reaches of the Dnieper to the Carpathians) was under the rule of the Commonwealth. The lower reaches of the Dnieper to Sivash and Perekop belonged to Ottoman Empire and its vassal, the Crimean Khanate, Transcarpathia was part of Hungary. Left-bank Ukraine was an agricultural region. The Ukrainian nobility, the Cossack elders and the higher clergy had huge land holdings. They waged an active struggle with the Russian government for the preservation of autonomy (“the rights and liberties of the Little Russian people”).
St. Andrew's Church in Kyiv Architect B. Rastrelli
In 1764, the hetmanship was abolished and Ukrainian autonomy was liquidated. With the annexation of the Azov-Black Sea steppes to Russia, the former Cossacks formed the so-called Black Sea Cossacks. After moving to the Taman Peninsula, they formed the Kuban Cossack army.
In 1782, in accordance with the provincial reform, Kiev, Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversk governorships were founded. The following year, the population was obliged to pay a poll tax, and the transfer of peasants from one landowner to another was also prohibited. The provisions of the Letters of Complaint to the nobility and cities extended to the Left-bank Ukraine. Ukraine did not escape the secularization of church lands.
After the accession to Russia of the Black Sea region as a result Russian-Turkish wars the fertile lands of this region were given by the monarchs to the nobility. So, the Prosecutor General of the Senate, Prince A. A. Vyazemsky, received more than 50 thousand acres of land as his property, a little less - G. A. Potemkin and other Catherine's nobles.
Unification of Ukrainian lands in the Russian state had great importance for the fraternal peoples - Ukrainians and Russians, contributed to the mutual enrichment of cultures.
The Kiev-Mohyla Academy played an important role in the development of education and science in Ukraine. Russian society the works of the philosopher and writer G. Skovoroda and the historical works of G. A. Poletika were known. In 1789, the first theater in Ukraine was founded in Kharkov. Talented composers A. L. Vedel, D. S. Bortnyansky, artists D. G. Levitsky, V. L. Borovikovsky, A. P. Losenko, sculptors M. I. Kozlovsky and I. P. Martos had Ukrainian roots. Ukrainians intensively populated the Black Sea steppes and Crimea, participated in the economic development of this richest region, and also moved to the lands of the Don Cossacks and North Caucasus, in the Voronezh and Kursk provinces.
Belarusians. In the middle of the XVIII century. Belarus was part of the Commonwealth. Most of the peasant farms worked out the corvee, an insignificant part of the state peasants paid a cash quitrent. Serfdom was aggravated by heavy national and religious oppression: Polish landowners forcibly planted Catholicism, sought to Polonize the Belarusians and deprive them of their own culture. The Belarusian gentry and wealthy citizens were educated in Catholic schools, as well as at the Vilna Academy.
In the second half of the XVIII century. Belarus became part of the Russian Empire.
Belarusians
Its population was over 3 million people. Russian government freed the population of Belarus from paying state taxes, but practiced the distribution of state lands and the peasants who inhabited them to the Russian nobility.
About 90% of Belarusians lived in the Minsk and Mogilev provinces, somewhat less in Vitebsk and Grodno, in the Vilna province the main population was Lithuanians.
The entry of Belarus into Russia contributed to the involvement of the region's economy in commodity production and the all-Russian market, the growth of large manufactories, and the use of civilian labor in them. Road construction was actively developed, channels were laid.
Reunification of Belarusians and Russians in single state met the interests of two fraternal peoples, related in origin, language, culture and historical past.
The peoples of the Baltic. After joining Russia, the Baltic States became the country's sea gates, and the ports of Tallinn, Pärnu, Narva, and Riga occupied an important place in foreign trade. The Russian government confirmed the former privileges of the Baltic and German landlords. They formed the local administration. The official language in the Estonian, Livonian and Courland provinces was German.
Estonian and Latvian nobles increased the corvee, which caused popular unrest and forced the government to make concessions. D. I. Fonvizin, who traveled around the Baltic states, wrote: “The men are against the masters, and the gentlemen are so furious against them that they are looking for the death of each other.”
Panorama of Riga. 18th century engraving
Most of the Latvians (up to 80% of the population) lived in Courland; there were few of them in Livonia, here a significant part of the population was Germans. Estonians lived in almost all counties of Estonia, and in Livonia they made up almost half of the population of the region. The Lithuanian population prevailed in the Vilna province, a small part of it settled in the Grodno province and Livonia.
The peoples of the Volga and Ural regions. In the second half of the XVIII century. on the territory of the Middle Volga region, the share of the Russian population increased. Some non-Russian peoples moved to the Trans-Volga and Ural regions, because the landowners seized land and settled them with serfs from the central regions of Russia. The bulk of the serfs in the Volga region were Russians. The government resettled state peasants, which included most of the non-Russian population of the Volga region (Mordovians, Maris, Chuvashs, Tatars), to new lands in Bashkiria.
The main occupation of the population of the Volga region was agriculture. Only the Tatars, along with agriculture, were engaged in raising livestock for dressing leather and obtaining wool for the purpose of selling them. Maris, Mordvins and Chuvashs developed horticulture and sold grown vegetables in the cities. With the reduction of forests and the expansion of arable land, hunting was no longer one of the main occupations of the population of this region.
Despite the fact that a significant part of the Udmurts, Maris, Chuvashs and almost all of the Mordovians adopted Christianity, they continued to believe in their pagan gods and made sacrifices to them. The bulk of the Tatars remained Muslims. The Tatar language was studied at the Kazan Gymnasium using the primer and grammar of I. Khalfin.
ABC and grammar Tatar language I. Khalfina
Most of the Tatars lived in the Kazan province. Their settlements were in Simbirsk and Penza provinces, as well as in Lower Volga. After the Russian conquest of Crimea Crimean Tatars moved to Turkey, and only a part of them remained in their original places.
In the second half of the XVIII century. the territory of Bashkiria was part of the Orenburg province. The Bashkirs had benefits: they did not pay the poll tax and were exempted from recruitment duty. They did not know serfdom. The population of Bashkiria was multinational - 70 thousand Bashkirs, more than 100 thousand Tatars, Chuvashs, Maris and Udmurts, as well as more than 130 thousand Russians lived here. The Bashkirs led a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle. The land was owned by the community. However, the Bashkir nobility enjoyed the right to distribute nomad camps.
The Lower Volga region was inhabited by Kalmyks who moved to the Caspian steppes in the first half of the 17th century. from Central Asia. They confessed lamaism. The power belonged to the tribal nobility and the clergy, they were paid by ordinary community members in kind or in cash dues. Under Catherine II, lands in the Kalmyk steppe were actively distributed to the nobles. In the 1770s a significant part of the Kalmyks went to Dzungaria (North-Western China).
Peoples of Siberia. At the end of the XVIII century. in Siberia there were two provinces - Tobolsk and Irkutsk, they were divided into regions, and regions - into counties. The peoples of Siberia were subject to local administration on the basis of the "Regulations on the management of foreigners." As a rule, local princes took an oath (shert) of allegiance and gave an obligation to pay yasak in a timely manner. They retained independence in the administration of their territories.
Siberia was one of the most multinational territories of the Russian state. Nenets (Samoyeds), Khanty (Ostyaks), Mansi (Voguls), Siberian Tatars, Nganasans, Khakasses, Evenks (Tungus), Evens, Yakuts, Yukaghirs, Chukchi, Kamchadals (Itelmens), Ainu (Kurils) - this is not a complete list of the peoples who inhabited Russia from the Ural Mountains to Kamchatka and the Kuriles.
In the XVIII century. there was a further property stratification among the reindeer herding peoples. Khanty, Mansi and Selkups accepted Christianity, but baptism was often formal. According to contemporaries, the newly baptized "secretly practice idolatry and shamanism."
The northern Tunguses were widely settled throughout the territory of Siberia. The lands of the Chukchi and Eskimos were peacefully annexed to Russia.
The Yakuts developed new habitats in the northwest and northeast of Siberia. The strengthening of property stratification led to the emergence of the nobility (toyons), ordinary Yakuts - free community members and dependent workers (religious workers). The administration of Siberia entrusted the toyons with the responsibility of collecting yasak. In addition, toyons issued so-called tickets, without which no Yakut had the right to leave his settlement.
The process of property stratification was also observed among the Buryats. In 1781, a congress of the Buryat nobility took place, which approved the "Steppe Code". Lamaism became the dominant religion of the Eastern Buryats. Lamaist monasteries (datsans) appeared in Transbaikalia.
At the end of the XVIII century. Russian settlements appeared in Alaska.
In Siberia, the land belonged to the state. The peasants were divided into state, ascribed and monastic. The latter, after the secularization of church lands, formed the category of economic peasants.
During the Northern War, the mining and metallurgical industries developed in Siberia. A significant part of the Siberian silver and gold was produced by the Zmeinogorsk mine. Altai factories and the Nerchinsk mine in Transbaikalia became large centers of local industry. The population of Siberia successfully traded with China.
View of the city of Tobolsk
The growth of the Russian population in the region was not only at the expense of peasant migrants. Siberia was a place of exile for the Don and Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, schismatics, landlord peasants and yard people who committed "impudent deeds" against their masters.
Kazakhstan. In the XVIII century. Kazakh tribes, depending on the places of nomadism, were divided into three zhuzes: Senior, Middle and Junior. Various khanates located on the territory of the zhuzes waged a fierce struggle for power among themselves. In the 1730s - 1740s. most of the Kazakhs of the Younger and Middle zhuzes accepted Russian citizenship.
The main occupation of the Kazakhs was nomadic cattle breeding. The Kazakh nobility - khans, sultans, bai - collected natural duties and taxes from their subjects. Cattle breeders gave their owners a twentieth of the cattle, farmers - a tenth of the crop. Patriarchal relations in the region coexisted with the remnants of the tribal system.
Peoples of the North Caucasus. Numerous Adyghe tribes occupied the territory beyond the Kuban, from the Laba River to the Black Sea coast and the mountainous part of the Western Caucasus. The princes often came from families connected by family ties with the Crimean Khan's house.
In Kabarda, the nobles themselves chose their owner, and the influence of local princes was fragile. There were people's meetings, in which people's foremen, communal peasants, princely servants participated. The main occupations of the population were cattle breeding and agriculture. The Russian government supported the princes, securing land for them.
There were about fifteen princely possessions in Dagestan. The Avar Khanate was large with 30 thousand households. Khan's power did not extend to the highland regions of Dagestan. Here reigned their own laws.
After the Peace of Kyuchuk-Kainarji (1774), fortresses were built in the North Caucasus in a short time. Vladikavkaz was built to protect the Georgian Military Highway.
colonists – settlers from other countries.
trait settled way of life - the border of the territory where Jews were allowed permanent residence.
Lamaism – a form of Buddhism common in Russia in Buryatia, Kalmykia and Tuva.
Questions This text is an introductory piece.
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Many times I have seen population growth charts in Europe that look almost like a straight line. That is, the growth in the number of Europeans for three centuries (from the 15th to the beginning of the 18th) was minimal. In Pierre Shonyu's book "The Civilization of Classical Europe" there are figures that explain this phenomenon well.
Shonyu refers to population censuses, church and tax acts. They become relatively detailed just in early XVII century, and since that time it is possible to clearly trace the main demographic trends.
Personally, I was struck by the fact of a very late marriage at this time. For peasants (and they made up 80-90% of the population of states), the age of marriage for women was 27 years, and their husbands were a year younger. Moreover, before this age, for the most part, both women and men retained their virginity (among the peasants, the percentage of illegitimate births did not exceed 2-3%).
Among the bourgeoisie, the age of marriage for women generally rose to 27.5 years (in Geneva it was 28.5 years at all), husbands were older by 6-7 years.
Among the townspeople extramarital pregnancy increased to 6-10%.
The marriage rate among the peasants was 99.2-99.5%, among the townspeople 97-98%.
As Shonu rightly notes, such a late age of marriage was a "subconscious Malthusian act" aimed at limiting the birth rate.
As in our time, the bourgeoisie had the largest number of children: from 8 people in Flanders to 8.7 in the Swiss cantons. This was partly due to the fact that women in labor did not breastfeed their children, but gave them to nurses. That is, as Shonyu writes, they did not experience temporary infertility of a nursing woman.
The interval between the last birth and conception averaged 8 months.
By the way, Shonu points out that at that time the only sure act of social mobility was the dairy brotherhood. As a rule, dairy brothers received some significant preferences from the bourgeoisie (for example, they could pay a high fee for entering a monastery for a commoner).
Peasants living on the plains had an average of 5 children, those living in the forest zone - 5.5 children.
For that time, these figures meant, in fact, the stagnation of their numbers. As Shönu writes, "a figure above 6 means that the population is growing at an acceptable pace, below 5 it is declining." The fact is that about 40% of babies lived to the age of 19.
However, in the "pioneer outskirts of Europe" the number of children per peasant family is increasing sharply. So in Canada, there are 8.3 children per family, in Mexico - 7.6.
I was personally surprised by the age limit for women's fertility. So, 85% became mothers for the last time between 37 and 46 years. The average age of the last birth is 41 years.
In 12 years after the start of marriage, in 60% of families one of the spouses died (in 2/3 of cases it was a woman).
Well, the last numbers. During the period from 1620 to 1750, the population of Europe increased by only 35% (that is, the growth was at the level of 0.2-0.25% per year).
(In one of the following posts I will write about the main factor in the "regulation" of the population at this time - diseases and epidemics).
The new feudalism of the second half of the 18th century took another step forward in comparison with the old Moscow one.
We remember that even then the estate was not quite self-sufficient: it lived not only to satisfy the immediate needs of its owner, but partly also for the market.
But it was not yet a rationally organized economy of the newest type. Rather, it was a kind of "robber agriculture" - a parallel to the "robber trade" of the 11th-12th centuries. The landowner of the times of Godunov did not achieve the correct permanent income - he strove in the shortest possible time to extract as much as possible from his estate more money, depreciating year by year with a speed capable of instilling panic in people whose habits still gave away the stagnant swamp of subsistence farming. He sold everything he could in the market, and, one fine day, left on the plowed and devastated land with ruined peasants, he tried to turn at least these latter into a commodity, since no one was buying the land.
This orgy of naive people, who saw the money economy for the first time, was bound to end, like any orgy, with a severe hangover. In the seventeenth century we have a partial reaction of subsistence economy: but since the forces that last century earlier, they continued to operate, and now, moreover, the further, the more, a new flourishing of landlord entrepreneurship was only a matter of time.
And this time should have been the shorter, the denser the population of landlord Russia, firstly, and the closer its ties with Western Europe were - secondly, because, as we remember, again, the depopulation of the central counties and the rupture of trade relations with the West, thanks to the failure of the Livonian war, greatly contributed to the aggravation of the agrarian crisis at the end of the 16th century. Just in time for the flowering of the "new feudalism", towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth, circumstances in both these respects were developing for landlord economy unusually favorable.
The Petrine wars, as we have seen, greatly thinned out the greatly increased late XVII centuries, the population of the old regions of the Muscovite state, but the traces of this devastation smoothed out even faster than the traces of the Time of Troubles. The Peter's revision yielded about 5,600,000 male souls: twenty years later - less than one generation - the Elizabethan revision, which was far from being carried out with such ferocity as the first one, and which gave, probably, a much larger percentage of "leakage", registered, nevertheless, 6,643 thousand souls.
The first Catherine's revision, which relied solely on the testimony of the population itself, i.e. for noble estates, to the testimony of the landowners themselves and their managers (at first, such a simple method of counting, proposed by the empress, stunned even the members of the noble senate), however, gave a new and very significant increase - 7,363 thousand souls.
Starting from the fourth revision, the census included provinces that were not previously involved in it, due to a different tax organization in them (Ostsee and Little Russian), as well as areas newly acquired from Poland: for the whole of Russia, the figures are obtained, thus, incomparable with the results of three first revisions. But already in the 70s (the fourth revision began in 1783), Prince Shcherbatov counted about 8 1/2 million souls within the borders of Petrine Russia. In other words, in the half century since Peter's death, the population has increased one and a half times.
The absolute figures of the population still say nothing, of course, by themselves. More important is its relation to the territory. With an average density for European Russia of 405 people per sq. a mile (about 8 per sq. kilometer), at the end of the reign of Catherine II, there were 11 governorships, where this density exceeded 1000 people per sq. km. mile (20 per kilometer), i.e. almost reached the average population density of present-day European Russia, which, as you know, according to the data of 1905, is 25 people per square meter. kilometer.
Those were the provinces: Moscow, with a density of 2403 people per square meter. a mile (almost 50 per square kilometer, i.e. almost as much as now in the central agricultural provinces - Kursk, Ryazan, Tambov, etc.), Kaluga, Tula and Chernigov - from 1500 to 2000 per square. a mile (from 30 to 40 per kilometer, like the provinces of the Middle Volga, Simbirsk, Saratov, Penza, Kazan), Ryazan, Kursk, Kyiv, Oryol, Kharkov, Yaroslavl and Novgorod-Severskaya - from 1000 to 1500 per square meter. mile, or 20 to 30 per sq. kilometer (denser than Samara and the region of the Don Cossacks and slightly lower than Minsk or Smolensk).
The city of Moscow had to exert a certain pressure on the population of the Moscow province, but not as strong, however, as it might seem: at the end of the 18th century, Moscow had no more than 250 thousand inhabitants. The influence of urban centers on the population of such provinces as Kaluga or Ryazan could have had an even lesser effect. Even if we reduce the population density of the Moscow province by 1/5, we will get up to 40 people per sq. km. kilometer of purely agricultural population.
In our time, provinces with such a density are already suffering from a lack of land: a hundred and fifty years ago it could not have been otherwise. Here is what Shcherbatov wrote in the 70s about the Moscow province of the Petrovsky division, which included the later Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Tula, Kaluga and Ryazan regions: "Because of the great number of people inhabiting this province (Shcherbatov considered 2169 thousand souls in it) , many villages remain so landless that with no diligence they can get bread for themselves, and for this they are forced to look for it by other works.For the same reason, the multitude of forests in this province has been greatly exterminated, and in the midday provinces there are so few of them, that they have a need for heating.
At the same time, in the Nizhny Novgorod province there were "many great villages and volosts", which, due to lack of land, "practicing themselves in needlework, crafts and trade", did not even have vegetable gardens.
The population of the Russian Empire was multinational in its composition. Only peoples numbering more than 10 thousand people lived in the empire over 20. Most of all in the Russian Empire there were Russians. However, the share of the Russian population in the Catherine era decreased: from 62.8% in 1762 to 48.9% in 1796. This was due to the fact that new territories were annexed to Russia, in which representatives of other nationalities lived.
The second place in terms of numbers in the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. occupied by Ukrainians, the third - Belarusians. Then came the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Tatars, Finns, Jews. The list was completed by peoples whose number did not exceed several hundred people.
The position of the non-Russian peoples was different. The rights of some of them were limited. So, for the Jews in 1791, the so-called Pale of Settlement was introduced, beyond which they were forbidden to live permanently.
The Pale of Settlement covered a significant part of the Kingdom of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Bessarabia, Courland, most of Ukraine. Jews were allowed to settle only in cities or in so-called towns.
The subjects of the Russian Empire professed different religions. The majority of the population was Orthodox.
The accession of new territories to Russia led to an increase in the number of Catholics (inhabitants of the western lands) and Muslims (Crimea). In 1773, Catherine II signed the Decree on religious tolerance. All religions in the Russian Empire received the right to exist, forced conversion to Orthodoxy was abolished.
The principle of religious tolerance was easily found on the main street of the capital of the Russian Empire. On Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, in close proximity to each other, in the second half of the 18th century there were: the Orthodox Church of the Nativity of the Virgin (on the site of the Kazan Cathedral), the Lutheran Church of St. Peter and Paul, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Catholic Church of St. Catherine , Armenian Church of St. Catherine. The last two temples were erected under Catherine II.
The social status of subjects of the Russian Empire was different. People who lived in Russia belonged to various estates and social groups. All of them differed from each other in their rights and duties. There were three main social groups:material from the site
- nobility ( see Nobility under Catherine II) is the smallest population group;
- peasantry ( see Peasants under Catherine II);
- merchant class ( see Merchant Guild).
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