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Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century: portrait of a city

catherine evtuhov

To the present-day observer, standing on the mansion-lined embankment overlooking the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, or wandering through the restored and freshly painted central streets of the city, Nizhnii Novgorod does not look so different from the provincial town it was a century ago. The massive automobile factory, the military installations and large-scale industry of the Soviet city of Gorky – all of which closed the area to foreigners until 1991 – sprouted around the edges while leaving the city centre intact. Only the cupolas which once studded the streets like points of gold have vanished, victims of the 1929 eradication of churches. Nizhnii Novgorod boasts all the features of the most lovely of Russian provincial towns: perched picturesquely atop a network of ravines, it nevertheless follows a strictly Petersburgian layout with the three straight avenues radiating from the central kremlin. The abovementioned observer can walk to the edge of the promenade to look out over the Oka at the old fairgrounds and the massive nineteenth-century Alexander Nevsky cathedral on the promontory. Across the Volga, in the meantime, forests still stretch north as far as one can see, past the pilgrimage site of Lake Svetloiar, whose depths conceal the lost city of Kitezh, and the historical refuge of the Old Belief.

Topography

The comfortable provincial ease with which Nizhnii Novgorod straddles bluffs and ravines was in fact the product of a concerted effort involving the central government, local authorities and the town population itself. The history of urban planning for Nizhnii Novgorod as for many Russian cities begins with Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter to the Towns, which not only bestowed certain privileges upon town dwellers, but converted frontier outposts and administrative centres into ‘proper’ imperial cities with regular street plans

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and municipal institutions.1 Yet Catherine’s quest for the well-ordered city had achieved only partial realisation at the time of Nicholas I’s visit to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1834 – an event that immediately entered local lore and whose story continues to be told to this day. Stopping in Nizhnii on his tour of the realm, the tsar expressed horror and dismay at how little it resembled a real city. In defiance of the regularised city plan on paper, the buildings along even the main streets jutted out unevenly and at irregular intervals, resembling an assemblage of manors (usad’by) merely more tightly spaced than they would have been in the countryside. Not only had residents obliviously built their houses along the lovely Volga embankment with their backs to the river, but they used the gentle slope of the bluff itself as a garbage dump. Nicholas’s solution both typified his mania for discipline (one of his passions was the planning of prison buildings) and his desire to bring the vast imperial reaches under central control.2 An 1836 decree gave property owners three years to erect a wooden house on any vacant lots in the city centre, or five for a stone one, under the supervision of an architectural commission that was in turn subject to the Department of Military Colonies in St Petersburg. Noncompliance meant simply that the empty lot would be auctioned off.3 The riverbank houses were turned around. In this fashion the central government enlisted the co-operation of the town residents, twisting their arms into conforming to its vision.4 At the end of the nineteenth century, though, a glance at detailed street plans reveals that Nizhnii’s streets remained lined not with single buildings as in a European or American city, but with whole manors: a main house and several outbuildings grouped around a courtyard – much as Belinsky had described Moscow at mid-century.5

The regular city plan required a victory not only over the undisciplined residents, but over nature itself. The meandering, slow-flowing Russian rivers

1See Albert J. Schmidt, ‘A New Face for Provincial Russia: Classical Planning and Building under Catherine II and Alexander I’, forthcoming.

2V. Kostkin, ‘Poseshchenie Nizhnego Novgoroda Imperatorom Nikolaem I i ego zaboty po blagoustroistvu goroda’, in Deistviia nizhegorodskoi gubernskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi kommissii

(NGUAK) (Nizhnii Novgorod (henceforth NN): Tip. gubernskogo pravleniia, 1994), vol. XVII:1, pp. 1–14.

3‘Polozhenie ob ustroistve gubernskogo goroda’, PSZ, 2nd series, 55 vols. (St Petersburg: 1830–84), 1836 no. 9149. Parallel decrees were issued, in this period, for many other cities, including Elizavetgrad, Kaluga, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Kharkov, Vladimir, Archangel, Tver, Kazan, Orel, Tiflis, Uman.

4For particular cases, see RGVIA, Fond 405, op. 4 (1826–59): Departament voennykh poselenii: khoziaistvennoe otdelenie (1 83 5 –1 843 ); otdelenie voennykh poselenii (1 843 –1 85 7 ).

5B. Belinsky, ‘Peterburg i Moskva’, repr. in D. K. Burlak (ed.), Moskva-Peterburg: pro et contra (St Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2000), pp. 185–214, p. 190.

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almost inevitably have one high bank (the right) and one low one; the nineteenth-century naturalist Karl Baehr explained this phenomenon by relating the current of longitudinal rivers to the earth’s rotation. The central part of Nizhnii Novgorod was located on the quite substantial hill that was created by the intersecting currents of the Oka and the Volga. Yet another feature of central Eurasian ecology, however, was the fragility and volatility of the topsoils – once upon a time ground down and eroded by the great Scandinavian-Russian glacier. Provincial residents were tormented by ravines, which a single rainfall could initiate, and which had been known to traverse paved roads, or agricultural plots, entirely within the space of a year. The construction of Nizhnii Novgorod involved a combination of careful coexistence with, and struggle against, the ravines: some were preserved and lined with houses, while others, including in the very centre of the city, had to be filled in or bridged with dams.

In about 1860, Nizhnii Novgorod was divided into four sections, each with a distinctive flavour and way of life. Atop the bluff lay the two Kremlin Sections, radiating out from the fifteenth-century kremlin situated exactly at the intersection of the two rivers. The formidable fortress, constructed as Muscovy’s defence against the Tatars, eventually served as the jumping-off point for the conquest of Kazan in 1551. Nizhnii Novgorod witnessed military action only once, when a stray Tatar murza’s bullet aimed at the walls landed along the Oka embankment and was commemorated by the construction of a small church which, curiously, the Soviet era merely concealed behind a prestigious apartment building bearing the slogan, ‘Peace to the World!’ (Miru – mir!). The expansive square around the kremlin accommodated the city’s most majestic institutions: the Church of the Annunciation (currently a park), the Theological Seminary, the city duma (representative assembly, council) and, just behind, the Alexander Boys’ High School.

Pokrovskaia street, universally known as Pokrovka, was Nizhnii’s answer to Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect. Walking up the busy shop-lined thoroughfare from the kremlin, one would pass the houses of the most distinguished citizens, soon reaching the city theatre – for many years the sole focus of local cultural life, the governor’s residence, and the National Bank. Perhaps more intriguing was the quieter Pecherskaia street, or Pechorka, just behind the Volga embankment. In the 1840s, the ethnographer and lexicographer Vladimir Dal’ and Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, who immortalised the Nizhnii Novgorod region in his magisterial diptych, In the Forests and On the Hills, lived next door to each other. Dal’ drew heavily on local materials for the Dictionary, while Melnikov’s pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii was taken from the street name. The pedantic record-keeping of the nineteenth century makes

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it possible to trace owners of every house until 1917. The documents show that, on the one hand, the social status of residents declined with distance from the centre; on the other, the social composition of the street gradually shifted from primarily gentry inhabitants in 1850 to a greater mix, including merchants and meshchane (urban lower-middle class), by 1900.6 The richest merchants built their elaborate stucco-embellished mansions just in front of Pechorka, overlooking the Volga. A third, radial, street, Il’inka, attracted well-to-do merchants and housed the stock exchange. The city’s limits were symbolically marked by the whitewashed building, rather charming to the contemporary eye, of the municipal prison.

Yet, while the typical provincial town would stop there, multifaceted Nizhnii Novgorod boasted two more neighbourhoods. The Makariev Section was perhaps the most dynamic part of the city. Nestled under the Oka bluff, it was Nizhnii’s true commercial heart: here was the wharf, where goods from ships and barges coming from as far as Astrakhan or as close as Rybinsk or Kostroma were unloaded; here was a second ‘main street’ with its wholesale warehouses and commercial enterprises; here was the fantastically ornate eighteenth-century Rozhdestvenskaia church, a remarkable example of Naryshkin baroque. Finally, the Fair Section across the river – there was no permanent bridge until the 1890s – displayed the immense permanent Fair House, constructed in the 1820s, the temporary ‘rows’ (riady) of retail outlets and the exquisite Alexandrine Fair Cathedral (now serving as Nizhnii’s primary house of worship), which, replete with Grail motifs, pyramids with allseeing eyes, and a Pantheon-like vault, resembles a Masonic temple as much as a church. The Kunavino suburb outside the fairgrounds completed the ensemble.

Rhythms

Nizhnii Novgorod was the capital of a province quite diverse in its ecology and economy. In the northern districts beyond the Volga, agriculture was virtually non-existent; the sparse population farmed the rivers and the abundant forests instead of the sandy, rocky soil, exporting fish, timber and the famed Semenov wooden spoons. The black soil of the south-east corner provided the rest of the province with the grain it could not produce itself. The districts around the city itself – Nizhnii Novgorod, Gorbatov, Balakhna, Arzamas, Ardatov – had a mixed economy, combining agriculture with industrial production. Boris

6 GANO (Gos. arkhiv nizhegorodskoi oblasti), Fond. 27, op. 638, d. 1046, 1332, 3158, 3888.

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Mironov has recently suggested that the separation between city and countryside in Russia remained partial even up to the early nineteenth century.7 Life in Nizhnii Novgorod pulsed to the rhythms of the surrounding countryside, as well as the rhythms of commercial enterprise and those created by the religious calendar. In a climate that school geography textbooks described as ‘sharply continental’, trade, transport, agriculture and industrial production were all subject to dramatic seasonal variations. The last days of winter witnessed an influx of migrants in search of work on the steamships and barges that plied the Volga. Carpenters and masons followed in springtime, hiring themselves out as collectives to do the building that could only be accomplished in the summer months. Stevedores and porters were in high demand throughout the ice-free season. The onset of winter in October, and the first sleigh-roads in the snow, brought droves of izvozchiki (cobmen); as many as 800 operated out of the city.8 Nizhnii Novgorod functioned as a magnet for the thousands of artisans, most of them doubling as farmers, working throughout the province: the leather manufacturers of Bol’shoe Murashkino came here to buy their sheepskins; farmers from the distant district of Sergach came to market their grain and tobacco; and the city provided the first major market for such locally renowned goods as Kniaginin caps and Vorsma locks. Still, it is interesting to note that much local or internal trade bypassed the city itself: the major river ports for grain exchange, for example, were located downriver at Lyskovo, upriver at Gorodets, and at Vorotyn. Nor did the city have a monopoly on factory production. Its two shipbuilding factories (one owned by a merchant, the other by a British citizen), salt-processing plant, sawmill and tobacco factory did well but ceded first place to establishments such as the renowned steel and iron manufacturers at Pavlovo (nicknamed the ‘Russian Sheffield’), the enormous Sormovo ship-building plant, or the venerable leather producers in Arzamas.9

For two months every summer, Nizhnii Novgorod metamorphosed from a relatively quiet provincial town into a major international centre – the largest trade fair in Europe (bigger than Leipzig), and a unique meeting place of East and West, where traders from China, Persia, Bukhara and Armenia rubbed shoulders with Astrakhan fishmongers, Moscow entrepreneurs, Baltic merchants and itinerant Old Believer icon peddlers. The fair had a yearly turnover

7B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), vol. I, p. 299.

8Pamiatnaia knizhka nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1 865 god (NN: Izdanie nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo statisticheskogo komiteta, 1864), p. 48.

9NB these data are from the 1860s.

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Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century

of 200 million roubles, and an attendance of 1.5 million;10 the greatest volume of trade was in tea, cotton, fish and metal.11 But aggregate trade statistics capture only a fraction of the life of the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, which had moved upriver from its old site at Makariev following a fire there in 1817.12 No stock exchange existed until late in the century, so that – in stark contrast to the commodities market in Chicago, for example (in some ways Nizhnii Novgorod’s American equivalent) – goods had to be physically transported in order to be saleable.13 Transactions took place, again until a new generation took over, through an elaborate informal network of friendships, marriages and deals sealed in smoky riverfront taverns. In his history of the daily life of the Fair, A. P. Melnikov describes the Madeira-lubricated rituals by which a debtor, unable to meet his obligations, appeases his creditor.14 An 1877 guidebook directs the visitor towards the Siberian wharf, where he can sample teas for hours; the multi million rouble Iron Line; the odorous Greben’ wharf, piled high with dried fish; and the Grain wharf. Paperweights made from Urals minerals, silver pistols from the Caucasus, exquisite Ferghana and Khorasan rugs, Tula samovars, books typeset in Old Russian, icons, crosses, gingerbread, sheepskin coats, felt boots, lace and Tatar soap vied for the visitor’s attention. Equally usefully, the guidebook counsels him to avoid the pseudoAsian ornamentation of the Chinese Row, where no one from China had ever traded; the Fashion Lane housing a number of brand-name establishments including the ‘inevitable’ Salzfisch; and the variety of theatres, circuses, zoos and freak shows that held no surprises for the sophisticated Western traveller.15

The Nizhnii Novgorod Fair functioned as an irreplaceable stimulus to the local economy as well. Where else could local sheepskin processors have bought Persian merlushka (lambskin) and Riga ovchina (sheepskin) – the top of the line for sheepskin manufacture16; local spoon-makers have bought palm

10A. P. Melnikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii nizhegorodskoi iarmarki (1817–1 91 7 ) (repr. NN: Izd. AO ‘Nizhegorodskii komp’iuternyi tsentr pol’zovatelei’, 1993), p. 108.

11Vsepoddanneishii otchet Nachal’nika Nizhegorodskoi gubernii za 1 87 1 god (manuscript), Rossiiskaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, Moscow.

12Rumours of arson abounded.

13Melnikov, Ocherki, p. 64.

14Melnikov, Ocherki, pp. 97–101. His father, Melnikov-Pecherskii, imparts a similar flavour in the negotiations between Smolokurov and the fish merchants, in Na gorakh, as the former, privy to information from St Petersburg on seal prices, tries to outwit his colleagues.

15A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka (NN: Tip. gubernskogo pravleniia, 1877), pp. 190–5.

16‘Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina’, in ‘Kustarnye promysly nizhegorodskoi gubernii: Kniaginskii uezd,’ Nizhegorodskii sbornik (NN: Tip. nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo pravleniia, 1890), vol. IX, pp. 242–3.

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and maple to make the most exquisite spoons17; or Kniaginin hat-makers have bought Popov, Singer or Blok sewing machines?18 Conversely, Pavlovo locks, knives, razors and surgical instruments, fine ‘Russia-leather’ gloves from Krasnaia Ramen’ and even local jams (known inexplicably as ‘Kievan’) and pickles found their way to Moscow, Petersburg and European consumers via the fair.19 Residents of Kunavino by the fairgrounds made good money by renting out their property for use as hotels, restaurants and taverns.20

Economic and religious rhythms overlapped to a large extent, as must be the case where the church calendar is the most reliable tool for calculating the passage of time. The two major trade congresses in Nizhnii Novgorod – one for the wood products which were one of the province’s staples, and the other a big horse fair – were timed to coincide with Epiphany (6–7 January) and St John’s (24 June), respectively. Artisans’ work seasons often began and ended on religious holidays; wheel-makers, for example, ended their labours on the Feast of the Protection, when they returned to the land. The seven-week Lenten season regularly wreaked disaster in the lives of small-scale producers and factory workers, leaving them without employ and thus severing the fine thread that linked them to solvency.21 No major event, from the yearly opening of the Fair to visits of royalty, was conceivable without the presence of the local hierarchy, with the bishop at its head. The actual moment of peasant emancipation, as everywhere throughout the empire, was as much a religious as a social phenomenon. The townspeople experienced Emancipation day, for Nizhnii Novgorod 12 March 1861, as one big religious procession: responding to pealing church-bells at ten o‘clock in the morning, the gentry, merchantry and honorary citizenry gathered in the diocesan cathedral to hear, together with the crowd packing the kremlin grounds, the first words of the manifesto as read by the proto-deacon in full ceremonial dress. A liturgy of thanksgiving, led by Bishop Nektarii, was followed by the reading of the manifesto itself outside, on the central square, by Chief of Police Khval’kovskii, accompanied by Governor Muravev and Prince Shakhovskoi who had brought the manifesto from St Petersburg, as well as by the vice-governor, marshal of the nobility and others.22

17 L. Borisovskii, ‘Lozhkarstvo v Semenovskom uezde’, Trudy kommissii po issledovaniiu kustarnoi promyshlennosti v Rossii, issue 2 (St Petersburg: Tip. V. Kirshbauma, 1897), p. 14.

18‘Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly v g. Kniaginine i okruzhaiushchikh ego slobodakh,’ in ‘Kustarnye promysly nizhegorodskoi gubernii: Kniagininskii uezd’, p. 185.

19Pamiatnaia knizhka 1 865 , pp. 63, 52, 49.

20Pamiatnaia knizhka 1 865 , p. 48.

21‘Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina’, p. 234.

22A. I. Zvezdin, ‘K 50-letiiu ob’iavleniia manifesta 19 fevralia 1861 goda v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii’, in Deistviia NGUAK, vol. X, p. 66.

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