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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Settled places

Settlements are one of the most important features of Russian imperial geography. Inhabited places came in a bewildering assortment of shapes and sizes, with a broad range of ascribed privileges and obligations. 12,205 appear on the Geographical Atlas of the empire (published in the 1820s); the Lists of Settled Places published later in the century attest to roughly a quarter million sites. (The discrepancy in the two figures has to do with population growth but primarily with the scale at which the atlas was executed.)

Locating settlements is a crucial piece of the work of mapping history. So is describing them. Sorting them. Analyzing their similarities and differences. It is tempting to begin this task by applying categories familiar to us from other historical contexts. One could, for example, divide the populated places shown on the Geographical Atlas into urban and rural categories. According to this logic, the settlements would break down in this way:

urban settlements: provincial towns, district towns, non-administrative towns, minor towns, large and mid-sized towns (Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland), fortified and unfortified towns (Georgia)
rural settlements: villages (those with churches and those without), pogosts, farmsteads, Cossack villages, and Protestant church parishes

This seems sensible enough, but the urban/rural classification scheme is not necessarily the most productive approach to understanding Russian space. Any bureaucrat worth his salt, for example, would have described Russian space using administrative logic. From this perspective, settlements would fall into two main categories:

those with "administrative status": provincial towns, district towns, minor towns, villages (sela), Cossack villages, Protestant church parishes, and the "large" and "mid-sized" towns of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland
those without "administrative status": zashtatnye goroda, pripisnye goroda, villages (derevni), farmsteads

(Bureaucrats are not always the splashiest thinkers.)

We could of course dispense with the map legends and classify settlements according to schemes that are either more illuminating or more entertaining:

murder sites
settlements within a day's walk of the imperial border
settlements inhabited by more than three ethnic groups
settlements that hosted annual fairs or participated in the tea trade
settlements with multiple taverns

... The possibilities are endless.

But we can, and should, start with location.

After all, where matters. Right?

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