The seventeenth century was a difficult period for Russia, as it appears to have been for much of Europe. Yet this is a very broad generalisation, difficult to substantiate from the limited evidence and paying scant heed to geographical and chronological differences. After 1613 Russia was able to enjoy the benefits of a stable dynasty, a situation in marked contrast to the anarchic times which went before. And it was a realm still undergoing vigorous expansion and colonisation. Such discordant processes were naturally reflected in the life of Russia’s towns. Fortunately the sources which permit the study of urban developments are richer and fuller for this period than they are for the sixteenth century and they have been better explored by historians. But they are all too often sporadic and uneven, and their meaning sometimes obscure. This chapter will consider a number of facets of urbanism in the period. It will also address two issues, namely the symbolic and religious role of towns and their physical morphology, which do not figure in Chapter 13 on the sixteenth century but which can be profitably studied for both periods taken together.

The urban network

As was the case in the sixteenth century, the legal status of towns in the seventeenth remained uncertain and the places referred to as ‘towns’ (goroda) in the sources were often fortresses with little or no commercial function, or sometimes they did have a trading function but lacked a posad population. Some ‘towns’ even had no subsidiary district (uezd), such as the three gorodki (literally, ‘little towns’) of Kostensk, Orlov and Belokolodsk built on the Belgorod Line near Voronezh in the middle of the century or, it appears, the nearby private town of Romanov which belonged to the tsar’s kinsman, boyar N.I. Romanov.