Kiev, p.8
Kiev, page 8
Fire proved to be the most consistent counter to congestion, for Kiev never experienced the systematic slum clearance and urban redesign that dramatically transformed midcentury Paris, for example. The fact that the city had many open spaces to absorb its growing population also helped in the battle against crowding, but many of late-imperial Kiev’s inhabitants appear to have been poorly housed. Rapid population growth drove rents upward and created great differences in the cost of living among the various city neighborhoods. In the 1870s an apartment cost 410 rubles a year on average, a room 85 rubles. These figures were said to be 20 to 35 percent more expensive than those for St. Petersburg. Rents for apartments in Lypky averaged about 850 rubles per year, those in Old Kiev 690. Rooms cost about 120 rubles per year in either district. Thus, much of the population was driven to the outlying neighborhoods such as Ploskaia or Lukianivka, where yearly rents averaged about 150 rubles for an apartment, 45 rubles for a room. These areas had virtually no services or amenities and were ravaged by epidemics.76
Data compiled by a local physician around the turn of the twentieth century indicated that 3 percent of Kiev’s population lived in basement apartments, most of them damp, dark, and unhealthy, and that one-room worker’s flats typically housed 4.6 people. Rents often consumed 30 percent of a worker’s wage. The city had the legal responsibility to combat contagion but seldom did so. In 1902 the city council had twenty-six committees, but not one was intended to deal primarily with welfare or social services.77 In mid-1903 the council established a committee to investigate basement apartments, but it may never have met. In January 1905, a couple of days before Bloody Sunday, it was noted that of all the council committees, only two dealt with the problems of the poor: the Committee on Doss Houses and Cheap Apartments, and the Committee on City Pawnshops. Neither had met a single time in 1904! The council did discuss basement apartments in May 1904 but buried the issue in committee.78
Committees of public care called popechitel’stva were established in 1902, but a 1904 editorial alleged that thus far, “society has paid them little heed,” in part because volunteers received too little recognition for their efforts. Some popechitel’stva were successful: in Old Kiev one raised two thousand rubles for a child shelter and a doss house, but in some parts of the city, as in heavily Jewish Lybid, the poor viewed the popechitel’stva “with fear and mistrust.” What was needed, it was argued, was fresh blood and a new spirit of volunteerism.79 A 1912 account reports that five child shelters were operating in the city, the first of which had opened in 1875, but they served only 356 children. The shelters were supported by N. I. Greter, N. A. Tereshchenko, and other industrial magnates, and helped children learn bookbinding and bootmaking. Child shelters received little support from the city council and relied heavily on revenue generated by the Merchants’ Club lottery. They suffered a blow when, in 1912, lotteries generating more than fifteen hundred rubles were made illegal.80
In 1904 a columnist for Kievskaia gazeta bemoaned the problems with syphilis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhus, pointing out that the victims were mainly poor, “crowded into basements and corners, especially in the outskirts, where epidemics often begin.” Even in the city proper, along the tracks, there is still a place “where they dump excrement, garbage, and every conceivable kind of junk, all of which is enveloped in a great stench. It attracts stray dogs and children who are lured by the junk and the prospect of finding a kopeck.”81 Inadequate municipal funds contributed to these problems, but so too did the absence of an ethos that viewed public welfare as a priority concern for city government. Many of Kiev’s wealthy and prominent residents gave generously to charitable causes, but these same affluent voters saw the church and the private charities—not the organs of municipal government—as the rightful purveyors of welfare services.
Rapid population growth, the fiscal and electoral restrictions of the 1892 counterreform, the financial limitations of the state as a whole, and a generally unconcerned and inept imperial leadership beginning with Nicholas II (1894–1917) all contributed to Kiev’s problems, which appeared to some to be worsening as the insurrectionary year 1905 approached. Rightly or wrongly, in 1904 Kievskaia gazeta cited the city council as the single most important cause of Kiev’s rising cost of living, which was “conservatively” estimated at 10 to 15 percent over the past five years. In order to keep taxes on real estate low, the council raised taxes on trade, including bazaar stalls; the resulting price increases hurt the poor.82 Unresponsive to basic issues of human welfare, in 1905 city government would condone a pogrom and essentially disintegrate.
SOME CONCLUSIONS: CONTINUITY AMID GROWTH
Late-imperial Kiev had all the signs of a boom town. Many of the open spaces and much of the greenery, so noticeable a generation earlier, disappeared as the city grew haphazardly, with little order or harmony. Some houses were set close to the streets, others were set back at various distances. Street paving was generally done by the German method of setting stones in concrete, as asphalt was deemed too expensive. By the 1870s about one-third of the streets were paved, but Kievans continued to complain about the condition of their streets and bridges. In 1910 one city council faction justified its paving expenditures with the argument that, according to midwives, walking and riding along rutted streets and bridges were “major sources of female ailments.”83 Congestion and sprawl aptly describe late-imperial Kiev, but the natural beauty of its hilltop vistas and splendid churches had not been diminished. As one Polish count put it, the city’s “disorderly” character had a kind of artistic quality to it.84
For all the growth, however, the city’s economic structure changed little over the century. Late-imperial Kiev was a major rail and water transport center, but overland and river trade had always been important to the city. In 1900 Kiev’s economy continued to be driven by the needs of the region’s agriculture, particularly sugar, and by small workshops producing consumer items, much as it had been decades earlier. Fancy shops and department stores were appearing on the Khreshchatyk, but small traders and craftsmen still predominated in the city. In the 1890s, 3,700 permanent retail stalls and kiosks were operating in the city’s nine major bazaars.85
The educational sector, long a driving force in Kiev’s economy, expanded substantially. The 1892 statute had charged the municipalities to oversee the development of public education, but the exact responsibilities of the cities, as opposed to those of the state, remained unclear. In 1908 the state began to provide subsidies for the salaries of elementary school teachers. By 1911 Kiev, which had had virtually no primary schools a century earlier, had 139 elementary schools of all types, although fewer than half were publicly funded. In 1914 primary school attendance reached 14,000, but another 11,000 children were either denied enrollment for lack of space or chose not to attend.86
Secondary education also grew very slowly over the century. Eight gymnasia for men and women enrolled only 3,677 pupils in 1895 (at a time when Kiev had 240,000 residents). After the 1905 revolution, the number of secondary schools grew rapidly, mainly because the new spirit of reform had encouraged women to seek an education. Almost all of the new secondary schools were privately funded, however. Higher education continued to contribute mightily to Kiev’s culture and economy. Although the Kiev Academy had lost its influence as a center of learning in the late eighteenth century, St. Vladimir University, founded in 1834, enrolled about 2,300 students in 1895, 5,300 in 1915. By the advent of the First World War, there were ten institutions of higher learning in Kiev, with a total enrollment of more than 15,000. Aside from St. Vladimir, the largest were the Commercial Institute, with 4,000 students, and the Polytechnical Institute, with 2,300. Some forty institutions, most of them private, taught everything from stenography and accounting to foreign languages and midwifery.87
Perhaps the decline in the relative importance of the Pechersk garrison represented the main long-term change, for Kiev’s economy was no longer geared to the needs of taming the steppe or defending the empire against Cossacks and Poles, Tatars and Turks. Kiev was no longer a frontier outpost.
Many improvements occurred in the nineteenth century in public health and medical care, but many pressing problems remained. Enforcement of hygienic standards continued to be haphazard and was attempted mainly when officials, having heard about epidemics elsewhere, began to worry that contagion might spread to Kiev. The Sanitary Commission, established in 1887, stopped issuing reports in 1898. Property owners feared that their findings might force the implementation of rudimentary plumbing codes and other expensive improvements. In 1904, although the city mayor was a physician, V. Protsenko, and several councilmen were doctors, the Sanitary Commission, by now consisting of “one old sanitary physician” and four assistants, was allowed to dissolve.88 By imperial standards, Kiev had plenty of physicians (one per 701 inhabitants in 1904, compared with one per 837 in Moscow and Odessa, and one per 3,175 in nearby Zhytomyr),89 but the city continued to be short of hospital beds. Aside from the army hospital, four small hospitals had provided only 268 beds in the 1860s. In 1875 the municipal Alexander Hospital was built, and the total number of available beds in the city reached 723. About half of the 190 beds at Alexander were free of charge. Complaints appeared in the press about the ignorance and ineptitude of hospital personnel; some were said to be “rough to the point of cruelty to the sick.”90
THE CITY AS FORTRESS
In his study of the nineteenth-century Russian city, Daniel Brower observes that the introduction of public health measures moved Russia’s cities
from the category of “Asian” city, where epidemics raged uncontrolled … closer to the “cities of light” of Western Europe.… Municipal public works, in other words, were part of a progressive agenda shaped by Western models of the city.… The heightened concern for local needs was the product of a new awareness of the public interest, increasing respect for scientific discoveries in such areas as public health, and the threat that mass urbanization posed to public order.91
Science and self-government did indeed make Kiev less Asian and more European, if by Kiev one means the historic central districts. The outskirts were left out and, in fact, were seen as places to dump problems that had surfaced downtown. In the early 1870s the council discussed a proposal to build a special “suburb” that would serve as a holding area for Jews without residence permits. The community would have its own water supply, hospital, slaughterhouse, markets, and parks. Pilgrims could also be detained here, for they were regarded as a particularly dangerous “source of infection and disorder.” Although nothing was done, the idea resurfaced frequently.92
The lower classes were also encouraged to move to the outskirts. In rejecting a request by a worker’s artel for free land so that private homes could be built, Councilman Dobrynin acknowledged that while home-ownership might reduce drunkenness, since Kiev was “a city of 300,000, 200,000 of them poor,” the council could hardly afford to set a precedent by giving away land. “Let them look outside the city for land,” he concluded.93 During a 1904 typhus epidemic, which was blamed on hunger and cold, and on the fact that the city’s water supply still did not have proper filters, Councilman P. A. Zalevsky revived the idea of a holding area in the outskirts, telling the council that “only people who can pay for their apartments and feed their children should be allowed to settle in Kiev.” Maybe “a Chinese wall” could be built around the city, one newspaper replied sarcastically, but Zalevsky’s idea drew some attention. The doss houses could be moved out of town, he suggested, in order to create a “plague barracks” (chumnoi barak) for the teeming migratory masses.94 Complaints about brothels also brought suggestions that they simply be moved to the edge of town.
Meanwhile, the outskirts continued to be virtually unrepresented in the council because of the property qualification required of voters, and some districts remained for years in unincorporated limbo. Demievka’s petition to join the city was rejected by the Ministry of the Interior in 1904. By then it had twenty industrial enterprises and 20,000 people. Hilly Solomenka, where many railway workers lived, was annexed in 1907. In 1910 it had but two recognizable streets. Garbage, collected only during half of the year, filled its ravines. In 1913, when the city population as a whole surpassed 600,000, Solomenka’s 30,000 inhabitants had only three schools serving 350 children; they had no doctor, hospital, or organized medical service. Hooligans shut down the community at night.95 During the cholera epidemic of 1907, an angry resident of Shuliavka’s partly annexed factory district asked whether authorities “even knew where Shuliavka was.”96
The affluent who controlled the local power structure saw the older, central districts of Kiev as a kind of fortress, barricaded against the mounting problems of the poorer outskirts. This attitude, and the glaring inequities between advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods, must have given visible reinforcement to socialist rhetoric on class oppression, adding tensions to a city that had already experienced ethnic conflict fueled by Polish nationalism and by the Judeophobia which was deeply imbedded in the culture of Kiev and Ukraine.
AT THE TURN of the nineteenth century, “politics” in Kiev revolved primarily around attempts by various guilds and burgher factions to defend parochial economic interests against one another, while staving off further encroachments by the Russian state. During the course of the century, however, national consciousness and conflict grew increasingly important as determinants of the political climate of the city, as they did elsewhere in the Russian Empire and Europe. Poles were the first to challenge authority, and their discontent came to dominate local politics until the insurrection of 1863. Largely as a result of Polish insurrectionism, the imperial government tried to Russify Kiev and the surrounding region. During these same decades, the age-old question of whether Jews could reside in Kiev also surfaced with a vengeance. In the 1790s a Jewish community took root in Kiev, only to be expelled in 1827. From the 1860s, however, it would grow rapidly, and Jews would be horribly victimized by pogroms in 1881 and 1905. Around midcentury the Ukrainian national movement began to become an irritant to the Russian state. Although the Ukrainian cause came to be centered in Habsburg Lviv, Kiev became the most important center for Ukrainian cultural and political activities in the Russian Empire.
It is important to note that not every issue came to be viewed through the prism of national consciousness. National aspirations helped fire the upheavals of 1905, but they were not the main source of those disorders, at least in Kiev. As the twentieth century progressed, however, national issues would become increasingly important to the politics of Kiev and Ukraine, and it is therefore useful to examine Kiev’s ethnic communities and their aspirations in the period under study. Because Poles had considerable influence in Kiev and Right-Bank Ukraine in the early nineteenth century, and because their aspirations resulted in upheaval, I will turn my attention first to the city’s Polish community.
In the sixteenth century Polish kings saw Kiev as a fortress against Moscow, an outpost for the further rooting of Catholicism, and even as a kind of model frontier community. Craftsmen and merchants were encouraged to settle there. After Poland lost Kiev to Russia in 1667, Polish influence in the city diminished but did not cease, for Kiev remained the most important outpost on the Russo-Polish frontier. After the partitions of Poland and the creation of Kiev Province in 1796 out of Right-Bank Ukrainian territory formerly held by Poland, flamboyant Polish noblemen frequently came to Kiev, “noisily” electing their provincial officials in a private home (probably in Pechersk, where the Polish magnates tended to live) inscribed with “Dworzańska kommissja” (Noblemen’s Committee) in huge golden letters. Poles owned most of the land in Right-Bank Ukraine and assumed most of the local offices. In 1812 there were 43,677 Polish noblemen in Kiev Province, compared with only 1,170 “Russians” of noble or civil-servant rank.1 Polish landlords often wintered in Kiev, and some of Warsaw’s finest families also had homes there. One example of Polish economic power in Kiev at this time was Count Branicki, a landowner and sugar magnate who owned Kiev’s largest grain and flour warehouse, a four-story stone structure built on the river.
Virtually all of the landowners in Right-Bank Ukraine visited Kiev each January in order to attend the Contract Fair, held in and around Podil’s Contract Hall, which was designed by the Pole Andrzej Melenski (1766–1833), Kiev’s most important early nineteenth-century architect. Table 3.1 provides one breakdown of the fair’s visitors. Most of the landowners who frequented the fair were Poles, for even in 1861, on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs, 87 percent of the landowners in Kiev Province, 89 percent in Podil (Podol) Province, and 93 percent in Volyn Province were Polish. As much as 90 percent of the arable land in the Russian Empire’s new southwest region belonged to Poles.2
TABLE 3.1
Visitors to the Contract Fair
1835 1846 1862
Landowners, nobility 944 1,597 1,357
Merchants 78 118 287
Foreigners 39 115 130
Jews 1,656 1,731 1,805
