Population of Moscow in 1812

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

We continue the cycle of posts about the population of Moscow. Today we will talk about 1812. Reading the literature on this issue, I was always bewildered by the lack of alignment with numbers. According to my research in 1716, somewhere around 50 thousand people lived in Moscow. And in 1775 already 84 thousand people. But in 1812, this figure suddenly jumped up to 250 thousand people. As it is all not logical turns out.

Then I came across two plans of the city of Moscow with a difference of 100 years. Moscow plan of 1739:

Large resolution.

And the plan for Moscow in 1836.

Large resolution.

Look, you can clearly see that the boundaries of the city have practically not changed for 100 years. On the plan of 1739, fields are still located within the city limits. By 1839 they had been built up safely, though not all. Population density should not have changed much over this century either. Most of the common people, as they lived in wooden huts, probably continued so. In the city of Perm, wooden houses in the center are still standing, despite the fact that the city is one million. Of course, they are slowly being demolished and built up with all sorts of business centers, but there is still enough.

And then on the Internet I came across a mention of the book: Matveev, Nikolai Sergeevich. Moscow and life in it on the eve of the invasion of 1812 / N. Matveev. - Moscow: Tipo-lit. t-va I. N. Kushnerev and Co., 1912.

And in it data on the population of Moscow in 1812

On the one hand, the number of houses logically corresponds to the development of the city. 6343 yards in 1716, 8884 yards in 1775. And 9158 already in 1812. But the number of residents living in them somehow confused me. Let's figure it out.

Those. most of the then nobility living in Moscow was of old age. The children no longer lived with them. But there were a lot of servants.

Again, this is not a city, but a large large village, according to modern times, it turns out. Therefore, the density of population and buildings was low. And it certainly could not have increased in 100 years.

Princes and high nobility lived richly, with a large number of servants:

Who else had more:

One can say striptease and prostitution have rich and long-standing traditions in Moscow. Russia we lost, yeah.

The ladies, by the way, did not lag behind either. I will cite a rather large piece from a book about the customs there. By the way, the word "Communism" flashed there at the beginning. Judging by the context, it was interpreted in 1912 (when this book was written) not quite the way we are now used to thinking.

How Alexander Rosembaum sang there - I remember, for a long time, my father and mother taught me: To heal is to heal! To love is to love so! Walking - so walking! Shoot - so shoot! But the ducks are already flying high … Fly - so fly! I'll wave my hand to them.

After reading the last passage, he openly laughed. Nothing has changed in Moscow society for 200 years.

But back to the population, everything that I described above concerned only the nobility and nobility. And according to modern research, they made up no more than 1 percent of the population in Russia at that time. In Moscow, of course, more.

But there was also the then middle class in Moscow. Quite a few people also lived in their houses, and again a vegetable garden and a personal plot. Those. we are not even talking about dense buildings.

But most of the population of the then Moscow was still peasants.

Now let's count. The total number of courtyards is 9158. Of these, there are more than 6500 wooden ones. We will conventionally assume that all wooden courtyards were serfs. Those. ordinary village. Demographers advise to multiply them by 8 people, if this is the maximum. In the city, the standard of living is usually higher, which means there are still fewer children. The total is 52 thousand people.

Remains somewhere 2,658 courtyards of the nobility and the then middle class, officials, merchants, bourgeois and others. Let's multiply them by 16, considering that in such houses, on average, twice as many people should have lived. It turns out somewhere 42 thousand people. Plus, let's roughly count the serfs in factories. In 1775 there were 12 thousand of them. It can be assumed that in 1812 there were already 20 thousand of them.

Those. in total it turns out somewhere 114 thousand people. Of course, this figure is conditional, but at least it gives at least some real idea of the population of Moscow at that time.

This is indirectly confirmed by the size of the population after the invasion of Napoleon. There are just over 51 thousand people left.

Book: German, Karl Fedorovich (1767-1838). Statistical research on the Russian Empire, / Written by Karl Hermann. - St. Petersburg: Printed at the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1819.

I've read several books from that era on this topic and it feels like authors are competing to write the big number. All the same, no one will check. Again, where did these 250 thousand people go? Something I doubt that they all left so abruptly. If the nobility had and where and what to go, then the common people, peasants and bourgeois, obviously no one was waiting anywhere. But to assume that somewhere half left, there is already more logic and common sense.

On the other hand, I can even imagine where the figure of 251,700 people came from for the author of the first book. You see, in the previous passage there is a text: but this number increases to 400,000 in winter? These are peasants who do not have any special work in the field or at home in winter. And they go to work in the capital. Build houses and other structures, pave streets, work in factories, serve as masters and just do small jobs. But, unlike modern guest workers, in the spring they went to their home, to the village, to plow and sow. They also paid taxes there. Therefore, it is not entirely correct to include them in the total population of Moscow. We do not consider shift workers working in any north as local residents, do we?

Here is such a small excursion through the life, customs and population of the then Moscow.