‘It remaineth that a larger discourse be made of Moscow, the principal city of that country. – Our men say that in bigness it is as great as the city of London with the suburbs thereof. There are many and great buildings in it, but for beauty and fairness nothing comparable to ours. There are many towns and villages also, but built out of order and with no handsomeness: their streets and ways are not paved with stone as ours are, the walls of their houses are of wood, the roofs for the most part are covered with shingle boards.’

Richard Chancellor’s somewhat disdainful description of the city of Moscow, which he first visited in 1553, fairly reflected European reactions to that and other Russian towns in the period before Peter the Great. Russian towns were different from, and much inferior to, the towns of Europe. This is a tradition which has endured down to our own day. Both pre-1917 Russian and modern Western scholars have contrasted the commercial dynamism and political liberties enjoyed by European towns in the medieval and early modern periods with the limited and restricted commercial development and politically repressed character of Russian towns at that time. Few if any Russian towns developed the ‘urban community’ described for the medieval European city by Max Weber. Such an emphasis, needless to say, ultimately stems from a much broader issue: to what extent has Russia ever been, or could it hope to become, European? Whilst specialists on Russia thus focused on the extent to which Russian towns exhibited fully urban characteristics, students of comparative urbanism increasingly challenged some of the assumptions lying behind such debates.