ABSTRACT
Rural-urban migration and its contribution to the development of the urban sector in eighteenth-century Russia is a subject which remains little explored in the historical literature. The widespread commercial and industrial activity of the Russian peasantry arose in the face of serious legal obstacles, the most obvious of which was serfdom itself. The Ulozhenie of 1649 established the principle that "only the Sovereign's urban taxpayers" had the right to operate stores, warehouses and other commercial facilities and industrial enterprises in the towns. Beginning in 1758, the government gradually withdrew from the struggle against "unauthorized" industrial production and ended the monopolistic privileges awarded to factory owners. The Russian state of the eighteenth century did not have the administrative resources to police the economy effectively, nor did it have the will to crush completely the commercial and industrial activities of the peasantry.
