ABSTRACT
There was real truth to the lamentations about the low state of many district towns, a truth that has resonated since with historians of Russian urban development. The creation of Ivanovo-Voznesensk was the starting point for a new urban history of the settlement, although that new history was based in continuity. The people were largely the same, and the lands and buildings were, too. But that longer history was recast in terms of an urban vision that in many ways echoed Catherine II's concerns from a century before. Ivanovo was already a well-known center of cotton textile production when its owner, Count Dmitri Nikolaevich Sheremetev, began to manumit some of its wealthier serfs in the middle of the 1820s. "In a word, the village of Ivanovo is already totally ready to accept town regulations, which have long been impatiently awaited". According to other reports, the new townspeople were full and active participants in their enlightened era.
