CENTRAL RUSSIAN CITY AT THE BEGINNING OF CATHERINE THE GREAT’S REFORMS: PECULIARITIES AND PATTERNS

The article analyses the structure and state of the city and the surrounding ‘suburban’ space included in the orbit of its life. The work considers the processes that took place directly on the eve and during the reforms of Catherine the Great: administrative-territorial, urban (social), and re-form of the Russian city (city as an administrative center). Thus, the author proposes to assess the state of both the urban space and the structure of the city, and partly the nature of the Central Russian urban settlements, with which the reformers came into contact in the course of their transformative policy, forming its course, assessing opportunities and choosing tasks. The author pays special atten-tion to the relationship and interdependence of different parts of the city (radii of the city spatial structure). At the same time, the work describes both the city itself and the adjoining settlements and territo-ries. They were not officially part of the urban space, but were in unity or close neighborhood with it, becoming an element of the urban pasture. The author also highlights features of the actual merger of the suburbs and the city, at all stages of this process: from the stable economic independence of the former service settlements (which owned extensive land holdings), to the merger of part of these set-tlements with urban pasture and residential territory. The article gives examples of the spread of ur-banization processes to the outskirts of rural settlements, as a result of which they acquired pro-nounced forms of urban economy. The article shows the transitional character of the 18th – 19th centuries turn for the formation of the New Age city. The material for the study is the Kaluga province, which the author considers as a possible model (reference point) for comparing and analyzing the structure of urban space and its evolution in differ-ent parts of Central Russia, as well as for assessing the evolution process and the results of reforming the Central Russian city in the middle of the 18th – early 19th century.