ИСТИНА

The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries formed the period of rapid industrial growth processes in Russia, and it meant also the growth of urban economies at all, as well as the growth of urban labour market which was formed on the basis of the vast migrations of the labourers from the peasantry. The current paper was made within a research project «Work, Income, and the State in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900-2000». The main attention of our research project is focused on urban households as on the basic socio-economic units in the cities and towns; our goal is to study how did people earn money in Russian cities and towns during the changing 20th century; we are interested to know both to which challenges people had to react and how did they do that. The state formed a lot of such challenges during the whole 20th century. Traditionally, the state in Russia always played the leading role in socio-economic development, and the current paper tries to show the role of the state in the forming of daily economic life patterns in Russian urban sector before 1917. On the one hand, almost no economic activities except the criminal ones were legally prohibited in the pre-revolutionary Russia (in contrast with the further Soviet times), this is why we can speak about the plenty of legal possibilities to get income available for the urban citizens. However for most of the people their real possibilities were strongly limited by another very important factors. Among these factors are those inspired by the state.