Moscow, Part by Part: How Ruban’s and Maksimovich’s Guidebooks Differ

The earliest guidebooks to Moscow — Vasily Ruban’s book of 1782 and Lev Maksimovich’s work of 1792–1793 — presented different ways of describing the city. The 1782 edition arranges information by fourteen police districts, while the 1792–1793 work follows four historic areas: the Kremlin, Kitay-Gorod, Bely Gorod and Zemlyanoy Gorod. Their different structures show how the authors addressed different questions readers might ask: what was recorded and where, or how monuments related to the capital’s historic layout.

Ruban retained historic place names in his descriptions, although he organised the book by police district. Maksimovich made those names the basis of his structure, but did not provide a ready-made walking route. The comparison here concerns the order of chapters and how readers find information: this criterion says nothing about the breadth of the authors’ knowledge.

Why is Ruban’s book called the first Moscow guidebook?

According to the Museum of Moscow, the first guidebook to the city was Vasily Grigoryevich Ruban’s ‘Description of the Imperial Capital City of Moscow’. The genre was still taking shape at the time. This designation does not mean that no one had described places in Moscow before 1782. It identifies a publication that brought together diverse information about the capital in a standalone book for readers wishing to understand the city.

The bibliographic record in the National Electronic Library records the year and place of publication: St Petersburg, the printing house of the Artillery and Engineering Cadet Corps for the Nobility, 1782. The book runs to 159 pages. A variant title page specifies that the material was collected in 1775. The date on the book therefore marks its publication, rather than indicating a single snapshot representative of Moscow life throughout 1782.

The full title of Ruban’s work serves as a statement of intent in itself. It lists gates, bridges, streets and lanes, monasteries, churches, palaces, government offices, courtyards, markets, factories and industrial works. The list reads like an inventory of the city: the author promises more than a picturesque view or a selection of famous buildings, offering information about the places and structures that make up the capital. This explains the book’s place in the history of guidebooks, although readers should not expect the familiar account of ‘what to see in a day’.

The title page reminds us that the Moscow volume was not Ruban’s first attempt at describing a city: the author identified himself as the publisher of ‘Description of St Petersburg’. Bibliochronicle dates the St Petersburg edition to 1779. The designation ‘first Moscow guidebook’ refers to the book’s subject, rather than the beginning of Ruban’s publishing career.

Descriptions of the capital existed before Vasily Grigoryevich’s work, although their authors had different aims. In his dissertation abstract on eighteenth-century Moscow, historian of science Simon Ilizarov recalls a printed plan of the city from 1741, based on surveys conducted between the late 1720s and 1739. In 1757, Alexander Sumarokov published the texts of tomb inscriptions from the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Archangel. The plan made the city’s layout visible, while the publication preserved individual pieces of historical evidence; neither was a city guidebook in the sense used in the museum’s account of the genre’s history.

Ilizarov also describes a manuscript by the land surveyor Fadey Okhtensky: it was compiled in May 1775, but only published from an archival copy in 1997. This text predates Ruban’s book, yet readers could not obtain it as a printed publication before 1782. The museum’s designation ‘first guidebook’ concerns the history of the genre in print.

Why are there two descriptions of the title page of Ruban’s book?

The National Electronic Library catalogue contains a bibliographic detail that is easy to overlook when dating the material. One version of the title page refers to the book’s publication in 1782; another, which replaced a page containing a misprint, explicitly names 1775 as the year when the information was collected. The catalogue records the correction of a misprint, rather than a new edition. Researchers must therefore distinguish between the printed copy, the title variant and the period when the information was compiled: each answers a different question.

Some details in the lists of places and features on the title pages also differ. The corrected version names cemeteries, roads, toll gates and cab drivers, which are absent from the shorter list on the original title page. This does not establish that the corresponding sections were later added or removed: the catalogue reports the replacement of the title page, rather than a comparison of all the pages. The reliable conclusion is more modest and precise: a single bibliographic description already shows why a book’s title should be checked against a particular copy before being quoted as an unchanging text.

How did Ruban divide Moscow for his readers?

Ruban used Moscow’s police districts as his framework: he described fourteen districts and began with the Kremlin. The museum’s overview shows that the book is organised along administrative lines. A police district here is a unit of administration and record-keeping used at the time, rather than an assessment of an area’s safety. Readers are given a sequence of sections, each offering information about the locality and its civic institutions.

The area where the description begins is revealing. A study of the old book published by the Bibliochronicle project quotes the opening of its territorial definition: ‘The first district in the Kremlin, Kitay and Bely Gorod’; ‘Kitay’ here means Kitay-Gorod. Several historic areas are brought together within a single administrative section. This provides a precise test of the argument: police district boundaries did not automatically align with the city’s familiar rings.

It would be wrong, however, to portray Ruban as someone who overlooked Moscow’s historic layout. He explicitly names the Kremlin, Kitay-Gorod and Bely Gorod when describing the boundary of the first district. In his book, historic names help identify an area, but do not form the main sections of the publication as a whole. The difference from Maksimovich lies in the hierarchy: which framework governs the contents, and which provides points of reference within it.

After defining the boundaries, Ruban listed city gates, bridges, streets and lanes, monasteries, churches, government buildings, pharmacies, industrial works, factories, markets, inns and other places and structures. This is no random assortment of details. The different categories allow readers to gain a picture of a district’s religious, commercial, economic and administrative life within a single section. The book answers the question ‘what lies within this area’ more systematically than ‘what is particularly interesting to see here’.

Ruban’s inventory places a market, a bridge and a pharmacy alongside a monastery and a palace. It preserves information about everyday places and structures in the city, but readers must turn to other sources to establish the historical connections between them.

The origins of the material also help explain the book’s form. Drawing on his study of the sources, Ilizarov characterises Ruban’s work as a compilation of general and detailed returns and lists of places and structures in the city, based on information from police and financial institutions. The numerous categories and counts therefore do not prove that the compiler personally walked every street and surveyed Moscow afresh. His work as an author consisted of selecting, collating and publishing material that had already been gathered.

This clarification changes how we assess the fourteen districts. The police divisions were more than a convenient literary device: the underlying information had itself been gathered by institutions that needed to record the city in territorial units they could administer. Ruban transferred this arrangement from official papers into a printed book. For readers, it became a way to navigate the information, but traces of its original purpose — recording courtyards, businesses, routes and institutions — remained in the lists.

Ilizarov judges the book’s structure more critically than the museum’s overview does: he considers it neither entirely clear nor entirely original. This scholarly judgement does not invalidate Ruban’s designation as the author of the first guidebook. The different assessments concern different criteria: the publication’s bibliographic place within the genre and the quality of its organisation of information. Rather than choosing a single label, it is more useful to recognise that the first extensive printed collection of information about the city could be both significant and difficult to search.

What can Ruban’s book tell us about Moscow in the 1770s?

Ruban’s book provides information about roads, trade, businesses, courtyards and institutions in Moscow in the 1770s. Bibliochronicle notes that the author rarely described landmarks as sights to visit. The work is useful for studying what made up the city when the information was collected; its lists can only be used for a walk through today’s neighbourhoods after their details have been checked.

The published analysis lists, for example, 114 major streets, 463 lanes, 8778 residential courtyards and 188 inns. These figures are useful neither as current statistics nor as grounds for a simplistic comparison between eighteenth-century Moscow and the city today. They show the scale of the compiler’s work and the kind of question he was answering: how many urban features could be recorded, and of what kinds. Since the information comes from material collected in 1775, it cannot be applied to later decades without separate verification.

Alongside streets and courtyards, Bibliochronicle cites 256 churches, 24 monasteries, six pharmacies and three printing houses from Ruban’s book. Information about worship, medicine and printing appears side by side in a single inventory. For historians, this offers a reason to use Ruban’s work to examine the distribution of urban functions, then compare it with other sources from the mid-1770s.

How did Maksimovich divide Moscow in his guidebook?

Lev Maksimovich devoted his chapters to four historic areas of the capital: the Kremlin, Kitay-Gorod, Bely Gorod and Zemlyanoy Gorod. The Museum of Moscow links this division to the rings of fortification walls. Readers could first choose an area, then look for the monuments described within it.

The Presidential Library dates the four-part publication to 1792–1793 and identifies V. Okorokov’s University Printing House in Moscow as its printer. The library describes the first part as a volume published in 1792, with 309 pages and additional Roman-numbered pagination. These details matter for the comparison: this was an independent and considerably more extensive publishing project, rather than a brief reworking of Ruban’s lists.

The difference is apparent in the title itself. Maksimovich offers a ‘guide to Moscow’s antiquities and notable sights’, promising to introduce readers to places and buildings worthy of attention. The lengthy title lists cathedrals, monasteries, churches, and public and private establishments, both old and new. The author states that he drew on inscriptions and other sources. This signals an intention to explain places and buildings historically, although the statement on the title page does not remove the need to verify each individual claim in the book.

It also promises an alphabetical index for locating the places mentioned. This offers two ways of reading the same publication. The sequence of four parts invites readers to move from district to district; the alphabetical index helps them find a name they already know. This combination is particularly telling in a guidebook: the author needs both to present the city as a whole and to give readers a tool for precise searches.

The Presidential Library describes Maksimovich as a historian and geographer associated with the Moscow Archive of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs and the publication of historical materials. His biography alone does not prove that his guidebook is free of errors. It does, however, help explain why the book emphasises monuments, inscriptions and sources. Establishing a specific construction date or the history of an institution from Maksimovich's account would require checking documents and research, rather than simply invoking the author's authority.

The compiler drew on a different foundation of research. Ilizarov links his work to the circle of the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller and the collections of the Moscow Archive of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. The researcher places Maksimovich within the tradition of studying the capital's ecclesiastical antiquities, in which inscriptions on monuments and documents provided material for descriptions of those monuments. This helps us read the guidebook's long title without imposing modern assumptions: the promise to provide information ‘from inscriptions’ refers to a method of gathering evidence of the past, rather than to tourism advertising.

Ilizarov also regards Maksimovich's four-part work as one of the earliest attempts to compile a historical record of Moscow's burial sites. This is the researcher's assessment, rather than a claim that the book was conceived as a complete list of burials. The shift in focus matters: for Maksimovich, a monument is connected to people and records of the past. When readers seek information about a church building, this approach can lead them from an address to names, dates and surviving evidence.

Scholarly preparation does not make every conclusion reached in the late eighteenth century definitive. A date in an inscription attests first and foremost to the existence and content of the inscription itself; interpreting it requires context, while the loss of the original makes verification more difficult. Maksimovich is therefore valuable in two ways: as a collector of the materials available to him and as a witness to which places his age considered worthy of remembrance. This is what distinguishes a historical guidebook from an inventory, even when both name the same monastery or street.

What can be established from the bibliographic description of Maksimovich's work?

The Presidential Library states that Lev Maksimovich's authorship was established from Vasily Sopikov's ‘An Essay in Russian Bibliography’, entry No. 9150. This is an important qualification: the author's name in the modern catalogue is based on later bibliographic evidence, rather than solely on the wording of the long title. When comparing the two books, it is useful to distinguish this attribution from information printed directly in the publication. Otherwise, a false impression arises that every element of a modern catalogue record provides equally strong evidence of the compiler's intentions.

The catalogue record also describes the particular copy held in the collection: the first two parts are bound together, and several leaves in the first part are damaged. These details do not alter the work's four-part structure, but they remind us of the physical aspects of working with a book. If a researcher draws a conclusion from a single page of a digital copy, the document's condition and any potentially missing passage matter. The overall title in the catalogue allows the publication's intended scope to be established with confidence; determining the content of a disputed passage requires examining the surviving leaf itself and, if necessary, another copy.

How does the same part of Moscow change between the two schemes?

Kitay-Gorod makes the distinction clear without an abstract table: Ruban names ‘Kitay’ in his definition of the first police district, alongside the Kremlin and Bely Gorod. The administrative division cuts across familiar historical areas. In Maksimovich's work, Kitay-Gorod is one of four distinct major districts around which the entire publication is organised. In the first case, the name helps clarify the boundary of an administrative unit; in the second, the name itself determines the scope and sequence of the account.

This distinction affects where readers begin. If they want to understand what is listed within a particular police district, they open the corresponding section in Ruban and work through the categories of sites. If their interest is in Kitay-Gorod as a historical area, Maksimovich's structure directs them straight to it. This describes how the organisation of the two books might make them useful; it is an editorial inference from their structure, rather than evidence of how every eighteenth-century reader actually used them.

Maksimovich's four areas do not amount to four brief stops. The Kremlin and Kitay-Gorod, Bely Gorod and Zemlyanoy Gorod cover large territories and contain buildings from different periods. A historical name provides a framework, but within it the author still has to select monuments and decide the order in which to describe them. Ruban faces the opposite difficulty: there are many entries, but the connections between them lie outside the main organisational scheme.

What does the example of Ivanovskaya Gorka reveal about the city's boundaries?

Ivanovskaya Gorka allows a historical area and an administrative grid to be compared within the same territory. An expert assessment report on a house in Podkopayevsky Lane places the plot within Bely Gorod and identifies it as belonging to the Myasnitskaya police district in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Comparing these designations requires keeping the different periods in mind: the documents do not establish the boundaries of Ruban's grid.

The report gives the house's address as 2/6 Podkopayevsky Lane, Building 1, and places it within the block bounded by Khokhlovsky, Podkopayevsky, Maly Ivanovsky and Podkolokolny Lanes. Here, the broad historical designation ‘Bely Gorod’ can be related to a specific property that experts studied using plans and residential registers. The reference to the police district in the report concerns the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: it cannot be used to reconstruct the administrative boundary of 1775 in Ruban's description.

The historical and cultural expert assessment report states that the residential registers of the Myasnitskaya district for 1809–1811 list the property as belonging to the merchant Sergei Fyodorovich Klepeshnikov. At that time, the plot contained wooden residential buildings and outbuildings; these were destroyed in the fire of 1812. A plan dated 1836 marks proposed new buildings. The masonry house at the corner of Podkopayevsky and Khokhlovsky Lanes was completed by December 1837 and extended in 1856. The main body of the present building dates from 1837. Following the extension, the façade along Khokhlovsky Lane grew from seven to nine window bays.

The historical name ‘Bely Gorod’ continues to apply to this location through all these changes, while the particular house, owner and administrative record belong to different periods. If a modern reader connects this area in a book from the 1790s with the present façade in Khokhlovsky Lane, they must first check the building's date. This example does not claim that Maksimovich described this particular property: it shows why a district's organisational framework helps formulate a question but cannot replace the history of a site after the 1790s.

Was Maksimovich's guidebook a response to Ruban?

The available verified sources allow us to speak confidently of different organisational principles, but not of a direct debate between the authors. The Museum of Moscow compares the two publications as stages in the development of the genre; bibliographic records confirm their dates, titles and contents. Claiming that Maksimovich deliberately challenged Ruban or corrected his book would require direct evidence: a preface, a letter, a review or some other reference by the author to his predecessor. The materials consulted provide no such confirmation.

The books are separated by roughly a decade, but chronology alone does not prove borrowing. The historical names of the Kremlin, Kitay-Gorod, Bely Gorod and Zemlyanoy Gorod existed independently of both compilers; the administrative districts were not Ruban's invention either. Each author chose from the existing ways of describing the capital the one best suited to his purpose. The consequences of those choices can be compared without assuming a personal dispute.

The same caution is needed when discussing success with readers. The Museum of Moscow considers Maksimovich's four-part structure effective and notes that many later authors followed it. This is an observation about the subsequent history of the genre, rather than a tally of sales of the two books or evidence of every Muscovite's preferences in the 1790s. It demonstrates the lasting appeal of the approach without diminishing the value of Ruban's work as a reference book.

What changed in Moscow guidebooks after these publications?

As early as 1793, readers also had access to another type of book about Moscow. The Presidential Library catalogue describes the ‘Moscow Directory’, with an alphabetical list of house owners, details of the district, block, number, parish, street or lane, and an accompanying coloured map. The first volume ran to 413 pages; the map of the capital was printed on a separate sheet. Its purpose was to locate addresses: to find a particular house by its owner's name and immediately link the entry to a district of the city.

The appearance of these publications in 1792–1793 is particularly important for our comparison. In the same years, readers were offered both Maksimovich's historical divisions and an address directory in which the police district remained an essential search field. Ruban's scheme was therefore not simply an ‘old’ one that everyone subsequently discarded. Different ways of dividing Moscow continued to coexist because the questions ‘Where is the house located?’ and ‘What is the history of this area?’ call for different answers.

Why can Ruban's fourteen districts not be located on the map of 1793?

The ‘Moscow Directory’ provides a concrete way to check how the administrative grid changed. A published reprint of its preface states that the accompanying coloured map is divided into twenty districts, distinguished by colours and numbers. Ruban used an administrative grid of fourteen districts. The historians I. M. Drobyshevskaya and B. N. Tikhomirov date Moscow's division into twenty districts to the period 1782–1797. Ruban's book appeared in 1782, but a variant of its title page dates the collection of information to 1775. Consequently, a district number in his book cannot automatically be transferred to the address directory of 1793. Establishing a correspondence would require a map from the relevant period and a check of the boundaries, rather than simply matching numbers or names.

The 1793 directory was also organised in a more complex way than the phrase ‘alphabetical list of owners’ might suggest. According to the reprinted preface, surnames were arranged alphabetically separately within each district. The map helped readers first identify the relevant section by a major street; they then needed only to turn to the appropriate letter of the alphabet. If a reader knew the surname but not the area, there was no promise of a single search across the whole book: several districts would have to be checked. This was a limitation of the printed reference tool, rather than a consequence of inattention.

This organisation shows that administrative divisions served different purposes in related genres. Ruban used the district to group a list of sites; the address directory linked it to the owner's surname, block, number, parish, street or lane, and a colour on the map. Maksimovich, by contrast, made large historical areas the basis of his account of monuments. Readers in the 1790s had no single universal grid that could be applied to any book about Moscow without losing something. They first had to understand the particular purpose of each publication.

The directory's preface contains another qualification important to anyone studying historical sources: the compilers made provision for a separate account of changes in ownership during printing and promised future supplements. This was the publisher's own acknowledgement that address information could change. Even when a house and its owner appear in the same volume, the entry reflects the time when the directory was compiled or revised; it does not certify ownership on every day of 1793. This makes the comparison with Ruban more precise: in both books, the publication date may differ from the date of the urban conditions recorded, but the address directory explicitly attempted to account for changes as they occurred.

The 1793 edition already included an overview map. According to the Museum of Moscow, the 1796 Historical and Topographical Description of Moscow, the Ancient Capital, published by T. A. Polezhayev, contained twenty coloured engraved plans of the city's districts. The directory's single overview sheet and Polezhayev's series of engravings offered readers different levels of detail when relating the text to the actual places. This was another way of organising information, alongside historical chapters and address lookups.

According to the Museum of Moscow's overview, small guidebooks for visitors appeared in the mid-19th century, including M. P. Zakharov's books of 1856 and All Moscow in the Palm of Your Hand of 1857. These pocket editions served as practical guides. This change in format shows how cautiously we should apply today's expectations of itineraries and travel advice to books published in 1782 and 1792–1793.

How can we read these books today without confusing the map with history?

First, we should distinguish between the date the information was recorded, the year of publication and the subsequent history of the place. This is particularly important for Ruban: one version of the title page gives 1775 as the year the material was collected, while the publication is dated 1782. For Maksimovich, we should remember that the four parts appeared in 1792–1793. The mere mention of a building, road or institution in either work tells us nothing about its condition in the 21st century.

Next, it is useful to identify the purpose of an entry. Ruban's counts of markets or properties form part of a survey of the urban environment. Maksimovich's description of a monastery or another historic monument aims to provide a historical account of the site. The former should be assessed as statistical evidence of its time; the latter as an author's interpretation of sources and the ideas of the period. Neither text should be treated as a definitive reference for the city's present-day topography.

When checking a particular location, it is useful to work systematically, noting both the district name and the type of source. If you encounter a police district in Ruban, first establish which survey the entry belongs to, then find the corresponding map of that administrative layout. If a site is described by Maksimovich, distinguish its location within a historical area from the dates and biographies that the author draws from inscriptions and documents. The 1793 address directory may help identify the owner and city block, but its twenty-district scheme cannot be used to interpret Ruban's numbers without cross-checking. This approach preserves the value of all three books without treating them as interchangeable.

The chapter structure shaped the way readers understood the city. Ruban compiled information about Moscow within a framework of police districts; Maksimovich arranged descriptions of antiquities and notable sights by historical district. One approach preserved the details of the survey, while the other connected monuments with the capital's larger areas. Comparing the books' structures reveals the value of both methods without assuming a personal dispute between the authors.

You can see a section of the Bely Gorod wall on the tour “The Soul of Moscow”: it runs from Slavyanskaya Square through Ivanovskaya Gorka to Khokhlovka. To discuss old books and the history of this area on a separate walk, you can choose a Moscow guide and agree on a theme.

Sources

1. Museum of Moscow: ‘A Guide for the Curious…’ Guidebooks from the Museum’s Collection
2. National Electronic Library: Vasily Ruban, ‘A Description of the Imperial Capital City of Moscow’ (1782)
3. Presidential Library: Lev Maksimovich, ‘A Guide to Moscow’s Antiquities and Notable Sights’, Part 1
4. Bibliokhronika: ‘A Description of Moscow (1782)’
5. Moscow City Portal: Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report on a House in Podkopayevsky Lane
6. S. S. Ilizarov. ‘Moscow in the Science and Culture of Eighteenth-Century Russia’: Abstract of a Doctoral Dissertation, 2004
7. Presidential Library: ‘Moscow Directory’, Part 1 (1793)
8. ‘Moscow Directory’ (1793): reprint of the preface and description of the edition
9. I. M. Drobyshevskaya, B. N. Tikhomirov: dating Moscow’s twenty police districts
10. G. P. Dolzhenko, ‘The History of Tourism in Pre-Revolutionary Russia and the USSR’ (1988)
11. Mos Radius: description of the ‘Soul of Moscow’ route