Modern American historians study many aspects of the history of the Russian city during the feudal period. Most of all, their attention is drawn to such aspects of urban life in Russia as the urban system, city management, urban autonomy, the state and the city, urban reforms, the place of the city in the socio-political structure of society, the city and the nature of Russian society, the urban bourgeoisie, and the mentality of citizens. As a rule, the study of a city takes place in a comparative historical context, from the point of view of finding out what is common and special in the history of a Russian and Western European city, in order to get answers to the following questions: how much and in what ways was the Russian city similar to the Western European one and how much and in what aspects did it differ from the latter? In turn, the answers to these questions are considered in the context of fundamental problems about the ways of development of Russia and the West, about the causes and destinies of the Russian revolutions of the early XX century. Although many of the ideas prevailing in American Slavic studies are derived from Russian liberal-bourgeois historiography, it would be wrong to think that at present all American authors remain epigones of our pre-revolutionary historians. Modern American Russianists develop their own approaches, sometimes apply an original research methodology, and use a different conceptual framework for analysis than before. These new trends, which are also reflected in urban studies, have not yet attracted the attention of Soviet researchers .1 However, they deserve serious analysis for two reasons. First, the most common ideas in American urban studies are directed against Marxist historiography, and historians who share them, willingly or unwittingly pursue political goals - to prove the unacceptability of the Soviet model of development for the rest of the world, primarily for the West, due to the alleged dissimilarity of ... Read more