Paul Goldschmidt's Dictionary of Period Russian Names - List of Cities

Copyright (c) 1996 Paul Goldschmidt. Used by permission.

Most of the towns listed here are dated to be post-10th century. There are reasons for this, as Tikhomirov (1956: 12) explains: "The mist enveloping the history of 8th century Rus because of the total absence of written sources, lifts in the 9th and 10th centuries when the testimony of the chronicles comes to our aid. Nevertheless, the number of ancient Rus cities cannot be established with any certitude even for that period, because our chief source of information, the chronicle, contains only scattered and vague data on the subject." Within a few years, however, the number of towns had grown dramatically and by 1237 there were nearly 300 towns known to exist (Chew, 1967: 10).

In creating this section I have faced two problems. First of all, I have had some difficulty in deciding exactly where the geographical boundaries of "Russia" should be. Certainly, it makes sense to include Ukrainian and Lithuanian towns, but what about eastern Poland? Just how far west should I go? The second problem is related: I have tried to wrestle with the fact that the spellings (and even the names themselves) have changed over the years. Particularly recently, the difference between the Russian spellings of cities in the non-Russian areas of the former USSR/Russian Empire and the spellings used by the indigenous inhabitants have become a hotly contested issue. For the purposes of this dictionary, I have preferred the Russian spelling to that of the Belorussian, Ukrainian, and the like, but I have not always been consistent.

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