Catherine issues the Charter to the Towns on 21 April 1785, organizing urban governance and defining the rights of city dwellers.
Issued alongside the Charter to the Nobility on 21 April 1785, the Charter to the Towns established a formal structure for urban self-governance across the Russian Empire, defining categories of urban residents and granting certain rights of local administration to town councils and merchant guilds. It organized city dwellers into six distinct categories based on property, occupation, and social status, each with specified rights and obligations.
This charter reflected Catherine's engagement with Enlightenment ideas about rational administrative structure and her broader effort to modernize Russia's institutions along European lines, following models she had studied from Western administrative theory. It aimed to stimulate urban economic development and civic organization by giving merchants and townspeople a defined legal identity and limited self-governing institutions, such as town dumas (councils).
Though the practical impact of the Charter to the Towns was constrained by Russia's overwhelmingly rural and autocratic character — genuine municipal self-government remained limited compared to Western Europe — the charter nonetheless represented a significant, if modest, step toward institutionalized urban civil society in Russia. Together with the Charter to the Nobility, it formed a cornerstone of Catherine's project to create a more legally structured, estate-based society, part of her broader legacy of administrative and legal reform that shaped Russian governance well into the following century.