Bread upon the Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811 [1 ed.] 9780822978718, 9780822944287

Citation preview

BREAD UPON THE WATERS

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

Jonathan Harris, Editor

BREAD UPON THE WATERS

R

The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811 ROBERT E. JON ES

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2013, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Robert E., 1942– author. Bread upon the waters : the St. Petersburg grain trade and the Russian economy, 1703–1811 / Robert E. Jones. pages ; cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies) ISBN 978-0-8229-4428-7 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. Grain trade—Russia (Federation)—Saint Petersburg—History—18th century. 2. Grain trade—Russia (Federation)—Saint Petersburg—History—19th century. 3. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—Commerce—History—18th century. 4. Saint Petersburg (Russia)— Commerce—History—18th century. 5. Russia—Economic conditions—18th century. 6. Russia—Economic conditions—19th century. I. Title. II. Series: Series in Russian and East European studies. HD9045.R83S25 2013 381’.413109472109033—dc23 2013007083

CONTENTS

R Preface

vii

Note on Usage

xi

Units of Weight and Measure Introduction

xii

1

Chapter 1. Founding and Feeding an Imperial City Chapter 2. Selling Flour in St. Petersburg Chapter 3. Sources of Supply

59

Chapter 4. Production

81

Chapter 5. Commerce

111

Chapter 6. Transportation Chapter 7. Exports

147 180

Chapter 8. Resolution Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

220 227 271 291

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9

PREFACE

R T his book has been a long time in the making. It began as a continuation of my published research on the provinces of northeastern Russia that, while serving as a natural barrier, also connected St. Petersburg with the rest of a vast empire that extended to the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to know how effectively laws, directives, and initiatives were transmitted from the capital to officials and subjects in the provinces and how information, taxes, and goods from the provinces reached Russia’s new capital and seaport. I presented papers and published articles on some of those topics, but my discovery that more than half the cargo shipped from the interior provinces to St. Petersburg consisted of grain and flour aroused my curiosity and moved that topic to the forefront of my attention. Were those cereals meant for export or consumption? What was drawing grain and flour to St. Petersburg, state authority or market forces? Who bought it? Who sold it? Where did it come from? How was it moved from one place to another over distances of hundreds and possibly even more than a thousand kilometers? Answering those questions and their many offshoots took me more than two decades, for my efforts to answer some questions provoked new questions that led me ever deeper into the workings of eighteenth-century Russia’s economy, government, and society. I found that I had to educate myself about nutrition, business law, military procurement, agriculture, hydroengineering, and several other subjects about which I originally knew very little. My research provided me with ample material to present at scholarly conferences and to publish in journals and collective volumes, and at that stage in my career I felt no pressure to publish a book prematurely in order to gain tenure or promotion. Those circumstances allowed me to take the time I needed to pursue my interests and follow them down the lengthening trail of questions and answers, picking up facts, clues, hints, and glimpses as I went. Family and personal concerns, medical problems, and service as the secretary of the faculty senate at my university and as the chair of my department vii

often diverted my attention and kept me from returning to Russia to continue my research. Even so, between 1985 and 2003 I made seven substantial research trips to the Soviet Union and the Russian Republic, during which I worked in archives and libraries, as well as some shorter ones, when I visited key sites and important museums. The research I completed there forms the core of this book and supplies much of its value. Personal memoirs, institutional histories, and antiquarian accounts supplemented and clarified my archival findings, and important secondary works based on archival sources (e.g., Mironov’s work on grain prices), as well as books by Rubinshtein, Confino, and Milov on agriculture, proved indispensable. From those many sources I acquired an understanding of the relevant activities of government officials, noble landowners, peasant farmers, and grain merchants from which I have tried to construct a portrait of eighteenth-century Russia’s government, economy, and society from a novel and, I believe, revealing perspective. My greatest frustration has been my failure to uncover any source that reveals consumers’ reactions to fluctuations in the price of their daily bread. Many people and institutions helped me with this work, and I am pleased to acknowledge their contributions. The International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) and the Research Council of the University of Massachusetts– Amherst provided funds for several of my research trips to the Soviet Union and the Russian Republic. Professors Boris Mironov and Oleg Omel’chenko directed me to important archival sources, and Professors Ruslan Skrynnikov and L. V. Milov helped me gain access to them. I am grateful to them and to the archivists at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA), in Moscow, especially Svetlana Romanovna Dolgova, who helped me with this project as she has with others going back many years. I also want to thank the archivists at the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) and the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences (SPIRI. RAN) in St. Petersburg for their efficient assistance. On the recommendation of Ruslan Skrynnikov, Pavel Sedov finished reading one of the archival collections in SPIRI. RAN that I did not have time to complete myself and provided me with meticulous notes on it. Discussions with Professors David Griffiths and George Munro at professional conferences helped me put my findings in the proper context and work out their implications. Extensive criticisms and suggestions for improvement from Professor Alexander Martin contributed to the final revision of the manuscript. Along that same line, I am also grateful to the editors at the University of Pittsburgh Press for their help in preparing my manuscript for publication. The professional cartographer Kate Blackmer deserves special recognition for creating the excellent maps that do so much to clarify the text. On a more personal level I also want to acknowledge the help and hospitality I received from my nonhistorian friends in St. Petersburg and Moscow: Iuri

viii

preface

Ivanov and his wife, Larissa; Liudmila Stychishina and her husband, Volodia; Sergei Tartakovskii and his wife, Natasha; Liubov Panova and her husband, Boris; Liudmila Vasileva; Anya Lavetskaia; and Zoya Samoilova. I thank them for taking me to historical sites and cultural events; for locating and purchasing books I needed for my work; for feeding and entertaining me; and for helping me get things done in circumstances that were often difficult. They made my stay in those cities a genuine pleasure. Above all, I want to thank my wife, Maxine, and my children, Kate and Ben, for putting up with my many absences, both physical and mental, while I was working on this book.

preface

ix

NOTE ON USAGE

R

Since this book is written in English, all quotations and passages from Russian are given in translation. Most of the translations are my own, but in a few cases I have used available published translations. In the text I have transliterated Russian names and words according to the Library of Congress system with a few modifications. Proper names that are well known in English are given in English, for example Peter, not Petr; Catherine, not Ekaterina; and Archangel, not Arkhangel’sk. Second, final soft signs in proper names have been omitted, for example, Tver, not Tver’. For any Russian-language term that lacks an exact English equivalent, I have transliterated the term when first used and given the singular or plural as appropriate. From then on I have Anglicized the term, omitted any final soft sign, written it without italics, and formed its plural in accordance with English practice, for example, first kul’ (pl. kuli) and then kul and kuls. In the notes and bibliography I have transliterated Russian into English according to the Library of Congress system without modification. All dates are given in accordance with the Julian calendar used in Russia throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Julian calendar lagged eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century and twelve days behind it in the nineteenth.

xi

UNITS OF WEIGHT AND MEASURE

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Grain Chetverik: A unit of volume or dry measure equal to 26.24 liters. Chetvert’: A unit of volume or dry measure nominally equal to 210 liters. One chetvert of grain was nominally composed of eight chetveriks, but in practice a chetvert of rye normally comprised nine chetveriks, and a chetvert of wheat comprised ten chetveriks. Because a chetvert of grain was a measure of volume, its weight was imprecise and variable. Estimates of its weight range from 131 kilograms to 158 kilograms. One chetvert of rye grain comprising nine chetveriks was assumed to yield one kul of rye flour, and indeed officials normally equated one chetvert of rye grain with one kul of rye flour. To yield a kul of flour, with a net weight of 142.42 kilograms, a chetvert of rye grain would have weighed approximately 147.42 kilograms, or 324.32 U.S. pounds. That is the equivalent used throughout this book. Flour Pud: a unit of weight, one pud of flour or anything else equals 16.38 kilograms, or 36.0 U.S. pounds. Chetverik: not to be confused with a chetverik of grain, one chetverik of flour weighed 15.35 kilograms, or 33.78 U.S. pounds. Chetvert’: not to be confused with a chetvert of grain, one chevert of flour weighed 7.5 puds, equal to 122.85 kilograms, or 270.27 U.S. pounds. Kul’: a kul, the unit of rye flour commonly used in shipping, weighed nine puds, or 147.42 kilograms, but that included the weight of the bast container, which weighed approximately 5 kilograms, or 10.8 U.S. pounds when new. Thus one kul would have contained 142.42 kilograms, or 313.32 U. S. pounds of flour. Meshok: high-quality flour was traded and shipped in a woven bag called meshok. Each meshok weighed five puds (81.9 kilograms, or 180 U.S. pounds). xii

BREAD UPON THE WATERS

INTRODUCTION

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Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Ecclesiastes 11:1

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 he primary subject of this book is the provisioning of eighteenthcentury St. Petersburg, a new and rapidly growing city created by fiat in an infertile region on the periphery of the Russian Empire. The book begins with Peter the Great’s founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 and his first efforts to provide its inhabitants with food at prices they could afford. It follows succeeding governments’ efforts to achieve that same goal, and it ends in the early nineteenth century, when Peter I’s successors finally produced a longlasting but by no means permanent solution to the problem. Within that period of slightly more than a century, food shortages—in the 1720s and again in the mid-1780s—forced the imperial government to take extraordinary measures to ward off starvation and possible rebellion, but even in more orderly times, supplying Russia’s capital with cereals constituted what Russia’s minister of internal affairs described to Emperor Alexander I in 1808 as “a special subject of concern and worry for the government.” Concern with the supply and distribution of cereals was certainly not unique to St. Petersburg or the Russian Empire. Before the twentieth century, governments accorded grain the importance that governments in the present age give to oil and gas. Providing grain or at least making sure that it was available and 1

affordable was also seen as a basic component of sovereignty. Rulers who could provide their subjects with the daily bread for which they prayed were acting as God’s agents on earth; those who could not, such as Tsar Boris Godunov, could face doubt about their right to rule or, in China, be accused of having lost the “mandate of Heaven.” Governments often went to great lengths to meet their subjects’ needs and expectations. States that could not produce enough grain for themselves had to find accessible sources and create dependable lines of supply, and most endeavored to regulate the availability and price of cereals in their capitals and major cities. As one might expect, the longest and most continuous record of grain procurement and provisioning belongs to imperial China, which began moving grain from the delta of the Yangtze River to the grain-deficient north as early as the sixth century B.C.E. By the sixth century C.E., it had completed the Grand Canal, a 1,776-kilometer waterway to bring grain from the Yangtze Delta to Beijing. Ancient Athens depended on a steady supply of grain from the steppe north of the Black Sea and from Egypt, and during the Peloponnesian War (432– 404 B.C.E.) Athens invaded Sicily to cut off the flow of grain from that island to the city’s enemies. Imperial Rome depended on a steady supply of grain from Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa to feed and placate its capital city’s population. The Byzantine Empire and its Ottoman successor in Constantinople directed and controlled the provisioning of that city with supply zones, price controls, and, when necessary, requisitioning. The much smaller cities of medieval Europe organized their own grain markets to stabilize availability and affordability, and the city-states of medieval and renaissance Italy bought grain with public money at harvest time and maintained public granaries that sold and distributed grain when supplies ran short. The best example from eighteenth-century Europe—if only because it has been the most thoroughly researched—is prerevolutionary France, whose government developed an elaborate system for provisioning Paris and other cities. The government of Sweden bought grain in Estland and Lifland to ensure the provisioning of Stockholm, and when it lost those two provinces to Russia in 1721, it preserved the right to continue buying grain there. While most European countries limited their efforts to supplying their capital cites, the government of seventeenth-century China created a network of granaries to stabilize the grain market throughout the empire.1 France presents the outstanding example of what could happen to a sovereign who failed to satisfy his or her subjects’ demands for bread. In the autumn of 1789, in response to rapidly rising prices and fear of famine, the women of Paris marched out to Versailles, demanding bread; once there, they forced King Louis XVI to return with them to Paris as a virtual prisoner. Nothing of that sort occurred in St. Petersburg during the crisis of the mid-1780s, but in February 1917 a series of bread riots in that city, by then renamed Petrograd, ignited the revolution that would overthrow Tsar Nicholas II and end the Russian 2

introduction

monarchy. Eight months later Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in that same city promising—along with peace for Russia and land for the peasants—bread for the city’s workers.2 In some countries the interests of urban consumers failed to outweigh the interests of producers. The government of the United Kingdom responded to its landowners’ interests by restricting the importation of grain even though that meant higher food prices for urban consumers. Facing relatively few city dwellers and a powerful landowning nobility, the government of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania allowed and encouraged the export of cereals and became the largest supplier of grain to other European countries, especially the Netherlands. Whatever the goal, the intention to influence if not control the movement and price of cereals was common to all the states of Europe. Their specific policies and regulations, however, differed according to the peculiarities of their circumstances. For St. Petersburg, the fundamental problem, as a committee of statesmen informed Empress Catherine II in 1786, involved access; “this capital,” they argued, “lying almost on the edge of the empire and unable to rely on the districts that surround it, . . . must supply itself with cereals brought here by water annually at great expense.” The southern provinces of European Russia could, as one statesman put it, produce enough grain to “feed the world,” but want of markets often kept grain prices in many of those same provinces so low that they discouraged production. Russia’s most fertile provinces lay hundreds and in some cases more than a thousand kilometers away from its major cities; from the grain-deficient provinces of the north; and, for most of the eighteenth century, from Russia’s only seaports. Over such great distances, water transport through rivers and canals offered the only practical means of delivering surplus grain to market. In a sense, those waterways were to grain what pipelines are to oil and gas but with one crucial difference: pipelines are located and built deliberately to connect production to consumption, whereas rivers run where they will, and humans have to use them as best as they can. Russia’s waterways made transporting grain to St. Petersburg possible, but they made it difficult, unreliable, and expensive as well. Holding down prices for consumers while encouraging production and allowing exports thus presented a conundrum for the government, which wanted to do all three. The second and larger subject of this book is the economy and society of eighteenth-century Russia as revealed by the workings of the grain trade. Like the Russian government, I came to understand that an initial interest in the provisioning of St. Petersburg inevitably leads to an investigation of the production, processing, and transport of grain and the actions and motives of the people involved in those activities. As presented in this book, the multifaceted operations of the grain trade provide a new and revealing view of eighteenth-century Russia, for as the Commission on Commerce told the Empress Catherine II in introduction

3

1779, “The grain trade exceeds all other trades in importance.” Indeed, there was hardly anyone in eighteenth-century Russia who was not involved in the grain trade in some way, whether as a producer, processor, intermediary, or consumer. The availability and price of grain affected the budgets and calculations of the government, the army, landowners, peasants, manufacturers, and merchants and motivated many of their actions and decisions. This is also a book about money and markets. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, monetary exchange replaced compulsory delivery and payment in kind as the prime mover of grain from person to person and place to place. As Carol Stevens has shown, the army moved away from levying assessments and taxes in grain in the late seventeenth century. It began collecting taxes in cash and then using that cash to purchase grain where and when it was needed, often from private contractors.3 In the 1720s Peter I made a similar switch in the procurement of grain for St. Petersburg. Over time, more and more nobles who resided in Moscow or St. Petersburg or in some official posting stopped feeding themselves and their households with grain from their own estates. They began selling the grain from their estates locally or regionally and then purchasing bread and flour where they resided. An increasing number of nobles also converted the labor obligations of their serfs to payments in cash, which they could more easily convert into the things they needed and wanted. The monetization of obligations went hand-in-hand with the expansion of the market economy and an intensified interest in acquiring money. That interest moved grain from the fields and threshing floors of rural Russia through rivers and canals on boats built, hauled, and worked by many thousands of peasants and on to the markets and shops of St. Petersburg and sometimes even to those of Hamburg and Amsterdam. In contrast to Muscovite Russia and Soviet Russia, imperial Russia not only tolerated private enterprise but encouraged and supported it. The government improved and tried to manage the waterways that brought grain and other goods to St. Petersburg. It provided grain merchants with capital by paying in advance for flour to be delivered later, and it attempted unsuccessfully to open banks that would lend money to merchants. It tried to issue money in forms that would best serve merchant purposes, and it created credit instruments that could be used in place of money. In enacting and enforcing commercial laws, the government sought advice from merchants and responded to their petitions, though not always as quickly or as fully as the merchants wanted. It also enhanced their social status and tried to improve their commercial practices. Otherwise it left the grain trade and other forms of commerce to the private individuals who practiced them. Accepting the responsibility for provisioning St. Petersburg, the government acted to subsidize and facilitate the process: on the one hand, it created a safety net in the form of a public granary, and it intervened in emergencies; on the other, it also allocated a large role to private enterprise and, despite a 4

introduction

persistent distrust of “speculators” and “profiteers,” depended heavily on market forces and the profit motive to provide St. Petersburg with food. With its focus on money, economics, and geography, this book is obviously not a product of any of the recent “turns” in the writing of Russian history, but neither is it unaware of them or opposed to them. While the subjects that interest me most might seem old-fashioned in the context of American, British, or French historiography, where they have been researched, analyzed, and debated in depth, historians of imperial Russia, especially those in Russia, are still working to fill in many blank spots in that nation’s history on subjects such as politics, law, business, and so on, which have been either neglected or distorted through the prism of a discredited ideology.4 The need and desire for money is a basic motivator of human behavior that should not be crowded out by concerns with identity, culture, discourse, and other approaches to understanding history. Not at the end of the day but at its very beginning, Russian peasants had to find ways to meet their obligations to their masters, pay their taxes, and feed their families; noble landowners had to preserve and advance their place in society; and the government had to pay the army, reward its servitors and adherents, and fund its many activities. All those fundamental concerns involved exploiting resources and raising money, and all shaped the way people lived and behaved. Thus, while Willard Sunderland has presented Russia’s conquest and settlement of the forested steppe as an example of imperialism, I present it as a response to demographic growth and the expansion of the grain market into an area more fertile and productive than the longer-settled regions of northern and central Russia.5 While David Ransel has used the diary/memoir of the eighteenth-century grain merchant Ivan Tolchenov “to bring to life an individual as part of a community and the larger world that impinges upon it,” I use it to explain how a grain merchant conducted his business: buying, selling, processing, transporting, using credit, employing agents, and so on.6 Our approaches do not conflict; they are complementary, with each telling a significant and previously unknown side of the story. Ester Kingston-Mann has shown that landlords and government officials who sought to control and reform peasant behavior often took up misguided and unsuccessful efforts, but I will argue that some such efforts fared rather better and that while paternalism and a psychological need to control peasants may sometimes have influenced landlords and estate managers, the desire to increase income was fundamental.7 The same considerations also operated at the highest level. Catherine II was an enthusiastic admirer of ancient Greece and Hellenism, and her personal relations with Gregory Potemkin sometimes clouded her judgment of his actions. But, as I will show in chapter 8, Catherine clearly understood the economic gains that would come from Potemkin’s policies in the south and from the new seaports with their Greek-sounding names once they began to export grain and bring in money from abroad. introduction

5

Although this book emphasizes economic pursuits and economic motives, it also recognizes the limitations of that approach for understanding the behavior of eighteenth-century Russians. The need and desire to make money are common to many countries and many ages, but they must be placed in the context of specific cultures, ideologies, physical realities, and other influences that motivate and circumscribe individuals, societies, and governments. For example, David Ransel has explained how the grain merchant Tolchenov neglected his moneymaking activities to pursue his social and intellectual ambitions. Alexander Chayanov in the 1920s and Karl Polanyi in the 1940s theorized that peasants often prefer leisure and status-enhancing expenditures to earning and saving even though they know they will be the poorer for it.8 Rulers exhibited the same mixture of motives. In chapter 1 I will argue that Peter the Great’s decision to seize the site for St. Petersburg and create a seaport there demonstrated a brilliant understanding of economics, geography, and commerce, but his decision to make that seaport a major city and the capital of the Russian Empire defied economic logic and subordinated it to ideology and personal glory. Finally, eighteenth-century Russians perceived grain shortages and rising prices through their social stereotypes, so that their first instinct was to attribute them to human failings and to blame lazy peasants, irresponsible landlords, or conniving merchants rather than natural causes or the workings of the market. Historians have been right to reject economic determinism and explore other sources of human behavior, but those other sources in turn need to be grounded in an economic context. Why did Peter create St. Petersburg where he did rather than on some other site? Why did Catherine and Potemkin focus so much attention and effort on the Black Sea and the lands adjacent to it? Why did Russians settle the forested steppe? What forms of compulsion made Russian peasants forgo leisure to earn money? How did the nobility respond to the social and cultural pressures that accompanied westernization? None of those questions can be answered adequately in the absence of economic considerations, and all of them can be illuminated by this study of the grain trade. There is no other book devoted to the grain trade in eighteenth-century Russia even though it was the major commercial pursuit of the time and place, the employer of hundreds of thousands, and a subject of great concern to the millions who depended on it. The only substantive works on the provisioning of St. Petersburg are three brief articles, one each by George Munro and L. N. Semenova focusing on the food crisis of 1786–1787 and one by A. L. Shapiro on St. Petersburg’s importance as a consumer of grain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.9 David Ransel’s biography of Ivan Tolchenov says more about buying, selling, and transporting grain and flour than does any other work, even though that is not its primary concern. Boris Mironov’s several works on the grain market, grain prices, and related subjects are statistical compilations of production and prices that do not deal with the operations of the grain trade and, in my 6

introduction

judgment, make unwarranted assumptions about them.10 In chapter 7 I dispute a number of Mironov’s assertions and conclusions, but there and elsewhere I make extensive use of his data. Even the very detailed official history of St. Petersburg published in 1955 has remarkably little to say about the city’s food supply other than listing and describing the places where food was bought and sold.11 Arcadius Kahan’s history of the eighteenth-century Russian economy contains one very short chapter on internal trade and says nothing specific about the grain trade, the most important and omnipresent branch of commerce.12 Because Kahan’s book relies heavily on secondary works published in the Soviet Union, it reflects their authors’ shared research agenda, which emphasized industrial enterprises and neglected commerce and merchants. There are, however, a number of important works on subjects inseparable from the grain trade that I have found indispensable in writing this book. The impressive research and detailed exposition in A. L. Milov’s book on peasant agriculture supplements and updates the earlier and equally impressive books on that subject by N. L. Rubinshtein and Michael Confino. E. G. Istomina’s publications provide a wealth of information on rivers, canals, and water transport, including the transport of grain. The same is true of A. I. Iukht’s writings on Russian coinage and currency. Authoritative works on their own subjects, they have broadened and deepened my exposition of the grain trade.13 This book is organized as the investigation of a problem. Chapters 1 and 8 establish the time frame within which the problem was created and resolved. The intervening chapters take up the various aspects and ramifications of the problem in the period between its creation and its resolution. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction of its significance and its relationship to the work as a whole. Then the narrative begins with a specific event that illustrates or sets up the topic to be explored and explained within the established time frame. In general, each individual chapter proceeds chronologically, showing how its specific subject— the sale of bread and flour in St. Petersburg; the sources of St. Petersburg’s grain supply; the growing of rye, wheat, and other grains in different regions of European Russia; the sale, resale, and processing of grain; the transport of grain from distant villages to St. Petersburg; and the export of Russian grain—evolved over the course of the eighteenth century. The final chapter sums up and evaluates those changes; it explains what they meant for Russia and how they made the Russian Empire of 1811, on the eve of Napoléon’s invasion, different from the Muscovite realm of 1700. The conclusion argues that this difference broke the often-alleged continuity between pre-Petrine Russian and the Soviet Union and that late eighteenth-century Russia was, as Catherine II asserted in 1767, “a European state.”

introduction

7

CHAPTER 1

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Founding and Feeding an Imperial City

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he creation of St. Petersburg as a seaport, capital, and metropolis marks a major turning point in Russian history. It proclaimed Tsar Peter I’s break with Muscovite Russia and ushered in the new, imperial period of Russian history, which would last until 1917.1 Although St. Petersburg’s importance as a cultural icon, an agent of cultural change, and an economic enterprise forms the subject of countless books and articles in many languages, this chapter addresses two aspects of St. Petersburg’s beginning and rise that have received far less attention: why did Peter create St. Petersburg on an infertile and inhospitable site in the far northwestern corner of his realm, and having done so, how did he arrange to feed the multitude of people he deliberately brought there. A NEW SEAPORT

On October 11, 1702, in the third year of Russia’s war against Sweden, Peter’s army captured the Swedish fort at Noteborg, where the Neva River exits from Lake Ladoga. In recognition of its strategic importance, Peter renamed the captured fort Schlüsselburg (later Shlissel’burg) after the German word for “key” because, as he noted in his journal, “with this key the gates into the enemy’s lands

9

were opened.”2 The following May Peter’s forces captured a smaller fort downstream at Nienschants (Nyenskans), just above the delta where the Neva empties into the Gulf of Finland. With those two victories Peter’s forces brought all seventy-four kilometers of the Neva under Russian control, divided Swedish forces to the north and east in Karelia from those to the south and west in Ingria and Estland, and gave Russia access to the Gulf of Finland. Almost immediately after the capture of Nienschants, Peter began building a new fort downstream on a small island in the Neva River delta. In itself that was a simple, prudent military decision on the part of a commander determined to hold territory he had seized, but Peter had grander ambitions, too. With the declared intention of making “that place great and populous,” Peter proceeded to pour money, manpower, and other resources into the site, turning it into a military base, a port, a commercial center, and the capital of the Russian Empire.3 By the time Peter died, in 1725, St. Petersburg had 40,000 inhabitants and had been set on a path to continued growth that would make it one of the largest cities in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century. Although Peter referred to the site of his new city as a “paradise,” most observers, both in his time and in centuries to follow, disagreed. Except for the small settlement that had grown up around the Swedish fort at Nienschants during the seventeenth century, the site had long remained a wilderness—and for good reasons. It lay in a no-man’s-land between the possessions of Sweden and Russia, on the very fringes of those states. The climate was inhospitable and unhealthy, frigid and overcast in winter and cool and damp in summer. The several branches of the Neva River divided the city into separate quarters, or “sides,” that would not be connected with permanent bridges before the middle of the nineteenth century. The Neva normally froze in November and thawed in April, and whenever ice dams or a strong southwesterly wind resisted its flow, the river would back up over the low-lying delta. A description of St. Petersburg published at the end of the eighteenth century counted 23 inundations between 1721 and 1778, and the historian James Cracraft has counted 269 floods between 1703 and 1986.4 The countryside surrounding the city was equally uninviting. Rocky to the north and swampy to the south, it was incapable of producing in abundance anything useful to mankind other than trees. A large settlement in such a location could neither provide for its own needs locally nor satisfy them by drawing on an established commerce. Counterbalancing its many shortcomings, Peter’s new city offered one decisive advantage: it combined access to the sea on one side with access to the Russian interior on the other. In the particular circumstance of the Great Northern War, that combination allowed Peter to construct a navy from domestic materials and then use it to wrest control of the Gulf of Finland and the eastern Baltic Sea from the Swedes. Once that had been accomplished, St. Petersburg could

10

founding and feeding an imperial city

then become a commercial port from which Russian products could be shipped to the markets of western Europe. Peter carried out those aims sequentially, but the order in which he formulated them is less clear. Perhaps his only goal at first was to build a navy to fight the Swedes, and the goal of selling Russian goods abroad came later, as new prospects arose from military success. In assuming that Peter stumbled onto a policy of enormous commercial value for the future of Russia, however, such an interpretation of events ignores not only Peter’s lifelong interest in commerce and trade routes but also the question of why he attacked Sweden in the first place.5 Did he do so only to achieve his stated aim of recapturing Ingria as a part of his patrimony that had been ceded to Sweden in 1617? But then why did he want Ingria, empty and ostensibly worthless, even at the cost of war at a time when he was already engaged in a costly war against the Ottoman Empire? The greater probability is that Peter went to war against Sweden specifically to acquire a Baltic port through which Russian and Asian goods could enter the world market and that the construction of a navy was only a part of that larger aim. In the negotiations at Preobrazhenskoe in November 1699 that formulated the terms of the anti-Swedish alliance, Peter insisted that Russia should have access to the Baltic Sea and had that point included in the formal alliance agreement as the price of his participation.6 Then, just a few days after the capture of Nienschants, his public bulletins began announcing his intention to bring goods to the Neva River delta from the East Indies, Persia, and China and to create a port that would replace Nienschants and enter the Baltic trade in competition with Narva and Riga.7 A wealth of circumstantial evidence suggests that Peter had long had such a goal had in mind. Well before his personal tour of Europe in 1697, at the age of twenty-five, he had come to understand that the goods Russia produced in abundance, such as timber, tar, hemp, hides, iron, and grain, commanded prices in western Europe far higher than those they attracted at home. Increasing the sale of Russian commodities to foreign consumers, therefore, presented the direct and attainable possibility of enriching Russia, its subjects, and its ruler.8 Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1533–1584) had understood as much when he founded Kholmogory and Archangel in the far north and waged war for twenty-five years in an ultimately futile effort to capture the Baltic ports in Livonia.9 So too had A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, a leading statesman of the 1660s, who had emphasized the importance of Russia’s acquiring ports on the Baltic. Sweden also realized the potential importance of Russian trade through the Baltic and had tried repeatedly to attract Russian exports to Narva and Nienschants, but the Russian government, unwilling to put its trade under the control of a foreign power, had responded by imposing discriminatory duties and other measures to divert Russia’s foreign trade to Archangel.10

founding and feeling an imperial city

11

OTHER SEAPORTS A rchangel

Since its founding in 1584 Archangel had demonstrated the profits to be gained by sending Russian goods abroad, but Archangel’s location also limited the possibility of increasing those profits. Goods from the Russian heartland bound for Archangel could be hauled by cart or sled to Vologda, some 460 kilometers northeast of Moscow, and then carried by boat down the Sukhona and Northern Dvina rivers. Goods from the Urals and the Viatka region could also reach the Northern Dvina through its eastern tributaries. From Archangel, Dutch and English ships carried Russian goods through the White Sea into the Barents Sea and then around Norway’s North Cape to the North Sea and onward to ports across Europe. But Archangel’s location left much to be desired. Ice blocked both the sea route to Europe and the river route from the interior for more than half the year. Even when those routes were open, the dangers and difficulties of moving goods to and from Archangel raised their cost and reduced the volume of Russia’s exports. A Swedish study of Russian trade in the middle of the seventeenth century stressed the fact that for western European shippers, a round trip to Archangel took three times longer than a comparable voyage to ports on the Baltic or the Gulf of Finland.11 Despite its many shortcomings, however, Archangel was still the only port in Russia’s possession when Peter came to power. A zov

When Peter visited Archangel for the first time in 1693–1694, he was fascinated by the sea and the prospects that it opened for Russia, but his subsequent actions suggest that he also gained an understanding of Archangel’s limitations. Much of the rest of his life would be spent trying to acquire seaports that offered better, more direct connections between Russian producers and European consumers. Peter’s first attempt to acquire a better port took him to Azov, an Ottoman fortress near the mouth of the Don River, in the far distant south. Ultimately his efforts to make Azov into a new and better Archangel turned out to be a false start, but by revealing Peter’s objectives and methods, those efforts help to explain his subsequent actions at St. Petersburg. Russia was already at war with the Ottomans when Peter seized the reins of power from his half-sister, Sophia, in 1689. Instead of continuing to attack the Ottoman’s vassal state in the Crimea, as the previous regime had done, Peter directed his forces against the Ottoman fort at Azov near the mouth of the Don River. After failing to capture Azov in 1695, Peter constructed a shipyard (admiralteiskii dvor) at Voronezh on the upper Don, close to abundant sources of timber and the raw materials for naval stores, where foreign technicians, including thirteen master shipbuilders from the Venetian Arsenal, designed and built 12

founding and feeding an imperial city

brigantines, galleys, and men-of-war for use in the second siege of Azov and subsequently for naval action on the Sea of Azov and beyond.12 After conquering Azov in 1696, Peter did what he thought necessary to make Azov the crucial pivot of transportation between the Russian interior and the Mediterranean Basin. To connect Azov with the Volga Basin and its extensive network of rivers, Peter hired foreign engineers, including the Englishman John Perry, to construct a canal between the Volga and the Don. Then he ordered the creation of a canal between tributaries of the Don and the Oka that would allow water transport of goods to Azov from Moscow and the central Russian heartland. Several locks were actually built on the Volga-Don canal before the project was discontinued in 1701, when Peter refocused his attention and his resources on the Baltic. Even then, work continued on the Oka-Don (Ivanovskii) Canal until Peter was forced to return Azov to the Ottomans in 1711, by which time more than twenty stone locks had been constructed along the canal’s projected route.13 At Azov itself Peter ordered the construction of new fortifications along contemporary European lines and took a close personal interest in their design. A civilian settlement, significantly named Petropolis, was to be laid out in a planned and orderly fashion on the bank opposite the military garrison. That it was to be a city of considerable size and importance can be surmised from Peter’s instruction to the Orthodox Church to appoint a senior bishop or metropolitan for the new settlement.14 Peter established an annual trade fair at Azov, and in 1701 he ordered Ukrainian merchants to bring their wares to Azov and not to sell them at other fairs or in other towns.15 From Azov Peter extended his projects outward to the sea. In 1696 he ordered nautical surveys made of the Don, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea. In 1702 the information gathered in those surveys was incorporated into a series of maps of Azov and the surrounding region, and soundings made by the warship Krepost’ were plotted on a map of the Black Sea from the Straits of Kerch to Constantinople. Two years later an atlas of the Don and its estuary was compiled in Amsterdam under the direction of Admiral Cornelius Cruys.16 Aware that the harbor at Azov was silting up, Peter began to develop a port at Taganrog beyond the mouth of the Don where shallow craft from Azov could transfer their cargoes to larger, seagoing vessels. Compared to Archangel and St. Petersburg, Azov offered several important advantages. For one thing, the harbor at Taganrog and the waterways leading to it were free of ice for eight months of the year; for another, the Don provided Azov with easy downstream transport from the southern edge of central Russia, and Peter’s canals promised to extend its reach to the Oka and the Volga. Moreover, because the Don flows for hundreds of kilometers through the fertile black-earth steppe, Azov, unlike Archangel or St. Petersburg, would have had no difficulty obtaining cereals for its own provisioning and for export. On the other side of the ledger, Azov had two serious handicaps. First, the founding and feeling an imperial city

13

harbor at Taganrog was shallow, exposed, and difficult for seagoing vessels to approach. Second, the Ottomans continued to control crucial straits separating Azov and Taganrog from the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean. Peter ignored the first handicap, but he quickly set out to eliminate the second.17 He sought a new alliance against the Ottoman Empire and a wider war that would open Russia’s way to the Mediterranean and the markets of Europe. Had his plan succeeded, St. Petersburg might never have been created at all, for it is easy to imagine that in the course of a long war against the Ottomans, Peter would have moved Russia’s capital from Moscow to Azov with consequences no less significant though very different from those that followed its transfer from Moscow to St. Petersburg. On his “Great Embassy” to Europe in 1697–1698, Peter learned that the allies he needed were too concerned about the Spanish succession to take any interest in his scheme to dismember the Ottoman Empire. But he also discovered that Saxony and Denmark were seriously interested in an alliance to partition the Swedish Empire in the Baltic. Still, even after he went to war against Sweden and suffered an embarrassing defeat by Charles XII at Narva, Peter did not abandon his hopes for the Black Sea so much as he subordinated them to his more immediate concerns in the northwest. Even while Peter was mobilizing Russia’s resources to fight the Swedes, work continued on Azov, Taganrog, and the OkaDon Canal. Then, after defeating Charles XII at Poltava in 1709, Peter once again went to war against the Ottomans. The ensuing campaign resulted in an ignominious defeat, and Peter escaped disaster only by agreeing to return Azov to its former owners. Only then did Peter abandon his ambitious plans for the Black Sea region to pursue the Baltic alternative with single-minded determination. Narva, R eval, and R iga

Military victories in 1711 and the Peace of Nystadt in 1721 brought Russia additional ports on the Baltic, but none so advantageous as St. Petersburg. Narva was a small city that had served briefly as Russia’s “window on the west” at the time of Ivan IV, but by the early eighteenth century its harbor was too shallow for most merchant ships. Navigable rivers provided transportation to Narva from the flax-growing regions around Pskov and Velikie Luki but not from other, more central regions. Moreover, the waterways leading to Narva were interrupted by the deep waters of Lake Peipus, whose large swells threatened to capsize shallow river craft, and by a waterfall just a few kilometers inland from the port.18 Reval (Tallinn) had a fine harbor, but with no water transport from the interior, it served mainly as a port for agricultural commodities hauled overland from nearby estates in Estland.19 Riga was a substantial city with an extensive agricultural hinterland drained by the Western Dvina and a longestablished maritime trade. Peter was pleased to annex Riga and collect tolls and duties on its exports, but its already flourishing trade could not be significantly 14

founding and feeding an imperial city

expanded to accommodate an increased flow of Russian goods. Riga remained an important destination for Russian and Ukrainian hemp, but Russian products, as opposed to those originating in Livonia and the Polish Commonwealth, could be brought to Riga only from the western edge of Russia and a part of the northern Ukraine, and until 1773 they were subject to tolls and tariffs on entering and leaving Poland.20 Peter recognized Estland and Livland as fiefs of the Russian Empire rather than as integral parts of Russia, and he confirmed their traditional laws and practices, including those concerned with commerce, tariffs, and tolls. ST. PETERSBURG’S ADVANTAGE

As a harbor for large merchant ships, St. Petersburg was inferior to Reval and even to Riga. A bar at the mouth of the river could not be crossed by vessels drawing more than 2.6 meters (8.5 feet). Peter dealt with that problem by creating a deep-water port at Kronstadt, on Kotlin Island, some twenty-nine kilometers out into the Gulf of Finland, to serve St. Petersburg as Taganrog was to have served Azov. Even so, the harbor did not offer sheltered conditions for loading and unloading cargo, and it was closed by ice for approximately half the year.21 The great advantage that St. Petersburg held over the other Baltic ports that Peter acquired from Sweden was that it could be connected directly to the Russian heartland. The Neva River flows to St. Petersburg in a broad, deep channel from Lake Ladoga, which serves as a great catch basin for the lakes and rivers of northwestern Russia. To the south and east only a relatively low and narrow divide stands between several rivers that feed Lake Ladoga and several tributaries of the Volga heading to the Caspian Sea. A canal joining two rivers on opposite sides of that divide therefore would create a continuous waterway from the Caspian to the Baltic and make it possible to transport goods to St. Petersburg by water from as far away as Astrakhan, the northern Ukraine, and the Ural Mountains—or even, at greater remove, from Central Asia, Persia, and the Caucasus. With such a canal St. Petersburg would in effect become the seaport for the Volga and provide that landlocked river system with the outlet that nature had denied it. The potential value of a seaport that could be connected by water to the Volga far surpassed the value of one that could not, and thus St. Petersburg, like Azov before it, possessed an advantage that no other seaport in Peter’s possession could match. THE WATERWAY

The importance of a waterway connecting a seaport with the interior cannot be overemphasized. No matter how good its harbor or how mild its climate, a seaport that cannot profitably acquire export goods faces severe limitations. At the time, water transport offered the most profitable and in some instances the only profitable means of moving heavy, bulky goods over long distances. founding and feeling an imperial city

15

Overland transport—by packhorses, carts, or wagons in summer or, more commonly, by sleds or sledges in winter—was sometimes used to transport grain, hemp, or even iron over hundreds of kilometers under special circumstances, especially when cost was not the greatest concern, but normally it was used over much shorter distances to haul goods to the nearest trading wharf (pristan) on a navigable river. As the governor of Tambov observed in 1785, when a drought hindered grain shipments from that province, “Transporting grain overland is incomparably more expensive and more difficult than if water were available.”22 E. G. Istomina, a specialist in the history of Russian water transport, has calculated that a normal barge on the middle Volga could carry as much cargo as one hundred carts or sleds and that on the shallower rivers between the Volga and St. Petersburg, a small boat with a crew of six could carry more cargo than twenty-seven carts or sleds. She further estimates that transporting goods from the Volga to St. Petersburg by road cost ten times as much as doing so by water.23 That differential is neither surprising nor out of line with comparative costs in other places. Studies of the costs of shipping grain from the eastern regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Riga show that whereas water transport increased the price of the grain by 6 to 50 percent, depending on the distance, overland transport added 4 to 125 percent and was profitable only for distances shorter than 150 kilometers.24 In early eighteenth-century France, Marshal Vauban found that six men and four horses could transport as much cargo in an ordinary boat as two hundred men and four hundred horses could haul overland on ordinary roads.25 In Russia sleds and sledges using so-called winter roads offered a faster and more convenient form of overland transport than carts and wagons, but because the draft animals could not graze, they progressively ate into the profits, especially in the north, where fodder was scarce and expensive. In his account of Russia published in 1716, John Perry, commenting on the need to supply St. Petersburg by water, explained that one major limitation on overland transport was “the very great Scarcity and Dearness of Forage for Horses” and that in the St. Petersburg region, “all manner of provisions” were “usually three to four times as dear and forage for their horses, etc. at least six to eight times as dear as . . . at Moscow.”26 Two years later a Dutch observer reported that Tver, Torzhok, and Vyshnii Volochek, three towns on the main road between Moscow and St. Petersburg, were filled with goods that could not be moved overland because of the poor condition of the roads and the high cost of fodder and thus would have to be brought to St. Petersburg in the spring by water.27 Improvements to the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway eventually lowered travel times and therefore the cost of overland transport from the Volga to St. Petersburg. In 1777 one of four boats carrying wheat owned by the grain merchant I. A. Tolchenov was still on the far side of the divide when the navigation season ended. To avoid the costs of “wintering over,” Tolchenov had the cargo 16

founding and feeding an imperial city

hauled overland on sledges to St. Petersburg yet still managed to sell all four boatloads for what he termed “a modest profit.”28 By the early nineteenth century, the British commercial analyst J. Jepson Oddy considered it economically feasible to transport heavy goods overland from Moscow to St. Petersburg even though it was still more expensive than shipping by water.29 By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hauling heavy, bulky commodities overland from beyond the divide to St. Petersburg had become feasible, but it remained exceptional. In Peter’s time direct water transport from the interior was an essential requirement for a seaport that was to serve as an outlet for Russian exports. That requirement explains not only Peter’s choice of Azov and St. Petersburg but also his decisions to connect them to the Volga by means of canals. Like St. Petersburg, Peter’s canals were enormously ambitious undertakings for his time. Europe’s first successful canal across a watershed between two river basins, the Canal de Briare, between the Loire and the Seine in France, opened in 1642 after thirty-eight years of investment and construction, and the vastly more impressive Canal du Midi, which crosses the divide between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in southern France, was completed in 1681, less than twenty years before Peter started work on his canals to connect Azov with the Volga. When Peter gave the order to start digging, the only canals across divides and watersheds to be found anywhere in Europe were those in France. In 1701, after Peter had gone to war with Sweden but before his armies had occupied the delta of the Neva, Peter sent John Perry and a Russian named Korchmin to investigate possible sites for canals across the divide between the watersheds of the Volga and the Neva. Perry and Korchmin quickly identified three existing portages where a canal or canals would permit continuous passage by water from the Volga to the Gulf of Finland: one between the Sias and the Tikhvinka, a tributary of the Mologa, which offered the shortest and most direct route from the Volga to the Neva, though it was obstructed by a high summit and numerous rapids; a second portage between the Vytegra and Kovzha rivers, which presented the lowest elevations but would require building twenty-two locks and a canal seven kilometers long; and a third between the Tvertsa and Tsna, which needed only a very short canal and two locks but lacked sufficient water at the summit to operate the locks and which also led to dangerous rapids on the northwestern slope (see map 1). Impatient to have the waterway in operation, Peter chose the third possibility. In January 1703 he put Vasilii and Matvei Gagarin in charge of creating a canal between the Tvertsa and the Tsna at Vyshnii Volochek, a coaching station (iam) on the road between Moscow and Novgorod. The Gagarins, in turn, hired Adrian Hauter, an engineer from the Netherlands, to plan and direct the construction. In 1709 Hauter’s creation, a simple, direct canal 2.8 kilometers long with a lock at each end, was opened to river craft and enabled them to transport cargo from the Volga to St. Petersburg without portage.30 founding and feeling an imperial city

17

City Portage Portage and Town

Lake Onega

100 MILES 100 KILOMETERS

Lake Ladoga

Lake Beloe B 3

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1 Vyshnii Volochek Canal opened 1709 2 Mariinskii Canal opened 1809 3 Tikhvin Canal opened 1811

BLACKMER MAPS

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Map 1. Natural Waterways in Northwestern Russia Natural Waterways in Northwestern Russia

Map 1 | 120821 Blackmer Maps Although the Dutch had dug canals in their low-lying country for centuries, Draft

they had no experience with the different requirements of a canal across a divide. Hauter’s canal followed the Dutch model and was inappropriate for the location. Because Hauter’s design failed to retain water at the summit, his canal sometimes lacked sufficient water for operation, while at other times it experienced flooding and serious erosion. After numerous complaints from merchants and state officials claiming that such problems were interfering with the movement of merchandise and supplies to St. Petersburg, Peter received a more constructive memorandum about Hauter’s canal from a Novgorodian merchant named Mikhail Serdiukov. Serdiukov explained why Hauter’s canal could never function satisfactorily and how a different design would not only solve the problems but also permit a much larger volume of traffic to move through the canal. In 1719, after a personal interview, Peter assigned the canal at Vyshnii Volochek and 18

founding and feeding an imperial city

the land surrounding it to Serdiukov as a concession. Serdiukov received authorization to collect tolls, to build mills on the sluices, and to establish a brewery, a tavern, and other enterprises. In return, he redesigned and rebuilt the canal and constructed a reservoir and aqueducts to provide it with water from nearby lakes and streams.31 Serdiukov had solved the most serious problems at Vyshnii Volochek by 1722, but other trouble spots along the 980-kilometer length of the waterway from the Volga to St. Petersburg continued to interfere with the passage of barges. The deep and often turbulent waters of Lake Ladoga presented the greatest hazard. Because the lake is much deeper to the north than it is to the south, between the mouth of the Volkhov and source of the Neva, a north wind could and often did raise up huge waves that all too often swamped and sank the flat-bottomed river boats crossing the lake on their way to St. Petersburg. In 1718, claiming that 10,000 river craft had been lost in Lake Ladoga since the founding of St. Petersburg, Peter ordered the creation of a canal 104 kilometers long around the southwestern corner of the lake, from Novaia Ladoga near the mouth of the Volkhov to Shlissel’burg near the source of the Neva.32 In contrast to Serdiukov’s undertakings at Vyshnii Volochek, the Ladoga Canal was a simple bypass canal with no change in elevation. Dissatisfied with its progress, Peter personally inspected the works in 1723 and put General Berkhard Christoph von Münnich in charge. Using soldiers for labor, Münnich completed the work in 1731, but the canal was shallower and narrower than Peter had wanted. For the remainder of the eighteenth century, the Ladoga Canal determined the legally allowable width of vessels plying the waterways between the Volga and St. Petersburg. Canals over the divide and around Lake Ladoga eliminated the most urgent problems along the Volga–St. Petersburg waterway, but the passage of Lake Il’men, between the Msta and Volkhov rivers, would remain a hazard until the turn of the nineteenth century. Other problems, such as low water in the Tvertsa on the southeastern slope of the divide, a number of dangerous rapids in the Msta on the northwestern slope, and less dangerous rapids in the Volkhov, were addressed sporadically, with improvements gradually introduced from 1722 until the so-called Vyshnii Volochek System was finally abandoned in 1889. Essential for delivering goods to St. Petersburg, the Vyshnii Volochek System could not be used to ship goods from St. Petersburg to the interior because of the rapids and swift currents on the north side of the divide. Imported goods that were easily available in St. Petersburg thus remained scarce and much more expensive in the interior. Boats delivering cargo to St. Petersburg were routinely broken up and sold as firewood for the capital even though state officials continued to worry about deforestation along the waterway and the rising cost of boats. In her evaluation of Peter I and his deeds, Lindsey Hughes judged Peter’s projects for canals and other improvements to the waterways to have been “wasteful,” but in fact they were necessary and essential components of his plans founding and feeling an imperial city

19

Table 1. Number of ships using the port of St. Petersburg-Kronstadt, 1718–1797 1718 1720 1722 1724 1760 1766 1773 1784 1790

Arrivals Departures

52 n.a

75 n.a.

114 n.a

270 n.a.

338 325

394 363

676 669

890 n.a.

1797

932 1,267 n.a. 1,224

Sources: Sukhnovalov, “Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’ Peterburga,” 1:86; Makarov, “Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’ Peterburga,” 1:288.

for St. Petersburg and Azov (both of which she also questioned).33 Despite all its hazards and limitations, the waterway through Vyshnii Volochek supplied St. Petersburg with the commodities on which its commerce and even its very existence depended. In a memorandum on commerce and transportation presented to Empress Catherine II in 1763, General N. E. Murav’ev noted, “the well being not only of St. Petersburg but also of the surrounding regions, which supply the capital with goods and which themselves depend on products brought from the southern provinces, depends on the good condition of the waterways.”34 In 1764 Jakob Sievers, the newly appointed governor of Novgorod Province, called the deteriorating condition of the locks at Vyshnii Volochek to Catherine’s attention and urged her to have them repaired, because, he said, “it is through them that St. Petersburg lives.”35 In 1810, as the unique role of the Vyshnii Volochek System neared its end with the opening of two additional waterways, the director of water communications reminded Alexander I that “by this one route the capital . . . [had] been supplied with needed products from the interior of Russia both for its own needs and for export abroad.”36 Peter I had not only understood the importance of Vyshnii Volochek for St. Petersburg; he had also foreseen it before his army had conquered Nienschants and occupied the delta of the Neva. SEAPORT, CAPITAL, METROPOLIS

St. Petersburg’s entered a new period of growth and development in 1722. Serdiukov’s improvements at Vyshnii Volochek had increased the delivery of export goods at the same time that the end of the Great Northern War had cleared the way for their transport through the Baltic (see table 1). Peter also reinforced those structural changes in St. Petersburg’s trade with a series of decrees discouraging and in some cases prohibiting the export of specific commodities from Archangel and other northern ports.37 The combined result was a rapid increase in St. Petersburg’s maritime commerce. Between 1712 and 1719 an average of 2,166 metric tons of cargo had passed through the locks at Vyshnii Volochek each year. From 1722 to 1731 that figure increased to more than 156,600 metric tons per year, and by the 1750s it would rise to 216,000 metric tons per year.38 In that same period the quantity and value of St. Petersburg’s exports surged and quickly surpassed those of Archangel (see table 2). 20

founding and feeding an imperial city

Table 2. Value of exports from Archangel and St. Petersburg, 1704– 1752 (in thousands of rubles) Year

Archangel

St. Petersburg

1710

1,688

0

1718

n/a

233

1719

2,344.2

68.6

1720

1,445.5

n/a

1723

294

n/a

1725

120

2,035.2

1726

285.4

2,403.4

1739

326.9

2,247.3

1740

676.6

n/a

1743

309.8

2,214.8

1744

373.7

3,717.4

1748

283.3

2,214.8

1749

339.8

3,910.0

1750

282.1

4,439.8

1751

421.0

3,510.0

1752

312.4

4,357.6

Source: Repin, “Izmenenie ob”ema i struktury eksporta Arkhangel’skogo i Peterburgskogo,” 177.

Peter’s motives for making St. Petersburg the capital of the newly renamed Russian Empire are less obvious than his motives for making it Russia’s primary seaport. By most accounts, the relocation of government agencies and officials occurred gradually and unprogrammatically, at least at first, and extended over a decade until Peter officially declared St. Petersburg the seat of government in 1713. According to the gradualist interpretation, Peter began spending so much time there both because it was a center of operations in the war against Sweden and because he loved his “paradise” on the Neva as much as he detested Moscow and the old ways it represented. Then, unable or unwilling to travel to Moscow to meet government officials, he made them come to him, first as a matter of expediency and only later as a matter of policy.39 Nonetheless, Peter’s matter-of-fact reference to the new settlement as “the capital” (stolitsa) in a letter dated September 4, 1704, indicates that he had already included that role in his vision of the city he planned to create.40 Peter wrote that letter to Alexander Menshikov, his close friend and confidant and the man most likely to have known Peter’s intentions. Peter had already appointed Menshikov governor of the newly conquered region and had delegated to him the task of founding and feeling an imperial city

21

making the new settlement “great and populous” in accordance with the tsar’s instructions. Although St. Petersburg is often mentioned as a precedent for Washington, New Delhi, Brasília, Canberra, Islamabad, and other capitals constructed as planned cities on previously empty sites, it differed from those new capitals in one crucial respect: they were conceived as stand-apart centers of government, whereas St. Petersburg was designed to serve as a seat of commerce, culture, and government all in one. As seaport, imperial capital, and metropolis combined, St. Petersburg was much less the predecessor of Washington, D.C., than it was the successor to Constantinople and, more distantly, Alexandria. The first new city of that type since Constantinople, it was also the first since then to be named for its founder. Although Peter finally and officially named his city St. Petersburg in honor of his patron saint, his original intention, announced on August 24, 1703, had been to name it “Piterburg” after himself. Piterburg (or Peterburg or Peterburkh, as it was variously written) meant in Dutch or German exactly what Petropolis, the name he had chosen for the new settlement near Azov, meant in Greek. Before he settled on the name St. Petersburg, Peter and others sometimes called the new city “Petropol” and occasionally referred to it as “Sviatoi Gorod Petra” (Peter’s Holy City).41 Some contemporaries saw Peter’s bold moves, naming the city and transferring Russia’s seat of government from Moscow to the new port, as evoking those of Constantine. Although there is no explicit evidence to prove that Peter set out deliberately to follow that Roman emperor’s example when he created St. Petersburg, he and others did not fail to note the obvious parallels.42 Exactly when Peter became aware of them and how far he took those parallels is a subject for speculation and further research, but there is no denying their existence: like Constantine, Peter the Great ruled as emperor and “father of the fatherland,” with the right to designate his own successor, and he would preside over a senate and a synod in a new, eponymous capital and future metropolis that would become the new political, cultural, and economic center of his empire. It would become the stage on which so many of the monarchy’s “scenarios of power,” to use Richard Wortman’s perceptive term, would be enacted.43 If Peter had simply wanted to move Russia’s capital away from Moscow, a city that in his mind embodied everything he was trying to change, he had many options. He could have relocated the seat of government to a provincial city on the route between St. Petersburg and Moscow, such as Tver or Novgorod; to some other provincial city; or to some convenient but unoccupied site as a stand-alone capital. Alternatively, he could have made Preobrazhenskoe, a village just outside Moscow, his version of Versailles. Instead, Peter wanted to create an imperial capital that would also be a thriving center of maritime trade and commerce. It was Peter’s ideology or “vision” that led him to want such a capital, but it was geography that determined and limited his possibilities. With no site comparable 22

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to Constantinople available to him, Peter’s choices were limited to Archangel, Azov, or St. Petersburg. All had significant shortcomings, but St. Petersburg offered the best choice because its shortcomings were offset by decisive advantages. Although they occurred almost simultaneously, creating a port and naval base near the mouth of the Neva and transferring the government’s central organs to St. Petersburg were independent developments, as the Supreme Privy Council understood in the late 1720s when it tried to separate them. Faced with the expense and inconvenience of ruling Russia from a distant corner of the empire, the Supreme Privy Council, which had acquired control of the government under the teenaged emperor Peter II, seriously considered moving the capital back to Moscow and might have done so if its power had survived the succession crisis of 1730. Such a move would have left St. Petersburg to serve as an outlet for Russian exports, like Archangel, and as a naval base. From an economic as well as from an administrative point of view, the council’s line of thought had much to recommend it. Although Peter’s decision to create a seaport near the mouth of the Neva had demonstrated a brilliant understanding of economic geography, his decision to make St. Petersburg Russia’s capital defied many considerations of economics and geography. Transporting goods to St. Petersburg made sense when those goods could be sold to foreign merchants at a profit but not when they were used to shelter, clothe, and feed multitudes of people there rather than in Moscow, where virtually everything other than imported luxuries was cheaper. Moreover, the need to transport goods for domestic consumption, especially building materials and foodstuffs, strained the limited carrying capacity of the waterways leading to St. Petersburg and interfered with the delivery of export goods. Yet deliveries of timber and cereals for domestic consumption always received the highest priority. In a decree dated June 26, 1720, listing the various goods delivered to St. Petersburg from the interior, Peter’s government specifically identified timber and cereals as the two most important items on the list.44 And so they remained: in 1797–1798 it was concern over deliveries of timber and cereals that finally prompted Paul’s government to seek new water routes between the capital and the interior.45 By the time of Peter’s death, in 1725, St. Petersburg was not only an imposing naval base and a busy commercial port but also the capital of the Russian Empire, and it was on its way to becoming a major European city. To the delta of the Neva came state officials and courtiers, along with their households and servants; imperial guards regiments; sailors and shipbuilders; construction crews; and ordinary people seeking work and opportunity in the midst of so much money and so many needs. European ambassadors, commercial representatives, scholars, and specialists of many kinds also found employment in one of Europe’s fastest growing cities. Beginning as a small settlement in 1703, St. Petersburg had become a substantial city by 1725; by 1790 it would surpass Moscow as Russia’s largest city, and by 1811 it would rank as the fifth-largest city in Europe (see table 3).46 founding and feeling an imperial city

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Table 3. The population of St. Petersburg, 1703–1811 Permanent residents

1703

1725

1750

negligible

40,000

95,000

1784

1800

1811

192,000 222,000 336,000

Source: Jones, “Getting the Goods to St. Petersburg,” 414.

THE DEMAND FOR RYE FLOUR

With few exceptions, the diet of eighteenth-century Russians consisted mainly of cereals. Oats, buckwheat, barley, and millet were commonly consumed in the form of groats (krupa) or meal (tolokno) served as gruel or porridge (kasha). Rye and wheat were processed as flour and used to make bread, rolls, pancakes, noodles, fritters, pies, and other baked goods. Flour was also used as a thickener for soup (pokhlebka). Slightly fermented rye was used to make kvas, the most common beverage, and various grains were brewed and distilled to make beer and vodka. Vegetables, namely cabbage, carrots, turnips, garlic, onions, cucumbers, and mushrooms, along with berries, added variety, vitamins, and flavor to the daily diet of cereals. Potatoes, which would become a dietary staple in the second half of the nineteenth century, were virtually unknown in the eighteenth. Protein came principally from dairy products such as milk, sour cream (smetana), and cottage cheese (tvorog) but rarely, if ever, from other kinds of cheese. Fish and meat were readily available to those who could afford them. For the vast majority who could not, fish and meat constituted a relatively small component of the regular diet, while bread and other cereals accounted for the bulk of it.47 Evidence from every quarter indicates that the Russian diet centered on cereals, especially rye. In the 1780s a topographical description of Tver listed the foodstuffs typical for most residents of that northwestern province: “The peasants’ diet consists for the most part of plain bread, boiled garden vegetables, and milk. They eat meat on feast days.” Noting that peasants under the jurisdiction of the state treasury enjoyed a higher standard of living than did the nobility’s serfs, it said that the former normally lived on rye bread; milk; soup with sour cream; kasha made from oats, barley, or buckwheat; pancakes; and pies filled with carrots, buckwheat kasha, or cottage cheese—all this supplemented with steamed turnips, fried mushrooms, onions, sour cabbage, and hempseed oil. On feast days these peasants ate meat; on fast days, only cabbage soup, kasha, and vegetables. Their principal beverage was kvas.48 While this account did not attempt to quantify consumption, those who had to provide food for others did. According to L. N. Semenova, monasteries in northern Russia based their accounting on the assumption that an adult male peasant needed two chetveriks or two puds of rye flour a month. Noble landowners in northern Russia also allotted the same ration to each of their non24

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Table 4. Estimated annual demand for rye flour in St. Petersburg Year

Population

Demand (in chetverts)

Demand (in metric tons)

1725 1750 1784 1800 1811

40,000 95,000 192,000 222,000 336,000

90,000 213,750 432,000 499,500 756,000

11,056.0 26,258.0 53,063.8 61,360.8 92,870.4

agricultural workers.49 Equal to 32.76 kilograms, that amount is virtually identical to the flour ration that the army assigned to Russian soldiers from the late seventeenth through the middle of the nineteenth century.50 In St. Petersburg employers and officials made similar assumptions when calculating the food needs of those in their charge. In the first half of the eighteenth century, whenever state agencies provided their workers with a monthly allotment of food as part of their salaries, they invariably included either two chetveriks or two puds (32.76 kilograms) of rye flour together with a much smaller quantity of groats and some salt and vegetable oil. When they included fish or meat (usually pork), they normally allotted something close to two kilograms per worker per month.51 Clearly, Russian authorities in different places and at different times all shared a common assumption that peasants, other workers, and soldiers consumed approximately one kilogram of rye flour a day, primarily in the form of bread. One kilogram of rye flour would yield approximately 3,500 calories, 16.7 percent above the 3,000 calories set by the World Health Organization as the daily requirement for an adult male. Slightly fermented and containing lactic acid, Russian rye bread was also heavy, filling, and slow to digest.52 In 1786, when St. Petersburg was threatened with a shortage of flour, an extraordinary five-member commission on grain appointed by Empress Catherine II attempted to calculate the city’s immediate and future need for cereals. The commission noted that “since the round number of 180,000 inhabitants” contained “an undetermined number of children,” it would assume a minimum rate of consumption of one and a half chetveriks (approximately 23 kg) of rye flour per month, or an annual intake of 2.25 chetverts (276.4 kg) for every man, woman, and child in the city.53 Let us assume, then, a minimum annual consumption of 2.25 chetverts, or 276.4 kilograms, of rye flour for all residents. All other foodstuffs amounted to supplements that could be ignored in an emergency, but rye flour constituted the essential, irreducible basis of subsistence. Thus the minimum annual requirement for food in St. Petersburg in given years can be estimated by multiplying the total population from table 3 by these. The results appear in table 4. founding and feeling an imperial city

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Table 5. Quantities of flour, groats, and raw grain en route to St. Petersburg as recorded at the Shlissel’burg terminus of the Ladoga Canal and reported to the Commission on Grain in 1786 (converted to metric tons) Year

Rye flour

Wheat flour

Fine flour in sacks

Groats of various kinds

Unmilled grain of various kinds

1781 1782 1783 1784 1785

55,248 65,909 51,465 61,341 55,175

8,974 11,881 4,288 6,091 7,761

5,454 7,627 5,333 6,384 7,739

9,476.4 8,291.0 6,518.9 6,260 4,736

53,518 40,535 55,434 68,290 46,176

Source: “Vedomost’ o propushchennykh v Sankt Peterburg chrez ladozhskii kanal sudakh, plotakh, obrubakh I o provezennykh na sudakh khlebe,” SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 232. Shapiro, “O roli Peterburga,” 389–91, gives figures for those same years that are almost but not quite identical, differing by only 10–150 tons per year, which indicates a different source.

Records of actual deliveries of rye flour and other grains to St. Petersburg in the early 1780s, reproduced in table 5, enhance the credibility of those estimates, for they demonstrate that table 4’s estimated demand for 1784, based on those assumptions, pretty well fits the supply in 1781–1785, before the government noticed the rising prices and threatened shortage of 1786. Thus the quantity of rye flour arriving in Shlissel’burg averaged 57,828 metric tons over the five years from 1781 to 1785, which is close to my estimated demand of 52,704 metric tons for 1784, especially given that an unspecified quantity of the rye flour arriving in Shlissel’burg was destined for Vyborg and other towns and garrisons in Ingria and Karelia. The delivery of rye flour in amounts greater than the minimum estimated needs of the city also reflects the good harvests and abundant supplies that prevailed during these years, when the government felt uncharacteristically confident about provisioning St. Petersburg and permitted the export of rye. By 1786–1787, however, officials had to confront rising prices and possible shortages, which the Commission on Grain attributed in part to an unexpected influx of 58,000 workers who had come to the city, creating additional demand and upsetting the grain balance.54 Table 5 also shows that at least for the years in question, rye flour amounted to between 41 and 49 percent of the total amount of grain and flour passing through the Ladoga Canal. Of the remainder, only groats constituted part of the general diet of the city’s population. Wheat flour and fine flour were consumed primarily by foreigners and wealthy Russians, but as substitutes for rye flour they still counted as part of the city’s food supply. Unmilled grain did not, how26

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ever, because as the Commission on Grain noted, “The sale of unmilled grain never occur[red] in St. Petersburg.”55 In fact, there were so few gristmills in the region surrounding the capital that in times of shortage, the government found it difficult to substitute shipments of grain for flour. Unmilled rye and wheat could be exported in the early 1780s. Unmilled barley was used primarily for brewing. Unmilled oats, which alone accounted for between 70 and 88 percent of the unmilled grain in any given year, were mostly fed to horses and, while not counting as part of the food supply, still counted as a basic necessity for the city. If the extrapolations for the early 1780s are equally valid for other years, they would mean that the city’s total annual demand for grain and flour was somewhat more than twice the estimated demand for rye flour alone. MEETING THE CITY’S NEED FOR RYE FLOUR

From the moment his armies seized the Swedish fortresses in Ingria, Peter had to contend with the problem of supplying flour to the occupants of a graindeficient region that could not meet its own needs. As usual, his first instinct was simply to order his subjects to do what he wanted done. Peter’s decree of 1703 thus stipulated that each household must deliver either four chetveriks (61.64 kg) of rye flour or one (volumetric) chetvert (approximately 131 kg) of oats and five puds (82 kilograms) of hay to one of four designated collection points on or near the northwestern frontier: St. Petersburg, Shlissel’burg, Iamburg, or Pskov. Russians were accustomed to paying a tax in kind, known as “zaprosnyi grain,” for provisioning of the army and had done so at least since the reign of Tsar Michael (1613–1645), but whereas previous legislation had required taxpayers to deliver their grain to local collection points or in some instances to Moscow, Peter now demanded that they deliver it to far-off Ingria.56 By doing so, Peter transferred the responsibility for, costs of, and difficulties attendant on transporting grain to the northwestern frontier, shifting all these to Russia’s peasants and their masters and thus making his problem their problem. In the central and northern regions, where surplus grain was scarce, many of the taxpayers subject to Peter’s decree responded to it by paying private contractors (podriachiki) to fulfill their obligations for them. The contractors purchased grain in bulk in surplus-producing regions where prices were low and delivered it to the designated depots on behalf of those who had hired them. Until the opening of canals across the divide and around Lake Ladoga, the cost of delivering the grain could easily exceed the price of the grain itself. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, a chetvert of grain that cost approximately one ruble in the province of Moscow normally cost three rubles to deliver to St. Petersburg.57 Still, contractors managed to make a profit from purchasing grain in the south and transporting it to the northwestern frontier, even after the state, ever suspicious of profiteering, imposed a tax on their purchases.58 In the later stages of the Great Northern War, Peter’s government increasfounding and feeling an imperial city

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ingly monetized the burdens it imposed on his subjects, converting other obligations to cash that it then used to purchase the goods and services it required. This process began in 1717, when Prince A. M. Cherkasskii, director of the Chancellery of Urban Works, sent Peter a report contending that forced labor was more costly and less efficient than hired labor. Citing specific facts and figures, Cherkasskii argued that he could save money on his projects by paying workers wages and firing them for cause instead of continuing to round up unwilling workers; forcing them to work; preventing their escape; and providing them with food, shelter, and medical care. This scheme would also produce better results. Even so, Cherkasskii wanted to make the change gradually because most Russians were unfamiliar with wage labor. In his report, Cherkasskii also opposed the practice of compelling merchants to settle in St. Petersburg, arguing that the ban on exports from Archangel would lead the appropriate merchants to relocate to St. Petersburg willingly without disturbing those who did not fit the city’s needs.59 Peter approved Cherkasskii’s proposals, and by 1721 both the compulsory resettlement of merchants and compulsory labor on state construction had been replaced by a newfound reliance on market forces and the rational calculation of economic self-interest. Almost simultaneously Peter’s government was similarly changing how it fed and financed the armed forces and the agencies that supported them. A decree from November 1718 called for the registering of individual male “souls” rather than households as the basic unit of taxation supporting the army. Several clarifications followed, but the household, or dvor, was still the basic unit of taxation in September 1721, when the state converted the tax in kind into a cash payment of one ruble per household to be delivered to St. Petersburg for provisioning the army.60 In 1725, when the individual taxable male rather than the household finally became the official unit of taxation, the rate was initially set at seventy-four kopecks per “revision soul.” Almost immediately, however, the rate was reduced to seventy kopecks per soul for peasants and remained fixed at that level until 1795. In the interval the state reversed Peter’s practice of demanding ever larger sums from the taxpayers, and the taxpayers accustomed themselves to paying their taxes in cash rather than in kind. In 1795, when the state finally raised the poll tax and tried to collect part of it in kind, taxpayers who were required to pay part of the tax in grain protested, and a special commission appointed to investigate the protest reported “no inclination or custom among the inhabitants to pay their taxes in grain.”61 After 1721, compulsory deliveries of cereals were replaced by the compulsory delivery of money, which the army and other state agencies could then use to purchase cereals either in the provinces or in the city itself.62 In St. Petersburg the largest and most important buyer of cereals was the Provisions Chancellery (Proviantskaia Kantseliariia), which provided monthly rations to the many army and navy units based in the provinces of St. Petersburg and Vyborg. By the end of the eighteenth century, military personnel and their 28

founding and feeding an imperial city

dependents constituted 50,304 of the enumerated inhabitants of the city of St. Petersburg. In addition, two regiments of cavalry and one regiment of infantry were perennially quartered in the city but were not included in the official count of residents.63 To feed all the enlisted men and their dependents in and around the capital, the Provisions Chancellery negotiated contracts with merchants who brought cereals to St. Petersburg. In the second half of the eighteenth century, it also purchased surplus flour secondhand from other state agencies. All told, contracts let by state agencies in the 1720s accounted for 37 percent of all grain exiting the Ladoga Canal at Shlissel’burg. By 1809 such contracts still accounted for 36 percent of the rye flour, 33 percent of the groats, and 10 percent of the oats arriving at Shlissel’burg.64 By the 1720s most state agencies other than the military simply paid their St. Petersburg employees significantly higher wages than those they disbursed in other locations and let the workers find their own sustenance in the city’s markets. There these workers met the rapidly increasing number of people who were not in the government’s employ but who were attracted to the city by the many opportunities it offered. One way or another, most of the money spent on cereals in St. Petersburg came from the taxes paid by peasants. Before the reopening of the Vyshnii Volochek Canal in 1722 and the opening of the Ladoga Canal in 1731, the government’s ability and willingness to pay high prices brought cereals to St. Petersburg regardless of the cost and difficulty of transport. In wintertime peasants, state coachmen (iamshchiki), contractors, and others hauled cargoes across the divide from the interior provinces to wharves from which they could be shipped downstream to St. Petersburg in the spring.65 During the Great Northern War, moreover, Peter’s embargo on exports across Russia’s western frontier and Sweden’s naval blockade of the Baltic combined to create temporary surpluses in Estland and western Poland that could be moved overland to St. Petersburg as long as the price remained high enough to cover the costs of transportation. The conclusion of the Great Northern War in 1721 and the almost simultaneous reopening of the Vyshnii Volochek Canal promised to end those unusual circumstances by increasing supplies and lowering prices. Instead, at the very moment when St. Petersburg residents began to expect a steady and increasing flow of cereals from across the divide, poor harvests in the interior provinces provided a sharp reminder of the city’s vulnerability to famine. THE STATE AND THE MARKET

During the so-called hunger years of the early 1720s, Peter’s government reacted to shortages and rising prices by trying to control and manipulate the cereals market. Peter’s first instinct was to try to hold down prices by fiat. In a decree enumerating the duties of his newly appointed chief of police (Politseimeister) in St. Petersburg in May 1718, the emperor instructed him see to it that the price of food neither rose nor fell.66 When the shortfall in deliveries rendered founding and feeling an imperial city

29

that injunction impractical, Peter responded with a new decree in April 1722; this one set maximum prices for various food items, but as supplies continued to shrink, bread and flour were either sold at prices higher than the law allowed or not sold at all. In February 1723 Peter turned from price controls to profit controls with a decree setting 10 percent as the maximum profit allowed on sales of cereals and imposing a tax on each transaction.67 Along with instituting those measures, Peter took steps to increase the amount of grain and flour available for sale. His decree of April 13, 1723, prohibited the export of cereals from the Russian Empire and invited imports by removing restrictions and import duties on cereals. The decree was to be publicized not only in Estland and Livland but also in Königsberg and Danzig.68 Undertaken in an emergency, Peter’s decree of April 13, 1723, made an extraordinary exception to his standing policy of feeding St. Petersburg with Russian cereals, and Peter rescinded it the following year. In 1724 he reimposed tariffs on cereals imported from abroad, although at half the rate charged on other goods, and later that same year he eliminated internal tariffs on all foodstuffs sent to St. Petersburg from within Russia.69 Those laws, combined with the earlier decree prohibiting the export of cereals from St. Petersburg whenever the price of rye flour in the province of Moscow exceeded one ruble per chetvert, effectively defined the St. Petersburg cereals market as a extension of the Moscow grain market, binding them together and erecting barriers between them and the international European market.70 Peter’s laws restricting the import and export of cereals through St. Petersburg followed the pattern set by other European states. Poland, Livland, and Estland regularly exported surplus grain in great quantities, but most European states wanted to maintain a balance between the internal production of grain and its internal consumption insofar as that was possible, thus confining their cereals markets within their own borders. In Russia, as in most of Europe at that time, authorities sought to avoid treating cereals as mere commodities that should be traded on the open market like other goods. In normal times authorities allowed cereals markets to function under controlled conditions, but in times of shortages and rising prices, latent suspicions of the cereals trade and all who engaged in it quickly came to the fore, and authorities would move in to regulate, control, and distribute.71 Over the longer run, however, the major strategic tools for regulating the cereals trade were thought to be taxes, tariffs, and controls over imports and exports. Peter’s legislation may have helped to mitigate St. Petersburg’s subsistence crisis in the 1720s, but substantial relief came only in the 1730s, when improvements to the waterways finally combined with normal harvests in the interior provinces to increase supplies. From the 1720s to the 1730s, the “real price” of cereals in St. Petersburg fell dramatically in comparison to the general level of other prices, and despite the steady increase in the city’s population, it continued 30

founding and feeding an imperial city

its overall decline until the 1760s, when it began to climb once again.72 Within those broad trends, however, lay some sharp fluctuations that occurred whenever a meager harvest in the interior sent prices in St. Petersburg spiraling upward. That happened in 1734–1735, 1765–1766, and 1786–1788, and each time the government tried to hold down prices and increase supplies by taking emergency measures. In the last two instances, the government also conducted investigations of the St. Petersburg cereals trade that provided it (and later historians) with basic information about the trade’s normal operations. By the end of his reign Peter I had not only directed the creation of a new city of some 40,000 people but also overseen the creation of a framework of laws, regulations, and practices that defined the St. Petersburg cereals market. Like all markets, it functioned on the basis of exchange. What St. Petersburg had to exchange was money, acquired through taxes, tariffs, minted coinage, and profits from foreign trade. Producers in the interior provinces needed money to pay taxes and, in the case of the landowners, to acquire the accoutrement of a westernized style of life. To get the cash they needed, producers had to sell grain and other agricultural products. Separated by hundreds and even thousands of kilometers, the two ends of the exchange system were connected by a network of transport and a set of commercial activities. Those systems of transport and commerce, the infrastructure of the cereals trade, were organized, supported, and improved by the state, but their successful operation depended on the perceived self-interest of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of Russians whose activities converted raw grain for sale in distant provinces into consumable products for sale in the markets of St. Petersburg.

founding and feeling an imperial city

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CHAPTER 2

R

Selling Flour in St. Petersburg

P

rovisioning eighteenth-century St. Petersburg presented the imperial government with two distinct but closely connected worries: bringing or attracting a sufficient quantity of cereals to the city and ensuring that consumers could afford to buy them. The first goal argued for high food prices, while the second argued against them. Prices had to be high enough to cover the costs of moving grain and flour over long distances and to reward the growers, dealers, and retail vendors who provided the city with its sustenance, but the government did not want them to rise above that level. Suspicious of speculators and profiteers, the government initially sought to control prices by regulating and policing the marketplace, but in the second half of the century it relaxed its controls and allowed the private market to function with less regulation and interference. At the same time, however, it instituted a granary to provide a public safety net by storing flour as a safeguard against shortage and a brake on runaway prices. Influenced by liberal economic theories emanating from France and Britain, the Russian government gradually came to see that a freer market in grain could help the government deal with its problems even if it could not be left to deal with them alone.

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POLICING THE MARKETPLACE

On January 14, 1725, the government of Peter I promulgated new regulations for marketing food in St. Petersburg. Having issued a number of ad hoc injunctions on that subject over many years, Peter now wanted to replace them with a more thoughtful, comprehensive statute. Enacted just two weeks before his unexpected death, the new law would be Peter’s final effort to regulate food sales and the starting point for his successors’ efforts to do the same. Peter’s law of 1725 restricted the sale of uncooked food to officially designated public markets and prescribed fines for selling it anywhere else. The law required local growers to bring their produce to the markets themselves and sell it directly to consumers in small quantities at posted prices until midday. Only then could they begin selling to merchants and retailers in larger quantities at negotiated prices. Middlemen and resellers of food were likewise restricted to buying in the official markets. They were forbidden to purchase foodstuffs in the city’s rural environs or to establish commercial relations directly with producers. To protect consumers, the law stipulated that flour, meal, and malt were to be sold by weight rather than volume because weight was a more reliable safeguard against chicanery and deception. It also required the elders (starosty) of the food markets and the head of the city magistracy to report the price of flour in the markets at regular intervals so that the police could determine the maximum allowable prices for baked goods sold to the public. The police were to appoint inspectors to watch over the sellers of baked goods and arrest those who violated the legal norms of price, weight, or quality as specified in the law. Upon conviction, the offenders were to be whipped publicly in the marketplace, and their wares were to be confiscated and sent to the hospital.1 Peter’s marketing regulations reflected not only his personal views of merchants but also the persistent and widely held belief that high food prices arose from merchant chicanery and market manipulation rather than an imbalance of supply and demand or some other impersonal force. Peter distrusted merchants and held their money-grubbing activities in contempt, but he also knew that they had talents and skills that he needed. He had come to understand that their self-interest and pursuit of profit led them to perform some tasks better than government officials following orders would, but he also understood that even when their interests coincided with his, they were not identical, and he resented that just as he resented his dependence on them and their activities. With some variations, a distrust of merchants similar to Peter’s appeared in marketing regulations across Europe. Consumers expected a steady supply of bread and other foods at affordable prices, and their first response to shortage or a sudden price increase was often to blame the retailers and wholesalers and sometimes to attack them physically. Governments and consumers distrusted vendors and middlemen and accused them of price gouging, colluding, hoarding, and selling flour in st. petersburg

33

cheating in order to raise food prices and increase profits. The Roman emperor Diocletian had made that claim in 301 in his decree setting maximum prices and regulating markets, and the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin repeated it in 2010 in his attempt to assign responsibility for the rise in food prices that resulted from that summer’s drought.2 In the eighteenth century, governments throughout Europe and much of the world prescribed and policed the activities of merchants who sold foodstuffs (and other essentials) and restricted retail trading to a limited number of public markets where it could more easily be watched and controlled. The first public market in St. Petersburg appeared within months of the city’s founding. It consisted of a number of wooden stalls set up some two hundred meters from Peter’s cabin (domik) on Trinity (later Petrograd) Island. In 1705 the government organized the market’s stalls in the traditional Russian pattern of parallel rows, with each item or commodity offered in a separate and distinct row. The rows selling flour and baked goods soon came to be known as Rostovskii Dvor because all the vendors there came from the town of Rostov, near the upper Volga, some two hundred kilometers northeast of Moscow. In 1710 the government relocated all the food stalls to the other side of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where it constructed a covered food market (mytnyi dvor) to house them. Over time it became known as the Sytnyi Rynok, a food market that continues to function on that site to this day. On the original market site the government constructed a two-story brick arcade for the sale of nonfood items. Once again those actions repeated the Muscovite practice of concentrating sales of particular items in specified locations, sometimes within the same market but often in separate ones.3 As it became increasingly apparent that Trinity Island would not be the whole of the new city or even the heart of it, the government set up markets in other districts. In 1719 it opened the Morskoi market in a covered brick building next to the Moika River on the Admiralty Side, and in 1721 it opened another covered food market next to the Malaia Neva River on Vasilevskii Island. By the 1730s the Admiralty Side had clearly become the most important and fastest-growing part of the new city. After a fire destroyed the Morskoi market and much of the adjacent district in 1736, the government of Empress Anna decided to create a central marketplace for the entire city on the Admiralty Side between the Fontanka River and the small stream that later became the Ekaterininskii Canal. On the west side of Nevskii Prospekt it built a wooden gostinyi dvor (merchants’ court) for the sale of manufactured goods, and slightly more than a kilometer to the west it laid out Sennaia (Haymarket) Square for the sale of agricultural products. Sadovaia Street, running east and west parallel to the Fontanka, connected those two markets and formed the principal axis of the new commercial district. The government located a flea market south of Sadovaia, between that street and the Fontanka, devoting this to the trade in second-hand goods, and to the north it relocated the Morskoi market, which featured the sale 34

selling flour in st. petersburg

of meat and fish. Stalls for the sale of flour originally occupied the western side of Sennaia Square, but in 1751 they were relocated and arranged in rows along the north side of Sadovaia and along the passage from that street to the Ekaterininskii Canal that eventually became known as Muchnoi Pereulok (Flour Lane). As the city continued to expand, additional food markets were opened in the 1750s in the Liteinaia, Moskovskaia, and Rozhdestvenskaia districts beyond the Fontanka River, bringing the number of markets on the Admiralty Side to four, in addition to the older ones on the Trinity (Petrograd) Side and on Vasilevskii Island.4 That arrangement lasted until 1782, when fire ravaged the central commercial district along Sadovaia Street. In its aftermath, the government reorganized and in some cases relocated the markets in all ten of the city’s administrative districts. Even after the fire, however, Muchnoi Pereulok remained the center of the city’s retail flour trade (see map 2). In accordance with Peter’s law of 1725, vendors sold flour to the public by weight. The standard unit for retail sales of rye and wheat flour was a pud, equal to 16.38 kilograms, or about 36 pounds, and retail prices were usually expressed in terms of rubles and kopecks per pud. Wholesalers, however, used the kul’, a container of specific size and composition, as the standard unit of account for ordinary flour and the sack, or meshok, as the unit for fine, premium flour. A sack of fine flour weighed five puds and presented no problem. A kul of rye flour weighed nine puds, or 147.42 kilograms, but the empty kul itself weighed 4.9 kilograms, and because it absorbed flour over time, it could weigh 6.15 kilograms or more.5 Retail merchants took that discrepancy as well as the quality and consistency of the flour into account when they negotiated prices with their suppliers.6 Government reports and records often equated a kul of flour with a chetvert of grain even though the latter was a unit of measure, equal to 5.75 English bushels. A chetvert of flour, however, was a unit of weight equal to 7.5 puds that was frequently used as an alternative to the kul when handling and recording large amounts of flour. Weights and measures were not standardized across the Russian Empire until 1835, but those used in the retail and wholesale grain trade were standardized in practice by the mid-eighteenth century and in use, as one source put it, “almost everywhere.”7 WHOLESALE TRADE

The wholesale flour trade in St. Petersburg was much less organized and regulated than the retail trade. Flour barges coming down the Neva River ended their journey on the eastern edge of the Admiralty Side, just north of the Alexander Nevskii Monastery. The barges either tied up or beached themselves on the riverbank, and the flour merchants or their stewards began selling directly from the boat. Buyers and sellers also met and bargained in a nearby tavern known informally as the “Flour Exchange” (khlebnaia birzha) or in the more formal and regulated commodities exchange (birzha) established on the site of selling flour in st. petersburg

35

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1 Original site of Morskoi Market 1719–1736

6 Public Granary after 1775

3 Muchnoi Pereulok (Flour Lane)

8 Trinity Square

2 Central Market (Morskoi Market) 1737–1782 4 Gostinyi Dvor

5 Haymarket Square

7 Provisions Storehouse 9 Boat Landing

10 Alexander Nevskii Monastery

Map 2. Commercial of St.inPetersburg Commercial Plan of St.Plan Petersburg the 1770s in the 1770s Map 2 | 120821 Blackmer Maps Draft

the original retail market in 1703 and subsequently relocated several times in the ensuing century. In those locations flour merchants gathered information on prices and market conditions and transferred ownership from the longdistance traders to the retailers. At that point most of the flour was reloaded onto smaller boats that could navigate the city’s many rivers and canals or else onto wagons that would carry it along the short, direct road from the riverbank to Nevskii Prospekt and thence to markets on the Admiralty Side. When the river froze, the crews unloaded any unsold flour and stored it in nearby warehouses or stacked it on the shore under a covering of bast mats.8 The boats themselves were broken up and sold for firewood and building material. At midcentury the area remained a crowded, muddy tangle of boats, their crews, teamsters, fishermen, and peddlers, in addition to a tannery and at least one bathhouse.9 Significant improvements came only in the second half of the eighteenth century when the government constructed granite embankments along the city’s rivers and canals and responded to petitions from boat owners and flour merchants by building wooden docks for the boats and a winter food market along the road from the docks to Nevskii Prospekt. The government paid close attention to prices in the wholesale market as a 36

selliNg floUr iN st. PetersBUrg

predictor of future retail prices and as a measure of retailers’ profits, but it seldom attempted to regulate or organize the market itself. In 1775, while the court was away in Moscow, the governor-general of St. Petersburg, Field Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, tried to persuade the wholesale merchants to sell their flour at a reduced fixed price, but they replied that they could not make a profit at that price and rebuffed him.10 A more successful intervention occurred in 1783 when the government banned the sale of large quantities of flour until afternoon, reserving the morning hours for individual consumers, as in the retail markets. The following year it renewed the prohibition, calling the resale of flour “a not insignificant cause of the rise in bread prices,” and banned the resale of any flour purchased before 1:00 p.m.11 The city’s flour merchants complained that the regulation raised their costs because it kept their stevedores and teamsters standing idle for several hours, but the rule remained in force.12 FROM BARGES TO BAKERS

This arrangement, with flour sold from barges on the banks of the Neva, helps to explain its distribution throughout St. Petersburg. All the city’s markets stood close to water transport, as might be expected given the city’s many waterways, but the flour stalls were invariably located closest to the rivers or canals. Hay, oats, vegetables, dairy products, and other goods that originated in the environs of the city normally came overland by cart or sled, but flour, purchased wholesale on the bank of the Neva, almost always came to market by water. Extending only a short distance from the Ekaterininskii Canal to Sadovaia Street and easily accessible from the Fontanka as well, Muchnoi Pereulok offered but one example of a layout that could also be found in other markets in St. Petersburg and throughout Russia. Cereals moved by water, and grain and flour were usually sold, bought, and traded in close proximity to it. No less important was the fact that cereals reached the city in the form of flour rather than grain. Because they had to be hauled long distances through shallow rivers, rye and wheat intended for consumption in St. Petersburg were milled on the other side of the divide in order to condense them. Accustomed to flour, St. Petersburg normally had no need of gristmills. As a report of the Commission on Grain stated bluntly in 1786, “The sale of unmilled grain never occurs in St. Petersburg.”13 Baked goods, however, were readily available. Although many of the city’s residents purchased flour and either baked their own bread or paid someone to bake it for them, they could also purchase baked loaves, buns, rolls, and pastries from stalls adjacent to the flour stalls in the public markets, from several types of retail outlets, and from street vendors. A. I Bodganov’s description of St. Petersburg in 1751 noted that the city contained many food shops or canteens (markitantskie izby) selling soup, pies, pancakes, bread, kvas, and other nourishment to workers and people of modest means.14 An official document from the year 1781 selling flour in st. petersburg

37

counted 154 market stalls and 344 other outlets selling baked goods to the public and provided figures showing that the sale of baked goods accounted for approximately 30 percent of all the flour delivered to St. Petersburg in that year.15 Although the government attempted to regulate the activities and products of the city’s bakers and bakeries, it did not identify and organize the bakers and bakeries themselves until 1786, a fact that constitutes an unexplained exception to its normal practices. The list of artisans relocated to St. Petersburg by government order in 1716 made no mention of bakers, nor did the list of the city’s artisan guilds (tsekhi) compiled and published by M. D. Chulkov in 1785.16 When the government reorganized the artisan guilds in 1786, it finally created one for bakers, which at that time had ninety-seven members, all of whom were foreigners.17 In his description of St. Petersburg in 1751, Bogdanov had noted that although the city’s bread shops had always baked white bread from fine flour for foreigners, they had only recently started to bake Russian breads as well.18 The military, some government enterprises, and large noble households employed their own bakers, and many Russian families did their own baking, but baking bread for sale to the public seems not to have been a traditional Russian occupation.19 THE LIMITS OF REGULATION

In such a context the government’s efforts to police the cereals trade fell far short of full control. Through trial and error Peter I had learned the futility of trying to prescribe cereal prices when supplies were uncertain and uncontrollable, and with very few exceptions his successors refrained from trying to fix or control those prices directly. After the fire of 1736, the government of Anna Ivanovna decreed that cereals and other food supplies be sold at prefire prices and published the official prices of various types of flour, meal, and groats, as well as butter and honey, but ten months later it replaced that law with another enjoining retailers not to raise the price of food and building materials but allowing them to add a 10 percent profit to the purchase price.20 In 1741 the government of Elizabeth Petrovna began publishing official price lists for meat and fish but not for cereals. Unable to control the supply of cereals and unable or unwilling to control other activities, such as shipping, milling, and wholesale trading, that contributed to their cost, the government found it could not control retail prices. Instead, it tried to protect consumers by preventing fraud and deception; by, as a 1784 law put it, promoting “orderly buying and selling”; and by limiting or forbidding speculation, resale, and other activities that might increase prices. The degree to which the state enforced those regulations is open to question, but the almost total absence of police records from the first six decades of St. Petersburg’s existence precludes a definitive answer. Some evidence indicates that the police did prosecute vendors for selling tainted or short-weighted food and for purchasing goods for resale.21 Less certain is the enforcement of profit controls on retail sales to individual consumers. Police reports on the wholesale 38

selling flour in st. petersburg

and retail prices of flour in 1777 and 1778 consistently show a markup of exactly 10 percent, never less and never more, which suggests that the police were simply extrapolating from the one to the other.22 Nonetheless, a report from the governor of St. Petersburg in 1786 indicates that the difference between the wholesale price of flour sold from boats and the retail price of flour sold from market stalls could range from 1.5 percent to as much as 28 percent.23 Because the state’s interest in the cereals trade rose and fell with the price of flour and baked goods in the city’s markets, the government paid less attention to the cereals trade during the long period of generally stable prices that began about 1730 than it did during the periods before and after that time. Any surge in prices prompted it to take countervailing measures, but in every case the underlying cause was a specific short-term event such as a poor harvest, a flood, or a fire that created serious but temporary distress; when prices fell back, the government lost interest. Adequate supplies and satisfactory prices encouraged government neglect and help to explain the comparative dearth of legislation and information about the cereals trade between 1730 and 1762. NEW APPROACHES

All that came to an end in 1762. Facing a financial crisis, the short-lived government of Peter III (Dec. 1761–June 1762) authorized the export of cereals from St. Petersburg in the belief that greater demand and higher prices would stimulate production, supply, and national income. The government of Catherine II (1762–1796), however, wanted to keep the price of cereals in St. Petersburg low and restricted their export from that city. Unlike Russian rulers since Peter I, Catherine paid close attention to the provisioning of her capital as well as to the larger issues of economic policy with which it was intertwined. Even without her personal intervention, the growth of the city’s population and the rise in the price of cereals that occurred during her reign would have forced her government to pay greater attention to the provisioning of the capital. By 1762 Russians’ interest had also been aroused and informed by the discussion of the cereals trade in contemporary France. That discussion had its origins in seventeenth-century opposition to the mercantilist policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Louis XIV, but it intensified during the course of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). As the war strained the finances of all the combatant states, it drew increased attention to national economies and opened minds to unconventional and even radical ideas about the wealth of nations. In that context, Quesnay, Mirabeau, Hébert, and other French writers of the so-called Physiocratic school decried the French government’s efforts to regulate what they termed “natural” economic activity. They argued that when the state interfered with the workings of the natural economy, whether to raise revenue or to promote the general welfare, it wound up damaging the interests of both the state and its taxpayers. More specifically, the Physiocrats denounced France’s elaboselling flour in st. petersburg

39

rate and long-established system for regulating and policing the trade in cereals on the grounds that policies aimed at holding down the price of bread for urban consumers discouraged production, gainful employment, and innovation to the detriment of all. A flourishing agriculture, they argued, provided the key to national prosperity.24 In May 1763 the proponents of free trade succeeded in persuading the government of Louis XV to deregulate many aspects of the cereals trade within France, but when the price of bread doubled over the next five years, the defenders of regulation blamed the reform and attacked its authors for harming the public welfare.25 The French government rescinded the reform, but the controversy continued. Catherine and members of her government paid close attention to the discussion of the cereals trade in France, learned from it, and tried, insofar as it was possible, to relate it to the problems they were facing, but it was not clear how they could do that. France had developed its methods of provisioning Paris over the course of centuries, but Russia lacked not only an elaborately regulated and policed system for moving cereals from the provinces to the capital but also the social and administrative resources necessary to operate it. Even though Catherine’s reign produced a noteworthy and costly expansion of provincial governance and administration, provincial Russia remained notoriously undergoverned and underadministered until the late nineteenth century. Catherine II came to the throne holding two strong, divergent, and in many ways incompatible views of free markets. For manufacturing and most items of commerce, she found free markets and the profit motive superior to government regulation and intervention. In those areas she agreed with the Physiocratic contention that free markets promote economic activity and increase prosperity. She opposed restraints on manufacturing and commerce and believed that free trade and open markets contributed to the national welfare. In 1767, in her wellknown “Instruction” to the Legislative Commission, Catherine II would declare that “trade flees from oppression and takes asylum where her tranquility is not disturbed” and she would assert that “it is necessary to preserve as a permanent rule, to avoid monopolies in all cases, that is[,] not to give to any one the trade in this or that exclusive of everybody else.”26 Acting on those convictions, she proceeded to abolish legal monopolies and many other restrictions on economic activity. Over the course of the next decade, she deregulated manufacturing so thoroughly that the Manufacturing College lost all reason for existence and was eventually abolished. Her law of March 17, 1775, proclaimed that “the freedom to carry on handicrafts of all kinds” was “not to be hindered in any way or subjected to approval or denial.”27 With a series of enactments culminating in the Charter to the Nobility in 1785, Catharine likewise repealed most of the regulations governing nobles’ estates, allowing the owners to manage them as they saw fit and to sell their products on the open market.

40

selling flour in st. petersburg

When it came to the cereals trade, however, Catherine agreed with Necker, Galiani, and other opponents of the Physiocrats who maintained that the government had a responsibility to protect the public from shortages and high prices by regulating and intervening. She also subscribed to an older strand of contemporary thought that emphasized demographic growth as the basis of national strength and prosperity. “Populationists,” as they are usually called, argued that nutrition determined both the welfare of the population and its propensity to increase; therefore, governments should strive to provide their subjects with the food they needed at prices they could afford. In that context, Catherine did not regard food as a commodity like flax or tar but rather viewed it as the staff of life and the lifeblood of a prosperous, powerful state. “The first thing,” she once declared, “is to see to it that everyone has enough to eat.”28 Catherine’s distinction between food, specifically cereals, and other goods shaped the commercial policies of the new regime. It explains why the same empress who abolished monopolies and deregulated manufacturing in the first years of her reign would at the same time prohibit the export of cereals, enjoin the police to keep closer watch on the sale of flour and baked goods in St. Petersburg, and create a new public granary to serve as an alternative to free market cereals. COLLECTING INFORMATION

While Catherine and her officials searched for a way to increase the supply of cereals to St. Petersburg and lower their price, they also began to amass information about the cereals trade. In 1764 the empress ordered the current chief of the St. Petersburg police, General-Politseimeister Nikolai Chicherin, to provide her with weekly reports on the prices of cereals in the city’s markets so that she could track them and notice significant fluctuations.29 When these prices rose sharply in 1767, the government extended its inquiries to include the arrival of fresh supplies. In May the Senate ordered Chicherin to issue monthly reports on the number of boats en route to the capital with cereals and other supplies, “distinguishing from the rest especially the quantity of rye flour.” Two days later it sent a similar order to the director of the Ladoga Canal, explaining that the Senate was currently dealing with the possibility of a flour shortage in the city and needed to calculate present and future supplies.30 Supplies proved adequate, but prices continued their upward trend through 1773 (see table 6), after which they stabilized and moderated. In 1767 and again in 1772 the empress ordered the Senate to investigate the deeper reasons for the rise in prices. In 1767 the Senate responded by sending provincial officials a list of fourteen questions about the cultivation of cereals. In 1772 the Senate asked agencies and officials to explain why the prices of cereals had risen and continued to rise. It also collected information on the prices of cereals in cities and towns throughout the empire. Those were not the first efforts

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Table 6. Market price of a chetvert of rye flour in St. Petersburg, 1764–1773 (in kopecks per chetvert) Date

Price

Nov. 1764

175

June 1765

183

Nov. 1765

187

June 1766

200

Aug. 1766

233

Nov. 1766

247

June 1767

258

Nov. 1767

273

Nov. 1769

273

June 1770

273

Oct. 1773

279

Nov. 1773

312

Source: Reports of General-Politseimeister Nikolai Chicherin to Empress Catherine II on events, arrests, food prices, and so on in St. Petersburg, RGADA, f. 16, d. 481, part 1, ll. 4, 107, 126, 132; part 2, ll. 6, 12, 19, 40, 99, 112, 195, 214; part 3, l. 51; and part 4, ll. 12, 14, 16, 161ob. Chicherin reported prices per kul, which I have converted to prices per chetvert to make this table compatible with others. Mironov (Khlebnye tseny, table 3) gives somewhat different figures year by year, which may represent averages prices for that year.

to collect information from provincial Russia, but they were the first efforts to study the price of flour in St. Petersburg in relation to the production and distribution of cereals in the provinces. The study revealed, among other things, that prices had approximately doubled everywhere in Russia between 1760 and 1767, a fact that conflicted with the suspicion that “speculators” and “profit-seekers” were to blame for the high prices in St. Petersburg.31 None of the responses to the Senate’s inquiry pointed to the general inflation that emerged as the ruble began deteriorating in the mid-1760s or to the Russo-Turkish War, which commenced in 1768. Some attributed the high price of cereals to the substandard harvests of 1766, 1767, and 1768, but a plurality asserted that supplies had diminished because peasants were abandoning agriculture for other employments. Some of the responses offering that explanation condemned the peasants’ moral character, others blamed the excessive demands of landlords, and still others blamed landlords for demanding their serf dues in 42

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cash rather than field labor; overall, however, the responses conveyed a strong sentiment that prices were high because supplies were low, and supplies were low because peasants were not growing all the grain that they could.32 All together, the comments and observations collected in 1772 helped the Senate and the empress understand, or at least clarified their hitherto inchoate understanding, that the price of bread in St. Petersburg depended more on supply than on market controls and that supply depended in turn on production and transport in places far away from the capital. Even though prices moderated and remained relatively stable from the mid1770s to the mid-1780s, Catherine’s government intensified and extended its efforts to collect information on prices and supplies. Blessed with a series of good to excellent harvests, the government proceeded to reduce or even eliminate its rules on marketing, on sales to peasants from the surrounding area, and on exports abroad, but as it did so, it demanded increasingly more information both to reassure itself of the status quo and to warn of impending problems. In 1776 it required the St. Petersburg police chief to submit weekly reports on deliveries of cereals by water as well as their prices in the city’s markets.33 At approximately the same time, couriers began carrying reports on barges and shipments passing through the canals at Vyshnii Volochek on their way to the capital, and the government’s official newspaper began relaying the news to the city’s merchants and consumers so that they could also anticipate the arrival of fresh supplies. In December 1780 the Senate ordered provincial officials to collect information on the prices of grain and flour in each district and forward it to the Senate three times each year.34 Once it began receiving that information, the government demanded still more. In 1782 it ordered provincial governors to collect, compile, and forward to the Senate figures on the amount of grain sown in each province, the amount harvested, the amounts needed for sowing and for local consumption, and the resulting surplus or deficit.35 In 1781 the Senate received additional reports on the St. Petersburg cereals trade. One noted when cereal-laden barges arrived and when they offloaded their cargoes. Another reported how much flour and grain of various types had exited from the Ladoga Canal between April 16, 1781, when it opened for the season, and November 15, when it closed. A third reported the number of flour stalls and bread shops in each district of the city and the amount of flour they had sold in the past year. Still another related how many vessels of various types had passed through the Ladoga Canal during the navigation seasons and how much cargo of different types they had brought.36 A much longer report, this one entitled “From which specific provinces cereals are sent to St. Petersburg each year by way of the Volga River,” may also have been composed in 1781, but the dating is uncertain. It explained in unprecedented detail not only where the cereals consumed in St. Petersburg were produced but also how they were transported from those distant places to the capital.37 selling flour in st. petersburg

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GRANARIES

One seemingly obvious way to stabilize grain prices was to build storehouses to retain cereals in good years and release them in leaner years. Ancient Egypt had done that successfully. China created a national system for storing grain in both urban and rural areas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Venice and some of the other Italian city-states had maintained public granaries for their civilian populations since the Middle Ages, but elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe granaries existed primarily to serve the military, and Prussia was the only state to create granaries in rural areas as well as cities and fortresses. Although Peter I had ordered the creation of storehouses for grain and flour in St. Petersburg and five other locations in 1724 “so that the people [would] not suffer hunger in years of poor harvest,” the project was abandoned after his death, in 1725, and did not return to the government’s agenda for almost four decades.38 Just two months after coming to power, Catherine declared her intention to stabilize the supply and prices of cereals by creating reserves throughout the country. In her decree of August 20, 1762, she stipulated, “Granaries [khlebnye magaziny] are to be created in all towns, so that the price of bread will always be in my hands.”39 Over the course of the next five years, a series of decrees expanded her plan for granaries to include peasant villages belonging to the College of Economy, the Court Chancellery, the Treasury, and noble landowners. Peasants were to build the granaries and contribute half a chetvert (105 liters) of rye each year, and the contents were to be turned over annually. In times of shortage the granaries were to lend grain to the peasants at interest for seed and food, but villages that failed to comply with the order were warned not to expect help from the government.40 Russia’s peasants resisted the government’s push to create village granaries. They looked on crop failures as acts of God, and they resented the required contributions to the granaries as an additional tax. Compliance with Catherine’s decree came slowly, if at all, but it was noticeably better in villages administered by the Treasury and the College of Economy because those agencies subsidized the costs of building and filling the granaries by lowering other demands on the peasants.41 Some noble landowners established granaries on their estates, but many others responded by proposing that the government create, maintain, and pay for granaries in rural areas.42 After decades of slow, inconsistent progress, Catherine’s successor, Paul, finally succeeded in compelling peasants on lands belonging to nobles, the state treasury, and the imperial family to build and maintain granaries. Where they existed, village granaries helped to ease the consequences of an insufficient harvest, but their reserves were too small to cope with more severe famines. The government’s effort to create a granary in St. Petersburg was ultimately more successful. Until 1766 the Provisions Chancellery managed the only sig44

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nificant reserve of cereals in St. Petersburg. Its storehouse, like those in other European capitals, held flour for the garrisons in the city and in nearby outposts, although in times of shortage it was sometimes called on to share its supplies with the city’s other residents. When Catherine carried out a reorganization of the Provisions Chancellery in 1766, she adopted N. I. Chicherin’s proposal that a separate reserve of grain and flour be created for the civilian population. She authorized the building of a masonry storehouse; once finished, the facility, operated by twenty employees working under the authority of the chief of police, could hold 24,570 metric tons of rye flour and 4,545 metric tons of various cereals.43 Chicherin assumed responsibility for carrying out Catherine’s plan, but a shortage of funds constrained his efforts. On January 21, 1769, Catherine ordered the granary to lend seed grain and flour to peasants in the city’s environs, which shows that it was functioning by that time, but it was still in the process of building up its reserves.44 When Chicherin ceded responsibility for the city’s granary in January 1775, its holdings amounted to only 8,151 metric tons of flour.45 A new era in the operation of the St. Petersburg granary began in January 1775 with the opening of new masonry storehouses next to the Kriukov Canal, near the western edge of the First Admiralty District. Catherine appropriated funds to fill the new storehouses and appointed Field Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, the governor-general of St. Petersburg, to replace Chicherin as director of the granary. In its first two years under Golitsyn, the granary purchased 24,204 metric tons of rye flour and sold 4,275 metric tons of flour to the public.46 By the early 1780s the government had also opened much smaller granaries all ten districts of St. Petersburg Province, and in 1785 it ordered the governor of Moscow to establish one in that city as well. According to an audit conducted after Golitsyn’s death, in 1783, the St. Petersburg granary had purchased 51,177 metric tons of rye flour between 1777 and 1783 but had sold only 9,349 metric tons to the public, even though it maintained a steady price of 33 kopecks a pud. In accordance with Catherine’s instructions, Golitsyn had turned over the inventory by selling 32,273 metric tons to the Admiralty and 22,826 metric tons to the Provisions Chancellery and on one occasion by exporting 2,690 metric tons overseas. On average, the granary had bought rye flour for 2.23 rubles a chetvert and sold it for 2.47 rubles a chetvert, or 33 kopecks per pud.47 It managed to do so in part because of good harvests and relatively stable grain prices during those years but also because it adopted the purchasing practices of the Provisions Chancellery. It paid merchants in advance for cereals they were to deliver to St. Petersburg at an agreed-on price, and it also bought grain and flour “at first hand,” that is, directly from the grower or miller, in surplus-producing regions through state officials and its own agents and had it transported to the capital on consignment. By thus avoiding markups by intermediaries, the granary had managed to make a small profit while selling rye flour at a fixed and moderate price. Operating expenses for salaries, selling flour in st. petersburg

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milling, packaging, and so on averaged 12,529 rubles a year. Between Golitsyn’s appointment in 1777 and his death in 1783, the operating capital of the granary had declined from 725,317 rubles to 710,326 rubles, for a net loss of 14,990 rubles, but that was easily explained by the loss of 61,831 rubles on an export in 1780 that Catherine had personally ordered and to spoilage caused by a recent flood.48 Golitsyn’s management of the granary had been exemplary, but the man had been fortunate to serve as its director in a time of relative plenty. His successor, S. I. Mavrin, would not be so lucky. FREER TRADE

In December 1763 Catherine created a new Commission on Commerce to advise her on commercial and economic matters. She charged it to examine the institutions and policies of the Russian government and propose measures to encourage commerce and promote economic growth. The commission was to report directly to the empress, and though the Senate and other agencies could call on it for information and advice, they were to have no authority over it. In the 1760s and 1770s, the membership of the Commission on Commerce included Grigorii Teplov, Count I. F. Minikh (Münnich), Timofei von Klingstedt, Mikhail Pushkin, and Mikhail Odar (Odart); all these individuals, who were knowledgeable and experienced in economic and commercial matters, believed that commerce could be expanded by freeing it of restrictions. Its membership changed gradually, but the commission continued to advocate freer trade throughout Catherine’s reign. In the commission’s first two decades, the empress adopted many of its proposals to liberalize important sectors of the Russian economy, but when it came to the cereals trade, she resisted its efforts to modify her ideal of a regulated market. After decades of struggle, however, the commission eventually succeeded in persuading Catherine to change her mind and liberalize the trade in cereals. The commission’s constant advocacy of freer trade played an important role in decentralizing retail trade in St. Petersburg. So too did the stabilization of prices and the successful development of the city’s granary after 1775, both of which served to reduce the government’s interest in supervising and regulating private traders. For example, Catherine’s Statute on Police (the Ustav Blagochiniia), issued April 8, 1782, prescribed the duties and responsibilities of the police in every urban settlement, doing so in considerable detail; in contrast to the legislation of Peter I, however, it said very little about the policing of markets and retail trade. It merely instructed the police to record the price of cereals monthly (“so that one can prove the price at which cereals sold in the town at that time”) and gave the police authority to verify and enforce accurate weights and measures.49 One month later a fire destroyed the gostinyi dvor built in the time of Empress Anna and badly damaged the Morskoi food market, which adjoined it. With the 46

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city’s central market in ruins, the Senate asked how the city’s retail trade should be organized in the future, and the Commission on Commerce stepped forward with an answer. Since 1766, the commission had been pushing for an end to the requirement that all goods other than prepared food and drinks be sold in the gostinyi dvor or one of the public markets. It had scored some small victories in that cause and had developed arguments in favor of dispersed trade that it would present in its report to the Senate in June 1782, just three weeks after the fire. In its report, the commission noted two judicial proceedings in which the Senate had ruled in favor of a merchant selling goods from home. In 1766 agents of the city magistracy had arrested a Frenchman named Poshet (Pochette?), a dealer in art supplies who, they said, had set up shop in his house rather than in a public market, as the law required. Poshet appealed and petitioned the Senate to be allowed to sell merchandise from his home. Since the reign of Anna Ivanovna, it had become customary for foreigners selling luxury goods to meet genteel customers in private shops away from the public markets even though the law expressly forbade it.50 In 1766 the magistracy wanted to close that exception to the rule, while Poshet wanted to preserve it, at least for himself; the Commission on Commerce, however, wanted to expand it. It not only supported Poshet’s petition but also recommended that all merchants be allowed to trade elsewhere than the gostinyi dvor and other public markets. In the end, the Senate ruled in favor of Poshet, and its decision encouraged more than a hundred other merchants to open shops in their homes. The city magistracy, dominated by wealthy merchants, continued to oppose what it saw as a violation of the law and a threat to the established order. It repeatedly petitioned the imperial government for stricter enforcement of the law, and in 1769 it confiscated the wares of a French merchant named Rembert (Raimbert?) because he was conducting business in his house rather than a public market. Reprising the Poshet case, Rembert appealed, the Commission on Commerce supported him, and the Senate ruled in his favor. In 1782, when the Senate asked the Commission on Commerce for advice on the organization of retail trade, the commission responded by citing the Senate’s decisions in the Poshet and Rembert cases as legal precedents and recommended that all retail merchants be allowed to sell from their houses if they chose to do so.51 In its report to the Senate, the Commission on Commerce presented three simple, pragmatic arguments for permitting merchants to sell goods in their homes or elsewhere outside the official public markets: the resulting dispersion would facilitate the operation of businesses, it would limit the damage done by fires like the recent one, and it would enable the residents of the large and growing city to purchase necessities in their own streets and neighborhoods instead of wasting time and money traveling to a more distant market. Then the report offered a fourth reason that connected the specific issue to the larger argument that the Commission on Commerce had been making in various forms since selling flour in st. petersburg

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its creation in 1763: restrictions on commercial activity benefited a few wealthy merchants at the expense of other merchants, consumers, and commerce in general. In its own words, the report advocated dispersed trade in homes and shops because “[it] will prevent monopoly such as often occurs when the stalls are in the hands of one merchant with much capital who either builds or buys many stalls for himself to the disadvantage of poorer merchants with few resources in order to set the prices he desires on his wares.”52 In support of its argument, the commission pointed out that Savva Iakovlev, the director of the St. Petersburg customs house and the city’s richest merchant, owned 91 market stalls and that twenty-one other rich and well-connected merchants owned somewhere between 10 and 27 stalls apiece. All told, those twenty-two men owned 451 of the 1,204 stalls in the gostinyi dvor and the public markets. Such men, the commission argued, either acted as monopolists in the goods they sold or, because stalls selling the same type of good were grouped together in each market, colluded with a few others to fix prices, something they could not so easily do if the sellers of a particular good were scattered throughout the city.53 Strong as it was, the commission’s report failed to mention the current law’s effect on the price of market stalls: by limiting the number of selling places, it increased their value, benefiting those who already owned stalls in the markets and reducing the opportunities of those who did not. The rapidly rising cost of purchasing or renting a market stall also created additional pressure to increase retail prices.54 In effect, the public markets that had been created to contain merchants’ profits and keep prices low had in fact been taken over by a merchant oligopoly and were being used to keep prices artificially high. The report of the Commission on Commerce, forwarded from the Senate to the empress, persuaded Catherine that her reasons for opposing monopolies and economic regulations in general also applied to the sale of food. At the same time, the existence of the state granary gave her leeway to experiment. In July 1782 she provided guidelines for the Senate’s reorganization of retail trade: markets were to be developed in every section of the city as replacements for the central market, which now lay in ashes, and a new gostinyi dvor was to be constructed on or near the site of the old one; the new markets, the rebuilt gostinyi dvor, and the stalls within them were to be constructed of brick and mortar; stalls should be sold or rented only to merchants or to the poorer class of city residents (meshchane); and all vendors should have the choice or either buying or renting stalls in the markets or setting up shops in their homes.55 Four months later the Senate finalized the reorganization. A new gostinyi dvor of brick and mortar would be constructed on the site of the old one, at the corner of Sadovaia Street and Nevskii Prospekt. Behind it, however, the new Assignats Bank would occupy part of what had been the city’s central food market.

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A covered food market would be built farther west on Sadovaia, beyond Sennaia Square, to serve the residents of the Third Admiralty District, and similar markets would be built in every one of the city’s ten districts. Instead of having to buy or rent stalls in the public markets, merchants would be allowed to sell goods from their homes or pool their capital and construct private markets.56 The major flour merchants in St. Petersburg responded to the new conditions by building two-story masonry houses on the site of the former flour stalls along Sadovaia Street and Muchnoi Pereulok and opening shops on the houses’ ground floors.57 Despite the construction and improvement of markets in other sections of the city, the Third Admiralty District remained the center of the retail flour trade and still sold more than 60 percent of the flour marketed in St. Petersburg in 1786.58 Even so, the flour trade, like all retail trade, would be more dispersed and more difficult for both the government and the merchants to control. CRISIS

Those arrangements—freer retail trade backed by a state-supported granary —were soon put to the test. In 1786 and 1787, after nearly a decade of ample supplies and relatively stable food prices, St. Petersburg faced the most severe threat of shortage and possible famine since the 1720s. From 1777 through 1784 rye flour in the city’s markets had sold for 2.10–2.83 rubles a chetvert, depending on the year and the season. In the last months of 1785, however, it sold for 3.33 rubles a chetvert, and the price continued to ratchet upward week by week: to 5 rubles in mid-March 1786 and 6–6.50 rubles in late June.59 Instead of falling back after the opening of navigation, as it had been expected to do, the price of flour continued to surge. Alarmed by reports of rising prices, the empress created a special panel, the Commission on Grain, to deal with the problem. Its members were A. R. Vorontsov, the president of the Commerce College; I. I. Shuvalov, an experienced adviser whose principal concerns had been education and culture; P. V. Konovnitsyn, the governor of St. Petersburg Province; S. I. Mavrin, the head of the Provisions Chancellery and director of the St. Petersburg granary; and the empress’s secretary, A. V. Khrapovitskii, who had experience in finance and administration. In her decree, Catherine charged the commission to “investigate the causes of the rise in cereals prices . . . in St. Petersburg and, having collected all the credible information pertaining thereto, to write a report on the means of averting shortages and establishing moderate prices.”60 In practice, Vorontsov and Shuvalov ran the commission, the three other members serving as auxiliaries when needed. At the commission’s first meeting, on June 18, 1786, Shuvalov and Vorontsov presented a list of the materials and information the commission would need to begin its work, and within two days it received everything it had requested: the

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number of people, including temporary residents, who would have to be fed; the amount of flour each resident could be expected to consume each month; the quantity of cereals, especially rye flour, currently stored in the city’s stalls, shops, granaries, and warehouses; and the amounts of flour and grains on the waterways en route to the city. Using that information, the commission quickly concluded that supplies already in the city would suffice for another five to six weeks; that an additional eight-to-ten-day supply of flour would arrive well before current supplies ran out; and that 2,948 metric tons of rye grain, enough to feed the city for two to three weeks once it was milled, was en route from Nizhnii Novgorod under contract for export abroad. In consequence, the commission recommended that the empress prohibit the export of rye flour from St. Petersburg for the duration of the crisis, that the Treasury purchase the unmilled rye contracted for export, and that the state granary begin selling flour to the public at steady prices.61 Having calculated that those first measures would suffice to feed the city for eight to ten weeks, the commission turned its attention to finding the additional supplies it would need beyond that period. In subsequent reports it recommended that the governor-general of Estland and Lifland and the governor of Archangel be instructed to purchase grain or flour destined for export and send it to St. Petersburg, that provincial governors in surplus-producing regions be authorized to purchase grain wherever it was comparatively inexpensive and arrange to have it shipped to St. Petersburg, that government agents be dispatched to distant trading wharves to buy these commodities “at first hand” and have them shipped to the capital under contract, and that the governors of provinces along the waterways be ordered to hasten the passage of boats carrying grain and flour to St. Petersburg.62 The empress implemented the commission’s recommendations immediately, often on the same day she received them, and she quickly appropriated 1,039,978 rubles to purchase emergency supplies of flour and grain. Several of those purchases met with unexpected problems, but in the end they succeeded in averting a famine.63 By the close of navigation, in late October, Shuvalov and Vorontsov could assure the empress that the city had enough grain and flour on hand to last through the winter and spring. The city would not starve, but its problems were not over. Provincial officials had informed the commission that in many areas, the winter rye and wheat sown that autumn had failed to sprout and was rotting in the ground. The coming harvest would be meager, supplies would remain tight, and prices would remain extraordinarily high. In the light of that forecast, the commission recommended that the government continue and extend its efforts to secure additional supplies for St. Petersburg for at least another year.64 In dealing with the crisis of 1786–1787, the Commission on Grain validated two of Catherine’s innovations: the information that the government had collected over the past two decades enabled the commission to calculate the city’s

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needs and resources and manage them effectively, and the St. Petersburg granary enabled it to collect, store, and distribute the flour that continued to feed the city’s inhabitants. At first the crisis caught the granary off-guard, but it soon measured up to challenge. When the Commission on Grain compiled its inventory of cereal on hand in St. Petersburg in June 1786, it found that although the granary had been built to hold vastly more, at that moment it held only 1,991 metric tons of rye flour, 2,390 metric tons of rye grain, and 489 metric tons of oats.65 Following the pattern of previous years, its director, S. I. Mavrin, had sold off most of the existing stock to the public, the Admiralty, and the Provisions Chancellery with the intention of purchasing fresh supplies from the 1785 harvest, but when the 1785 harvest turned out to be the worst in decades, Mavrin found supplies much tighter and prices much higher than he had expected. Unlike the information on supplies and deliveries that the Commission on Grain found so useful, reports from the provinces had somehow failed to alert officials in St. Petersburg, including Mavrin, that the harvest had been meager and that grain prices were soaring. Instead, the first warning of an impending crisis, or at least the first warning that anyone in the government heeded, was the sudden spike in the price of flour in the city’s markets. With the granary nearly empty, Mavrin reacted by halting sales to the public and then, on June 1, 1786, by notifying the Admiralty and the Provisions Chancellery that the granary would not be able to sell them any more flour that year.66 Three weeks later the empress removed Mavrin as director of the granary and appointed P. I. Novosil’tsev, the vice governor of St. Petersburg, to replace him, but she allowed Mavrin to retain his post as head of the Provisions Chancellery. Throughout the summer of 1786 the granary took possession of the cereals that the Commission on Grain managed to acquire and sold flour to the public at bargain prices. In July and August alone it sold 5,307 metric tons of flour, an amount equal to approximately 60 percent of the city’s estimated need, at a constant price of forty-five kopecks per pud when flour on the open market was selling for a price that fluctuated around eighty-five kopecks per pud. Although that price was ten kopecks lower than the price the Commission on Grain had recommended, the empress resolved to maintain it despite her suspicion that it would lead to resale and profiteering at the expense of the poor and needy. Indeed, her directive that the granary sell only to the common people and not to nobles was often ignored, and several members of the wealthy elite—Catherine’s secretary A. A. Bezborodko; Vorontsov’s sister, Princess E. R. Dashkova; and Police Chief N. I. Ryleev, among others—bought flour from the granary to feed their extensive households at a substantial saving. By the end of 1786, the granary had acquired 21,418 metric tons of rye flour and had sold 8,878 metric tons of it to the public and another 3,677 metric tons to government agencies.67 On

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November 30, 1786, when the worst of the crisis had passed, Catherine rewarded the employees of the public granary for “the zealous performance of their duties.”68 In 1787 the granary purchased slightly smaller amounts of grain and flour than it had in 1786 but sold slightly more to the public. Once the crisis had passed, the Commission on Grain tied up some loose ends and dissolved itself, but the St. Petersburg granary continued to play an important role in provisioning the city into the nineteenth century. On October 23, 1786, Catherine codified the procedures it was to follow in the future, combining established practices with the lessons learned during the recent crisis. She instructed the officials in charge of the granary never to buy cereals already delivered to the city but to purchase them instead “at first hand” through merchants under contract, through its own agents, and through provincial governors who could be commissioned to buy at low prices in surplus-producing areas and arrange for processing and transport to the capital. On the other side of the ledger, the granary was to continue to sell flour to the public at prices calculated on the basis of cost plus overhead plus a small profit. The demand for flour from the granary varied with the difference between its prices and those in the marketplace, which were usually but not always higher. From 1787 to 1807 there were only five years in which the granary sold less than 2,138 metric tons of rye flour to the civilian population of St. Petersburg and the surrounding countryside. To turn over its inventory and keep supplies fresh, the granary also sold to the military each year.69 With a several months’ supply of flour stored in the granary, the government knew that the city would not run out of food, and residents had confidence in the government’s ability to prevent that from happening. Though prices resumed their rise a few years after the crisis, the inhabitants of St. Petersburg somehow managed to cope. Unlike Paris and other French cities, St. Petersburg did not respond to rising prices with bread riots and rumors of a famine plot perpetrated by the rich and powerful. The granary no doubt played a role in preserving calm and order, but so too did the presence of a great many soldiers, who did not have to worry about the price of flour and who made up a much larger percentage of the population in St. Petersburg than their counterparts constituted in Paris in 1789 or Petrograd in 1917.70 THE ROLE OF MERCHANTS

During the crisis the empress repeatedly warned officials to be wary of middlemen and speculators and tried to devise measures to limit their influence on prices, but her government did not arrest and punish them. Suspicion and distrust of flour merchants and grain traders did not disappear, but they and their stalls and shops were never attacked by angry mobs, and the government actually relaxed its controls and supervision as it learned more about the grain trade

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and the workings of the market. In that sense, the granary provided a sense of security that allowed the government to worry less about the possible consequences of merchant chicanery. Like other aspects of the cereals trade, the role of St. Petersburg’s flour merchants attracted the attention of the imperial government during the crisis of 1786–1787. In its report to the empress on June 20, 1786, the Commission on Grain observed, “The cereals trade is practiced freely by those who engage in it, but according to the local governor, they number no more than eight people.”71 Nonetheless, when the commission needed to ship flour and meal from the public granary to the maritime forts in Russian Finland in October 1786, it signed contracts with six flour merchants, only two of whom were among the eight listed in its earlier report. The discrepancy suggests that the commission exaggerated the concentration of the retail flour trade and the possibility for manipulating the market. Even so, the commission understood that the simplest, the easiest, and probably even the cheapest way to supply the forts in Finland was to turn to the merchants who knew the flour trade.72 Provincial governors also found it expedient to turn to merchants for help in supplying grain and flour to St. Petersburg. Ordered to purchase specified quantities “at first hand” from peasants and estate owners, governors often found that they could not do so within the allotted time. Merchants, however, could provide the needed amounts of grain and flour and deliver the material to the shipping wharves almost immediately. In some instances they even quoted a price that included delivery to St. Petersburg.73 Such dependence inspired distrust and focused suspicion on the merchants. Alarmed by rising prices at the start of the crisis in the spring of 1786, P. V. Konovnitsyn, the governor of St. Petersburg, responded by haranguing the flour merchants and urging them to moderate prices.74 Similarly, when the Commission on Grain took inventory of the city’s supplies in June 1786 and found the amounts held by merchants surprisingly low, it immediately assumed that the flour merchants had underreported their holdings “out of greed,” seeking to create the illusion of a greater shortage and drive up prices. When the commission dispatched the police to investigate, however, it found that the discrepancy in the reported figures had come from a miscalculation in the governor’s office and not from any deceit on the part of the merchants.75 The commission also had to deal with rumors that the city’s flour merchants were withholding fresh supplies to increase prices and profits. Although many residents believed those rumors, the members of the commission did not. The empress was uncertain and asked the commission to investigate the matter. In response, it sent an official of the Commerce College up river to Shlissel’burg and Ladoga to search for flour barges that were rumored to be lying at anchor, withholding flour from the city and waiting for prices to rise even higher. After

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more than month’s investigation, the official returned to the capital to report that he had found only one barge carrying flour that had halted its progress toward the city, and it belonged to a peasant from beyond the divide who was selling flour to the local villagers in full accordance with the law.76 In the four months between its appointment and the winter freeze that marked the end of the navigation season, the Commission on Grain became convinced that skullduggery, conspiracy, and manipulation were not responsible in any way for the high price of flour in St. Petersburg. In October, with the supply crisis waning and its work nearly done, the commission sent the empress a report summarizing its activities and findings in which, among other matters, it made a point of trying to exonerate the flour merchants and clear them of suspicion: “Everything we learned showed that there had never been any malfeasance by those trading in cereals. They had to purchase flour at the wharves at high prices and could not sell it for more than the permissible profit. Nor did we uncover any profiteering or gouging by the shippers who brought it down the river on boats.”77 Three months later, however, the new governor-general of St. Petersburg, I. A. Brius (Bruce), took a different line with the merchants and their profits. Perplexed that the price of flour had continued to rise to new high of 8.50 rubles a kul even though the supply was now adequate and stable, Brius attributed the increase both to an unfounded fear of shortages that led consumers to believe prices would rise even higher in weeks to come and to merchants’ “greed for unreasonable profit.” Like Golitsyn and Konovnitsyn before him, Brius tried to talk the merchants into holding down prices, but unlike his predecessors, he was able to claim some success. Informed that nine merchants controlled the flour trade in the city, Bruis summoned them to his office and, as he reported to the empress, “convinced and persuaded them” to sell their flour for seven rubles a kul, “the same price at which they bought it,” until the new shipments began to arrive in the spring. He ordered city officials to monitor flour sales from the stalls and shops and was pleased to report that flour was selling everywhere for seven rubles a kul: “Despite my unilateral reduction in price, I take the liberty to assert, Most Merciful Sovereign, that these merchants will retain a handsome profit, keeping of course from each kul as much as two rubles after all expenses.”78 That information, like Brius’s assurance that he had moved the flour merchants “without any force, solely by exhortation and argument,” cannot be taken at face value. Brius made no effort to explain how the merchants could make a profit of two rubles a kul by selling flour at the same price at which they bought it. Neither did he seem to think that a two-ruble profit on a kul selling for seven rubles was in itself excessive. The confusion probably stems from an effort on Bruis’s part to claim credit for achieving one of Catherine’s goals while fearing that she might disapprove of his arbitrary intervention in commercial affairs, however successful it might otherwise have seemed. 54

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By the 1780s Catherine’s view of the cereals trade had evolved from the stand the empress had taken in the 1760s, and she was increasingly willing to extend her belief in free markets and free trade to the food supply. In February 1785 Catherine had told Brius, who at that time had been the governor-general of Moscow, to publicize the price of cereals in the several districts of that province so that merchants could see them and pursue their own benefit by moving grain and flour from places were prices were low to places where they were high, because that would offer, in Catherine’s words, “the most reliable means of preventing not only shortage but also a surge in prices.”79 In 1787, five months after receiving Brius’s report of his meeting with the flour merchants, Catherine, who was then on her way to the Crimea, responded to his latest report that prices in St. Petersburg had begun to rise again. Contrasting that development with the flourishing grain fields she had recently passed, she implied that merchant collusion might be responsible for the seeming discontinuity, but she went on to propose an entirely different remedy from the one that Brius had employed: “Only five or six merchants, who are not the least of swindlers, trade in cereals in St. Petersburg,” she wrote, “but it is necessary to try to introduce more merchants into the cereals trade in order to take the trade out of the hands of profiteers [perekupshchiki].”80 FREE TRADE AND THE GRANARY

Catherine’s words evinced the same distrust and distain for perekupshchiki that Peter I had expressed in his decrees, but unlike the earlier monarch, Catherine had come to see competition and free trade rather than government regulation as the corrective. Her position—trust the free market but not the merchants, who will conspire against it—came very close to that of Adam Smith, and though it perhaps cannot be traced directly to him, it can be traced to the growing influence of liberal economic thought in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century. In September 1787, after learning that the Senate had banned transporting cereals out of provinces that were experiencing shortages, Catherine stated her position officially in a personal decree to the Senate: “Free trade in cereals within our empire is not to be restricted by any law, but complete freedom was given to all internal trade freed from all monopolies by our decree of July 31, 1762. . . . We order the immediate removal of such bans on the shipping of cereals from one province to another wherever they exist, and do not allow anyone at any time to create similar prohibitions, confirming free and universal trade in cereals within the boundaries of our empire.”81 Catherine’s successors agreed. Soon after coming to power, Paul emphatically affirmed merchants’ freedom to trade from their houses or shops and declared an end to all prohibitions on sales and all similar restrictions on commerce.82 When flour prices surged anew in September 1797, Paul called on the Senate to investigate the causes and take measures to provide the capital with selling flour in st. petersburg

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an abundance of food at affordable prices. Rather than turn to new controls and regulations on merchants, however, the governments of Paul and Alexander I relied on the public granary to cope with temporary problems with supply and price. For the longer term, they devoted considerable sums to improving transportation to increase the flow of goods from the provinces to the capital, and they assisted merchants with legislation to stabilize and encourage commerce. Two memoranda on provisioning St. Petersburg prepared for Emperor Alexander in 1808 clarified the roles of both the state and the free market. The first, submitted jointly by the minister of internal affairs and the governor-general of St. Petersburg, assessed the city’s needs and described the ways in which they were met. Although 278,689 people now lived in St. Petersburg, not all of them purchased black bread or rye flour. Senior officials, military officers, “eminent” merchants, and some others ate white bread purchased from bakers or prepared at home from fine white flour, which could always be found, albeit at higher prices, in the city’s shops and markets. Military personnel in the lower ranks, their wives, and children all ate black bread supplied by the Provisions Chancellery as part of their rations. The authors of the memorandum subtracted the number of people in those two categories from the city’s total population and counted each child in the remaining category as half a person. On that basis they determined that the demand for independently purchased black bread and rye flour was equivalent to that of 199,700 individuals. At the rate of two chetverts (245.7 kg) per person, the city needed to put 49,006 metric tons of rye flour on sale each year. On the other side of the equation, the two officials found that in any given year, the amount of rye flour coming to the city for public sale ranged between 37,050 and 64,125 metric tons, while the public granary held another 28,500 metric tons in reserve. Thus, even when deliveries fell to the bottom of their range, as they had in 1807, the city experienced no shortage even though prices rose to “extraordinary” heights. When deliveries exceeded the city’s demand, the balance could be restored by selling the surplus to the inhabitants of the surrounding provinces of St. Petersburg and Vyborg.83 The second memorandum focused more narrowly on the operations of the public granary. Prepared by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it recounted the history of the public granary through 1807 and observed that providing flour and grain to the capital constituted “a special concern for the government.” The report portrayed the granary as an appropriate response to that concern, but it concluded that, for all its efforts, the granary could not possibly satisfy the needs of the city and the surrounding region or bring down the price of flour on the open market. Instead, the memo argued, the granary had a twofold mission: to help the poor and to moderate prices. It served the first of those purposes through various methods of rationing and policing that directed sales to those most in need. It served the second by reducing overhead, limiting profit, and selling at

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fixed prices. Those practices acted as a check on sharp and sudden increases in the price of flour, but over the longer term, the price of flour at the granary, like the price at the market, reflected the price of grain at the source.84 This memorandum recommended that the granary hold a smaller inventory so as not to interfere with free trade, that its operations be dispersed among several smaller granaries, and that it sell to the poor whenever the price of flour exceeded eight rubles a pud and to the general public only when it reached ten rubles a pud.85 Taken together the two memoranda clearly reveal that the public granary played a crucial but secondary role in feeding the city’s population. Even in 1807, when it sold a record 10,089 metric tons of flour to the public, it provided only 21 percent of the rye flour sold in the city, with merchants providing the other 79 percent, and if the consumers of white flour were to be included, the disparity would be greater still. Nevertheless, the operations of the public granary enabled the government to avoid not only shortage but also the fear of shortage. Even the 11,504 metric tons of flour it sold to the public and the military combined in 1807 did not threaten to exhaust its reserves. As other supplies dwindled, the granary stepped into the breach by selling between 43 and 57 metric tons a week in the latter part of the year.86 The granary thus helped to moderate wide fluctuations in both supply and price. While the granary could prevent panic buying and restrain a short-term surge in prices, the Ministry of Internal Affairs pointed out that sales from the granary did not and could not lower retail prices on the open market over longer periods of time. More significantly, such sales also failed to prevent the longterm rise in flour prices that began in the latter half of the 1780s. From 1787 to 1791 the cost of a pud of rye flour in St. Petersburg declined from its peak in 1787, even though it remained considerably higher than it had been in 1785, but by the early 1800s, the extraordinary prices of 1786–1787 had become the norm.87 In 1811 rye flour in the merchants’ stalls and shops was selling for 15.50 to 17.00 rubles a kul, roughly twice the 8.10 rubles a kul it had cost during the worst weeks of crisis in 1786. Alexander ordered the granary to continue selling flour to the poor by the pud at the rate of 7.50 rubles a kul until November 1811, but as its losses mounted to unbearable heights—to a total of 758,169 rubles for 1809 and 1810—the emperor had to impose limits on its sales. Henceforth, the granary was to sell no more than one or two puds per month to any purchaser and no more than four puds (65.52 kg) per month for an entire family, and it was to sell only to purchasers who presented documents from the police certifying their poverty.88 In the long run, none of the government’s measures succeeded in holding down the price of rye flour in St. Petersburg. Cereal prices rose along with other prices amid the general inflation caused by the moderate decline of the ruble’s purchasing power in the 1760s and its rapid loss of value from the late 1780s on.

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Prices for cereals and related products rose almost everywhere in Russia, but they remained higher in St. Petersburg than in almost any other place. The reason, as several contemporary observers noted, was the city’s location and its distance from its sources of supply. Those conditions trumped the government’s best efforts to provide St. Petersburg’s inhabitants with inexpensive food. They also kept St. Petersburg from exporting the surplus of cereals that Russia was capable of producing in provinces far distant from St. Petersburg.

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CHAPTER 3

R

Sources of Supply

B

ecause cities do not produce food, they need to acquire it from places that produce more than enough to satisfy local demand. Paris, for example, ate cereals from Champagne and other surplus-producing provinces within France. Amsterdam brought Polish and Livonian grain from Danzig and Riga. Stockholm relied on grain from Estland and Lifland. To sustain itself and to grow, St. Petersburg likewise needed an accessible source of surplus grain, but its supply problems were more difficult than those of other large cities. European Russia as a whole produced a surplus of grain in most years and was undoubtedly capable of producing far more, but it encompassed a large territory comprising different regions with widely differing agricultural productivity. Situated in the far northwestern corner of European Russia, St. Petersburg lay far from Russia’s most fertile provinces, while those to which it had the easiest access almost never produced a surplus of grain. Although cereals could be brought to St. Petersburg from regions of surplus production, this was difficult and expensive—though possibly less difficult and certainly less expensive than importing them by sea. Even so, St. Petersburg endured high prices and repeated threats of scarcity, while a number of provinces that were capable of producing

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enormous surpluses curtailed their production because they had no access to St. Petersburg or any other market. The crucial difference between the surplus-producing regions that supplied St. Petersburg with cereals and those that could not was water transport. When long distances were involved, grain and flour moved by water, and by linking specific regions of surplus production with available consumers, the waterways of European Russia created, organized, and defined Russia’s separate markets for surplus grain, the largest and most important of which supplied St. Petersburg and much of northern and central Russia. THE PROBLEM

In June 1772 Senator Grigorii Teplov wrote a response to the Senate’s inquiry into the causes of the recent rise in the price of cereals. In a brief memorandum, Teplov explained that the fundamental problem was one of supply, calling it “the consequence of creating this capital city in such a region of the empire, which, either from the characteristics of the soil or of the climate, is itself unproductive and in which nothing that is nourishing grows satisfactorily, but everything is, of necessity, brought from far away with great difficulty.”1 Teplov was not only one of Catherine’s closest associates but also a well-educated and experienced government official with a deep interest in economic matters. His many assignments included an appointment, in 1763, to the Commission on Commerce, for which he acted as secretary and executive director until his death, in 1779. Given its source and its context, Teplov’s memorandum directed the Senate’s attention to the structural problems underlying the city’s provisioning, but its remarks about the region surrounding St. Petersburg were hardly original. Ever since the city’s founding, Russians and foreigners alike had commented on the surrounding area’s inability to provide food and other necessities for a populous city.2 In June 1786 the Commission on Grain made that same point in its third report to the empress. After identifying the proximate causes of the most recent rise in prices, it added, “The commission cannot refrain from saying that this capital, lying almost on the edge of the empire and unable to rely on grain brought from the districts that surround it, is deprived of the advantages by which all populous cities attract to themselves the nearby rural inhabitants with their domestic produce, but must supply itself instead with cereals brought here by water annually at great expense.”3 The information that the government gathered during the crisis of 1786–1787 and in succeeding years demonstrated the accuracy of that statement and provided a wealth of detail on the places from which St. Petersburg could and could not obtain its supply of cereals. THE HINTERLAND

The vast sheet of ice that covered northern Europe during the last ice age defined and shaped the natural hinterland of St. Petersburg. It removed much of 60

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the soil from the areas north and northeast of the city and deposited it well to the south and east, where it created the series of low hills that separate the watershed of the Neva from those of the Volga and the Dnieper. As it melted, the glacier deposited rocks, gravel, and soil to varying depths over the scoured bedrock. A mixed forest of pine, larch, spruce, birch, and adder eventually covered much of the land, and over centuries the decay of leaves and evergreen needles had acidified the soil, leeching out minerals and other nutrients and creating “podzol,” the light gray soil characteristic of northern Russia. Decaying vegetation also collected in the low places and shallow basins to form swamps and peat bogs. With a few local exceptions, those conditions prevailed throughout St. Petersburg Province and the neighboring provinces of Vyborg, Olonets, and Novgorod, all of which fell within the city’s natural hinterland insofar as they could easily send goods to the city overland or through one of the many waterways that fed into the Neva (see map 3). At the end of the 1780s Alexander Radishchev composed a detailed description of St. Petersburg Province for his patron, A. R. Vorontsov, the long-standing president of the Commerce College. Radishchev had already written several essays on economic and commercial topics for Vorontsov, and in the aftermath of the crisis of 1786–1787, he turned his attention to the surrounding province and its influence on St. Petersburg’s economy. (In June 1790 Radishchev would be arrested and sent to Siberia for addressing larger, more political issues in his famous Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.) Radishchev described the province’s soil as marshy, light, clayish, often mixed with stones and gravel, and thus unsuitable for agriculture unless it was heavily manured. Its growing season, moreover, lasted only four and a half months.4 Given these conditions, its inhabitants directed their efforts to dairy farming and vegetable gardening and gathered what they could from the streams and forests. Those pursuits allowed them to provide consumers in St. Petersburg and Kronstadt with milk and cottage cheese, cabbages and cucumbers, hay, fish, berries, and mushrooms.5 Their primary field crop was oats, which can grow in poor soil and requires no manure. “Rye and barley,” Radishchev noted, “are scant. Millet is grown out of necessity and wheat out of curiosity.”6 Later studies have shown that at the time Radishchev was writing, only 14 percent of the land in the province was being used for field crops.7 Clearly, St. Petersburg Province could not produce enough cereals to feed the capital city’s burgeoning population. On the contrary, the city supplied flour and bread to the surrounding countryside. In January 1766 Empress Catherine II complained to the Senate that peasants near the city were buying flour in St. Petersburg instead of growing their own grain. The Senate responded with a decree prohibiting peasants from purchasing flour and baked goods in the city and chided them for their “astounding lack of zeal for agriculture,” but neither the prohibition nor the scolding sources of supply

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White Sea

Country Boundary Province Boundary

OLONETS

250 MILES 250 KILOMETERS

ARCHA NGEL

OLONETS

G

Vo

lkh

BUR

ov

na

ER S

NOVGOROD

Novgorod

na

SMOLENSK

iep Dn

O REL

TA M B O V

A R K O

Vo

r

D on CH ERKASSK

Don

E

RE

G

C

Y

O

F

E

C

A

A

SU

S

a

V

IC

EN

H

C

lg

Azov

T

U

Vo

Sea of Azov

lga

S A R AT O V

VORONEZH

V

te

i Dn Kherson

ma

Simbirsk

H

V

es

r epe

Ka

SIMBIRSK

Saratov

Acquired from the Ottoman Empire in 1774

Black Sea

Cheboksary Kazan

KAZ AN

PENZA

K

GO

ni

Odessa

T U L A RI A Z A N

KURSK

NI V

Oka

GA

Orel

ER

D

Acquired from the Ottoman Empire in 1792

IE

NIZHNII NOVGOROD

Sura

CH K

MOSCOW

V I AT K A

Nizhnii Novgorod Kosmodem’iansk

Moscow V L A D I M I R

Kaluga

KALU

KOSTROMA

Volga

Iaroslavl

Astrakhan

Caspian Sea

BLACKMER MAPS

Volga Tver

er

vi

IAROSLAVL

TVER

ROD VGO NO VERSK SE

Acquired from Poland 1772–1795

V O L O G D A

vi

D

D

P ET

PSKOV

rn

n

S T.

Riga

te

er

St. Petersburg

LI F L A N D

es

th

EST LAN D

W

or

Reval

N

RG BO VY

Baltic Sea

ARCHANGEL

Archangel

Map 3. Provinces of Russia European in the Late Eighteenth Century Provinces of European in theRussia Late Eighteenth Century

Map 3 | 120822

persuaded the peasants to change their ways.8 More than twenty yearsMaps later, Blackmer Radishchev recorded that many of the province’s inhabitants bought flour Draftin the towns in exchange for cabbages and cucumbers and added that because of poor soil and meager harvests, those who lived nearest to the city had abandoned agriculture altogether. Although he understood the difficulty, Radishchev, who often sympathized with peasants, was no less disapproving than the empress and the Senate. “One should not imagine,” he wrote archly, “that they think to manure the soil. By nature man is inclined to laziness.”9 What the Senate attributed to “lack of zeal” and Radishchev to “laziness” should in fact be ascribed to microeconomic rationality. Even if sufficient manure had been available (it was not), peasants saw little sense in trying to grow rye and wheat in the province’s poor soil when they could make a better living through dairy farming, vegetable gardening, fishing, gathering, carting, haul62

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ing, and performing other types of wage labor. With the money those activities raised, they could not only buy flour from regions that produced a surplus of grain but also pay their taxes and serf dues. The same calculations also led the predominantly Finnish peasants of neighboring Vyborg Province to abandon agriculture for wage labor and other, more rewarding occupations.10 Radishchev put the province’s population, excluding that of the capital city itself, at 379,650, and data from the tax revision of 1795 allow us to estimate the total population of Vyborg Province as 200,000.11 Although the two provinces produced some grain, they consumed far more. Instead of supplying cereals to the city of St. Petersburg, they added to its demand for cereals “brought from afar.” Even when the government was scrambling to provide flour for the inhabitants of St. Petersburg, as it was in 1786, it had to share the city’s reserves with the surrounding area. In October and November of that year, it dispatched almost 3,000 metric tons of rye flour to the maritime forts in Vyborg, 900 metric tons of rye flour to four towns in that province, and 2,211 metric tons of rye grain to six provincial towns in St. Petersburg Province.12 In 1808 the minister of internal affairs informed the emperor, “Every year a great quantity of cereals must be provided not only for the inhabitants of the city but also for the provinces of St. Petersburg and Finland (Vyborg).” In that same year those two provinces received one-third of the cereals delivered to St. Petersburg.13 Extensive areas within the provinces of Olonets and Novgorod must also be counted as part of the natural hinterland of St. Petersburg because their rivers drain into Lake Ladoga and so provided them with relatively easy access to the city’s consumers. But neither province produced a surplus of grain. Olonets, lying beyond Lake Ladoga to the north and east of the city, was similar in most respects to the province of Vyborg except that its climate was harsher and its growing season was shorter. The province was almost entirely forested, and Radishchev noted that it and the neighboring regions of Novgorod Province sent nothing to St. Petersburg but building materials, boats, and ships.14 In 1762 Olonets had a population of approximately 200,000 and a population density less than half that of the neighboring province of Novgorod. The scarcity of noble landowners further indicates its infertility: only 6 percent of the peasants in Olonets were enserfed to individual landowners, while nearly 80 percent of them were registered as state peasants with no overlord or owner.15 What little grain the sparse and scattered population could manage to grow in such an inhospitable region normally lasted only four to six months before more had to be purchased from other regions.16 The rocky terrain of Olonets and the marshy, acidic podzol of St. Petersburg extended southward into neighboring districts Novgorod Province. Forests covered two-thirds of Novgorod’s surface, while field crops occupied a mere onetenth.17 The best region for agriculture lay on the slopes of the Valdai Hills, which formed the province’s southern border. Landlords there found it worthwhile to sources of supply

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cultivate demesnes, and in the districts of Borovichi and Valdai, a majority of the serfs performed barshchina (compulsory labor) for their masters. Everywhere else the great majority of landowners responded to the poor returns from agriculture by demanding obrok, a cash payment in lieu of labor, from their peasants.18 With some 12 percent of the land in Novgorod devoted to pastures and hay meadows, animal husbandry also played a significant role in the local economy. The forests provided mushrooms, berries, and game, and the many lakes, swamps, and rivers produced fish and waterfowl. Vegetable gardens and orchards supplemented the local diet. On the 10 percent of the land used for field crops, oats constituted the grain of choice, especially in the northwestern districts closest to the capital, where this cereal was grown as a cash crop.19 Rye, wheat, barley, and millet were less common than oats and did not grow as well. Peasants and noble landowners (pomeshchiki; sing., pomeshchik) struggled to grow rye, and with sufficient manure and good weather, they could meet part of their own needs before having to purchase additional supplies at high prices. Outside the areas lying directly along the main waterways to the capital, the price of cereals was often higher in Novgorod Province than in the city of St. Petersburg.20 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the population of St. Petersburg’s hinterland was approximately five times greater than the population of the city itself.21 Although its dependence on transported grain was only partial and varied according to the harvest, the population of the city’s hinterland added significantly to the aggregate demand for grain in that distant region of the empire and placed additional stress on the supply line that carried grain from the Volga to the Neva. Even in good years the residents of that region depended on flour purchased along the waterways to the capital or in the city’s markets; in bad years not only did those diversions of flour increase, but the city also had to share its supplies with towns and garrisons in the region and still feed thousands of additional workers flocking to the capital in search of jobs and food. The transfer of Russia’s capital to the delta of the Neva had also made it possible for the neighboring provinces to develop and maintain larger populations than they could have done otherwise. St. Petersburg not only generated a large and steady flow of cereals into the Northwest, thus creating a source on which the provincial population could draw to meet its own needs, but it also provided a means of earning the money to purchase them. Were it not for St. Petersburg, peasants in the surrounding provinces might have tried to grow more grain to feed themselves, but ultimately the population would have had to adjust to the food supply. Fewer people would have come to the region seeking work, more would have left for the same reason, and malnutrition would have restricted the growth of the population. For those reasons, an unspecified portion of the demand for cereals in the hinterland of St. Petersburg must be attributed to the creation of the city, and that additional demand must be added onto that of the

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city itself. Far from solving the problem of supplying St. Petersburg with cereals, the surrounding districts made the problem more severe. SOUTHWEST AND NORTHEAST OF THE HINTERLAND

While the lands to the southwest of St. Petersburg Province did not add to the city’s demand for cereals, they did little to help meet it. Like the provinces of St. Petersburg and Novgorod, the province of Pskov and much of the province of Smolensk consisted of soggy, acidic podzol that required drainage and heavy manuring to produce an adequate harvest of grain.22 This area did, however, produce an abundance of flax and some hemp, which made agriculture profitable, and most landowners chose to cultivate a demesne and require barshchina. Producers in those provinces also benefited from access to ports at Narva, Reval, and Riga, to which they sent linen, flax, flaxseed, timber, and hemp. Although the government allowed and at times even encouraged the export of grain from Narva, that city managed to export only 2,961 chetverts of cereals in the twelveyear period between 1764 and 1776 because growers in the region had little or none to sell.23 Most often the prices of rye and rye flour in the Pskov region were among the highest in European Russia.24 Farther west, the provinces of Estland and Livland constituted the northernmost region of Europe capable of producing more grain than its inhabitants consumed. Indeed, that surplus was so important to Sweden that when the Treaty of Nystadt transferred the two provinces from Swedish to Russian sovereignty in 1721, it simultaneously granted Sweden the right to purchase up to 50,000 rubles’ worth of grain a year from Estland and Livland. That provision was renewed in 1768 and again in a modified form in 1779. The revised agreement of 1779 granted Sweden the right to purchase 50,000 chetverts (6,552 metric tons) of grain each year from Russia’s Baltic provinces free of export duty provided there was no shortage of cereals in Russia.25 Those terms reflected marketing arrangements that had emerged since the 1730s: in normal years the two Baltic provinces exported surplus grain to other European states, but when needed, they were to serve as alternative sources of supply for the St. Petersburg region. That was the role they had played during the so-called hungry years of the 1720s, when the imperial government’s willingness to pay extraordinarily high prices for cereals had temporarily made the city a competitive market for Baltic grain. As the price of cereals in St. Petersburg declined from the 1720s to the 1760s, it was rising in port cities to the west, reaching record highs in Amsterdam in 1740–1741 and again in 1772–1778.26 As a result, ships carried grain from Riga, Reval, and Pernau (a lesser port on Estland’s west coast) westward to the old Hansa cities of Germany; to Denmark, Sweden, and the United Provinces; and beyond to Portugal and the Mediterranean. In 1771 exports of rye from those three ports amounted to 362,798 chetverts, or 47,541 metric tons, an amount ap-

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proximately equal to the annual consumption of rye in St. Petersburg at that time.27 The Western Dvina conveyed grain, flax, hemp, and other Russian goods to Riga from as far away as Smolensk Province and, with portage, from the Dnieper and the northern Ukraine. The Russian government prohibited the export of Russian grain from Riga, but Riga’s merchants circumvented that restriction by exporting grain grown in Livland and Poland and reserving Russian grain for domestic consumption.28 Unable to transport their surplus grain to Reval by water, growers in Estland often converted it to alcohol, which was much cheaper to transport to Reval or even to St. Petersburg. As customs duties between Estland and Russia diminished with the tariff revisions of 1766 and 1782, Estland’s surplus of grain combined with its lack of water transport to make the area a major supplier of vodka for the St. Petersburg market. In normal years St. Petersburg drew its cereals from Russia’s interior provinces, while the two Baltic provinces shipped their surplus grain to profitable markets farther west. In abnormal years those arrangements proved difficult to alter. In 1734, when a poor harvest temporarily reversed the downward trend of prices in St. Petersburg, the imperial government responded by purchasing 7,200 metric tons of rye in Riga and Reval only to find that there were too few cargo vessels available on short notice. It managed to move only 1,118 metric tons to the capital by the end of the navigation season and had to wait until the following year to transport the remainder. In 1735, when the imperial government tried to purchase another 13,500 metric tons at a price well above the going rate in St. Petersburg, it found that merchants in the Baltic ports were unwilling to sell grain at a price they considered too low.29 Confronted with an unfavorable price gradient and blessed with adequate to excellent harvests at home, Russia made virtually no demands on Baltic grain for the next twenty years. When it finally did so during the Seven Years’ War, it hired Swedish ships to transport the grain westward to feed the Russian army in Poland. When prices rose in St. Petersburg in the 1760s, the imperial government made no effort to compete with western buyers of Baltic grain, and rising prices in Amsterdam from 1772 through 1778 kept Baltic grain moving westward, away from St. Petersburg.30 When grain prices in the west collapsed at the end of that period, the manager of the St. Petersburg granary purchased flour in Estland, but even then it was no bargain. He bought rye flour for 2.75 to 2.90 rubles per kul and sold it to the public for 2.50 rubles per kul.31 In 1786, with flour prices and anxieties rising in St. Petersburg, the Russian government returned to the Baltic markets. On June 22 the empress appropriated 150,000 rubles to purchase grain in Riga and Reval and ship it to the capital. Twelve days later Governor-General Browne reported that he had already bought some 2,500 metric tons of rye grain in Riga for 91,082.5 rubles (i.e., 4.57 rubles a chetvert), as well as 61.5 metric tons of rye flour.32 In August and Septem66

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ber German, Swedish, and British ships transported the rye and rye flour from Riga to Kronstadt. The small amount of flour was transferred expeditiously to the state granary in St. Petersburg, but the unmilled rye posed a serious problem.33 Although Browne had tried to purchase as much flour as possible, Riga dealt almost entirely in grain and had only a few gristmills for local use. On the receiving end, St. Petersburg depended exclusively on shipments of flour and lacked facilities for handling and processing grain. First authorities in the capital had to locate boats to bring the grain from Kronstadt; then they had to find ways to have it milled. With considerable difficulty, they arranged to have most of the grain hauled to either of the region’s two functioning gristmills, one near St. Petersburg and the other at Shlissel’burg. The remainder had to be milled by hand, some by the inmates of the city’s jails and workhouse and some by the soldiers of the Nevskii Infantry Regiment. By the time it reached the granary as flour in the spring and summer of 1787, the rye that Browne had purchased in Riga for 4.57 to 4.66 rubles per chetvert wound up costing 6.07 to 6.16 rubles per chetvert.34 That would have been an exorbitant price in June 1786, but with prices in St. Petersburg continuing to rise, it was more than reasonable by June 1787. When the empress appropriated another 60,000 rubles to purchase grain in Riga in December 1786, the Commission on Grain pleaded with the governorgeneral to send flour rather than grain. Browne managed to do so and shipped 8,421 kuls (12,000 metric tons) of rye flour to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1787 at a price of 5.815 rubles per kul; at the same time, however, the governorgeneral of Tver was able to send more than twice that amount of rye flour, having purchased this quantity on the upper Volga for only 4.535 rubles a kul.35 In emergencies like those of the 1720s and the 1780s, when the imperial government was willing to pay extraordinarily high prices and do whatever was necessary to solve the problems of transportation and processing, the Baltic provinces could meet at least part of St. Petersburg’s demand for cereals, but otherwise they did not. Radishchev noted that the Baltic ports, especially Reval, supplied the capital with building materials, vodka, fish, and butter, but he made no mention of grain or flour.36 Far to the north-northeast, Archangel had a similar relationship with St. Petersburg. Like Riga, it received shipments of cereals from its own hinterland and sent them to western Europe in foreign ships because the prices were higher in western Europe than in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg in turn almost always found that it could procure cereals from the Volga Basin at prices significantly lower than those in Archangel. Amid the crisis of 1786–1787, however, the Commission on Grain found that the recent ban on exports from Archangel had caused prices there to fall to levels it could afford. It devised a plan to have grain purchased at Archangel, milled there, and transported overland through the province of Olonets to a wharf from which it could be shipped to St. Petersburg. The plan had to be discarded, however, when the governor of Olonets sources of supply

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informed the commission that it was not feasible to transport the flour overland through his province.37 Viatka, to the south of Archangel, also lay beyond the reach of St. Petersburg, as the Commission on Grain discovered in 1786. Having learned that the recent harvest there had been exceptional, the commission ordered Viatka’s governor to purchase some of the surplus and send it to the capital. The governor replied that it was not possible to transport grain and flour from many of the districts in his province because they lay “rather far from navigable rivers, above all the Volga.” Districts with access to the Northern Dvina, in contrast, had already sent their surpluses down that river to the port of Archangel.38 Like the Western Dvina, which carried goods to Riga, the Northern Dvina created a cereals market separate and distinct from the one that supplied St. Petersburg. BEYOND THE DIVIDE

In 1794 Heinrich Storch, a Baltic German employed by the College of Foreign Affairs, published a detailed description of St. Petersburg. Storch’s work was part of a project initiated by the Russian Academy of Sciences to inform both Russians and foreigners about the true condition of the Russian Empire. Given access to information that the government had collected to inform itself, Storch produced a knowledgeable, detailed description of Russia’s capital in the last decade of the eighteenth century. With respect to provisioning St. Petersburg, he wrote: “The district in which St. Petersburg stands is so greatly behind in agriculture and gardening as to be obliged to fetch its supply of provisions entirely from a distance. Not only the objects of extravagance, but even the simplest necessaries of life, for upwards of two hundred thousand persons are produced in foreign, and in some part very distant climes. Were it not for the large and invaluable communications by water, it would be impossible to provide for the sustenance of St. Petersburg.”39 Some of the goods to which Storch referred, especially what he called “the objects of extravagance,” came to St. Petersburg by sea from the countries of Europe and their colonial dependencies. Indeed, they were much cheaper and more available in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in Russia. Most of what Storch termed “the simple necessaries of life,” however, came via inland waterways from the Russian interior or, in some cases, from lands more distant still. A decade earlier Radishchev had noted, “By way of the Volkhov, the Ladoga Canal, and the Neva, St. Petersburg receives its supply of grain and most of its hay, logs, and trade goods for export.”40 The waterways that Radishchev identified as St. Petersburg’s lifeline brought grain, flour, and other goods to the city from the Volga Basin on the far side of the Valdai Hills. The canals across the divide at Vyshnii Volochek had created a continuous waterway from the upper Volga to the Neva that attached St. Petersburg directly to the grain market of central Russia. Within that market, 68

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however, the provinces closest to St. Petersburg along the upper Volga could not produce enough grain to meet their own needs, never mind a surplus that could feed the new capital. Although they were better drained and less rocky on the whole than the natural hinterland of St. Petersburg, the provinces of Tver, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Smolensk, Moscow, and Vladimir and the northern districts of Nizhnii Novgorod shared the relatively infertile podzol and clay of their northwestern neighbors, and their growing season was short and undependable.41 Even in normal years, the grain harvest in what later came to be known as “the central non-black-earth region” returned on average only two to three times the amount of seed sown.42 In the words of one official from the 1750s, “the whole area from Moscow to the maritime cities is not grain-growing country.”43 The topographical description of Tver composed in the mid-1780s reported that even in a good year, only two of that province’s ten districts could produce enough grain to feed the local population. Both those districts lay along the Volga and contained alluvial deposits of sand and silt. Elsewhere the soil consisted of approximately two vershki (8.8 centimeters, or 3.5 inches) of soft gray podzol covering a subsoil of clayish loam or actual clay. In several districts the fields were also full of stones. As a result, less than one-third of the land in the province as a whole was used for agriculture. The authors of the description also noted that the summers were often cool and wet, as in other “northern regions,” and that first frost usually occurred in late August or early September. Even so, peasants tried to grow grain or hemp wherever they could, but according to the topographical description, even “an average harvest” of rye required dry weather and heavy applications of scarce manure.44 Surprisingly, though, a slight majority of the nobles’ serfs were performing barshchina in the 1780s.45 Similar conditions prevailed in the neighboring province of Iaroslavl, where, according to data gathered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the grain harvest in 1802, 1803, and 1804 returned only slightly more than twice the amount of seed sown.46 Except for a few outcroppings of chernozem (black earth), the soil in Iaroslavl consisted of podzol, clay, sand, and stone. As in Tver, even an adequate harvest of rye depended on favorable weather and heavy applications of manure, neither of which was abundant in Iaroslavl. To supplement their meager harvests, many of the inhabitants purchased cereals passing through the province on their way from the southern steppe to St. Petersburg, and over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of them abandoned the unrewarding struggle to grow grain and turned instead to handicrafts, textile production, and wage labor on the waterways and in capital cities.47 They sold their goods and their labor in St. Petersburg and Moscow and added to the demand for transported grain and flour in those cities. The noble landowners of Iaroslavl included Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, an intellectual, writer, historian, economist, statesman, and defender of serfdom. In the 1750s Shcherbatov struggled in vain to implement his ideal of a selfsources of supply

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sufficient, patriarchal manor, but despite his repeated efforts to improve agricultural practices, he found that rye seldom yielded more than twice the seed planted and sometimes failed even to return the seed.48 Although Shcherbatov attributed much of that failure to his peasants’ deceit, indiscipline, and disobedience in carrying out his instructions, he clearly understood that nature itself was to blame.49 Shcherbatov managed to incorporate even that lamentable fact into his defense of patriarchal authority and serfdom by insisting that a peasantry free of seigniorial control would evacuate Russia’s old historic provinces and move to more productive lands on the frontier.50 Within its twisted logic, Shcherbatov’s argument contained an important truth: serfdom confined an excessive proportion of the agricultural population to infertile regions of Russia that common sense would otherwise have led them to abandon. Without serfdom to restrain them, farmers from Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire behaved exactly as Shcherbatov predicted the peasants from his region would do if given the opportunity: they abandoned their homesteads and moved to richer agricultural lands on the frontier in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on.51 Some peasants from provinces such as Tver and Iaroslavl did migrate to more fertile regions of Russia, with their masters’ consent or without it, but St. Petersburg and serfdom enabled and compelled others to remain and adapt. Growing conditions in other provinces of what would later be known as the Central Industrial Region resembled those in Iaroslavl. Reporting in the journal of the Free Economic Society in 1766, a landowner from the neighboring province of Kostroma noted, “Even with the best harvests, grain is not suffice for the inhabitants.” In another issue of that same journal, Ivan Bolotov, whose enthusiasm for agronomy and estate management exceeded even that of Shcherbatov, reported that in the Kashira district, south of Moscow along the Oka, the inhabitants could not grow enough grain to meet their own needs and had to bring additional supplies from localities two hundred to four hundred kilometers away.52 Using similar words, the geographer L. K. Bakmeister wrote that the inhabitants of the Volokolamsk district west of Moscow frequently had to supplement poor harvests with grain purchased in Moscow and in towns as far away as the northern Ukraine.53 Data collected by the governor of Moscow revealed that the harvests for 1779, 1780, and 1781, all of which were good years, yielded only twice the seed planted in the district of Moscow and slightly less than that for the province as a whole. Such reports agree with the more systematic modern study of V. A. Federov, who concluded that by the end of the eighteenth century, the provinces of Moscow and Vladimir were producing only one-third to one-half of the grain they consumed.54 Since those two provinces had a total population of slightly more than two million in 1811, their combined shortfall would have amounted to between 2,250,000 and 3,000,000 chetverts (331,695 to 442,260 metric tons) of cereals per year in the first decade of the nineteenth century. If those calculations are extended to Tver, Kaluga, Iaroslavl, and 70

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Kostroma, where growing conditions and grain yields were certainly no better and probably somewhat worse, the estimated annual grain deficit for the six provinces of north-central Russia in the early nineteenth century would rise to between 6,325,402 and 8,425,436 chetverts, or 932,490 to 1,242,072 metric tons.55 Despite poor soil and bad weather, the forested northern regions of European Russia had long before then acquired and retained a larger population than their fertility warranted because they offered protection from the nomads and marauders of the open steppe. In medieval times the north’s few outcroppings of rich black-earth soil, such as the Vladimir Opole, near the city of that name, had played an important role in enriching and empowering their owners, but as the population increased, so did Moscow’s dependence on grain transported from the south. Moscow gained an important advantage in the early fourteenth century when it acquired Kolomna, at the confluence of the Moskva and Oka rivers, opening a way for southern grain to reach the city by water. That waterway had made the Oka Basin the granary of the Muscovite state, and the city of Moscow the center of the Russian grain trade. Those trends intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as military actions against the Tatars and the stabilization of the southern frontier behind military “lines” made land increasingly available for settled agriculture. SOUTHWARD: THE STEPPE

The transition from the grain-deficient North to the surplus-producing South occurred within a relatively short distance, and it was plainly visible. On his way to the Black Sea in 1781, Vasilii Zuev, an adjunct member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted that agricultural conditions began to improve once he reached the southern part of the Moscow district.56 As he approached the town of Kaluga, on the middle Oka, Zuev found the soil somewhat heavy but exceptionally fertile and productive. He observed that merchants there shipped hemp and grain to St. Petersburg from wharves on the Oka River.57 The town of Kaluga stood at the approximate fulcrum of the grain balance. In good years the districts that surrounded it produced a surplus that found ready markets in Moscow, only 168 kilometers away by water, and more distantly in St. Petersburg. In other years, however, the grain harvest failed to suffice for the local population and had to be supplemented with cereals brought from Orel and other surplus-producing areas to the south.58 Like Kaluga, the provinces of Tula, Riazan, Tambov, and Nizhnii Novgorod marked the zone of transition from deficit to surplus, and within their boundaries the growing conditions improved markedly from north to south (see map 4).59 The forests of northern and north-central Russia give way to the forested steppe along a line running from Kiev to Ufa; this line passes through Orel, to the south of Kaluga, as well as Tula and Riazan before looping down and back up to Kazan. From that line southward to the Black Sea and the semidesert north sources of supply

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White Sea

O l on e ts

Country Boundary Province Boundary Vegetation Zone Boundary

T U N D R A

250 MILES 250 KILOMETERS

A rc h a n gel

A rc h a n gel

N or O l on et s

vi

ov

lkh

g

na

bur

Vo

Ia

Dn go v Kh

ar

S T

P

E

ko v

te r

Vo

ron

E

Pen z a

Ta

Ka

ma

S i m b i r sk

Saratov

ez

h

Ch erk a ssk

Don

S T E P P E V i c e R egen c y o f t h e C a u c a su s

lg

Ch e rka s s k

Saratov

Vo a

Sea of Azov

Kazan

P mbov

G R A S S

er

Black Sea

R ia z a n

Tu l a

Ku r s k

ni

es

iep

Oka

O re l

er

ni

Dn

Ni z h n i i No v go ro d

Sura

Ch

D

R

S T

l

a ug

O re l

D

V iatka

Volga

Vl ad i m i r

M os cow Ka

E

K o st rom a

k

iep

o

l

V ice R egen c y of th e C a u c a su s

Caspian Sea

BLACKMER MAPS

Sm

s len

od gor N o ve v e r s k S

K ie v

F O

av

ga

na

F O R E S T

E

sl

Vo l

vi

ro

Volga

er

D

Tve r

T A I G A

Vo l o gd a

No v gorod

Ps ko v

rn

D

ers

L ifl a n d

te

n

Pe t St.

es

Vo l o gd a

er

E s tl a n d

W

th

Vy borg

Baltic Sea

Map 4. Vegetation Zones and Provinces of in European Russia inCentury the Vegetation Zones and Provinces of European Russia the Late Eighteenth Late Eighteenth Century Map 4 | 120821

Blackmer Maps of the Caspian Sea, the mean temperatures grow steadily higher and the growing Draft season longer. The black earth that Zuev began to notice near Kaluga becomes predominant, and its quality improves as the pH balance shifts from acid to neutral. The climate also grows sunnier and drier, becoming too dry for trees south of Kharkov and Saratov and too dry even for grass below Tsaritsyn and Ural’sk. Russian settlement of the forested steppe and the creation and growth of St. Petersburg were interrelated developments. Both resulted from deliberate policies and actions on the part of the Russian government, and together they allowed Russia to escape the restrictions on economic growth that nature and geography had long imposed on an agricultural society concentrated in the forests of northern and north-central Russia. By the 1680s military lines and peasant settlement had established agriculture in the forested steppe south of Orel and 72

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Briansk along the upper reaches of the Oka and the Desna.60 Those processes continued into the eighteenth century, but as Willard Sunderland has persuasively argued, they took on new meanings and new intentions under Peter I and especially Catherine II. Not just matters of border warfare, defense, and simple expansion, they became part of an economic policy, new to Russia but common throughout most of Europe, aimed at enhancing state revenue and state power by developing, coordinating, and maximizing resources rather than simply exploiting them.61 In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the construction of a fortified line between Poltava and Samara protected a new swath of the steppe from the Kuban Tatars and permitted extensive agricultural settlement in the provinces of Belgorod, Voronezh, Penza, Tambov, and Saratov. The Orenburg Expedition (1734) and the brutal suppression of the Bashkir Revolt (1735–1740) extended Russian control and settlement eastward to the southern Urals and the Ural River. Convinced that Russia contained, as she put it, “vast tracts of land . . . neither peopled nor cultivated,” Catherine II brought more than 30,000 foreign (mostly German) colonists to Russia between 1762 and 1775 and settled some 25,000 of them along the Volga near Saratov.62 The suppression of the Pugachev Rebellion and the final pacification of the Bashkirs in the mid-1770s eliminated the remaining obstacles to settlement and allowed grain growing to spread eastward through the steppe from the Volga Basin to the Urals. Between 1696 and 1796 the amount of plowland within the political boundaries of 1696 grew from 21,320,000 to 54,240,000 hectares.63 In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the total area sown in grain within the empire as a whole expanded by an estimated 60 to 100 percent.64 After 1786, some of that enlargement came in older regions as higher prices began to increase the profitability of growing grain, but the great bulk of it throughout the century came from the expansion of cultivation in the steppe, where agricultural productivity was at least twice that of non-black-earth regions and often much greater than that.65 In the forested steppe and the even drier grassland steppe, a severe drought can devastate grain fields, but that happened only four or five times in the eighteenth century. Otherwise, a sowing of rye, wheat, or barley could return five, ten, or even twelve times the amount of seed planted without any fertilization beyond the annual burning of stubble.66 An English traveler traversing the forested steppe at the turn of the nineteenth century wrote, “You travel for miles and miles and see nothing but corn [i.e., grain of any sort].”67 Ziablovskii’s agricultural atlas of Russia compiled in 1810 described the soil of the forested steppe in terms very different from those it applied to the forest zone of northern and north-central Russia. It called Tula a province of “exceptional fertility” and said that because of the deep black soil in Orel Province, agriculture there met “with great success.” Of Kursk Province it noted, “Even many townsmen practice agriculture, including grain-growing, which, owing sources of supply

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to the great fertility of the soil, is practiced almost everywhere with exceptional success.” It described the soil in Voronezh Province as being “among the very best in Russia.”68 Along with those generalizations, Ziablovskii provided data obtained from the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the number of chetverts of grain sown, harvested, and surpassing local consumption in 1802, 1803, and 1804. Reorganized in the table 7, those figures demonstrate the productive capacity of the black-earth provinces and their potential ability to supply the grain-deficient provinces north of the Oka. The settlement and cultivation of the steppe in the eighteenth century redistributed the population and reorganized the Russian economy. According to the Soviet demographer Kabuzan, the male population of the “Central Agricultural Region” and the “Mid-Volga Region,” encompassing the provinces of Tula, Riazan, Orlov, Kursk, Voronezh, Tambov, Kazan, Penza, and Simbirsk, rose from 2,212,822 in 1719 to 4,878,861 in 1811, while the male population of the Central Industrial Region, encompassing the provinces of Tver, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Kaluga, Moscow, Vladimir, and Nizhnii Novgorod, rose from 2,278,535 to only 3,271,515 in that same period. The population of the grassland steppe rose even faster, but from a much smaller base. Meanwhile, the male population of what Kabuzan termed the “Lake Region” (St. Petersburg, Pskov, Novgorod, and Olonets) rose from 553,879 to 991,733, largely because of the growth of metropolitan St. Petersburg.69 .

WATERWAYS AND MARKETS

The reciprocal developments of St. Petersburg’s growth and expanded cultivation in the forested steppe drastically altered the economic geography of Russia. St. Petersburg could hardly have grown as it did without access to the surplus grain produced in increasing quantities in the steppe south of the Oka and along the middle Volga, but at the same time, the settlement of those regions was accelerated, if not prompted, by St. Petersburg and the concomitant growth of a market for surplus grain. The Volga with its tributaries, as well as the canals and rivers from the Volga to St. Petersburg, gave the new capital access to surplus-producing provinces in the forested steppe; no less significantly, however, those waterways also provided producers in the steppe with access to St. Petersburg and the grain-deficient provinces of the north, creating and defining a huge grain market covering much of European Russia. Because of that market, large estates owned by wealthy, absentee landlords were more prevalent in the forested steppe than in areas to the north.70 Beginning in the 1720s, the St. Petersburg elite—Alexander Menshikov, the Vorontsovs, the Dolgorukiis, the Shuvalovs, and the Chernyshevs—led and directed the settlement of the forested steppe.71 The great nobles of the court and the capital had no intention of living on their estates in the newly opened frontier territories. They acquired them for the same reason that they acquired metallurgical 74

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Table 7. Grain surpluses in black-earth provinces, 1802–1804 (in chetverts) Year

1802

1803

1804

Province

Sown

Harvested

Surplus

Kazan

1,515,378

3,848,014

688, 623

Nizhnii Novgorod

1,542,046

3,563,497

567,129

Tambov

1,745,633

9,294,827

5,481,967

Voronezh

1,243,830

4, 951, 649

1,567,559

Penza

1,860,384

5,939,720

2,741,526

Riazan

1,203,474

4,559,071

1,585,318

Tula

1,819,562

4,469,787

917,887

Orel

2,242,312

9,200,693

5,093,651

Kursk

1,554,868

6,619,925

2,825,746

Slobod. Uk.

1,082,101

3,709,423

963,766

Total Kazan Nizhegorod Tambov Voronezh Penza Riazan Tula Orel Kursk. Slobod Uk. Total Kazan Nizhegorod Tambov Voronezh Penza Riazan Tula Orel Kursk Slobod. Uk. Total

22,433,235 1,477,717

4,645,445

1,619,729

1,443,216

5,927,622

2,731,331

1,873,040

10,335,544

6,363,899

1,262,756

3,258,319

197,513

1,766,984

7,379,850

4,212,068

1,250,617

4,252,085

1,197,878

1,664,450

7,441,604

3,954,741

1,783,659

6,121,047

2,376,422

1,589,620

3,820,176

473,277

1,068,033

6,380,964

3,360,112

1,394,722

4,645,445

1,619,729

1,443,216

5,927,622

2,731,331

1,828,420

10,432,933

6,626,214

1,173,315

6,628,023

3,429,186

1,731,156

5,109,534

2,558,741

1,324,531

4,845,643

1,701,736

1,770,281

6,644,620

3,067,384

1,834,799

7,748,670

3,878,667

26,486,970

1,543,464

7,176,782

3,282,139

1,122,432

5,263,064

2,509,959 31,405,086

Source: Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 4:100, 126, 160, 179, 241, 5:128, 151, 179, 209, 238, 272.

enterprises in the Urals: to make money. Estates in the forested steppe enriched their owners not only because they could produce salable surpluses of grain and cattle but also because they had access to a new and growing market without which the surpluses themselves meant little. The eagerness of Russia’s great families to establish large estates in the steppe south of the Oka and along the middle Volga contrasts with their lack of interest in acquiring land farther south in equally fertile regions around the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the lower Volga. Unlike frontier regions with access to markets, those territories were initially left to peasant farmers and foreign colonists seeking subsistence rather than profit.72 Despite the government’s ambitious efforts to populate the steppe country north of the Black Sea, the great noble families showed little interest in acquiring estates there until the turn of the nineteenth century, when exports through Odessa finally provided that region with a market for surplus grain. From the 1720s on, however, much of the forested steppe had access to an established, dependable, and growing internal market that extended from the Oka and the middle Volga to the Gulf of Finland. An official government report on the shipment of cereals to St. Petersburg in the late eighteenth century identified Gzhatsk, on a tributary of the upper Volga, and Orel, on the upper Oka, as the main embarkation points for grain grown in the western reaches of the forested steppe between the Don and the Desna.73 Together they supplied a significant portion of the capital’s flour, but as the report hastened to point out, a much larger quantity was “sent from the provinces lying downstream on the Volga—Nizhnii Novgorod, Simbirsk, Kazan, Saratov, and, bordering on them, Tambov and Viatka.” Explaining where grain destined for St. Petersburg was first purchased, the memorandum went on, “In the provinces lying downstream on the Volga, grain is purchased in towns and trading villages that have nearby wharves and warehouses to be rented for storage of the purchased grain until the time for loading it on to boats.” The document pointed out that all of those places save one (the village of Alekseevskii, located eight kilometers from the Kama River in Kazan Province) lay on the banks of navigable rivers, and it listed twenty-two towns and villages lying along the lower Oka, the Tsna, the Sura, the Kama, the Viatka, and the Volga between Nizhnii Novgorod and Saratov that regularly dispatched grain and flour to St. Petersburg.74 While the poles of supply and demand stood in the forested steppe and on the delta of the Neva, the movement of grain and flour from one to the other was not necessarily direct or exclusive. Some cereals did pass between those poles as discrete, designated shipments, but most moved through a succession of regional and local markets where people living between the two extremes could join in the series of transactions that eventually moved a net amount of grain from the Oka or the middle Volga to St. Petersburg. Those with a surplus at any given

76

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time could add to the flow, and those with cash and a need for grain could subtract from it. Given the general deficiencies of agriculture north of the Oka, the latter occurred far more often than the former, diverting supplies destined for St. Petersburg to other areas of the north but simultaneously expanding the market for southern grain. More important, the availability of relatively inexpensive southern grain reduced the need and the incentive for northerners to grow their own under unfavorable conditions and so served to intensify and solidify the divergence between agricultural and “industrial” regions. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the central Russian grain market underwent an enormous expansion. In the seventeenth century the principal source of marketed grain had been the northern reaches of the forested steppe, specifically, the districts of Orel, Mtsensk, Belev, Novosilsk, and Livny, with extensions south and west to Ryl’sk, Putivl, Briansk, and Sevsk.75 The main avenues of transportation had been the Oka and the Moskva, and the center of consumption had been Moscow, from which cereals were dispersed to consumers to the east, north, and west of the city. The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new, additional center of consumption in the distant northwest and the extension of surplus-producing agriculture to the south and east. That entire market was tied together by a network of waterways that made it possible to ship grain and flour to St. Petersburg from as far away as Gzhatsk, Orel, Tambov, and Kazan. Historians as different from one another as Lenin and Mironov have argued that the eighteenth century witnessed the formation of an “all-Russian market” for cereals and other goods, yet that term is not just an exaggeration but a misnomer. Although the market that linked St. Petersburg with the forested steppe encompassed an enormous area, it stopped far short of the borders of European Russia whenever it became economically impractical to move grain between producers and consumers. Those limits were felt most keenly in the south, whose fertile steppe lands were capable of producing large surpluses of rye and wheat but lacked any practical means of transporting those surpluses to the centers of consumption in Moscow and St. Petersburg, yet they affected peripheral areas in the north as well. Either such areas found other markets for their surpluses, or they remained outside the developing market economy. In the eighteenth century the central Russia grain market stretched along the Volga and its tributaries to the southern limits of Kazan Province. In the first decade of the nineteenth century it extended even farther southward to Simbirsk. Below those points the expense of hauling cereals upstream to consumers in the north became too great. Instead, surplus grain from the lower Volga moved downstream to markets in Astrakhan and, by way of the Caspian Sea, to points south and east, or else it was portaged from the Volga to the Don for sale to the Don Cossacks and, after 1775, to exporters in the ports of Azov and Taganrog. Even so, the provinces of Penza and Saratov and the southern districts of Riazan

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and Tambov produced far more grain than they could consume or sell. The remainder was converted into beer and vodka on the nobles’ estates or in large state distilleries or else was fed to cattle.76 Farther west, in the Ukrainian regions of the forested steppe, producers found even fewer outlets for surplus grain. L. N. Engel’gardt, whose father owned an estate in the Sarochnitskii district of Malorossiia, recorded that in the 1770s, incomes there and in other southern provinces were “practically insignificant; rye sold for 25 kopecks a chetvert on the local market and could not be sent elsewhere because there was no water transport and few distilleries.”77 Similar conditions prevailed in the neighboring province of Chernigov. Describing that province in 1786, Afanasii Shafonskii, a local landowner, asserted that land in and around Chernigov was six to ten times more productive than land in the north but, because grain growers in Chernigov and its neighboring provinces had no market for their surplus other than Belorossiia, the market remained weak: “Grain is very cheap, so much so that the work of growing it is almost unprofitable.”78 Similar conditions prevailed in the western Ukrainian provinces that Russia annexed from Poland. In 1771 a French diplomat reported, “Piles of corn as big as houses, enough to feed all Europe[,] are again rotting in Podillia and Volhynia,” and in 1784 a report informed the French government that grain was “at such a low price in the Ukraine that many landowners [had] abandoned its cultivation.”79 Still later, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Ziablovskii wrote that Kharkov province was blessed with “exceedingly fertile” soil capable of producing “excellent harvests” and “surpluses of all kinds” but noted that its grain found only a small, local market; “Beyond that,” he said, “except in unusual circumstances, very little is sent elsewhere because this province is far from navigable rivers.”80 Some grain from the northern Ukraine did make its way to other markets. From the upper Dnieper grain could reach the Western Dvina for shipment to Riga. From the Desna and other tributaries of the Dnieper, it could be carried to Gzhatsk for shipment to St. Petersburg or to Orel for shipment to Moscow. Nonetheless, the amount of grain moving along those routes was quite small both in relation to the supply and in comparison to the shipped quantities hemp, hempseed, and hempseed oil, whose greater profitability gave them the lion’s share of the limited available transport.81 That explains why, when the Commission on Grain investigated St. Petersburg’s sources of supply, it found that Briansk, on the upper Desna, sent no grain at all to any of the aforementioned wharves in 1784, 1785, or 1786.82 With few exceptions, the lack of practical, convenient water transport kept surplus grain from the Ukraine out of the central Russian market. Contemporary observers saw the problem and proposed solutions, but grain prices in those areas remained depressed even when they rose dramatically in St. Petersburg and

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other grain-deficient areas of the north. In the 1760s the governor of Novgorod, Jacob Sievers, advised Catherine II to create a canal between tributaries of the Desna and the upper Volga to bring “the riches of the Ukraine” to St. Petersburg.83 At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Department of Water Communications presented a similar proposal to connect the Desna with the Oka; “by such means,” the department argued, “a certain amount of grain can be provided to St. Petersburg and Moscow from the fertile regions of the Ukraine.”84 Neither proposal proved to be feasible, and Ukrainian grain did not enter the markets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in appreciable quantities until the second half of the nineteenth century.85 Unable to bring Ukrainian grain to northern consumers, the Russian government stationed as much as one-quarter of its army in the Ukraine, where it could be fed inexpensively.86 Before the construction of railroads in the 1860s and 1870s, European Russian contained not one but several markets within which grain was produced and sold. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, the central Russian market, which encompassed a number of integrated submarkets, was so extensive that calling it “the all-Russia market” is more an exaggeration than an error. It comprised the middle and upper Volga and its tributaries with a northwestern extension through the canal at Vyshnii Volochek to St. Petersburg. To the west of it lay two smaller, local markets focused on Narva and Reval and a large market extending from Riga through the basin of the Western Dvina and encompassing most of Livonia, much of western Poland, and parts of Smolensk, Belorossiia, and the northern Ukraine. To the northeast lay the market of the Northern Dvina, focused on the port of Archangel, into which cereals from the middle Volga were sometimes diverted. To the southeast lay the market of the lower Volga stretching from Kazan or Simbirsk to Astrakhan, on the Caspian, and Azov, on the sea of Azov. To the south lay the Black Sea market through which the grain of the Pontic Steppe was shipped to consumers overseas. Created after 1774, when Russia acquired ports and navigation rights on the Black Sea, that market experienced phenomenal growth once Russia developed a suitable port at Odessa at the turn of the nineteenth century. All those markets were formed by navigable waterways, and regions that did not have navigable waterways through which surplus grain could be transported to consumers found themselves excluded from markets. The largest region of that type encompassed Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev, and parts of neighboring provinces, but there were similar, if smaller, examples in other parts of European Russia. They had little or no access to consumers, and St. Petersburg had no access to their grain.87 In 1786–1787 the Commission on Grain kept coming back to the realization with which it began its labors: St. Petersburg and much of northern Russia depended on cereal brought by water from distant interior provinces. Additional

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supplies could be acquired from Riga or Reval, but only an emergency could justify the difficulties and costs that such an undertaking entailed. Because nature and Peter I had linked St. Petersburg with the central Russian grain market, the most practical way to improve the provisioning of St. Petersburg over the long run (and even in the short run) was to encourage and facilitate the movement of cereals through that market from the steppe to the capital.

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CHAPTER 4

R Production

A

lthough Catherine II was reluctant to treat grain as a mere commod ity, like flax or wool, that was how grain traded on the market, and  although her instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767 identified money making and economic self-interest with merchants, those phenomena equally applied to the peasants and noble landowners who produced Russia’s grain. Peasants and nobles needed cash and tried to earn it by the most effective means available to them. If growing grain satisfied that criterion, they tried to do more of it; if not, they would neglect it in favor of other, more lucrative pursuits. The decisive factor in either case was profitability as determined by the market and signaled by prices. Such behavior will no doubt strike the readers of this book as normal and even obvious, but it did not correspond to the ideological notions that educated eighteenth-century Russians had of themselves and of others. The creation of St. Petersburg, the settlement of the forested steppe, the monetization of obligations, the increased availability of consumer goods, the intensification of the cash economy, and the emancipation of the nobility from compulsory service in 1762 altered the context in which Russian society and its individual members

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operated. In consequence nobles, merchants, and peasants changed their personal behavior and their economically driven actions more swiftly than they changed their prescriptive notions about how people should act. Peasants and landowners produced grain first of all to feed themselves. How much more they might produce in order to sell it depended not only on the market but also on the constraints imposed on them by Russian society and by nature itself. PRICES AND PRODUCERS

From 1764 to 1766 the price of rye and rye flour rose to unprecedented heights not only in St. Petersburg but also throughout northern and central Russia.1 In 1767, prompted by the empress, the Senate called on provincial officials to explain why the price of cereals had risen so sharply. Many of those who responded attributed the increase in prices to a decline in production. Prices had risen, they argued, because peasants had deserted agriculture for other occupations and were failing to produce all the grain that they could (and presumably should). A few officials, however, reversed the relationship between prices and production and explained that peasants had turned to other occupations because grain prices had fallen too low in the recent past. The governor of Astrakhan, for example, pointed to producers’ reactions to prices in explaining the rising costs: The high price of grain arose in most cases from its extremely low price previously; a kul of rye flour sold for forty kopecks in Astrakhan and even less in Kazan area, and so from a whole summer of exhausting labor, the peasant, in need, received hardly enough to pay his poll tax and meet his other obligatory expenses, . . . and thus when the peasant, wanting to support himself from other work that would be more to his advantage, left the plow and turned to various jobs in the town, and more of them entered them than should have, the balance between those who grow grain and those who eat it was thereby lost. . . . As grain prices rose many raznochintsy [people falling outside established social categories] and petty merchants, thinking how to gain more advantage for themselves than through their trade because of their small amount of capital, have taken up agriculture. Since 1765, with the rise in prices, grain growers have multiplied, so that now not only landless peasants and soldiers but also merchants and craftsmen, all according to their power and capability, have settled [into agriculture].2

In similar terms the voevoda, or administrative head, of the Elets district of Orel Province informed the Senate that the price of grain had fallen so low by 1762 that many peasants had taken up industries, various crafts, and trades on their own initiative and at the orders of their masters.3 His counterpart in the Kotel’nich district of Viatka Province also pointed out that the higher prices

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occurring since 1765 were reviving agriculture. “Grain growing is not dead,” he wrote, “but increases still from year to year because the grain has become more expensive in price such that the peasants are attracted to agriculture.”4 In other words, landowners and peasant laborers were reacting in economically rational ways to market forces signaled by prices. That proposition should surprise no modern readers, but it did not fit well into the mind-set and discourse of the eighteenth-century Russians who believed or at least wanted to believe, as Catherine II expressed it in her famous instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767, that nobles were people of “virtue and merit” and peasants were people who tilled the soil and whose labor maintained the other orders of society “because that is their lot.”5 With such an outlook, eighteenth-century Russians created enduring but unreal images of Russia’s peasants and landowners. Government officials and private landowners frequently portrayed peasants as lazy, drunken louts or else as childlike simpletons and insisted that in either case they needed guidance and supervision for their own good as well as that of society.6 In much the same way, nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, even those who were nobles themselves, tended to characterize noble landowners as economic incompetents. In fact, it did not take much more sophistication to react to the economic pressures and opportunities then in place—to stop doing things that were unprofitable or useless and to do more of those things that paid well— than it did to take shelter in a storm or move closer to the stove to get warm. The presence of a grain market and the opportunity or lack thereof to make money by selling grain inevitably affected production, but they did so in ways determined by the conditions of Russian agriculture and Russian society. If it ever existed in its idealized form, the closed economy of the selfsufficient estate vanished in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of that century, the crown, the church, and the nobles tried to satisfy most of their needs from their own estates. They cultivated demesnes and required labor, or barshchina, from their serfs. Most lords also demanded a payment of agricultural commodities in kind, while only a few demanded cash in lieu of labor (obrok).7 Then the development of St. Petersburg, the levying of taxes in cash rather than in kind, and the settlement of the steppe expanded the commercial grain market and replaced a closed estate economy with an open one. From the 1730s to the 1760s peasants and landlords in northern and central Russia responded to falling prices by purchasing grain on the market and seeking income from other sources. When grain prices rose in the 1760s and again in the 1780s, peasants and landowners throughout Russia responded by increasing their production. SUBSISTENCE AND BEYOND

Peasants grew grain because they had to. Unlike hemp or flax or other cash crops, grains were the basic means of subsistence. Cereals played such an import-

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ant role in the Russian diet that even a meager increase of their seed could make an important difference to those who sowed and reaped. Before the widespread adoption of the potato in the mid-nineteenth century, most Russians had no substitute for the nourishment that could be obtained from cereals. They had to grow grain or buy it, and with few exceptions, those who had access to land tried to satisfy at least part of their own needs by growing it. Consequently, despite the great variation in agricultural productivity in different regions of the country, peasants cultivated rye and other grains almost everywhere, even where the returns were minimal. They sowed grain near the shores of the White Sea and in clearings amid the forests of Olonets Province. According to Ivan Bolotov, a provincial noble with a deep interest in agronomy, Russians considered land unsuitable for grain only when it failed to return twice the seed planted.8 Throughout the forest zone of northern and north-central Russia, the average harvest returned two or three times the seed planted, but it varied considerably from one locality to another and from one year to the next.9 In any given season, those who owned land in those regions and those who tilled it knew that the next harvest might be a lean one, but they also knew that it could be better, perhaps much better, and so they plowed and prayed. In black-earth regions, however, the return on rye was seldom less than three to one or so and usually more.10 Spared the occasional and possibly disastrous drought, growers there could easily satisfy their own needs, and with some extra effort, they would have a surplus to sell. For them, the question was one of expending the extra effort. Peasants’ willingness to perform even more of the difficult, demanding, and often disappointing labor required to grow grain depended on their need for money versus the amount of money they could earn by selling grain. Earnings, as Bolotov noted in 1770, depended in turn on three elements: the size of the harvest, the market for cereals, and their price.11 Peasants (and landowners) in the fertile province of Chernigov, an area with no access to markets, might not bother to produce a surplus they could not sell, while those in provinces such as St. Petersburg or Novgorod, who enjoyed easy access to a regional market, might struggle to grow more grain on less fertile land so that they could either reduce their need to purchase grain at high prices or, in an exceptionally good year, sell the surplus. Peasants provided all but the tiniest fraction of the agricultural workforce. Technically, the term peasant designated a hereditary legal category, but educated upper-class Russians of the eighteenth century generally assumed that peasants were simple, rustic people who lived in villages and cultivated the land. Nobles saw nothing wrong with turning peasants into household servants, but, like Catherine II, many found it anomalous and distressing that peasants should take up employments outside agriculture.12 By the middle of the eighteenth century, increasing numbers of peasants in northern and central Russia were finding that

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agriculture alone could not supply their families’ needs. Many left the village for seasonal or part-time work, many devoted more time to handicrafts, and some entered the market as traders. With few exceptions, they did so with the consent and often the encouragement of their masters. Only a few left agriculture permanently; those who took up other employments usually retained their ties to the village as seasonal workers, part-time farmers, or farmers-in-waiting.13 Members of other legal categories also tilled the land. The drivers and couriers of the state coaching stations (iamshchiki) received allotments of land for their support, as did parish priests. Poor nobles commonly worked in their own fields alongside their serfs. In the more fertile south, many people who were townsfolk in the eyes of the law, including some who were officially registered as merchants, cultivated fields and produced their own food. So did the odnodvortsy, a legal category intermediate between peasants and the nobility, who inhabited several provinces in the forested steppe.14 All in all, Mironov’s estimate that only 4–6 percent of the civilian population of late eighteenth-century Russia were not engaged in agriculture to some degree is thoroughly credible.15 Even nobles who did not till the fields themselves were nevertheless engaged in the production of grain to the extent that they sought to manage its cultivation on their estates. Beyond growing what they needed for subsistence, peasants produced a surplus of grain in response to demands imposed by the authorities who governed them. Without those demands, it is entirely possible that they would have produced a much smaller surplus, growing only enough to purchase the few necessities that they could not produce for themselves. Although classical economic theory assumes that people strive to maximize income, Adam Smith’s “economic man” was a universalized eighteenth-century Scot, not a central or eastern European peasant. In the view of Chayanov, Polanyi, and others, peasants outside the commercialized regions of western Europe tended to regard labor as a necessary evil and leisure as a commodity more valuable than the goods they might buy if they worked harder.16 There is considerable anecdotal evidence to support the views of Chayanov and Polanyi, but much of our information comes from serf owners and officials who interpreted the peasants’ lack of zeal for agriculture as laziness and primitive simplicity.17 Some peasants accumulated considerable wealth, and a very few even became successful entrepreneurs, but they did not make their fortunes from agriculture. Serfdom and peasant society operated in ways that restrained the growth of peasant incomes from agriculture and kept them within a fairly narrow range. The topographical description of Tver Province composed in 1783 contains a model budget that the authors had constructed for a peasant family consisting of a husband, wife, and two children; the annual expenses for such a family are given in rubles and decimal fractions thereof:

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85

4.505

for house, barn, sheds, etc.

7.49

for poll tax and quitrent (obrok)

0.70

for salt

1.955

for harnesses, horseshoes, etc.

0.975

for purchased clothing, especially hats

4.91

for agricultural implements and other tools

0.60

to the church

3.00

on wife and children

3.00

for unforeseen expenses

27.135

total

On the other side of the ledger, the editors saw their imaginary family earning approximately seventeen rubles from nonagricultural labor and only ten rubles from the sale of agricultural products, including eggs, butter, meat, and grain.18 The budget presented may not have corresponded to the actual budget of any living family. One obvious flaw is that it omits any entry for the family’s share of communal expenses. Still, it is based on observed data and provides a starting point for the examination of the economics of production from the standpoint of a peasant cultivator in the non-black-earth region who paid obrok to his master and engaged in seasonal or part-time wage labor. It shows a need for cash to purchase a few necessities and to meet financial obligations, but it shows little or no discretionary income. Other sources, however, reveal that peasants bought consumer goods at the thousands of fairs held throughout rural Russia each year. In 1782 the Commission on Commerce compiled and sent to the Senate a list of “all the items .  .  . sold to peasants in villages and hamlets,” including clay and wooden dishes, plows, sickles, scythes, needles, knives, cloth, ready-to-wear dresses, sheepskin coats, kaftans, shirts, crosses, chains, earrings, buttons, belts, votive candle holders, writing paper, sealing wax, tar, harnesses and other gear for horses, and mats and other items made of bast.19 Unfortunately, the document provides no information on the volume of such trade, and we have no idea of the number of peasants who participated in it or the percentage of their income that they spent on it. Clearly some peasants had money left after meeting their obligations to the authorities, but those obligations came first; they applied to all peasants, and they were the primary reason peasants would try to grow more grain than they needed for their own subsistence and sell any surplus for cash. OBLIGATIONS TO THE STATE

During the reign of Peter I, the Russian state reorganized and restructured the obligations of its subjects. By the end of Peter’s reign, the state had largely 86

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converted payments in kind into payments in cash, thereby monetizing the obligations of peasants and causing them to sell grain on the market rather than deliver it directly to the state and its agents. Thereafter the basic tax and the main source of revenue for the government was to be the poll tax, or capitation, a broad-based, predictable, and generally dependable levy imposed on every male in the lower orders of society. Despite inflation and the growth of state expenditures over time, the poll tax remained fixed at seventy kopecks per registered male, commonly known as a “revision soul,” from 1725 until 1794, when it increased to one ruble.20 Many peasants had difficulty earning enough money to pay the poll tax, and for the first decade or two after its introduction, uncollected arrears ran as high as 30 percent of collections. By the 1750s, however, the rate of nonpayment had fallen to somewhere between 7 and 14 percent of collections.21 Because Russia’s provinces were woefully underadministered, the state counted on the peasant communes and noble landowners to collect and deliver the poll tax. They could extract it from the peasants by any means necessary, or they could make up the difference themselves, as long as the state received what it was owed. If nonpayment persisted beyond an undefined period, the state would eventually send troops to collect the arrears. Shcherbatov described the process in his instructions to the stewards of his Iaroslavl estates in 1761. He pointed out that the poll tax was seldom paid on time because the peasants claimed they had no money. State officials would respond to the nonpayment first with a series of reminders and finally with a detachment of soldiers who had to be provided with food and drink while they coerced the peasants into paying what they owed. Noting that such collections inflicted serious losses on the landowners, Shcherbatov enjoined his stewards to collect the money from the peasants and deliver it to the authorities on receipt of the first notice, on the next day if possible but never later than the fourth day.22 In 1769, in the midst of war, the state enacted a new law on arrears that called for sequestering noble estates and renting them to other landowners until the arrears had been paid. In such cases the state could also sell not only “grain and other supplies” from the sequestered estate but also its peasants. If the landowner happened to be in the army or another branch of the service at the time, up to half his salary could be withheld to settle his liability for overdue taxes.23 Beyond the poll tax, the most onerous and the most dreaded burden that the state imposed on the lower orders of Russian society was military conscription. Each year the state set the size of the recruitment levy and divided it among the number of eligible “revision souls,” demanding as few as one recruit for every 300 souls, as it did in 1767, or as many as one for every 100 souls, as in 1773.24 Like the poll tax, the recruitment levy became the responsibility of the peasant commune and the noble landowner under the threat of a dragonnade. Thus, in 1779, when treasury peasants in Orel Province failed to deliver their quota of military recruits, Governor-General Shcherbinin dispatched a detachment from production

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the cavalry squadron of the Orel garrison to live in the offending villages at their expense (“byt na ikh koshte”) until they turned over the specified number of recruits to the authorities.25 The selection of military recruits posed a most sensitive and difficult problem for the peasant communes and noble landowners. A recruit would leave his family, including his wife if he had one, and be lost to his village and his landowner forever. In some recorded instances, the heads of households met in secret to select the young men they would send as recruits in order to keep those likely to be chosen from running away. Peasants designated for the military were usually seized, clapped into irons, incarcerated, and finally led away under guard. Beyond the emotional and psychological stresses it inflicted, military conscription confiscated labor and earning power from the peasants and, if they had one, from their lord. Both peasants and nobles tried to limit their loses by sending troublemakers, idlers, younger sons, and unmarried men, in roughly that order, before giving up the more valued members of the community.26 When they could, they tried to purchase substitutes. In his well-known memoir written for Alexander I, Nicholas Karamzin described the peasants’ desire to purchase recruits for their sons and brothers as a major source of peasant industriousness, thrift, and sobriety.27 For all that, the price of a recruit was well beyond the means of most peasant families, rising from four hundred rubles in 1780 to five hundred rubles by 1790.28 Still, on a Golitsyn estate in Kostroma Province, peasant families with profitable commercial activities managed to finance the purchase of ninety-nine substitutes through the commune between 1780 and 1788, and on a Kurakin estate in the same province, the peasants purchased twenty recruits between 1798 and 1814.29 Some landowners subsidized the purchase of military substitutes for their peasants. Shcherbatov made it a practice to pay half the cost of purchasing substitute recruits and to reduce the obligations of serfs who paid the other half.30 P. A. Rumiantsev exempted any peasant family that purchased a military substitute from all other state and seigniorial obligations for two years.31 In 1816 the manager of a Lieven estate in Kostroma Province, with peasant support, purchased thirty-two recruits by dividing the purchase price among the peasant households in accordance with their ability to pay.32 On another estate in that same province, the commune agreed to finance the purchase of substitutes through yearly assessments on all peasant families. When some communes failed to raise enough money to purchase substitutes, they used the funds they had collected to compensate the wives and mothers of men sent to the military.33 Those are not isolated examples, but they need to be balanced by recalling that every time a family, village, or landowner purchased a recruit, someone else had to sell one.

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OBLIGATIONS TO THE MASTER

In addition to fulfilling the demands imposed on them by the state, peasants had to meet obligations imposed their masters or by the state agency to which they were legally bound. According to the third revision of the tax registers (1762), Russian peasants were distributed among the four main categories of peasants as follows. Approximately 56 percent of Russian peasants were enserfed to noble landowners. Slightly more than 10.6 percent were enserfed to a monastery, a bishop, or some other ecclesiastical authority until 1762, when the state began the secularization of ecclesiastical estates. As that process unfolded in the 1760s, ecclesiastical peasants were transferred to the College of Economy and became known as “economic peasants” or “treasury peasants.” Another 5.25 percent of Russia’s peasants belonged to the Russian crown, which acted as their landlord and exercised seigniorial authority over them through its appointed agents. The final category, comprising almost 28 percent of the peasantry in 1762, consisted of various categories of state peasants and odnodvortsy.34 With considerably more autonomy in the conduct of their own affairs, state peasants were in effect the serfs of the state, which could and did assign them additional labor and monetary burdens, including onerous and hated work as “assigned peasants” in the smelters and foundries of the Urals. The different categories of peasants were not distributed evenly throughout the various regions and provinces of the empire. Ecclesiastical peasants, for instance, were concentrated in the older areas of the Muscovite state, in the northern and north-central provinces, and were much less common in territories settled and annexed after 1550, when land grants to the church declined significantly. State peasants, on the other hand, were an insignificant component of the peasantry in the core areas of the Muscovite state, but they were much more numerous in the north, where few nobles held estates, and in the steppe country to the south and east, where serfdom was restricted throughout much of the seventeenth century as various categories of servicemen were granted land behind successive fortified lines. With the introduction of the poll tax in 1724, Peter I converted most of those servicemen into state peasants or odnodvortsy.35 As a result, state peasants and odnodvortsy comprised approximately 27 percent of the peasantry in the province of Voronezh; 35 percent in Kursk, Tambov, and Simbirsk; and 69 percent in Kazan.36 Court peasants were more evenly and more randomly distributed throughout Russia’s provinces. Peasants enserfed to nobles (whom I hereafter term “proprietary serfs” to distinguish them from peasants in other categories) constituted a majority of the peasants in all of Russia’s provinces except Kharkov, Kazan, and the sparsely settled peripheral provinces far to the north, the trans-Volga, Siberia, and the grassland steppe. Though subordinated in different ways to different authorities, peasants in all categories bore obligations to their masters or the authorities to which they production

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were bound. In theory, those obligations conformed to one of two distinct types: either barshchina, compulsory, uncompensated labor on a demesne, or obrok, a specified amount of cash or commodities delivered in lieu of agricultural labor. In practice barshchina and obrok were often imposed simultaneously in various combinations, and other obligations, such as carting, hauling, road repair and other forms of maintenance, and nonagricultural labor were commonly added to the mix. That was true for most monasteries prior to secularization and for most noble estates in the central Volga region between 1750 and 1775.37 The topographical description of Tver in the 1770s recorded that peasants in the district of Krasnyi Kholm owed their masters three days of agricultural labor per week, as well as three rubles per soul in cash, half a ram, a chicken, 1.6 kilograms of lard, 7.1 meters of linen cloth, and 2 kilograms of beef per labor unit.38 The experience of Shcherbatov’s estates in Iaroslavl show just how complicated the mixture of obligations could be. Until 1761, most peasants on those estates performed barshchina, but some, especially those who lived outside the two main villages, paid obrok in varying amounts. Those performing barshchina also made payments in kind of meat, eggs, wool, honey, mushrooms, and other commodities. As Shcherbatov converted his estates to obrok between 1761 and 1763, he turned all the fields and meadows over to his peasants and freed them from all uncompensated labor except repair of the mills. In return, he demanded that the peasants pay him 6.50 rubles per soul per year; that they deliver specified quantities of fabric, hay, and firewood; that they and their children work for wages in his factories and commercial enterprises; and that they sell their raw materials exclusively to his enterprises rather than on the open market.39 From those activities and from wage labor outside the estate, Shcherbatov’s peasants would earn the cash they needed to meet their obligations to the state and their master and to purchase additional grain to supplement their own inadequate harvests. OBLIGATIONS TO THE COMMUNE

The various demands of the state and the landlords for taxes, recruits, obrok, barshchina, and miscellaneous labor services were transmitted to the peasants through the commune (mir or obshchina). Though based on the number of revision souls, those demands were usually imposed on the entire peasant community as a collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka). Some landlords took an active role in apportioning those obligations among their serfs, especially in the case of exceptionally prosperous serfs engaged in commercial enterprises, but typically they simply insisted that the demand be met and left the assessments and collections to the communes. The commune included all the members of the community, but its active members were the heads of households, the family patriarchs. In most cases these men chose the officials and functionaries of the commune, but on some noble estates the landlord or his steward selected and appointed some or even all of 90

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them. The communes included several officials, each assigned certain duties. First, a “headman” (starosta, vybornyi, or burmeistr) served as the official leader. He presided at communal meetings, intervened in disputes, and dealt with authorities outside the commune, the most important of whom were state officials and, on noble estates, the master or his steward. The other officials within the commune included a treasurer (tseloval’nik), who collected money, held it, and made payments on behalf of the commune; clerks (zemskie), who handled correspondence and kept records of orders, offenses, punishments, and so on; police officials (sotskie), who supervised behavior and kept order; and, on barshchina estates, overseers and drivers (smotriteli and nariadchiki), who were responsible for the performance of compulsory labor.40 In most cases the commune compensated all those officials, but on some estates the landlord paid the headman. In addition to choosing the commune’s officials, the heads of households convened to make decisions about issues facing the community and to act on its behalf. They administered justice, imposed discipline, and resolved disputes, usually in conjunction with the steward or some other official. They petitioned the lord or the government. They decided and enforced the communal bylaws, deciding when plowing would begin; when the harvest should be completed; how communal resources such as water and pasture should be shared; and other practical, mundane issues. They saw to the needs of widows, orphans, and paupers and to the needs of the church and the priest. They approved or forbade the division of households. They decided which young men would be sent to the army, and they distributed the obligations and resources of the commune among its families. Finally, they determined the expenditures for all these communal activities, including the payment of bribes to various officials and the purchase of substitute recruits. The case of the Sheremetev estates shows just how large those expenditures could be: assessments there for the communal fund equaled 30 percent of assessments for obrok in the 1760s and 60 percent of obrok by the 1790s.41 At those rates, compulsory payments to the communal fund imposed more of a financial burden on the peasants than the poll tax did (see table 8). In Smolensk Province, where rye sold for an average of 4.00 rubles a chetvert after the harvests of 1786 and 1787, a village of two hundred souls would have had to sell 325.5 chetverts, approximately forty-eight metric tons, of rye to raise that much money. Because local growing conditions made that impossible, the peasants would have had to earn much of the money they needed from nonagricultural labor.42 In Kazan and Penza provinces, where grain flourished and nonagricultural employment was less common, rye was selling for 2.50 to 2.80 rubles after the harvests of 1786 and 1787, so that a comparable village in those provinces with no other sources of income would have had to sell 465 to 520 chetverts, or 68.6 to 76.7 metric tons, of rye to meet its obligations.43 Those amounts would be reduced by nearly one-third if the commune did not or could not purchase a substitute recruit for the army. production

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Table 8. Cash obligations of a hypothetical village of two-hundred revision souls paying obrok in the 1780s Ruble amount

Obligation

140 512 250

poll tax obroka communal expensesb purchase of military recruitsc

400–500 Total

1,302–1,402

This figure applies to treasury, court, or state peasants; those belonging to nobles probably paid more. b This figure is based on the assumption that the rates on the Sheremetev estates had wider application. c This figure is based on the assumption that the national levy that year was one from every two hundred souls. a

Such calculations were important to the peasants themselves because communes tried to apportion farmland in accordance with each household’s share of the total communal obligation. In some communes the number of revision souls in each household determined its obligations, but in others the total communal obligation was monetized and reapportioned according to the number of labor units (ventsa; sing., venets) in each household.44 In principle, the more revision souls or labor units a household included, the more land it would receive—but that would entail being assigned a proportionately larger share of the community’s collective obligations, too.45 The close link between land and obligation, both in practical terms and in the peasant’s mind, is reflected in the fact that the same word, tiaglo, referred both to the peasant’s burden or obligation and to his allotment of land. Every adult male peasant was subjected/entitled to tiaglo in both meanings of the word.46 Russian peasants did not till the earth to “maintain all ranks of people with the fruits of their labor” because that was their lot, as Catherine II put it. They did so to meet their many obligations, including feeding themselves and their families. In the eighteenth century those obligations had created an inexorable need for cash. When the harvest allowed, peasants sold grain. When things did not work out so well, they often had to sell their grain at harvest time, when the poll tax was due but grain prices were at their lowest, only to have to buy grain at higher prices if and when their reserves ran out. When they could not earn enough money by selling grain, peasants, especially those in the non-black-earth regions, had to find alternatives in handicrafts, wage labor, and other employments. Knowing how much they needed, peasants responded to those pressures by making economically rational decisions that distressed their betters; those who had noble masters, however, were just as likely to have those decisions made for them. 92

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NOBLES

Noble estate owners had their own reasons to raise cash by selling grain. From 1701 to 1762 and again from 1797 to 1801 noblemen were required to serve in the military or the civil administration, and at other times they were expected to do so. Service paid a salary, but it also meant a prolonged absence from the estate that required money for living expenses and travel to and from one’s post. Entering service also required the purchase of boots, uniforms, and other equipment, which imposed a serious burden on poor noblemen.47 Nobles were also supposed to educate their sons for service, an obligation that many found beyond their means. As landlords, nobles were also responsible for collecting and delivering the specified number of military recruits and the assessed value of the poll tax on their serfs, both of which could drain their finances substantially. Noble estate owners, or pomeshchiks, also had to provide food not only for themselves and their immediate families but also for their dependents, who, depending on the size and wealth of the household, might include relatives, servants, and various sorts of clients. In time of famine, they would also have to provide food for their serfs. To help meet those responsibilities, masters commonly required their serfs, even those on obrok, to furnish them with chickens, eggs, milk, pork, geese, ducks, butter, and so on and might even require them to cart the specified items to the pomeshchik’s winter residence in Moscow or St. Petersburg.48 Some wealthy nobles sent flour from their estates to their Moscow townhouses, mostly in the first half of the eighteenth century but in some cases well into the nineteenth. Some even established small retail shops in their houses to sell surplus flour to the general public.49 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Sheremetevs used virtually all the surplus grain from one of their estates in Tula Province to feed the residents of their Moscow townhouse and their suburban estates.50 In St. Petersburg some nobles also attempted to “live off their own” by having grain or flour transported from their own estates either by their own peasants or through agreement with a third party. For most of them, however, transportation between their estates and St. Petersburg was too difficult and too expensive, and so they relied on the market, selling grain from their estates in the provinces and purchasing flour in the city.51 In the mideighteenth century, when prices were at their lowest, Count K. G. Razumovskii spent more than a thousand rubles a year to purchase flour for his St. Petersburg household.52 Beyond these legal and economic obligations, the quest for social status drove nobles to raise cash by selling grain and other commodities. Under the laws of Peter I, all noblemen were equal in the sense that they bore the same obligations, enjoyed the same privileges, obeyed the same laws, and belonged to one undifferentiated category of subjects. Within that category, a nobleman’s status and precedence were supposed to come with his rank in the army, navy, court, or production

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civil service. In practice, however, a noble’s place in the world depended above all on wealth and connections to wealthy and powerful people, including the sovereign. Wealthy nobles could provide their sons with fine educations, including private tutors, enrollment in elite academies, and study at foreign universities, that all but guaranteed their success in state service, and they could provide their daughters with sizable dowries that cemented marriage alliances with other rich and powerful families. Promoting sons’ careers and daughters’ marriages meant moving in society, and that in turn meant keeping up and competing with other families in displaying wealth and taste. To those pressures, Peter’s westernization of the state and the upper levels of society added the appeal of foreign luxuries and previously unknown or little-known items of consumption. According to the estimates and calculations of Arcadius Kahan, the nobility’s consumption of western luxuries, mainly items of food, drink, and clothing, accounted for 41 percent of Russia’s imports by the last decade of the eighteenth century, and when expenditures on travel and education are included, the total comes to more than 18 million rubles per year, or more than 35 percent of the nobility’s annual income.53 One has only to compare the few surviving townhouses and manor houses of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the palatial mansions of a century later to understand that nobles of the latter era wanted and enjoyed a much grander style of life.54 Prince Shcherbatov’s instructions to the steward who managed his estates in Iaroslavl Province reveal the intimate connection between social status and money. Because Shcherbatov not only moved in the wealthy noble society of his time but also thought about it and recorded his reactions, he provides a double-sided view of landowners’ concern with money and the things it could buy. As a moralist, Shcherbatov condemned the growth of luxury and conspicuous consumption as “the contagion of the age,” but as an ambitious absentee landlord, he discovered that the practices he condemned on philosophical, moral, and traditional grounds nonetheless served to increase his income, and so he adopted them. In 1757 he instructed his steward to practice greater economy so that he would “not lose money designated for St. Petersburg, money,” he added, that he could “not do without.”55 In his subsequent efforts to extract more revenue from his estates, Shcherbatov proceeded to violate in practice virtually every principle of estate management he upheld in theory.56 Shcherbatov’s 3,000 revision souls made him one of the wealthiest noblemen in Russia, but as a politically and socially ambitious member of St. Petersburg society, he could still feel poor compared to Count P. B. Sheremetev, who owned more than 60,000, or K. G. Razumovskii, who owned approximately 45,730.57 The society in which Shcherbatov moved was not that of the nobility as a whole, which included a majority of poor, uneducated nobles struggling to make ends meet on small estates in the provinces, but that of the empire’s elite families, who lived mainly in Moscow and St. Petersburg on money provided by numerous 94

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Table 9. Noble ownership of revision souls as a percentage of the nobility Serf ownership more than 1,000 501–1,000 101–500 Fewer than 100

1720s

1762

1777

1834a

1834ba

0.3

1

1.5

?

1

0.8 7.9 91.3

2 15 82

2.6 12.1 83.8

? 26.3 67.8

2 13 84

Source: The figures for the 1720s are from Shepukov, “Ob izmenenii razmerov,” 390– 91. Those for 1762 are from Köppen, “Über die Verteilung,” 7:429, and are based on the third revision. Those for 1777 are from Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Ekaterine II, 1:31, and do not include landless nobles. Those for 1834a are from Aleksandrov, “Russkoe krest’ianstvo v seredine,” 3:322. Those for 1834b are from Köppen, “Über die Verteilung,” 7:420–22. The two calculations for 1834 differ because Köppen included landless nobles in his totals, while Alexandrov, like Semevskii, included only landowners. Alexandrov did not divide nobles owning 501 to 1,000 serfs from those owning more than 1,000.

a

landholdings in several provinces. As tables 9 and 10 indicate, such families constituted a small percentage of the nobility, but they owned a surprisingly large percentage of the proprietary serfs. With 500 revision souls marking the traditional dividing line between wealthy and middling nobles, these tables show that 1 percent of Russia’s landowners owned approximately 25 percent of all the proprietary serfs in the 1720s and that 3–4 percent of the nobility owned more than half from the 1760s on. In the 1720s, the 617 families that would be considered wealthy owned a total of 782,667 souls; by 1834, 2,319 such families owned 3,037,251 souls.58 Constituting the social, cultural, and political elite of the Russian Empire, they had the capital, the education, and the power to adapt production to changing market conditions, and they played an inordinately large role in agriculture and grain production. Their problem was to turn their ownership of land and peasants into revenue even though almost all of them were absentee landlords. BARSHCHINA VERSUS OBROK

Turning land and labor into cash was the problem Shcherbatov confronted in the 1750s as he struggled to extract revenue from four large estates in Iaroslavl Province. Ideologically, Shcherbatov was committed to the traditional ideal of a patriarchal closed estate, but when he tried to manage his estates in that manner, he found that the harvest never returned much more than twice the seed planted. Even when there was some grain to sell, prices were so low that growing grain could not provide the money he needed to make a successful career in St. production

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Table 10. Noble ownership of revision souls as a percentage of all privately owned serfs Serf ownership more than 1,000 501–1000 101–500 Fewer than 100

1720s

1762

1777

1834

17.3

46.3

35.3

30

8.9 32.5 41.3

7.9 26.6 16.2

10.5 43.1 11.1

25.6 24.4 20

Sources: The figures for the 1720s are from Shepukov, “Ob izmenenii razmerov dushevladeniia pomeshchikov Evropeiskoi Rossii,” 390–91. Those for 1762 and 1777 are statistical estimates made by Arcadius Kahan on the basis of Semevskii’s figures cited in note 57 to this chapter. Kahan points out that his method maximizes the percentage of serfs belonging to the small and middle landlords and thus minimizes those belonging to the great lords (Kahan, “The Costs of ‘Westernization’ in Russia,” 61). The figures for 1834 are from Köppen, “Über die Verteilung,” 7:420–22.

Petersburg. With cheaper grain coming up the Volga from the steppe on its way to St. Petersburg, Shcherbatov found that his own efforts to grow and market grain could never produce the revenue he needed. By 1761 he was ready to admit defeat, convert his peasants to obrok, and try to make money by other means, including the transport of grain along the Volga. He constructed lumber mills and textile factories on his estates and required his peasants to work in them for wages. Like other landlords in Iaroslavl, he also encouraged and helped his obrok-paying peasants to find wage labor in St. Petersburg.59 Within two or three years the estates of the Russian Orthodox Church completed a similar conversion from barshchina to obrok. Having failed to compete on the grain market, they began abandoning barshchina in the 1750s. In 1762– 1764 the lands and serfs of the church were secularized, and the remaining labor dues were converted to obrok at the rate of one and a half rubles per soul, raised to two rubles in November 1768.60 By that date, the estates of the crown had also been converted to obrok and were assigned an identical assessment of two rubles per soul.61 In addition, approximately 63 percent of proprietary serfs in the nonblack-earth region were on obrok by the 1780s.62 The majority of nobles’ estates in the black-earth region remained on barshchina, but obrok increased there as well, especially in provinces without convenient water transport. The conversion of estates from barshchina to obrok in the middle third of the eighteenth century occurred despite the strong personal preferences and ideological opposition of Catherine II, Shcherbatov, and other landlords who opposed obrok on principle and believed that it would ruin Russia’s economy. In practice, however, they understood its advantages. What landlords wanted most from their estates was revenue, and with low grain prices, they could do better by 96

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demanding cash from their serfs than they could by demanding labor that they would have to convert into cash through the sale of grain and other agricultural commodities. In his pathbreaking study of the Russian peasantry in the second half of the eighteenth century, V. I. Semevskii argued that obrok predominated in northern and north-central Russia, where the soil was poor, while barshchina predominated in the more productive black-earth provinces to the south. He accounted for exceptions to that simple geographical dichotomy by noting that large estates had a preference for obrok and smaller ones for barshchina.63 Semevskii collected his data about 1880 and published his conclusions in 1901. Since then, N. L. Rubinshtein and Michael Confino have reexamined Semevskii’s data and determined that they do not support his overall conclusion: when Semevskii’s figures on obrok and barshchina are considered province by province, the intraregional differences stand out more sharply than the interregional differences do. For example, in the 1780s, 79 percent of the nobles’ serfs in Pskov and 70 percent of those in Smolensk rendered barshchina, while the comparable figures in the neighboring provinces of Novgorod and St. Petersburg were only 51 percent and 49 percent, respectively. In the black-earth provinces of the forested steppe, however, 92 percent of the nobles’ serfs in Kursk and Tula were on barshchina, but only 48 percent in Penza and 36 percent in Voronezh performed such labor.64 Clearly the choice of barshchina, obrok, or mixed duties did not depend solely on soil type and estate size, nor did it depend primarily on personal preference, since owners with multiple estates commonly assigned them different types of obligations. Seeking to correct Semevskii’s hypothesis, Rubinshtein argued that the determining factor in choosing between obrok and barshchina was access to the market, but his explanation is hardly more satisfactory than Semevskii’s. It fails to account for the relatively low incidence of barshchina in provinces such as St. Petersburg and Novgorod, which had excellent access to markets. Unlike Pskov and Smolensk, with their abundance of marketable flax, St. Petersburg and Novgorod did not produce abundant agricultural commodities and therefore could not take full advantage of the opportunities that the city and port of St. Petersburg provided. Rubinshtein’s hypothesis also fails to explain shifts between these regimes. The preference for barshchina or obrok changed over time in regions where the access to markets did not change. What did change were the signals sent by the market in the form of prices. Several considerations influenced landowners’ preferences for one regime over another. Some estate owners derived psychological satisfaction from ruling over their lands and peasants like petty sovereigns; others preferred a dependable income involving little effort on their part. Barshchina could provide an outlet for a landlord’s talent and energy, but obrok was easier and simpler to administer. A large estate in Samara Province exemplifies this point: an audit on the estate, production

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which had recently converted from one system to the other, revealed that barshchina produced revenue of 216,239 rubles but entailed administrative expenses of 106,280 rubles, whereas obrok produce revenue of 110,930 rubles but cost only 2,800 rubles to administer.65 When the two systems produced markedly different results, however, the determining factor in choosing one over the other was the profitability of agriculture, which in turn depended on the productivity of the land and on access to markets. In general, the greater the profit from the sale of agricultural products, the more likely it was that the landlord would chose to cultivate a demesne and demand barshchina from the peasants. The price increases of the mid-1760s broke the momentum of the nobles’ flight from growing grain, and another wave of price increases in the mid-1780s decisively reversed it. In the last third of the eighteenth century and on into the next, landowners expanded demesne farming, especially in the black-earth regions, and played an increasingly active role in the cultivation and sale of grain.66 The experience of A. I. Polianskii, a landowner in the black-earth province of Penza, nicely illustrates the general trend. In 1769 Polianskii sold no rye from his demesne. The entire harvest was consumed on the estate, fed to cattle, lent to peasants, or reserved for seed. But Polianskii paid close attention to grain prices, and as they rose, he responded by expanding the demesne, sowing more grain, and altering the mix of grains on his demesne to maximize his profits. He gave the same attention to selling his grain, having his peasants transport it to wharves along the Volga and its tributaries and to a local distillery. From 1779 until his death, in the mid-1790s, he sold on average 60 percent of his harvest. By then the volume of sales had become massive at a price more than three and a half times what it had been in the 1760s. Other examples from the same province indicate that Polianskii was by no means alone in his aggressive pursuit of profit from agriculture.67 Confino’s suspicion that conversions from barshchina to obrok reached a peak in the 1750s and 1760s is certainly plausible, but statistical evidence for the two decades between the price increases of the mid-1760s and those of the mid1780s is too sparse to be certain. What is certain is that during the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, barshchina expanded at the expense of obrok.68 In a period of rising grain prices and overall inflation, landlords with good land and access to markets found a renewed advantage in growing and marketing grain, and many who had switched to obrok in earlier decades began to reestablish their demesnes and demand barshchina from their serfs. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, areas where barshchina prevailed and where it was increasing most rapidly were also the areas in which obrok rates rose the most, as lords who for one reason or another preferred not to engage in agriculture still sought to profit from their peasants’ ability to grow and market grain.69 Among the latter were the Sheremetevs, the greatest owners of estates and serfs in Russia, who converted most of their holdings to 98

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Table 11. Obrok in the eighteenth century (in rubles) Levied by landowners (average)

Levied by the state

Levied on

Date

Rate

Date

Rate

–

–

1723

0.40

all peasants not owned by nobles or church

1760s

1.00–2.00

1764

1.50

treasury peasants

–

–

1768

2.00

treasury, court, state peasants

1770s

2.00–3.00

–

–

–

1780s

4.00

1783

3.00

treasury, court, state peasants and odnodvortsy

1790s

5.00

1797

3.50–5.00

treasury peasants

Sources: The figures for obrok levied by landowners, come from Baranovich, Ocherki istorii SSSR, 54 (Milov [Issledovanie, 271] points out that those figures, derived from Semevskii’s data, are based on very small samples, for example, ten cases for the 1790s). Those for obrok levied by the state are from Neupokoev, Gosudarstvennye povinnosti, 91.

obrok over the course of the eighteenth century and worked to increase their incomes from agricultural rents, industrial enterprises on their estates, and the sponsorship of or participation in their serfs’ business activities.70 Instead of returning to barshchina, they, like many other landlords, responded to the rise in grain prices and the deterioration in the value of the ruble by increasing the amount of obrok they demanded from their peasants. Aware of its inability to supervise and administer agriculture on its estates, the state also refrained from joining the return to barshchina, but in 1783 it increased the amount of obrok to be paid by court, treasury, and state peasants from two rubles to three, pointing out that Russian nobles were now demanding at least four rubles per soul from their serfs (see table 11).71 The state’s reluctance to raise the poll tax on all peasants and the obrok on peasants under its direct control worked to the advantage of the nobles on the one hand and to the advantage of the treasury, court, and state peasants on the other. Once they had met the state’s demands, those peasants had the opportunity either to work less or to pursue a greater income, whereas proprietary serfs were likely to find that both those courses conflicted with the masters’ demands. The topographical description of Tver completed in 1783 described the result of differing demands of the state and the nobles: “Treasury peasants live much better than nobles’ peasants. They have more horses, more grain, more trade, and more money. They live more substantially and more abundantly.”72 Describproduction

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ing the Zubtsov district of that province, it observed that treasury peasants not only held an advantage over nobles’ peasants both in time (vo vremeni) and in the amount of obrok they paid but also lived better and more prosperously.73 This disparity had several consequences. For one, treasury peasants with lower obligations did not work as much as the nobles’ serfs or as much as they might have; when given a choice, they preferred some increased leisure to some increased income. That helps to explain why treasury, court, and state peasants were accused of laziness and lack of agricultural zeal more frequently than were proprietary serfs.74 Whereas the obrok rates imposed by the state were uniform and fixed, those set by the nobles varied widely from one region to another and even from one estate to another, largely in accordance with the serfs’ ability to pay. Some serfs were so poor that it was almost impossible to collect any obrok from them, whereas those few serfs who had developed successful businesses might have to pay an obrok of several hundred rubles a year.75 The same general rule applied to the serfs’ potential profit from agriculture. The average for obrok nationwide in the 1790s may have been five rubles per soul, but in the rich agricultural province of Simbirsk, where more than 70 percent of the serfs were on barshchina, those on obrok paid an average of ten rubles per soul, an amount that required them to sell approximately 3.5 kul (approximately 500 kg) of rye per soul if they had no other source of income.76 Demands for barshchina could also vary from place to place and from time to time. According to Rubinshtein, the common practice was to demand three days of labor per week from each adult male and his wife, but in some instances less was demanded, and in others, more.77 At the busiest times of the year, many lords required the serfs to complete work on the demesne first, because they would finish it quickly and exert themselves to the utmost to complete their own work later. When agriculture prospered but the demand for barshchina had reached the limits of practicality, lords could exceed that limit by demanding some obrok in addition to barshchina. A very few even went so far as to incorporate all the plowland into their demesne, require full-time barshchina, and furnish rations to their serfs under a regime indistinguishable from slavery.78 The ultimate limit on the nobles’ demands, of course, was the serfs’ ability or willingness to meet them by working longer and harder. The lords had many means of compulsion at their disposal, but they had no desire to ruin their peasants or destroy their ability to go on working. ESTATE MANAGEMENT

Studies of estate management in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia depend almost entirely on information about the thinking and practices of great landowners. Poorer nobles with little land or education ran their estates in person, relying on oral commands and leaving few if any records.79 Wealthy noblemen, however, commonly owned several estates, frequently in different provinces, that they managed or tried to manage from central offices in Moscow 100

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and St. Petersburg, and they maintained archives that preserved their correspondence with and instructions to the stewards of their various holdings. Discovered and analyzed by historians, those instructions are one of the two major sources for studies of estate management and serf-based agriculture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia.80 The other major source of information on these subjects is Trudy, the journal of the Free Economic Society. Founded in 1765, the Free Economic Society originally consisted of wealthy, high-ranking nobles and foreign-born scholars. Additional members of those two groups joined the society over the next half century, as did a number of provincial nobles, important ecclesiastics, physicians, merchants, and foreigners. As part of Catherine II’s campaign to promote economic development, the society and its journal sought to stimulate discussion and disseminate useful information about agriculture, mechanics, and related aspects of the Russian economy. Pursuing that same goal, the imperial government sponsored, subsidized, and otherwise encouraged the translation and publication of European writings on agronomy and other technical subjects from a variety of sources, including Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The results, however, were modest at best. As Colum Leckey has shown, the regular meetings of the Free Economic Society were mostly ceremonial occasions for social networking and self-congratulation. Trudy did stimulate practical discussions of agriculture and estate management, but as sales and readership lagged, subsidies and press runs shrank.81 Costing fifty kopecks per issue until 1771 and forty kopecks thereafter, each new issue of Trudy sold only a few hundred copies, and the cumulative sales of all volumes, including back issues, usually ran between 1,000 and 2,000 copies a year. The press run was reduced from a high of 2,400 copies a year in 1766 to 120 a year in 1795 after the government terminated its subsidy. In 1801 the press run increased to 600 and remained between 600 and 700 copies per volume for the next twenty years.82 Although they fail to offer a comprehensive picture of Russian agriculture, landowners’ instructions to their stewards and the articles published in Trudy do represent the thoughts of Russia’s richest and most enlightened landowners, the very people who possessed the desire, capital, and education to increase the output and profitability of their vast estates. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the instructions that noble landowners gave their stewards, like those of ecclesiastical authorities, dealt almost entirely with regulating and controlling peasant behavior and with making and enforcing demands for labor and money.83 In that half century, noblemen spent most of their lives in state service, grain prices were falling in real terms, and many nobles, especially the wealthiest and most powerful, received extensive land grants from the state.84 Landowners had neither the time, the incentive, nor the knowledge to work at improving agricultural productivity. The 1760s brought a noticeable change in the outlook of Russian landowners. production

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Compulsorily state service for noblemen ended in 1762, and even though most continued to serve for some part of their lives, they had more time to devote to managing their estates either in person or in absentia. They also had greater interest, as the price of grain was rising and market relations had largely replaced self-sufficiency and closed-estate farming. Those changes occurred just as the first publications of the French Physiocrats in 1756 were triggering a mania for agronomy that was producing new ideas for improving agriculture. Russia’s government took an interest in those ideas. Faced with the deficits and debts created by the Seven Years’ War, the governments of Peter III and Catherine II sought to encourage agricultural reform as a far-reaching solution to Russia’s financial and economic problems. In addition to sponsoring publications to promote the dissemination and discussion of useful ideas and information, Catherine’s government acted to provide the landowners with consolidated estates that would be easier to manage and improve. The General Survey, begun in 1766, and the provincial reform of 1775 clarified boundaries, reduced multiple ownership of estates, and facilitated the resolution of land disputes. The Charter to the Nobility of 1785 affirmed and guaranteed the nobles’ rights to own and control their estates as private property and completed the legal transformation of the nobility from a service class supported by the ownership of lands and serfs to a landed nobility that was expected to serve the state.85 Catherine’s government also established several banks and credit institutions that lent millions of rubles to Russia’s landlords on relatively easy terms. Although the nobles spent much of what they borrowed on consumption and living expenses, one of the stated purposes for lending them the money was to provide capital for agricultural improvements.86 With so much encouragement from all sides, noble landowners sought to increase their incomes by improving the management of their estates.87 The common theme of all noble writings on estate management in the second half of the eighteenth century, according to Confino, was profitability, income, revenue, money. Even for writers with the greatest concern for agronomy, such as Bolotov and Rychkov, the overriding concern was to increase incomes without ruining the peasants.88 That concern underlay virtually all the other aspects of estate management that filled the pages of Trudy and its competitors, from the debate over the respective advantages of barshchina and obrok to the discussion of methods for evaluating stewards. Amid universal agreement that finding a good steward constituted the essential first step toward improved estate management, Bolotov explained to the readers of Trudy that “the greatest talent of a steward lies in increasing revenues and in obtaining the greatest quantity of commodities for sale.”89 After 1760 or so, landowners’ instructions to their stewards began to reflect an outlook similar to Bolotov’s. To their continued concern with regulating peasant behavior, they added and often emphasized a new interest on producing 102

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salable commodities for the market and in several instances even referred to prevailing market prices. Some nobles had their stewards buy up peasant grain for sale along with their own, while others, including Shcherbatov, ordered stewards to enter the grain trade directly by purchasing grain on its way to St. Petersburg, milling it, and transporting the flour to the capital.90 Like Shcherbatov, many nobles focused their efforts to increase revenue on the processing and distribution of commodities and invested capital in valueadding industries and businesses.91 In the 1780s, the previously cited topographical description of Tver, a province of small estates and relatively low fertility, noted that local pomeshchiks had introduced new types of barns and sheds for drying, threshing, and milling grain, and a report on Moscow Province at the turn of the nineteenth century noted that whereas peasants continued to thresh their grain on open floors and dry it in unheated barns, the nobles used a newer type of heated barn (riga) for both threshing and drying.92 Landowners also encouraged their serfs to engage in light industrial production and commercial activities of various kinds.93 Where agriculture was profitable, they also invested capital in land and labor to expand agricultural production and struggled, with only limited success, to increase agricultural productivity. OBSTACLES TO INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY

Through centuries of experience, Russian peasants had adopted agricultural practices that suited their peculiar circumstances. By the eighteenth century, peasant agriculture had been so thoroughly bound up with the physical environment, the seasonal calendar, and peasant culture that it resisted innovations based on ideas or the experience of others. Lest anyone think that their attitude was peculiarly Russian, it should be noted that Prussian officials and landowners encountered similar resistance throughout the eighteenth century when they tried to introduce new crops and new techniques that had proven successful in England.94 Perched on the margin of subsistence, peasants preferred to do what had worked in the past, even if it had not worked all that well. Consequently, the interest in agronomy that began to appear in agricultural journals and landlords’ instructions in Russia in the 1750s and 1760s seldom found application outside the lord’s demesne in a barshchina regime, if there, and even there it generally encountered serious and often insuperable obstacles. Still later, in the 1830s, Alexander Pushkin observed, “Russian grain does not grow according to a foreign system.”95 With some exceptions and modifications, Russian agriculture followed the three-field system of crop rotation, switching from fallow to winter crop to spring crop and back to fallow, thus removing one-third of the arable from production in any given year. Variations included a two-field system and “spotted” fields, in which the spring and winter crops and fallow areas lay interspersed in one large field. Where land was plentiful in relation to the population and production

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the labor force, some part of it was normally set aside as long fallow to replenish its fertility over a number of years on a longer cycle of rotation. The fields themselves lay open and divided into small plots or strips. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a lord’s demesne included strips scattered among those of the peasants and even those of other pomeshchiks, but from the 1760s onward the government’s consistent effort to eliminate boundary disputes and multiple ownership of estates enabled nobles to rationalize and control their holdings and, especially on newly opened land on the southern and eastern frontiers, to consolidate their demesnes. On such a demesne, lords and stewards could decide what to grow and how to grow, till, and harvest it, but they had to depend on serfs to cooperate and carry out their orders. Although there are examples of masters like Shcherbatov, who preferred wage labor to serf labor for certain nonagricultural tasks because he found it more productive, there are no known examples of masters paying or rewarding peasants for cultivating the demesne.96 When they encountered resistance or disobedience, landlords and stewards could fine and beat the most lazy and uncooperative serfs; in extreme cases, they might sell them or send them as recruits or colonists. If the peasants resisted en masse, however, the noble or his steward might have to compromise or back down. If peasants felt that a particular change to their normal practices was impractical, unwelcome, or intolerable, they might resist by ignoring it, rebelling against it, or in extreme cases, especially when authorities sought to enforce compliance by beating or threatening them, even murdering the steward or the landowner.97 An ill-fated effort to reform the crown estate of Korostina, adjacent to Lake Il’men, in Novgorod Province, provides a salient example of peasant resistance to changes imposed from above, however well intentioned. In 1765 the recently appointed governor of Novgorod, Jakob Sievers, won Catherine’s approval to take over and reform Korostina and its 4,673 revision souls. In cooperation with E. I. Elagin, the director of the Glavnaia Dvortsovaia Kantseliaariia, which had jurisdiction over crown estates, Sievers attempted to introduce practices from his native Livonia: individual peasant holdings, fixed and defined peasant obligations, and improved agriculture practices including variations on the three-field system. Sievers sincerely believed that these innovations would improve both the lot of the peasants and the productivity of agriculture. The peasants, however, refused to accept the reforms, probably because they knew that agriculture there was unrewarding. Accustomed to paying obrok, they resisted the imposition of barshchina that Sievers’s plan required. They petitioned the government to stop the reforms and won a hearing and investigation of their complaints. At one point they even refused to plow the fields designated for the next season’s crop. Facing this episode at the same time as it dealt with the peasant disturbances associated with the Pugachev Rebellion, the government treated the peasants

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leniently, and Sievers, who had many other demands on his attention, abandoned the attempt to reform Korostina.98 The effort involved in making serfs obey instructions explains many landlords’ preference for obrok on the one hand and their emphasis on regulating peasant behavior and enforcing labor norms and discipline on the other. Even some of the most authoritarian serf owners found it necessary to consult the commune or its officials before changing the amount or the nature of peasant obligations or the distribution of burdens.99 When the peasants protested that they could not possibly do more than they were doing, they might be telling the truth, in which case the steward and the pomeshchiks wanted to avoid “ruining” their peasants through exhaustion, malnutrition, or some other undesirable consequence. Then again, the peasants might be lying. The art of successful estate management lay in knowing the difference. Climate and soil supported peasants’ reluctance to change. In most regions, the plow of preference was the sokha, a light, iron-tipped, wooden implement with no wheels capable of cutting a trench only two to five centimeters deep. Its limitations necessitated a second or even a third plowing just to reach a desired depth of nine to eighteen centimeters, followed by repeated harrowing to break up the clods. A heavier version, the kosulia, had a moldboard that moved the soil to one side and could plow twice as deep. A much heavier plow, the plug, with wheels and an iron plowshare, never appeared in central Russia but was confined to the south and southwest, where it was needed to break previously unplowed soil in the steppe, just as the kosulia was needed for heavy clay. Otherwise, peasants and most landlords used the sokha whenever they could because it was cheap, easy to build, and easy to operate, and it required little draft power. Unlike the plug, which required three to four men and six to eight oxen, the sokha could be handled by one plowman and one small, undernourished horse. That was an important advantage in northern and central Russia, where long winters normally kept draft animals confined to their barns for up to two hundred days a year and left them weak and undernourished for the spring plowing. Cold winters, long-term penning, and limited stores of fodder imposed severe limits on raising stock and consequently on the availability of manure.100 In non-black-earth regions, manure was treated as a precious commodity, reserved for rye or for an important cash crop, such as hemp.101 In the unfertilized spring field, growers normally sowed oats, buckwheat, millet, or some other crop that could yield a satisfactory harvest without manuring. In black-earth regions, where the soil was far richer, growers did not make much use of manure as long as good farmland remained abundant. Instead, they would burn the fields and plow the ashes into the soil before sowing; alternatively, especially along the Volga, they might sow grain amid the ashes before plowing and harrowing. If and when fertility began to decline, they would remove a field from cultivation

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for several years and then burn it and bring it back into the normal rotation.102 Only gradually, as land became increasingly scarce, did growers find it advantageous to add manure to the chernozem. And only at the end of the eighteenth century did they first begin to grow fodder crops in the fallow field.103 Russia’s long winters also limited the amount of labor that peasants could perform during the short growing season. In black-earth provinces, such as Penza and parts of Tula, the agricultural year normally began in the second half of April, but farther north in Smolensk and Tver, it did not commence until the first half of May. Plowing, harrowing, and sowing the spring field came first and took two months. Next workers plowed, harrowed, and manured the fallow field and then mowed hay. The most intense labor of the year began in early to mid-July with the harvest of winter grains, followed by the sowing of winter grains on the formerly fallow land and then by the harvest of spring grains, all within a period of six to eight weeks. Women joined in the fieldwork during this time, manuring, making hay, and harvesting the winter grain.104 Threshing and winnowing began immediately after the harvest and lasted well into January. Men harvested spring grain and mowed hay with scythes, but women cut winter grain, usually rye, with sickles. This technique accommodated not only women, who generally have less upper-body strength than men do, but also the rye itself, which has a relatively delicate character. Russians understood that scythes reap more quickly and efficiently, but scythes also knock seed kernels off the ripened rye. In his instructions to his steward in 1794, for example, Grigory Shipov expressly forbade harvesting rye with scythes because too much grain would be lost.105 The seemingly inefficient use of sickles, then, suited both the reapers and reaped, enabling women to join the agricultural workforce when the demand for labor was greatest and simultaneously yielding more grain than the faster and otherwise more efficient scythe. The seasonal schedule of agricultural labor made peasants resistant to any change that would increase their burdens in the critical months of July and August. That was particularly true in the fertile regions to the south and east, where the ratio of workers to plowland was lower than it was elsewhere. It helps to explain why peasants preferred to plant oats rather than some other cereal in the spring field. Oats normally do well even on poor soil without manure, and soil for this crop needed to be plowed and harrowed only once before sowing. Oats could be sown more thickly than other cereals, and planting them yielded a modest but stable and predictable harvest that provided security against a poor harvest of rye. Barley and buckwheat shared many characteristics with oats, making them, too, easier to cultivate than spring wheat or spring rye.106 Bolotov noted that in Tula, peasants sowed oats on mediocre soil and buckwheat on the poorest soil, where this was combined with beekeeping. Peas, another spring crop that required little labor, helped to restore fertility.107

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SOME SUCCESSES

Despite the many obstacles to innovation, some landlords persistently struggled to increase crop yields through improved agronomy. In Penza landowners introduced the wheeled, iron-tipped plug as a replacement for the sokha in the 1780s, and its use there and in neighboring provinces increased in succeeding decades. The Kurakins, for example, purchased fifty plows of that type for their estates in Penza and Saratov. Iron harrows also replaced wooden ones on a number of aristocratic estates. The use of manure on wheat and rye increased in black-earth regions as landlords and peasants began to plow up poorer soils and abandoned or reduced long fallows.108 A significant but unspecified number of landlords also replaced the traditional three-field rotation with a four-field rotation of fallow, new, winter, and spring in which the “new” field would be sown with the best cash crop.109 From the 1760s on, landowners also introduced and tested unfamiliar varieties of grain from other regions and even from abroad. Most new varieties failed quickly, but a few, such as Arabian or black oats, succeeded in increasing yields.110 The most widely adopted innovations, however, were new strains of wheat whose success altered the traditional mix of grains on individual estates and throughout entire regions. Wheat required good soil and almost twice as much labor as rye; it was more susceptible to drought and disease; and it generally yielded less seed than other grains.111 Until 1766, therefore, only a few provinces with favorable growing conditions, such as those in central Ukraine, devoted much space and attention to wheat. Even in adjacent regions, such as the Don Valley and the northern Ukraine, growers preferred other grains to wheat.112 In central Russia rye usually occupied most if not all of the winter fields and accounted for 40 to 45 percent of all grain harvested, while oats, buckwheat, barley, millet, spring rye, and other grains limited wheat to a marginal role in the spring field.113 Catherine’s decree of April 13, 1766, allowing the duty-free export of wheat encouraged landowners to cultivate wheat as a cash crop.114 As the price of wheat rose to a level that was generally 30 percent higher than that of rye, landlords began to sow more wheat, sometimes giving it their best land, such as the new field in a four-field rotation, or applying manure to poorer soil. As M. P. Naryshkin explained in 1775 when he ordered the steward of his estate in the Krapivna district of Tula to sow spring wheat in the winter field, wheat could “be sold at a profit.”115 Landlords experimented with unusual varieties of wheat variously labeled “tatar,” “white-turkish,” “egyptian,” “assyrian,” and “japanese” and discovered some that would grow well under local conditions. The greatest success came with a variety of spring wheat known as “ledianka” (the icy one), which was particularly well suited to the limitations of Russian agriculture. Tolerant of cold and moisture, ledianka could be sown in the very early spring on ground

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that had been prepared the previous autumn, when peasants had more time and energy for plowing and harrowing. Its introduction led some landlords, including A. I. Polianskii in Penza Province, to sow more wheat in the spring field and to expand the spring field at the expense of the other two.116 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landlords throughout the black-earth region turned to wheat as a cash crop, and some peasants began to follow their lead.117 By the mid-1780s the province of Orel, where ledianka attained its greatest success, was producing a salable surplus of more than 100,000 chetverts (14,742 metric tons) of wheat but only some 60,000 chetverts (8,845 metric tons) of rye.118 In the less fertile northern provinces, some producers found that they could grow wheat, sell it, and use the money to purchase more rye than they could have grown for themselves. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Russia, exclusive of the Ukraine, was still harvesting three times more rye than wheat, but both the amount of wheat and its share of the annual harvest had increased significantly since the 1760s. The turn to wheat provides the clearest but by no means the only example of the commercialization of cereals production in Russia. Little if any wheat was consumed by its producers within the central Russian grain market; it was grown to be sold not only for export but also to meet the growing demand for it in Moscow and even in St. Petersburg.119 Producers did not sow wheat because it grew more prolifically but because it sold at a higher price. If anything, wheat lowered agricultural productivity, but it increased profitability, which was after all the end to which increased productivity had been only a means, and a relatively minor one at that. Improved varieties and improved techniques may well have succeeded in raising agricultural productivity on individual estates like that of A. I. Polianskii, but on the whole, increased productivity contributed little to the increase in overall agricultural production within the central Russian grain market that occurred between 1703 and 1811.120 Its effects paled into insignificance before the chief wellspring of increased agricultural production: the expansion of arable land. EXPANSION

Within the boundaries of European Russia, the acreage covered by field crops expanded from 20 percent of the total area in 1696 to 31 percent by 1796, an increase of 55 percent over the course of one century.121 By itself that figure is not surprising, since the male population of European Russia, excluding Poland, the Baltic provinces, and the Ukraine, increased by 75 percent between 1719 and 1795.122 But the expansion of arable land did not occur uniformly throughout European Russia, nor did it occur gradually. Instead it occurred disproportionately in the black-earth provinces south of the Oka and along the middle Volga in response to the surge in grain prices that occurred during the mid-1780s. In the black-earth provinces of Tambov and Voronezh, arable land expanded 108

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by 60 percent, with most of the increase devoted to wheat. In Riazan and Kursk, arable land increased by 100 percent, with most of the increase devoted to rye and oats in Riazan and to wheat in Kursk.123 Comparable figures are lacking for Penza, but according to I. A. Bulygin, arable land in that province may have expanded by as much as 230 percent between 1782 and 1795.124 Using different data, E. I. Samoilov concluded that all the black earth in Penza had been brought into cultivation by 1790 and that this plowland accounted for 40 percent of the area in that province.125 Over time the cultivation of poorer soils led to an overall decline in productivity in the black-earth region, and the rapid conversion of forest to plowland in the forested steppe eventually produced the gullying and erosion that would emerge as a serious problem in the nineteenth century.126 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the expansion of arable land served its purpose for growers with access to a market. To cite one example, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, V. G. Orlov acquired and expanded an estate in the black-earth province of Samara that eventually encompassed thirty-six villages with 27,000 revision souls on barshchina. In 1804 that estate brought him 200,000 rubles, almost all of which came from the sale of grain from his demesne.127 In northern, non-black-earth regions, the results were quite different. In Novgorod only 10 percent of the land area was sown in the 1780s, and in Tver only 20 percent. In the 1790s the increase in the sown area was negligible; in the 1800s planted land increased by 25 percent in Novgorod and 10 percent in Tver, raising the totals to 12 percent and 22 percent, respectively.128 Those additions to the sown area consisted mainly of less desirable land in provinces where the return on seed was already among the lowest in the area of the central Russian grain market. Increases were slightly larger in other non-black-earth provinces during the 1790s; arable land increased by 35 percent in Kaluga and Kostroma and by 60 percent in Moscow. In all three of those provinces, most of the increased area was sown with rye and oats.129 By the first decade of the nineteenth century, if not sooner, production in the non-black-earth region was reaching the point where it could not be increased by sowing a larger area. In the absence of increased productivity, a rising population meant increased dependence on grain grown elsewhere and purchased on the market. Because the expansion of arable land in the non-black-earth region could not keep pace with the growth of population and the rise in prices, an increasing number of peasants sought employment outside agriculture, often with the approval and encouragement of their lords. By the end of the eighteenth century, some 20 to 33 percent of the adult male population in these regions were engaged in nonfarm labor, whereas agriculture employed virtually the entire available workforce in the black-earth regions.130 The distinction between agricultural and “industrial” provinces that would attract so much attention in the nineteenth century had already emerged by the middle of the eighteenth century and intenproduction

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sified as the price of agricultural commodities increased, as the north depended on the south for much its food, and the south depended on northern consumers for much of its income. From the late 1760s on, landlords and peasants in the fertile black-earth region south of the Oka and along the middle Volga produced an increasing surplus of grain. Some of that surplus went to feed livestock, and some was sold to distilleries or the military, but wherever water transport provided access to markets, lords and peasants sold their surplus to grain dealers and state officials who would send it on its way northward to the grain-deficient provinces of central and northern Russia and the city of St. Petersburg.

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CHAPTER 5

R Commerce

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he transfer of ownership as cereals passed from barns and threshing floors in the south to market stalls and shops in the north was an important, indeed essential, component of the eighteenth-century Russian economy but one that has received little attention from historians. When historians mention it at all, they almost always do so as a small component of some other subject they have investigated.1 As a result, the specifics of the cereals trade—how it was conducted, by whom, and under what conditions—has been a little-explored topic, but investigating it reveals much about eighteenth-century Russia’s economy, its merchants, and the relationship between an absolutist government staffed by noble landowners and a commercial market operated by private entrepreneurs. Significantly, the imperial government did not undertake to supply St. Petersburg on its own. It assumed the ultimate responsibility for provisioning St. Petersburg and its own military forces, but it did not produce the grain it needed on its own land lands or compel producers to deliver grain to designated depots, as the Russian government had done in the seventeenth century or as it would do again in the twentieth. From the early eighteenth century through the early twentieth, the Russian government participated in the grain trade as a consumer 111

and acted in numerous ways to facilitate its operation, but it left most of the actual trading to self-interested, profit-seeking individuals and depended on them to buy grain and flour from producers and sell them to state agencies, retailers, individual consumers, and foreign exporters. The most important task the government accepted for itself was that of providing the physical and commercial infrastructure that would make all that possible and easier. One other thing the government did not do was restrict the cereals trade to a privileged group or category of its subjects. Russia’s officially registered and recognized merchants repeatedly asked the government to assign the cereals trade to them as one of their distinct privileges and ban all others from it, but the government ignored them and left it open to all comers other than foreigners, who had been banned from all internal trade within Russia since 1667. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter has pointed out that all the social categories recognized in Russian law intermingled and overlapped in membership and in function, but even so, the cereals trade and some other branches of commerce, such as bread baking in St. Petersburg, constitute a remarkable exception to the Russian government’s practice of organizing and categorizing its subjects and their functions.2 The government did not enroll grain dealers, register them, or even keep a separate list of them. Nonetheless, the Russian government did encourage and facilitate commerce and private enterprise over the course of the eighteenth century. Few of its efforts were focused specifically on the cereals trade, but those who practiced that trade were affected by those efforts, and their experience illuminates the success and failure of the government’s efforts as well as commercial conditions as they changed over time. The scattered and scanty bits of information about the cereals trade provide a close and revealing view of eighteenth-century Russia’s economy and society. PEASANTS IN THE GRAIN TRADE

In the early months of 1767, the registered inhabitants of Russia’s cities and towns described their problems and concerns in a series of instructions (nakazy; sing., nakaz) to the legislative commission that would convene in Moscow at the end of July. Since merchants dominated almost all the meetings at which the instructions from the towns were composed, the interests and concerns expressed in those documents were mainly those of merchants.3 These included their concerns about the primary accumulation of grain and the participation of peasants in the cereals trade. As an introduction to those subjects, several of the instructions are worth quoting at some length. The instruction from Zubtsov, a town on the upper Volga in the province of Tver, for example, provides a rare description of the initial steps that brought surplus grain into the commercial market: “The local mer-

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chants have a significant trade in hemp and grain and other products for the sake of which they travel around the towns and districts, but in many places purchases by merchants are made in local places from peasants called prasoly who, over and above their own harvest, purchase from others with large sums, and they carry out resale from themselves to the merchants.”4 Large estates might sell surplus grain in bulk to the army, a distillery, or a merchant, but peasants commonly sold grain in small amounts to a skupshchik, a dealer who literally “bought up” the villagers’ small amounts of grain with the aim of reselling the grain in larger lots at higher prices. To the townsmen of Kosmodam’iansk, in the province of Kazan, the activities of nonmerchant skupshchiks constituted a grievance, and in their instruction to the Legislative Commission, they complained, “Peasants and some others go to residents’ homes and buy up all their grain at prices contrary to those prevailing in the marketplace and send it to other towns and districts, and grain is not brought into the town.”5 The instruction from the nearby town of Cheboksary added nobles to the list of skupshchiks and complained that some nobles had even built warehouses in which they conducted business on a large scale. It also complained that peasants were bypassing the town and selling grain directly to long-distance merchants at trading wharves in villages along the Volga. The merchants of Cheboksary respectfully requested that such practices be halted and that trading wharves outside their town be destroyed.6 As the peasants of northern Russia turned to occupations more profitable than agriculture, some inevitably entered the grain trade. In his study of the Moscow grain trade in the 1720s, Kafengauz found that while merchants supplied most of the grain delivered to that city by water, peasants predominated in overland deliveries. Most of the peasant deliveries in Kafengauz’s study consisted of small amounts of grain from villages in nearby districts, indicating the sale of personal grain, but some involved significantly larger amounts brought over greater distances, suggesting that the peasants who delivered them were skupshchiks.7 Peasant traders also participated in the earliest deliveries of grain and flour to St. Petersburg, and by the 1720s they accounted for some 20 percent of these commodities arriving in the new capital. One of them, an ecclesiastical peasant named Ivan Pechugin, is revealed in the records as a skupshchik who purchased grain from other peasants and transported it to St. Petersburg, where he sold it to the Treasury.8 Peasant participation in the grain trade, including long-distance trade, continued and remained a substantial though minority component of that business. To cite one example, in 1772 a group of peasants in the district of Dmitrov, a town near the upper Volga north of Moscow, purchased 1,200 chetverts of rye in Moscow and the northern Ukraine, transported it to Dmitrov, and sold it to a merchant, who then milled it and shipped it to St. Petersburg.9 According to the instruction from Rybinsk, an important center of commerce and transport on the Volga, peasants’ involvement in the cereals trade was

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not limited to their roles as skupshchiks; these peasants were competing with merchants in many aspects of that trade, unfairly and, as the merchants saw it, illegally. The instruction expressed merchants’ frustration: The local merchants are content to pay taxes . . . and would be happy but for the peasants who come from various downstream wharves on boats and, abandoning the grain-growing necessary for society, [not only] trade in various small goods just like merchants but [also] bring here from various downstream wharves various supplies of grain they have bought up . . . and sell here, not only wholesale but also retail, rye flour, wheat flour, malt, kuls of rye, wheat, peas, millet, krup, and oats by the chetvert and chetverik despite the fact that the town council [ratusha] has forbidden them to do so. And others . . . buy more of all kinds of grain at the local wharf and load it on boats for sale in the towns upstream and in St. Petersburg.10

In their instructions to the Legislative Commission of 1767, merchants vigorously protested the government’s tolerance of commercial activities by nonmerchants. Repeating an idea expressed by Pososhkov almost half a century earlier, one instruction proposed, “Let everyone keep to his assigned role [chin], and let merchants serve their country usefully.”11 Many instructions insisted that all commerce and manufacturing be kept within established towns. All denounced the entry of peasants into commercial activities, but many also drew a distinction between what the authors saw as illicit peasant trade and the legitimate trade of peasants who legalized their activities by enrolling in merchant guilds and paying merchant taxes in addition to their financial obligations as peasants. One instruction went so far as to recommend that peasants with five hundred rubles of capital be enrolled automatically in the merchantry and freed of peasant obligations, adding that it would serve their masters right for having allowed them to engage in commerce.12 Operating on that same principle, a number of merchant guilds accepted nobles as registered, taxpaying members until the state banned the practice in 1790 because it found membership in a merchant guild inconsistent with the dignity of the nobility.13 The merchants’ claim to the grain trade rested on the widely held assumption that each of Russian society’s several orders bore specific and distinct obligations and pursued specific and distinct activities: nobles were supposed to serve the state and manage lands and serfs; peasants were supposed to farm; priests were supposed to perform religious functions; and merchants were supposed to manufacture and buy and sell for profit. Like nobles and priests, merchants sought to make their essential activities an exclusive monopoly forbidden to members of other legal categories and to restrict commerce to those who were officially registered in the merchantry and paid the corresponding taxes. The merchants’ signal success in restricting trade by nonmerchants had come in 1649, when the new law code, the Ulozhenie, gave registered members of the 114

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urban commune (posad) exclusive rights to the retail trade within towns. Thereafter, Russia’s merchants repeatedly petitioned the government to protect that privilege and extend it to other branches of commerce, but they met with little success and much frustration. Serf-owning nobles staffed and directed the state agencies, which thus tended to support their efforts to increase their incomes and those of their serfs by engaging in trade. Some nobles sponsored the commercial undertakings of their peasants and defended them when they were accused of encroaching on merchant prerogatives.14 Serf owners had strong reasons for wanting their peasants to earn extra income by entering trade: with more money, peasants could better support themselves and their families; they could pay their own poll tax; they could pay more obrok; and in extreme cases, they could even buy their way out of serfdom at a high price. After 1762 the economic interests of the serf owners merged with an explicit though hesitant and inconsistent policy of free trade that conflicted with the older paradigm of ascribing specific economic activities to specific social categories. Instead of excluding nonmerchants, the government left the wholesale cereals trade open to all comers and extended that principle into other areas of commerce. The tariff regulations of 1755 gave noble landowners the right to engage in both wholesale and retail trade in the products of their own estates. A law of March 9, 1777, allowed peasants to trade in “small necessary items” in villages five kilometers or more from any town. Other legislation from the middle of the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century authorized the proliferation of urban bazaars and rural fairs, which competed directly, if temporarily, with the established retail trade in towns.15 In practice, government agencies recognized and accepted the commercial activities of people not registered as merchants and made no distinction between them and registered merchants when it came to deciding civil suits over contracts and debts.16 Legally or illegally, nobles, peasants, and other nonmerchants played a significant role in the grain trade as the growth of a money economy accompanied by intensified commerce and the expansion of the grain market made the closed, controlled world of merchant commerce as impossible to maintain as the closed, self-sufficient agricultural estate. Both remained an ideal for many merchants and nobles, but in reality both were giving way to pressures and opportunities generated by economic forces. The opening of the economy did not occur across the board, however, or affect the different social orders equally. Nobles managed to retain and even strengthen their monopoly on the ownership of serfs and agricultural estates, and they acquired an exclusive right to produce alcohol, even as they and their serfs were making a mockery of the merchants’ claim to a monopoly on manufacturing and trade. From small beginnings as skupshchiks and petty dealers, some peasants who entered the grain trade developed substantial businesses. Some acquired the legal status of trading peasants by enrolling in an urban commune and paying commerce

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merchant taxes in addition to their peasant dues. Others managed to purchase their freedom and register as townsmen, replenishing and increasing the unstable ranks of Russia’s merchantry. One peasant who succeeded in that way was Savva Iakovlev, a grain dealer from Ostashkov, who made a fortune shipping food to the imperial court during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna and then added to it by purchasing shares of the alcohol monopoly in the two capitals. By the 1770s he had become the wealthiest and most influential Russian merchant in St. Petersburg and the director of the St. Petersburg customs house. Social mobility led to a different end in the case of Andrei Esipov, who started life as a serf in the district of Iaroslavl in 1728. His father somehow managed to purchase the boy’s freedom and provide him with 1,000 rubles of capital by the time he was sixteen. Enrolled in the merchantry in 1744, the younger Esipov began his independent career by managing a distillery and selling alcohol. Several years later he entered the cereals trade and began shipping grain from Orel to St. Petersburg on his own boats. He suffered major setbacks in 1758 and 1768 when several of his boats sank with their cargoes and again in 1768 and 1770 when fire ravaged his warehouses. Unable to pay his debts, Esipov fell out of the merchantry into the lower ranks of townsmen.17 The careers of Esipov and Iakovlev illustrate the transitory character of Russia’s merchant class and the rapid turnover in its ranks. Membership was accessible to members of the lower classes who could accumulate the necessary capital, but membership was also impermanent and nonhereditary. With success and good fortune, a merchant could dream of rising into the nobility, as the Stroganovs and the Demidovs had done, but he was more likely to lose his capital and status through the kind of misfortune that ruined Esipov. NOBLES IN THE GRAIN TRADE

Noble landowners entered the grain trade as an extension of active estate management. Under pressure to produce income for his employer, the enterprising manager of a Sheremetev estate in Simbirsk Province routinely bought all the peasants’ surplus grain for resale on the market.18 The Penza pomeshchik A. I. Polianskii paid as much attention to marketing grain as he did to growing it. He sought out the most advantageous prices over a large area of the eastern frontier and delivered his grain to distilleries and trading wharves in the provinces of Penza, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Simbirsk.19 The Kursk pomeshchik I. P. Annenkov went even farther. Instead of selling locally, he regularly sent his grain to Orel, where it was loaded on boats and shipped to Moscow for sale there. Whenever he found it more profitable, Annenkov also sold grain in Kaluga and Gzhatsk.20 By taking at least some of the risks and responsibilities on himself, Annenkov increased his income by the classic means of eliminating the middleman. In Moscow a number of nobles who brought grain from their estates to feed their households also sold some of it to the public from shops on the grounds of their townhouses.21 116

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Prince M. M. Shcherbatov provides a different example of a nobleman entering the grain trade to increase his income. Convinced that he could not make enough money growing grain on his estates in Iaroslavl, Shcherbatov entered the long-distance grain trade as a trader. He ordered his stewards to purchase grain in Iaroslavl and Nizhnii Novgorod and bring it to his mill for grinding. If the price of flour in Iaroslavl was high enough, they were to sell it there. Otherwise, they were to purchase boats, hire workers, and transport the flour to St. Petersburg. Sounding very much like a grain merchant, Shcherbatov gave his stewards detailed instructions on various aspects of the operation, such as buying boats of a certain size and form, paying peasants for their work to encourage diligence, and shipping the flour early so as to obtain the best price in St. Petersburg.22 REGISTERED MERCHANTS IN THE GRAIN TRADE

Shcherbatov was an exception among the nobles who entered the cereals trade. Few others tried to ship cereals all the way to St. Petersburg or, for that matter, beyond Rybinsk, Moscow, or Gzhatsk, the principal entryways to the upper Volga. From there to St. Petersburg, handling grain and flour became more complicated and technical, and the trade itself grew more specialized. Some peasants practiced it on a small scale, but professional traders, legally enrolled and registered as townsmen and merchants, delivered most of the grain and flour that fed St. Petersburg. Although they failed to monopolize the trade, they continued to dominate it. In 1703, when Peter I directed his subjects to deliver the zaprosnyi grain levy to St. Petersburg and other points on the northwestern frontier, some peasants delivered it themselves, some hired boatmen to deliver their grain, and some paid contractors to purchase grain elsewhere and deliver it for them. Peasants from the grain-deficient regions north of Moscow most often chose the third option and turned, logically enough, to the professional dealers who were already supplying them with the grain they needed to make it through the year. When the government began demanding that its peasant subjects pay taxes in cash rather than goods and then used that cash to purchase the grain it needed, it too turned to dealers who were already established and experienced in handling grain and flour. Although the Provisions Chancellery and other state agencies regularly purchased more than one-third of the grain and flour delivered to St. Petersburg, they almost always did so by contracting with professional dealers. Given a contract and payment in advance, the dealer assumed responsibility for delivering a specified quantity and quality of a particular kind of flour. The source and manner of transport to St. Petersburg were left up to the merchant. By the late 1720s professional grain dealers were supplying 90 percent of the grain and flour delivered to St. Petersburg. Eighty percent of those dealers were officially enrolled as merchants, two-thirds of whom were registered in towns along the upper Volga and the waterways leading to St. Petersburg.23 commerce

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The largest contingent of merchants supplying grain to St. Petersburg in the 1720s came from the town of Tver, a crucial junction on the route to St. Petersburg where boats left the upper Volga and entered the Tvertsa to begin the difficult ascent to Vyshnii Volochek. In 1709, 110 families in Tver listed their principal activity as commerce, but at that time only 7 were engaged in longdistance trade “to the ports.”24 In 1714, two townsmen from Tver delivered 20,000 chetverts (2,457 metric tons) of rye flour and 400 chetverts of groats to St. Petersburg.25 In 1720, with the onset of the so-called hunger years, seventeen merchants from Tver, acting together as a group, signed a contract to provide the capital with 44,000 chetverts of rye flour and 4,835 chetverts of groats for a total combined price of 123,780.3 rubles. The Provisions Chancellery agreed to pay the merchants 92,745.4 rubles in advance, and that sum, equal to fourteen times the merchants’ total capital of 6,600 rubles, enabled them to enter the grain trade on a large scale, buying grain along the middle Volga, processing it, and delivering it to the capital as agreed. They then used their profits to buy additional grain for their own account and sold it in St. Petersburg on the open market.26 By the 1720s, 59 of the 257 families in Tver with merchant capital dealt primarily in grain, but only 7, including one with three brothers bearing the surname Vagin, possessed more than 100 rubles of capital. The richest of the 7 families, headed by A. G. Aref’ev, possessed 6,250 rubles of capital and owned a gristmill in Kazan, on the middle Volga, that employed fourteen hired workers.27 The merchants of Tver remained important suppliers of grain and flour to St. Petersburg throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. In 1765 the Commission on Commerce identified twenty-three grain merchants in Tver with 62,300 rubles of capital who traded “at the port.” The wealthiest was Peter Aref’ev, with 7,500 rubles of capital, while two merchants named Sobolev possessed a total of 6,500 rubles of capital, and three merchants with the surname Vagin possessed 5,500 rubles of capital among them.28 In 1772, thirty-seven merchants of Tver sent 162 boats to St. Petersburg loaded primarily with cereals but also containing smaller quantities of hemp, lard, and iron.29 The notary and local historian Dmitry Karmanov recorded that in 1775 most merchants in Tver dealt in grain, buying it in the South and selling it in St. Petersburg.30 The topographical description of Tver from 1782 noted, “Tver has fifty-seven families in wholesale trade. They buy grain and hemp in the towns downstream and in towns surrounding this province and send them to St. Petersburg by water”; in that year, it added, they sent 227 boats to St. Petersburg “carrying cereals and other goods.”31 In 1792, when Tver’s merchants sent 269 boats full of goods to St. Petersburg, the principal cargoes were rye flour, wheat flour, oats, barley, flax seed, lard, and iron, in that order.32 The merchants of Torzhok, a town on the Tvertsa fifty-five kilometers upstream from Tver, had a similar history of supplying grain to St. Petersburg. Involved in only a small way at first, they became significant suppliers of grain and 118

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flour to St. Petersburg in the 1720s with the help of state agencies that paid them 75 percent of the purchase price in advance. For example, in 1720 the merchant A. I. Gaitannikov, with a personal capital of only 150 rubles, concluded an agreement with the Treasury to provide 3,000 chetverts of rye flour and 210 chetverts of groats at a total price of 8,098.5 rubles. The Treasury paid 6,000 rubles of that price in advance, providing Gaitannikov with sufficient capital to fulfill his part of the bargain. His was not an unusual case. By the mid-1720s, forty-nine merchants from Torzhok were supplying St. Petersburg with grain and flour, most of which they brought from as far away as the middle Volga.33 In 1782, fifty families in Torzhok sent 120 boats to St. Petersburg laden mainly with grain purchased in Moscow and along the middle Volga. The total value of their trade in that year came to 238,205 rubles.34 Even merchants from the smaller towns of Tver Province delivered cereals to St. Petersburg. In 1724–1726, some sixty families in Rzhev, a settlement above Tver near the head of navigation on the upper Volga, dealt in cereals. Possessing little capital, they bought small amounts of grain and flour and shipped them to the capital in their own boats to sell on the open market. In 1726 they brought 2,670 chetverts (328 metric tons) of flour to St. Petersburg, along with 229 metric tons of hemp.35 By the 1760s, Rzhev had fewer registered merchants than Tver (sixty-three versus eighty-nine) did, but the former possessed more than three times as much capital (299,800 rubles versus 91,700 rubles) than the latter.36 Many, if not all, were Old Believers, a religious minority whose communities would produce many of nineteenth-century Russia’s leading businesspeople. An unofficial network of support and cooperation helped produce the Old Believers’ business success both in nineteenth-century Russia as a whole and in eighteenth-century Rzhev in particular. In 1767, for example, the governor of the province informed the Senate that the merchants of Rzhev had collectively subscribed 200,000 rubles to purchase grain and hemp in the Ukraine and transport it to St. Petersburg.37 In 1783 the merchants of Rzhev sent to St. Petersburg some 1,000 boatloads of hemp and flour valued at 553,956 rubles.38 Although merchants from other towns in Tver Province, such as Staritsa, Ostashkov, Vyshnii Volochek, and Zubtsov, also joined in supplying these commodities to St. Petersburg, they played only a minor role compared to those of Rzhev, Torzhok, and Tver.39 Even so, their participation is evidence of the importance of the St. Petersburg cereals trade in the economic life of the province. As the topographical description noted in 1783, “The merchants of Tver Province carry on their main trade with the St. Petersburg port in grain and hemp, buying grain in the lower towns along the Volga and hemp in Malorossiia, Belorossiia, and Smolensk.”40 The merchants of Iaroslavl and Moscow, the two provinces lying downstream from Tver along the upper Volga, also played an important role in the cereals trade to St. Petersburg. In Iaroslavl the two most important centers of the grain trade were the city of Iaroslavl itself and the twin settlements of Rocommerce

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manov and Borisoglebsk, situated on opposite banks of the Volga approximately halfway between Iaroslavl and Rybinsk (Rybnaia Sloboda). In the province of Moscow, the most important center of the grain trade to St. Petersburg other than Moscow itself was Dmitrov, a town located some sixty kilometers north of Moscow on the overland route from that city to the nearest wharf on the upper Volga. When Academician G. F. Müller visited Dmitrov in 1779, he recorded that the local merchants were actively engaged in the flour trade to St. Petersburg, and in that year alone they had provided the city with 30,000 kuls (4,275 metric tons) of flour.41 In 1779 such a quantity of flour would have satisfied approximately 8 percent of St. Petersburg’s minimum demand for rye flour.42 The long-distance cereals trade to St. Petersburg attracted surprisingly few merchants from St. Petersburg itself or, after the first few years, from Moscow. The reasons are unclear but may be connected to their relative unfamiliarity with boats, shipping, and other aspects of river-borne commerce. Instead, the wealthiest merchants of the new capital, many of whom were either foreigners or the partners of foreigners, concentrated on international trade, while those of Moscow focused on the long-distance trade in luxury goods.43 In both capitals the merchants who did deal in cereals concentrated on the retail trade, but those in Moscow also engaged in milling and resale.44 Merchants from the surplus-producing regions south of the Oka and along the middle Volga also participated in the long-distance grain trade to St. Petersburg. Merchants from towns in those regions, especially Belev, in the Tula region south of the Oka, and Balakhna, on the middle Volga near Nizhnii Novgorod, appear in the lists of dealers carrying grain and flour to St. Petersburg in the 1720s and throughout the eighteenth century.45 Though important to that trade, they played a smaller role in the delivery of grain to St. Petersburg than did merchants from the grain-deficient north, in part because towns in basins of the Oka and the middle Volga enjoyed a more diverse trade than did those along the upper Volga and its tributaries. In the 1760s the Commission on Commerce found that the merchants of Kaluga and Kolomna, two important centers of the grain trade along the Oka, shipped large quantities of hemp, lard, cattle, and fish to St. Petersburg but very little grain. According to the commission’s report, only four of the fifty-seven merchants of Kolomna who sold goods in St. Petersburg dealt in grain.46 In a similar vein the “Economic Observations of Tambov Province,” composed in the 1790s, noted that dealers in the town of Morshansk, located on a tributary of the Oka, made a good living buying cattle in Malorossiia and grain, lard, honey, and hemp in local villages and taking or sending them to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other towns.47 More typical, however, was a report on Orel, the largest grain market south of Moscow, stating that the merchants of that town shipped grain, hemp, lard, wax, and other goods along the Oka to Kaluga, Gzhatsk, Rybinsk, and Moscow.48 Moscow had long depended on Orel, Kaluga, and other towns along the 120

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Oka to feed its population, but after the founding of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Rybinsk, and Gzhatsk became the principal points along the trade routes in which cereals destined for the new capital were stored, processed, and transferred to different vessels. There, southerners could sell their cargoes to northerners purchasing grain for the St. Petersburg market. While many merchants from surplus-producing regions sold their grain in Moscow, Gzhatsk, Rybinsk, and other points along the trade routes, some transported it from their home region all the way to St. Petersburg.49 By the same token, while some merchants from the upper Volga commonly bought grain in Moscow, Gzhatsk, or Rybinsk, many others purchased grain for St. Petersburg along the middle Volga and its tributaries. For example, in 1766 local officials in the province of Simbirsk informed the Senate that six grain dealers, acting individually, had purchased a total of 11,050 chetverts of cereals in the village of Promzino on the Sura River between September 1, 1765, and April 11, 1766. The two dealers from Nizhnii Novgorod and the two from Iaroslavl planned to ship their grain no farther than Rybinsk, while the two from Tver intended to convey theirs all the way to St. Petersburg.50 One of those two merchants from Tver was Filip Sobolev, whose close relative was registered in St. Petersburg as a grain merchant. Like most of the principal suppliers of grain to St. Petersburg, the Sobolevs were merchants in both the functional and legal senses of that term. Functionally, they were businessmen who bought and sold goods with the intention of making a profit; legally, they were registered, taxpaying members of an established merchant guild within a town or posad. Unlike the guilds of western Europe, the guilds organized in Russia by Peter I’s legislation of January 17, 1721, and reformed by Catherine II’s legislation of March 17, 1775, and April 21, 1785, grouped merchants by the amount of capital they possessed rather than the occupation they followed.51 In principle, the great merchants of the empire, including most of those engaged in international trade, were enrolled in the first guild. Substantial merchants, including most of those trading “at the port” or at least outside their hometowns, were enrolled in the second guild. Local merchants, petty traders, and others were enrolled in the third guild. Although grain merchants constituted a majority of the members of some guilds, especially in towns along the upper Volga, they had no specific guild or association of their own but were grouped instead with merchants from other branches of commerce who possessed similar amounts of capital. Those conditions prevented grain merchants from regulating or managing the grain trade in any meaningful way and from prohibiting or restricting entry into their ranks. As defined by law, the Russian merchantry, the legal category that included merchants, was less stable than other social strata were, but even as its ranks changed over time, a core group of families who engaged in business over several generations gave the merchantry some stability and continuity and shaped its commerce

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character. Neither nobles nor peasants, its members associated with one another socially and professionally. They lived in towns; they had money and property; they often intermarried; and they were conscious of their social and legal status, with its attendant obligations and privileges. MERCHANT STEREOTYPES

Russian merchants have long been the objects of satire and distain. Eighteenth-century observers criticized their lack of status, skills, and integrity and characterized them as backward or even primitive in their practices, outlook, and capabilities. Of the Muscovite merchants with whom he dealt in 1698–1699, the Austrian diplomat Johannes Korb wrote, “Since the Muscovites have no sound principles, so therefore, deceit, in my opinion, serves as evidence of a good mind.”52 Viewing things from a totally different perspective, Korb’s Russian contemporary, the upwardly mobile manufacturer Ivan Pososhkov, having noted an “inveterate lack of probity of merchants among themselves,” wrote, “There are many people of little understanding who consider merchants to be of no account, despise them and treat them badly without good reason, yet nowhere in the world is there any calling to which the merchant is not of some use.53 The Main Magistracy Regulation of 1721 observed, “Merchants and taxed craftspeople in all towns abide not only with scorn, but even all kinds of insult, attacks, and unbearable burdens, from which they have greatly diminished and almost all have been ruined, causing significant harm to the state.”54 More than forty years later, the Commission on Commerce came to much the same conclusion about the state of the merchantry. Its leading member, Grigorii Teplov, concluded that Russian merchants were few in number, poorly educated, disrespected, and narrowly conservative in the practices and activities, and consequently they failed to provide Russia with the vibrant business class that more prosperous states possessed.55 In his Historical Description of Russian Commerce, Teplov’s younger contemporary, Mikhail Chulkov, wrote that 150 Russian merchants had gone bankrupt since the time of Peter I through negligence, lack of understanding, failure to keep records and accounts, and a general ignorance of commercial science (nauka).56 Criticism of Russian merchants by state officials pales next to the critique offered by the former industrialist Prokofii Demidov. Having entered the society of the wealthy aristocracy, whose values he also mocked and deplored, Demidov decried Russia’s lack of a genuine bourgeoisie. In contrast to the commercial class that had contributed so much to western European societies, the Russian merchantry struck Demidov as “evil, poor, stupid, and defenseless,” a social order whose principal characteristics were “falsehood, wickedness, destitution, lawsuits, trouble, and especially connivance in swindling.” As a result, he wrote, Europeans regarded Russians as fools and their country as another “East India.”57 Those stereotypes permeated the discussion and portrayal of Russian mer122

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chants and reinforced the popular suspicion that merchant dishonesty lay at the root of high and inflated prices. When the opera Sanktpeterburgskii gostinyi dvor portrayed merchants as conniving, dishonest money-grubbers in 1779 and again at its revival in 1792, it was repeating a cliché that was immediately acceptable to the audience. So were similar portrayals of merchants in nineteenth-century literature, such as Gogol’s Inspector General or Leskov’s Choice Grain. It is worth remembering, however, that all categories of Russians were usually disparaged by foreigners and Russians alike and that positive descriptions of any category of Russians other than peasants or Cossacks, be they noble landowners, priests, townsmen, army officers, or bureaucrats, are difficult if not impossible to locate. Recent publications by N. V. Kozlova, David Ransel, O. E. Nilova, and others have succeeded in modifying the received stereotypes of Russian merchants, especially the wealthier merchants of the two major cities. As they have shown, virtually all late eighteenth-century merchants were literate; some had private libraries. They patronized churches and charities, took an active role in civic affairs, participated in drafting laws that affected them, and developed a sense of their own distinct identity.58 In many ways the cultural transformation of Russia’s merchantry resembles the earlier transformation of its nobility. A transformation occurred in both cases, but how far did each transformation extend and against what standard should it be measured? In the case of the Russian merchantry, the “Europeans” that Demidov and other critics took as their standard were primarily the British but also the Dutch and French, who were then the world’s leaders in business and commerce. By that standard, not only Russia’s merchants but almost everyone and everything in Russia fell short of the mark and were soundly criticized for it. Size and military strength made Russia a great power, but they did not make it an advanced country when compared to the European countries by which educated Russians measured themselves.59 As numerous historians have pointed out, Russia had far more in common with the continental countries of central and eastern Europe, making it far fairer to measure Russia against them than to set it against the maritime states of northwestern Europe, with their overseas colonies. Compared to those of Poland, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire, Russian’s merchants and indeed Russia’s commerce as a whole look much less incompetent.60 Indeed, during the second half of the eighteenth century, the German merchants of Reval repeatedly petitioned the imperial government to ban Russian merchants from that city because they were so successful in competing with local ones.61 ONE GRAIN MERCHANT’S CAREER

While cultural historians can tease out evidence of merchants’ agency from portraits, charitable contributions, and petitions, business historians suffer from a paucity of primary sources. To date not a single merchant archive has been discovered in Russia that sheds any light on business operations—a telling contrast commerce

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not only to the situation for western Europe, for which we have documents from as far back as the Middle Ages, but also to that of Russia’s noble estates, for which we have management records. It is largely because eighteenth-century Russian merchants have told us so little about themselves that the descriptions and characterizations of them by others have had such a strong influence on the historiography. Very few Russian merchants kept diaries or wrote their memoirs, and of those who did, only one, Ivan Tolchenov, provides information about the actual conduct of business. The almost total absence of merchant accounts lends some credence to Governor Sievers’s complaint that the merchants of northwestern Russia carried on trade “without any order, seldom with written documents, without books, and almost without numbers.”62 Tolchenov was clearly an exception in that regard, and his diary/memoir constitutes a unique source of information about the commercial operations of a Russian merchant in the second half of the eighteenth century—and not just any merchant, for Tolchenov was a professional cereals trader in the business of supplying St. Petersburg with flour. The life and career of Ivan Tolchenov illustrate a number of important points about the Russian merchantry. His business was, first of all, a family business. His ancestors had been merchants in the town of Dmitrov since the seventeenth century. Ivan’s paternal grandfather had entered the cereals trade around the time St. Petersburg was founded, and Ivan’s father and four uncles had all become grain dealers. Ivan’s grandfather had been registered in the first guild of merchants, but when his capital was divided among his five surviving sons, they declined into the second guild. Ivan’s father recovered by marrying the daughter of a wealthy Moscow merchant, a step that brought him not only capital but also important connections in that city. Born in 1754, Ivan joined the family business at the age of thirteen, and he learned about it from practical experience and the instruction of his elders.63 In 1768, while his father was serving as an elected delegate to Catherine’s legislative commission, Ivan spent several months in St. Petersburg, where he studied geography and, as he later noted, learned to love books. At the age of eighteen Ivan entered an arranged marriage with the daughter of a Moscow merchant, and at twenty-five he inherited his father’s business, consisting of capital, experience, family and personal connections, and several gristmills along the waterways to St. Petersburg. He undertook a number of business deals in conjunction with his blood relatives and in-laws, and he employed some of them in the management of his various activities.64 The Tolchenovs also employed several agents or stewards (prikazchiki) whom they entrusted with serious responsibilities and large sums of money. At least seven agents who are mentioned by name in Tolchenov’s memoir were not connected to the family by blood or marriage but appear from repeated mention to have been trusted, long-term employees. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the Tolchenovs played a sig-

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nificant role in the St. Petersburg cereals trade.65 Ivan Tolchenov’s account of his activities during the 1770s and 1780s, the decades for which he provides the most information on his business activities, indicate that a typical year would find him and his agents buying grain as far away as Orel and the Kama River east of Kazan, renting storehouses, buying boats at different points along the waterways, milling grain at several facilities they owned and leased, and selling flour in St. Petersburg. In 1775 Tolchenev traveled 5,087 kilometers performing or directing those activities in person and was away from home for a total of 193 days. In 1780 Tolchenov and his agents purchased 1,700 metric tons of rye and wheat in at least three different locations, milled the grain at two different sites, shipped the flour to St. Petersburg on eleven boats, and sold it. Such a quantity of flour would have supplied approximately 2 to 3 percent of the city’s minimum requirement for that year.66 Although his business made significant profits in most years, by the late 1780s Tolchenov found himself in financial difficulties, and in 1794, with his capital and credit exhausted, he abandoned the long-distance grain trade.67 Tolchenov took most of the blame for those difficulties on himself, citing his own laziness and extravagance as the major causes of his downfall. After he had inherited the business in 1779, Tolchenov, who was the sole heir, spent less time away from home and more on satisfying his personal tastes and enthusiasms. He delegated more and more responsibility to his agents and later claimed that one of them had made a mess of his affairs in St. Petersburg and helped bring on his ruin. But the greater causes were to be found on the expense side of the ledger. Tolchenov built himself a large masonry house, the first of its kind in Dmitrov, and an orangery such as only the wealthy aristocracy could afford. He entertained aristocrats, including I. F. Golitsyn and I. P. Obolenskii, and famous scholars, such as G. F. Müller and Leonhard Euler. He spent heavily on additions and embellishments to the local church. He sent his son to an expensive private school in Moscow at a cost of 800 rubles a year, and in 1794, the year he left the grain trade, he laid out 3,000 rubles for his son’s wedding to the daughter of a Moscow merchant. Having crossed the threshold of higher society, he had also taken up gambling, thereby losing large though unspecified amounts of money.68 Unable to pay his debts, Tolchenov sold off his assets, including his house, and moved to Moscow, where he ran a factory that made playing cards. He no longer had sufficient capital to enroll in the merchantry. Tolchenov’s life may not have been typical of the Russian merchantry as a whole, but it was fairly typical of merchants who acquired not only capital but some degree of education and sophistication. In the absence of a stable, prestigious bourgeois society, which would begin to emerge only in the nineteenth century, merchants who appreciated learning and culture were drawn to the society and lifestyle of the nobility. Those who fulfilled their ambitions, such

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as the Lazarevs or the Evreinovs, eventually abandoned commerce and entered the nobility, while others, such as Tolchenov, ultimately failed and fell from the merchantry into the lower classes of townsmen.69 BUILDING A BETTER BOURGEOISIE

Dissatisfied with the condition of Russia’s merchantry, the imperial government took steps to improve it. Over the course of the eighteenth century, it moved away from the Muscovite attitude that the merchantry was a resource to be exploited for state purposes toward a deeper appreciation of merchants as contributors to the national economy and the national welfare. One step was to reduce the merchants’ service obligations to the state. In Petrine Russia as in the Muscovite past, merchants and other members of the urban commune were required to work for the state in various capacities without pay. While poorer townsmen served as sentinels, police officers, or laborers on public works, merchants filled administrative posts as tax collectors, customs officials, and managers of state monopolies. Such assignments created opportunities for useful contacts and interactions with state officials as well as opportunities for graft and embezzlement, but they also diverted effort and attention from the merchants’ own enterprises, especially when they required long absences from home. Merchants could be fined and even knouted for failing to perform their duties satisfactorily, and they were expected to make up any financial losses or shortfalls of revenue out of their own pockets.70 The service burdens of merchants declined rapidly in the second half of the eighteenth century. When the government abolished internal tariffs in 1753–1754 and privatized the alcohol monopoly in 1765, it inadvertently freed more than a thousand merchants from onerous and much-resented service. Even so, government records show that in the mid-1760s, the number of merchants in the province of Novgorod performing uncompensated service for state agencies averaged 266 per year, while the total number of registered merchants in that province, including minors and infants, came to only 902.71 At the same time, the inhabitants of Archangel claimed that of the 342 mature members of the urban commune in that city, 80 were working for the central government; 27, for the city government; and 34, for the police.72 As one might expect, Russians merchants and townsmen complained vociferously about such service in petitions to officials and in their instructions to the Legislative Commission of 1767.73 In subsequent years the government of Catherine II proceeded to free merchants from uncompensated service and began to pay salaries to those elected to offices in towns and provinces. Another step was to improve the legal definition and the legal status of the merchantry within the context of a society based on exclusive social orders with distinct obligations and privileges. Although that effort began with the Main Magistracy Regulation of 1721 and continued sporadically for another forty 126

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years, it acquired a new urgency and vigor in the 1760s. With the overall aim of creating a stronger, more productive economy, the government of Catherine II consciously strove to create an urban middle class with a vigorous, stable merchantry at its core.74 Between March 17, 1775, and April 21, 1785, Catherine’s government redefined the merchantry through a series of enactments that restricted it to those holding substantial commercial capital and purged it of its poorer and noncommercial elements. As a result, the number of legally registered merchants dropped from 214,000 in 1762 to only 24,470 in 1775.75 New laws freed the surviving merchants from the compulsory, uncompensated service that the state had imposed on merchants for centuries and from the poll tax, which had become the social stigma of the lower orders. Merchants of the first and second guilds (but not the third) were exempted from corporal punishment; they could purchase substitutes for military recruitment; and they could ride in coaches, wear swords, and be received at court. Merchants with more than 80,000 rubles of capital were officially recognized as the equals of servitors holding the eighth rank in the Table of Ranks, the one conferring hereditary nobility on administrative officials, but neither they nor any other merchants were permitted to own serfs or landed estates. Merchants and other townsmen received a measure of self-government within their social order and a significant role in governing the towns in which they were registered.76 By enacting those measures, Catherine’s government tried to enhance the status and prestige of successful merchants and “eminent citizens” so that they might achieve some of their social ambitions without entering the nobility. Ivan Tolchenov, for example, enjoyed the honor and prestige that came with his election first to the town magistracy and then as the mayor of Dmitrov. At the same time, Catherine’s government also enacted a number of sumptuary laws intended to keep merchants from trying to live beyond their means. Ironically, however, the most successful stabilizer of merchant society may well have been Old Belief, whose adherents were officially disqualified from entering the nobility and internally resistant to extravagant luxury and conspicuous expenditure. Old Belief thus helped to create a stable merchant society, but not one that the government, with its gaze focused on western Europe, could recognize as “bourgeois” or one with which it could be satisfied. By changing its own laws, the government could create a new social-legal position for the merchants to occupy, but it faced greater difficulties when it tried to change what it regarded as the narrow, tradition-bound conservatism of Russian merchants and their consequent lack of interest in living up to the government’s expectations. Russian merchants responded favorably to the institutions of self-government and urban government, but they showed little enthusiasm for education. When Prokofii Demidov put up the money for the School of Commerce in Moscow, he pleaded with that city’s merchants to send their sons to the institution, where they could study bookkeeping, commerce, geography, economics, and other useful subjects, but he was disappointed by their response. commerce

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The first enrollment numbered only two students; the second, two again; the third, fourteen; and the fourth, thirteen. Finally, after nearly two decades of frustration, the school was reorganized and moved to St. Petersburg.77 The governors-general of Novgorod and Tver reported similar experiences when they tried to establish schools for merchants and townsmen. Unlike the local nobles, who contributed money to build and maintain schools for their young and enrolled their sons in them with an urgency that bordered on desperation, the merchants and townsmen showed little interest in sending their offspring to free classes teaching basic literacy. In the face of such indifference, Sievers, now a governor-general, raised the issue with the empress. “What means should be employed,” he asked in a letter from March 1781, “to oblige the inhabitants of towns to build schools and send their children to them? Your Majesty in her wisdom will find some compromise between compulsion and free will.”78 Other than providing opportunities and issuing occasional exhortations, the empress had no answer, and the initiative remained with the merchants, who continued to disappoint her and her officials. Paul’s government came up with a more effective answer in the Bankruptcy Statute of 1800, one provision of which declared that a merchant’s failure to keep written records and account books constituted prima facie evidence of negligence in lawsuits and bankruptcies. The number of merchants sending their sons to schools increased immediately thereafter.79 More significantly, the merchants of Moscow began to create institutions for commercial education on their own initiative, starting with a privately funded school in 1802 and followed in 1804 by the Moscow Commercial School and the Moscow Practical Commercial Academy, both of which were funded by the Moscow Merchants Society. The former taught foreign languages, geography, history, mathematics, drawing, architecture, and dancing in addition to bookkeeping, commercial practice, and statistics; the second was more narrowly focused on bookkeeping, the preparation of legal documents, and other clerical subjects. By 1807 the Commercial School had forty-seven students, while the Practical Commercial Academy had fifty, including four whose fathers were Old Believers.80 Russia’s merchants in turn had reasons to be dissatisfied and disappointed with the government. Although the government eventually addressed many of their complaints and fulfilled many of their aspirations, merchants continued to feel aggrieved about the extent of their privileges in relation to those of other groups.81 Through changes in the laws, the state gradually accorded wealthier merchants some of the privileges and marks of respect that had previously been reserved for nobles, but it denied them the legal right to own serfs. Peter I granted that right to factory owners, be they merchants or nobles, to help them secure a labor force, but the government of Peter III had repealed that provision in March 1762, and thereafter even merchants who owned factories had to hire labor. Other merchants never enjoyed the legal privilege of serf ownership, al128

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though some, such as Ivan Tolchenov, owned household serfs in apparent violation of the law.82 Their commercial operations depended on hired labor, in many cases the obrok-paying serfs of the nobility. Even as the government protected the exclusive privileges of nobles, it ignored the merchants who continually sought comparably exclusive privileges to engage in commerce. Nonetheless, Russia’s merchants found the government willing to listen to their views on commerce. It received their complaints and proposals; it sought their advice on legislation affecting them; and eventually, years or even decades later, it responded in ways they found helpful. Despite their dissatisfactions with each other, the state and the merchants held a common interest in promoting and facilitating commerce. Peter I and his successors understood that expanding trade and commerce would increase Russia’s prosperity and enlarge the government’s revenue. The founding of St. Petersburg exemplified that understanding, as did subsequent efforts to develop a stable, entrepreneurial merchantry and encourage commercial activity by eliminating internal tariffs and abolishing monopolies. But promoting trade and commerce required the state to do more than simply create opportunities and allow people to pursue profits. It required the creation of a commercial infrastructure that would make business transactions easier, safer, and more regular. In that regard, Russia entered the eighteenth century far behind the more advanced states of Europe, where more complex and sophisticated forms of commerce had been developing since the Middle Ages. Only slowly, over the course of more than a century, did Russia come to adopt many of the practices and institutions of contemporary European capitalism. MONEY

The increasingly monetized economy of the eighteenth century intensified the demand for money as a measure of value and as a medium of exchange. The expansion of commerce, the substitution of the poll tax for payments in kind, the spread of obrok, the purchase of recruits, and the decline of the closed-estate economy all created a greater need for money. Many peasants continued to pay all or part of their serf dues with labor or produce, and the state occasionally agreed to accept certain payments in kind rather than in cash, but otherwise the use of money as a substitute for barter or service required that money be made available in greater quantities and new forms. The official monetary standard of the Russian Empire was the silver ruble coin, whose content of precious metal supported its worth and stability. In practice, however, silver was too scarce and valuable to meet the needs of an expanding market economy. Until the 1740s, a shortage of silver led to specie imports and put a premium on foreign coins. As late as 1764, Russia had only 80 million silver rubles—fewer than four rubles per capita—in circulation.83 From 1762 to 1796, the government coined on average slightly more than 2 million silver commerce

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rubles a year.84 Even so, and even though the silver ruble remained the official money of account and the official coin of the realm until the end of the eighteenth century, it failed to provide Russia, especially provincial Russia, with a convenient medium of exchange. Peter I addressed that problem in 1700 when he ordered the minting of copper coins to facilitate small transactions, especially for peasants, who dealt in small amounts of money and had little use for silver. Even so, the lack of small change remained a problem. In 1734 some merchants from Kazan complained of “a great shortage of small coins among the common people,” adding that there was “not enough for petty trade and for the buying of peasants’ goods.”85 The government responded by increasing its output of copper coins in 1735–1736 and again in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Between 1757 and 1762, it minted 11 million rubles worth of copper coins, and from 1762 to 1796 it minted another 80 million rubles worth of copper coins worth twenty kopecks apiece.86 Peasants used those coins to pay their taxes and make necessary purchases, and they preferred them to silver. In 1787, for example, the Treasury office in Kazan reported that the grain dealers commissioned to purchase supplies for the St. Petersburg granary insisted on being paid in advance in copper coins “because all the agriculturalists [sold] their cereals more eagerly for copper money.”87 In their own dealings, peasants used copper coins almost exclusively well into the nineteenth century.88 In 1757 P. I. Shuvalov tried to sort out Russia’s de facto bimetalism by bringing silver to the capital and dispersing copper to the provinces. Shuvalov’s reform, which included minting more copper coins of lesser value, had a number of motives and goals, among them an increased money supply in the countryside and the facilitation of monetary transfers. At his instigation, the government opened exchange offices, called “banks,” where copper and silver coins could be exchanged for each other; it further allowed merchants and others to deposit silver in these offices, which were located in the capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and withdraw an equal value of copper coins in provincial centers or to deposit copper in the provinces and withdraw silver in a capital.89 The experiment was short-lived and ended when the so-called banks were closed in 1763. Copper coins proved useful in small amounts but not in large ones. Because one ruble’s worth of copper coins weighed slightly more than one kilogram, the transfer of large sums of money could become extraordinarily burdensome. Forwarding tax revenues from the provinces to agencies of the central government in Moscow and St. Petersburg, for example, literally meant sending money by the boatload. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it required annual shipments of 11 million rubles’ worth of copper coins, which weighed more than 11,000 metric tons.90 In August 1780 the governor-general of Orel reported that in the previous year, the provincial treasury chamber had sent 140,000 rubles’ worth of copper coins to Moscow by boat on the Oka and Moskva rivers and that

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every year it shipped 700,000 to 750,000 rubles’ worth of copper coins to various places in order to settle its accounts.91 Merchants also found it burdensome to transport all the copper coins they needed to purchase cereals from peasants and skupshchiks. If they brought silver or credit instruments to the provinces, however, they sometimes found it difficult to convert those kinds of money into copper. In the 1780s a group of them complained to the government about the situation, writing, “Heavy copper money is harmful to the treasury and the people and is ruinous to trade. People who trade need forms of money that are easy to receive and to pay out, light to transport, and capable of being sent by post.”92 VEKSELS

Although the government had not eliminated the problems involved in moving and converting copper coins by that time, it had taken significant steps to ameliorate them. It began in 1729 when it created a system for transferring funds by means of an official legal document, the veksel, that could serve as a bill of exchange, letter of credit, promissory note, draft, or other monetary instrument. The introduction and preamble to the Veksel Regulation (Veksel’nyi Ustav) of May 16, 1729, stated explicitly that the statute was modeled on the example of legislation in other European countries. It went on to explain that the purpose of the statute was to benefit merchants and the imperial treasury by lessening the danger of highway robbery, making it easier and more convenient to transfer funds from one place to another, and reducing the demand for gold and silver.93 The Veksel Regulation allowed merchants to use veksels to transfer money among themselves, and it authorized state agencies to issue veksels as payments for goods. A merchant who received a veksel from the government under those terms could then present it to a state agency authorized to cash veksels and convert it into coin, or the merchant could endorse the veksel and assign it to a third party in lieu of cash. There was no limit on the number of times a veksel could be endorsed, provided it was cashed within the allotted time, usually a specified number of months up to two years. In their business dealings, merchants and others treated veksels as another form of money and used them as convenient substitutes for gold and silver.94 Tolchenov mentions using veksels for business several times in his memoir. In January 1779 he traveled sixty kilometers from his home in Dmitrov to the office of the Provisions Chancellery in Moscow “to get money.” Since he had sold the previous year’s flour in St. Petersburg, he probably took his receipts in the form of a veksel and converted it to cash in Moscow at the beginning of the next trading season. Almost immediately after getting money, he sent his steward Afanasei Popov “na niz” (downstream), that is, to the middle Volga region, to start buying grain and flour. One month later he sent a second steward “na niz” with

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money. By March 5 he was back in Moscow, and at dawn the next day he sent a third agent downstream “with money.” Then he went immediately to the office of one of the state agencies authorized to issue and cash veksels and arranged for funds to be transferred to Kazan so that they could be more conveniently disbursed to his agents. Tolchenov’s first actual use of the word veksel’ occurs several pages and several months later, at the end of that commercial year and the beginning of the next. The merchant recounted that in late November 1779 he had traveled to Moscow once again to cash a veksel sent to him from St. Petersburg by his agent Afanasei Popov. That same day he dispatched another steward to Lyskovo, in the province of Nizhnii Novgorod, to begin buying cereals, and two weeks later he sent other stewards downstream for the same purpose.95 Tolchenov’s account helps to clarify the advantages and limitations of the veksel as a means of transferring money. Only certain governmental offices were authorized to issue and cash veksels, and they existed only in provincial capitals, not in the smaller district towns; this at least allowed Tolchenov to use veksels to transfer his receipts from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Kazan, or Tver. Most often, he converted the veksel to cash in Moscow and dispatched his agents from there or from Dmitrov with cash in hand. On one occasion he did receive money in the district town of Alatyr, but he did so with a special transfer order (perevodnyi ukaz) from the War Office to the Alatyr Chancellery, not with a veksel. Tolchenov’s transfers by veksel seem to have gone smoothly, with little inconvenience or delay, but repeated injunctions from the central government to provincial agencies to act more promptly in issuing and cashing veksels indicate that others were not so fortunate. One of those injunctions, issued in 1764, stated that delays in veksel operations inconvenienced merchants, delayed state revenue, and led to a decline in the value of the instrument.96 PAPER RUBLES

In December 1768 the government of Catherine II introduced a new form of money, the paper ruble, or “assignat.” Her decree authorized the printing of 1,000,000 rubles in denominations of 25, 50, 75, and 100 rubles.97 The following year the government opened an “assignats bank” in St. Petersburg and another in Moscow, both of which could accept mortgages and discount veksels but whose principal function was the exchange of assignats and copper coins. Between 1772 and 1783 the government opened offices for the exchange of assignats in twenty-three provincial towns, but by 1783 only eight of them were still in operation, and by 1796 there were only three, one each in Archangel, Rybinsk, and Vyshnii Volochek. Between 1804 and 1807 three more offices were opened in the Black Sea ports of Odessa, Taganrog, and Feodosia.98 By that time all six of the towns in which offices of the assignats bank remained open were major centers of the cereals trade, either external, as at Archangel and the Black Sea ports, or internal, as at Rybinsk and Vyshnii Volochek. In at least some of the towns 132

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where exchange offices were opened and then closed, a major difficulty seems to have been a shortage of copper coins with which to make change for assignats.99 For almost twenty years the assignat served as both a medium of exchange and a repository of value. The public adopted the assignat as a convenient substitute for silver, and the expansion of the money supply brought it into closer balance with the demand. Until 1788 a paper ruble traded at par with a silver ruble or at worst at a discount of 1 or 2 percent. Then, as the government began printing assignats to cover its rising deficits, the assignat lost more than 25 percent of its value in the next five years. After recovering somewhat, it plunged again in 1807 and reached a low of five paper rubles to one silver ruble in 1815. In 1812 the government acknowledged the deterioration of the paper ruble and declared its revised worth to be the equivalent of twenty-five silver kopecks, a value that it reached and retained after the Peace of Vienna in 1815.100 From 1788 to 1815 the Russian government issued millions of paper rubles to finance its wars against Turkey, Sweden, Poland, and France. Paper rubles flooded the country, driving silver out of circulation and inflating commodity prices. Price inflation in turn increased the government’s costs and expenditures, magnifying its deficits and causing it to print more assignats in a cycle that continued to 1815. In 1818 the government, trying to stabilize and, if possible, revalue the paper ruble, reversed course and began a long campaign of budgetary discipline that eventually enabled it to withdraw 240 million rubles’ worth of assignats from circulation.101 CREDIT Banks

In the 1670s L. N. Ordin-Nashchokin, a high-ranking official in the government of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, concluded that a shortage of merchant capital and limited access to credit was constricting Russia’s commerce and weakening its economy. To address the problem, he created a bank in Pskov that was to lend state money to merchants at interest. The tsar’s government, however, soon brought his initiative to a halt because it was itself in desperate need of funds and had other, more urgent demands on its resources.102 That experience would be repeated several times over the course of the eighteenth century. In comparison to Britain, France, and the Netherlands, Russia, like the other states of central and eastern Europe, suffered from a scarcity of financial institutions and commercial capital. The government was well aware of the problem and repeatedly expressed concern over the shortage of credit, the high rates of interest resulting from that shortage, and the consequent exploitation of Russians at the hands of foreign moneylenders. In 1733 a decree authorizing the State Mint to lend its surplus funds to private individuals expressed that concern: “Many of our Russian subjects, needing money, have to borrow from foreigners and others at unbearably high rates of interest and with such collateral as might be commerce

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worth twice the amount of money borrowed, and they pay not just 12 percent but 15 percent or even 20 percent . . . , [and] for their sake we order the Mint to lend out money at interest from its capital to all ranks of persons for the benefit of the whole people.”103 Although the decree spoke of “subjects” and “the whole people,” its requirement that loans be backed by collateral in the form of gold, silver, or jewelry revealed its principal clientele to be wealthy Russians, mostly nobles, who were short of cash. The State Mint began lending money in 1729 and stopped in 1736, when the government took the available funds to finance its war against the Ottoman Empire.104 The lending operations of the State Mint exemplified in miniature the subsequent experience of the state’s credit institutions. Although the decrees establishing them usually mentioned economic stimulus and growth, those credit institutions primarily functioned to make relatively inexpensive credit available to nobles struggling to maintain their standard of living. The Nobles Bank (1754), the Copper Bank (1757), the State Assignats Bank (1769), the State Loan Bank (1786), and the Bank of Assistance for the Nobility (1798) all made loans in the form of mortgages backed by lands and serfs, as did the charitable institutions authorized to lend their capital at interest, notably the State Foundling Home (1763) and the Boards of Social Welfare established in most provinces after 1775.105 Prohibited by law from owning landed estates and serfs, merchants were consequently ineligible for such loans. The government’s first venture into commercial banking came as part of the Shuvalov reforms in 1754, when the government created the first real banks in Russian history: the Nobles Bank, with offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which offered mortgages on landed estates, and the Bank for the Improvement of the Trade of St. Petersburg to offer loans on trade goods warehoused in that city. The latter, commonly known as the Commercial Bank, was intended to help exporters wait out the market in the hope of obtaining better prices from foreign buyers. It offered loans for only six months duration and only for 75 percent of the value of the goods underwritten, all of which were to be confiscated if the loan was not repaid.106 Intended to ease the cash flow problems of exporters, the Commercial Bank had nothing to offer the grain merchants who provisioned the city. Indeed, when the bank was reorganized in 1764, its directors specifically rejected the Commission on Commerce’s proposal that it extend credit to merchants engaged exclusively in internal trade.107 Despite its limited field of operations and insistence on adequate collateral, the Commercial Bank ran out of funds in the early 1770s and ceased making new loans. By 1779 it was itself borrowing money to pay the salaries of its employees. In 1782 the government closed the Commercial Bank and transferred its remaining assets to the Nobles Bank.108 In 1786 a reformed version of the State Assignats Bank known as the State Loan Bank (Gosudarstvennyi zaemnyi bank) took over the functions of the Nobles Bank and the Commercial Bank. The manifesto establishing the new bank 134

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authorized it to increase the value of assignats in circulation up to a limit of 100 million rubles and to lend up to 22 million rubles to noble landowners at 8 percent interest and 11 million rubles to merchants at 7 percent so that they would not have “to depend on loans from foreigners,” which, it said, had “restricted trade.”109 However sincere the manifesto’s words may have been at the time, they were quickly forgotten when wars against the Ottoman Empire and Sweden, followed by the second and third partitions of Poland, created a financial emergency. The government printed assignats to cover part of the ensuing deficit, and inflation followed. The State Loan Bank lent 11 million of the 22 million rubles designated for the nobility to high-ranking government officials, especially Potemkin, but for more than a decade, it offered no loans to merchants.110 Under Paul the Russian government introduced a program of economic and financial reform intended to restore fiscal discipline and spur economic growth. In line with that program, the State Loan Bank began offering merchants loans secured by trade goods. One office of the bank would certify and insure the goods, and another would then lend the owner as much as 80 percent of their certified value. A third office accepted promissory notes (veksels) for internal trade. To conduct those operations, the bank opened offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Archangel, Odessa, Taganrog, and Feodosia.111 The locations strongly suggest that the purpose of such loans was to provide merchants who had not yet sold their wares with sufficient capital to begin the succeeding year’s operations, but the transactions of those institutions, unlike their predecessors’, have never been examined in detail. Payments in A dvance

In the absence of banks and other credit institutions, foreign merchants doing business in Russia served as the principal source of credit and commercial capital for their Russian counterparts. When western Europeans wanted to buy Russian goods for export, they and their Russian suppliers would first come to an agreement on the date of delivery, the price, the quantity, and the quality of the goods they desired, and the two parties would register the agreement with the customs office as a binding contract. The foreigners would then pay the Russians in advance and so provide them with the capital they needed to purchase the goods in question. British and Dutch merchants usually paid at the port city in which they operated with a bill of exchange, also called a veksel, drawn on a bank in London, Amsterdam, or Hamburg. Russian merchants would then sell the veksel at a discount to one of the great Moscow merchants or to one of the English or Dutch banking houses that had opened an office in Moscow. The purchaser could subsequently resell the veksel to a merchant buying foreign goods for the Russian market and make a profit on both transactions. A description of Moscow written in 1785 mentioned buying, selling, and discounting credit instruments as significant: “In Moscow this trade is very large and important.”112 commerce

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By providing capital to their Russian partners and clients, foreign merchants connected Russian ones with the great financial centers of Europe and thus to the international world market. For much of the eighteenth century, their ability to provide much-needed capital also gave foreign merchants a distinct advantage in dealing and bargaining with Russian merchants.113 Grigorii Teplov, the source of many denigrating remarks about Russian merchants, called them as “the hirelings or, better said, the teamsters of foreign merchants.”114 By the end of the eighteenth century, however, observers noted that more and more Russian merchants were buying and selling from their own accumulated capital without cash advances or credit from foreigners. Virst, writing in 1807, noted that Russian merchants were selling their goods at the time of delivery instead of asking for a loan and having to sell them cheaper as part of the repayment. At that point, he argued, Russia’s internal trade had become independent of foreign finance.115 As was mentioned previously, the Provisions Chancellery, the state granary in St. Petersburg, and some other state agencies adopted the foreigners’ practice of advancing capital and paid grain merchants in advance for goods to be delivered later. The Provisions Chancellery in particular had made it possible for many small grain dealers to enter and establish themselves in the long-distance cereals trade to St. Petersburg, and it continued to support the cereals trade in that manner throughout the eighteenth century. Tolchenov’s memoir provides a pertinent example. In his summary of his business activities for 1771, Tolchenov mentions the chancellery’s involvement: We turned all of the rye flour over to the Provisions Chancellery in accordance with the contract concluded in January of that same year under which we were obligated to deposit 10,000 kuls at the main office of the Provisions Chancellery for 2.60 rubles a kul. Since purchases below and at Rybinsk did not suffice, 2,000 kuls were bought at the Ladoga Canal through Andrei Korobov for 3.09 [per kul]. On the open market that flour could otherwise have been sold in St. Petersburg for 3.25 rubles per kul, and thus there was a considerable loss to us on the delivery to the Provisions Chancellery.

Nevertheless, the Tolchenovs made a handsome profit on the fine flour they had bought for themselves along with the ordinary rye flour for the Provisions Chancellery.116 Ivan Tolchenov dealt with the Provisions Chancellery only occasionally. Whenever he could, he preferred to finance his annual purchases with money from the previous year’s sales, but sometimes the sale of flour in St. Petersburg was delayed beyond the start of the next buying season, or his personal expenditures had already exceeded his anticipated receipts, leaving him short of capital. In such cases, his best and possibly his only alternatives were to accept the terms offered by the Provisions Chancellery or find an individual willing to lend him money at interest.117

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Promissory Notes

Until the seventeenth century, Russian law had permitted the lending of money at interest, but the practice appears to have died out in the early seventeenth century and was expressly forbidden by the law code of 1649.118 After that, people engaged in commerce with insufficient cash on hand had few options. Sectarians or Old Believers might be able to find financial assistance within their religious communities. In the right circumstances, the underfunded might be able to find partners to join them in potentially profitable ventures. Failing those possibilities, the only recourse was to take an illegal loan at high and potentially ruinous rates of interest. Although the prohibition on lending money enacted in 1649 remained on the books until 1754, it was seldom, if ever, enforced, but even so, it prevented lenders from using the courts to secure repayment. Without legal redress for unpaid debts, creditors charged exorbitant rates to offset the risk of default and discounted the interest from the principal in advance. As part of P. I. Shuvalov’s program of economic reforms, the government finally legalized private moneylending in 1754, but it set the maximum rate of interest at 6 percent. Like the earlier prohibition, that provision could be and often was ignored. When Tolchenov turned to moneylenders toward the end of his career, he paid interest at the rate of 6–12 percent.119 In the 1730s the interest on such loans would have run to 12, 15, or even 20 percent a year. The difference shows not only the beneficial effects of legalizing private loans but also the growing availability of capital in Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century. To obtain a loan or to purchase goods on credit, merchants (and others) used a veksel as a promissory note. The Veksel Regulation of May 16, 1729, distinguished fourteen different types of veksels, including one that could be used as payment from one individual to another. The law stipulated that such a veksel include the day, month, year, and place of its signing, the amount pledged, a declaration of the promise to pay, the name of the person making the promise, the name of the person receiving it, the signatures of both, and the signature of the public notary certifying the agreement and the signatures. Notary publics were to keep registers of all the veksels they had signed.120 Once issued, a veksel could be endorsed by the creditor and used as a substitute for money until it came due. In receiving cash for a promise to pay at a future date, the issuer or endorser of a veksel paid a premium in the form of a discount to face value, the size of which depended on the length of time and the creditworthiness of the issuer. For that reason Tolchenov tried to sustain the appearance of prosperity as his debts mounted, doing so to maintain confidence in his creditworthiness, but once his creditors learned that he would have to sell his fancy house to cover his debts, they began to sell his veksels at a steep discount.121

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Concern for their credit rating encouraged borrowers to fulfill the terms of their promissory notes, because a default could make it more expensive, if not impossible, to borrow money in the future. Default could also incur the loss of trust and reputation that played an important role in commercial relations. Even so, desperation and chicanery could and did lead borrowers to try to avoid paying off their notes. In such cases, the Veksel Regulation of 1729 empowered creditors to file an official protest and seek legal redress from the courts. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the total value of protested notes in all of Russia reportedly came to more than 2,000,000 rubles.122 In the first six months of 1773, the total value of protested notes in St. Petersburg alone exceeded 880,000 rubles, which were owed to more than 1,340 lenders by more than 1,580 debtors.123 Although those figures show that many promissory notes were not paid on time, they also show that veksels were nevertheless widely used and accepted as promissory notes. They also indicate confidence in the ability of the courts and the legal system to resolve disputes over contested notes. CONTRACTS

The law treated promissory notes like contracts, which they resembled in both form and purpose. Both were drawn up and registered with an official intermediary (makler), and both laid out the terms of agreement in a formal and highly specific manner, with dates, signatures, terms, witnesses, and official certification all recorded. Such full and explicit documentation differed greatly from the imprecise and spotty documentation of land ownership before the completion of the General Land Survey in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and made veksels and contracts easier to interpret and adjudicate. For example, in 1786, when the Provisions Chancellery contracted with the St. Petersburg merchant Avvakum Dmitriev to deliver rye flour to the Russian garrison towns in Karelia, Dmitriev obligated himself to deliver a total of 6,375 kuls weighing nine puds each at a price of four rubles per kul. The contract further specified that the flour was to be of good quality, barn dried and not milled damp, shipped in new containers on his own boats, and unloaded at his own expense. For all that, Dmitriev was to receive three rubles per kul in advance and the remainder on delivery. Another merchant, Grigorii Avrosimovich Anisimov, guaranteed Dmitriev’s compliance and, by signing the contract, made himself liable in the event of default.124 The specificity seen in this contract and others from the same period made it relatively simple for a court to determine the exact terms of an agreement.125 As in any legal system, disputes arose over gray areas, matters of interpretation and definition, and circumstances. A law of April 10, 1766, reinforced the importance of contracts by requiring that the courts register and retain copies of all contracts and that they treat the exact wording as prima facie evidence, irrespective of circumstances and persons.126

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COURTS

Russian law entrusted the resolution of commercial disputes and the enforcement of contracts to the corporate institutions of the merchants and the towns. When Peter I reformed and renamed those corporate institutions, he preserved and extended their existing jurisdiction over merchants and their affairs. His Main Magistracy Regulation of January 17, 1721, ordered the merchants of each town or posad to elect a magistracy composed of a president and up to four members, to be assisted by two councilors. The magistracy’s principal function was to assess and collect taxes on the local merchants, but it also served, among other functions, as the court that adjudicated commercial disputes. Over the next half century, the imperial government repeatedly modified Peter’s urban legislation, applying different names to the merchants’ courts and altering their jurisdiction. It transferred most of their authority in criminal cases to appointed state officials, but it retained and even broadened their authority in civil cases. Most important, the Veksel Regulation of 1729 gave the merchants’ courts exclusive jurisdiction over disputed veksels, including those involving nonmerchants. Such courts were to be notified of veksels that had not been paid off by the appointed date; once a merchants’ court judge received such a notification, the court was to arrest the alleged offender and seize the person’s property. The judge was then to make a determination within eight days, and if the issuer of the note was found to be at fault, the judge was to sell the offender’s property at public auction to settle the debt.127 In some cases the merchants’ courts even attached the salaries of young nobles in the state service when they failed to pay off their notes, but the Senate instructed them not to do so as a matter of course.128 Like so many other subjects discussed in this chapter, the actual operations of the merchants’ courts have not been subjected to detailed investigation by historians, and we know little about how those courts functioned. We can, however, take the urban instructions to the Legislative Commission of 1767 as implying that unlike the nobles, who criticized their courts in one instruction after another, Russia’s merchants were relatively satisfied with their courts. The vehemence with which the nobles denounced the handling of land disputes by their courts contrasts sharply with the absence of complaints about the handling of commercial disputes by the merchants’ courts.129 Instead of voicing dissatisfaction, the merchants proposed that the authority of their courts be broadened and strengthened. In particular, more than one-third of the urban instructions from central Russia requested that the urban magistracies be given an even greater role in guaranteeing contracts. Several wanted the magistracies to be able to hold nobles and their stewards responsible for contracts signed and broken by their serfs. Others requested that in such cases, the municipal courts be empowered to find and punish serfs without intervention by their masters. As for dealings be-

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tween merchants, several instructions proposed that the magistracies maintain a registry of contracts as well as a registry of merchant’s property for use in settling contract disputes and bankruptcy proceedings.130 BANKRUPTCY

Because it was so common, bankruptcy constituted the most frequent cause of default on contracts and promissory notes. It was also the most serious cause, because one merchant’s failure to meet contracted obligations threatened to pull down many others connected to that merchant and to one another through loans, contract guarantees, deferred payments, and partnerships. Although the law provided for the seizure and sale of a defaulter’s property, prior to 1800, its provisions could be circumvented by hiding assets or transferring them to relatives and secret partners. Once again, Ivan Tolchenov’s career provides a pertinent illustration. Once he realized that he would not be able to pay off his mounting debts, Tolchenov attempted to save as much of his wealth for himself and his heirs as he could by cheating his creditors. He “sold” his opulent house in Dmitrov to his son’s father-in-law with the understanding that he would go on living there and that it would eventually pass to his son. When the ruse was discovered and his creditors began to close in, Tolchenov went into hiding while he sold off his remaining assets and distributed the proceeds to his children. That done, his sons legally separated themselves from Ivan and his misfortunes and placed themselves under the protection of their fathers-in-law.131 Although Russian merchants were notorious for the kind of chicanery that Tolchenov employed, they also understood that such behavior raised interest rates and eroded trust and confidence. Merchants might not have hesitated to cheat their partners, guarantors, and creditors for the sake of their own families, but at the same time, they wanted to make certain that others could not cheat them. Consequently, a number of merchants’ instructions to the Legislative Commission of 1767 recommended that the state enact tougher measures to prevent fraudulent defaults on debts and contracts.132 Despite several desultory efforts on the part of Catherine’s government, significant change came only in December 1800, when Paul promulgated a new, comprehensive law named the Statute on Bankrupts. The new law placed bankruptcy cases under the jurisdiction of the merchants’ courts and laid out precise timetables and detailed procedures for those courts to follow. Within that formal structure, however, it gave unprecedented power to the creditors of an accused bankrupt. Suppose several merchants were doing business with a certain man whom they suspected had gone bankrupt. They could initiate proceedings leading to his immediate apprehension. Then, based on his written deposition listing his assets and debts, they could decide whether to have him released on his own recognizance or placed under detention. Next, they could decide that his inability to pay his debts was no fault of his own, in which case he could resume his 140

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business affairs and arrange a settlement with his creditors, or they could decide that it stemmed from negligence or fraud, in which case the accused was to be placed under arrest, and—except for the clothes on his back and the food needed to keep himself and his family alive—all his property was to be seized. Finally, the creditors would elect one or more curators to take over his property, his business affairs, and all his papers and records for the purpose of discovering and liquidating all his assets to satisfy his debts to the greatest extent possible. Curators in a bankruptcy proceeding received full powers to conduct an investigation so as to find and recover assets, including the power to subpoena and interrogate the accused, his relatives, his employees, and his associates. Depending on the circumstances, a bankrupt found guilty of negligence or deception by his creditors could face criminal charges pursuant to the bankruptcy proceedings.133 By ensuring that authorities relied on written business records to untangle a bankrupt’s financial affairs and determine the person’s culpability, the Statute on Bankrupts deliberately prompted a change in commercial practices. By 1800 such records may not have been as uncommon as they had been earlier, but to the extent that they were, the law set out to change that situation in a way that would make merchants want to comply. Section 25 of the statute begins by enjoining “all merchants, Russian as well as foreign, practicing internal and external trade to acquire within one year from the publication of this statute and to have forever in the future books necessary for the merchantry unless they want to make themselves liable to the title of negligent bankrupts in the event of a bankruptcy.” It then explained that the term books included copies of all outgoing letters, a journal of daily notes on all business matters, a register of all receipts and disbursements, a journal brought into order (v poriadok privedennyi), inventories of goods purchased and sold, and a “great book” (grosbukh) “from which one can yearly and at any time in similar circumstances calculate the balance and see the condition of affairs . . . in a word, a description of all business affairs, i.e., all purchases and sales, receipts and expenditures.” Lest there be any doubt or confusion about those documents, the law called for forms of all of them to be printed in St. Petersburg and distributed in appropriate numbers to every province of the empire.134 Although the law’s effects were not sudden or dramatic, the Statute on Bankrupts marks an important turning point in Russian record keeping and business practice. INSURANCE

Despite its concern with fraud and chicanery, the Statute on Bankrupts made it clear that the great majority of bankruptcies arose from guiltless, unpredictable misfortune. Tolchenov’s enterprises failed because of his own negligence and extravagance, but Andrei Esipov’s enterprises failed because his boats sank and his warehouses burned, and he had no insurance to cover his losses. Many others shared his fate. With only a few, insignificant exceptions, Russian merchants recommerce

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mained completely vulnerable to casualty losses until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.135 A fire insurance society began operations in Riga in 1765, and a second one followed in 1785, but the first agency offering insurance protection of any kind within Russia proper was, typically, a creature of the state. The law of June 28, 1786, creating the State Loan Bank authorized the bank to offer fire insurance on masonry buildings with iron or tiled roofs, but although that provision applied to commercial as well as residential structures, it did not include the goods or merchandise they might contain. Rather, the insurance clause was meant to protect the bank’s interest in property on which it had written mortgages, mostly the town and country houses of nobles, not to protect businesses or their owners. For a while, the bank’s insurance office enjoyed a modest success, with some 6,500,000 rubles’ worth of property insured, but that total had shrunk to 1,600,000 rubles by 1822, when the bank was closed.136 Any role it might have played in saving merchants from catastrophic losses was incidental. The first attempt to offer insurance on commercial goods and commodities came in 1799 with a reorganization of the State Assignats Bank. The reform authorized the bank’s offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Archangel, Odessa, Taganrog, and Feodosia to insure trade goods and commodities owned by Russian merchants. The merchants had to pay 1.33 kopecks per ruble of value to insure the goods, but they could then use the goods as collateral to secure a loan from the bank.137 The new arrangements were designed to save Russian merchants from having to sell their goods at low prices to generate cash flow, and the insurance provision was clearly intended to protect the state rather than the merchants. In any event, it failed, and the insurance offices were closed after only two years, with collections totaling 1,214 rubles in premiums.138 Real insurance on buildings and commercial goods would not become available in Russia until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. COMPANIES AND CORPORATIONS

In 1699 Peter I urged Russian merchants to form “trading companies, as in other states,” yet Russia was nevertheless slow to establish trading companies and commercial corporations. Peter was no doubt thinking of the Dutch and British companies established in the seventeenth century to trade with the East Indies, North America, Muscovy, and other foreign lands, and he specifically linked the formation of similar companies in Russia to his goal of increasing Russia’s foreign trade. The very few Russian companies chartered in succeeding decades shared this goal. These firms included the Temernikov Company, founded in 1757 to trade with the Ottoman Empire; the Persian Company, established in Astrakhan in 1758; and the Central Asian Company, chartered in 1759.139 The first and only corporate company to operate in the domestic grain trade received its charter in 1767. Alarmed by a sharp rise in flour prices, the empress 142

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and her officials were looking for ways to improve the supply of grain and flour to the capital. They approved and may even have initiated the creation of a grain-trading company in Nizhnii Novgorod whose explicit role was to purchase grain in and around that city and ship it to “towns upstream and to St. Petersburg.” Merchants in Nizhnii Novgorod purchased shares in the company, and the government lent it 20,000 rubles for five years at no interest in return for a commitment to deliver grain to St. Petersburg in amounts to be negotiated between the company and the director of the St. Petersburg granary. Apparently reflecting the assumption that the company would be sufficiently capitalized and diversified to survive disasters that often ruined individual merchants, the law stated that “if, God forbid, the grain should be burned or sunk in Nizhnii Novgorod or along the way,” the loss was to be “borne by the company.” Unlike companies chartered to trade with foreign countries, the Nizhnii Novgorod company was denied exclusive trading privileges and was explicitly forbidden to hinder trade by anyone, whether its own stockholders trading outside the aegis of the company or anyone else.140 The company’s fate remains a mystery. The company does not appear in lists of major suppliers bringing cereals to the capital or in lists of proprietors shipping goods through the waterways, nor did the Commission on Grain ever mention or refer to it. If it ever functioned at all, it achieved no success worthy of mention or imitation, and no other trading company entered the St. Petersburg cereals trade in the period under discussion. Nonetheless, its corporate structure was cited in 1772 as a model for a grain-trading company chartered in Voronezh “to trade in grain to the Crimea and other Tatar places.”141 The charters of the Nizhnii Novgorod and Voronezh companies were also cited as precedents by a group of merchants in Smolensk who in 1788 proposed to organize a trading company to ship grain and hemp to Riga for export.142 Russia’s cereals trade remained private and familial even though some government officials and some merchants clearly understood the value of trading companies and corporations. In their proposal of 1778, the Smolensk merchants who wanted to organize a trading company pointed out the benefits of collective operation: “Because trade is personal and not corporate, then the disasters that happen with the wreckage of boats sent by us on the river Dvina fall with total destruction on one individual, and because of that many formerly wealthy merchants have been led to their downfall and to destitution.” In his covering letter supporting the proposal from the Smolensk merchants, the province’s governor-general argued that it would indeed spare merchants with little capital from commercial failure resulting from accidents.143 In the following year, his successor reported that merchants in the neighboring province of Orel continued to ship large quantities of grain and other goods to distant markets even though their situation was perilous because they had “no general agreement or trading company.”144 commerce

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Whatever the reason, trading companies of any kind remained exceptional throughout the period under discussion. Catherine II chartered only four during her thirty-four-year reign, and each required a personal decree from the empress herself. The commercial code enacted by Alexander I in January 1807 retained that requirement and devoted only two sentences to corporations. It gave far more attention to three other forms of business enterprise: proprietorships by a single merchant enrolled in a guild; full partnerships among members of the same guild, all of whom remained fully liable for debts; and limited partnerships composed of full partners and outside investors with only the latter, most of whom were likely to be noblemen, enjoying limited liability. General legislation normalizing and facilitating the formation of corporations would not come until the 1830s.145 Although trading companies and corporations remained largely unknown, Russian merchants often cooperated with each other for mutual benefit and sometimes joined together in cooperative undertakings (skladnie torgi), pooling capital and sharing risks and profits. The existence of such informal associations is assumed in Governor Sievers’s report that the merchants of Rzhev (a center of the Old Belief) had pooled their capital to buy grain and hemp in the South and in the various petitions from merchants to have their joint undertakings recognized and chartered as a trading company, but because such combinations were informal and unofficial, they left too few traces in the historical record to gauge their extent or their importance. EVALUATION

Between 1703 and 1811 private enterprise and the commercial market in Russia grew broader and stronger, and together they played a primary, though not exclusive, role in delivering grain and flour to St. Petersburg. Slowly but continually, the Russian government improved the lot of businesspeople and the conditions in which they operated. On numerous occasions it sought advice from merchants when drafting laws that affected them and their operations, and on others it acted in response to requests initiated by the merchants.146 The increased availability of cash and credit and the improved enforcement of contracts and other legal obligations made buying and selling easier and safer for merchants and allowed them to expand their activities. Even so, almost all businesses remained personal or familial and heavily dependent on personal rather than legal or institutional relationships. Enforceable contracts and promissory notes enabled them to deal more effectively with the world beyond the sphere of personal and familial connections in which familiarity, trust, and social pressure sufficed. In that regard, business practices in Russia and those in western European countries differed more in degree that in kind.147 The same informality and reluctance to adopt professional business practices also characterized the way in which merchants ran their businesses. Those atti144

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tudes underlay their lack of interest in professional accountants and accounting principles despite their keen interest in prices and profits. In Tolchenov’s memoirs, for example, the reader can find numerous instances in which the author gives the price he paid for each lot of cereals and the price at which he later sold it, showing that he kept records of his transactions. He also calculated his profit or loss on each lot by comparing the purchase price to the selling price. Nonetheless, he never mentions his overhead and expenses. Could his record keeping have been so superficial? If so, the Bankruptcy Statute of 1800 was intended for just such a case, an effort to bring him and others like him to task by providing strong incentives to maintain detailed records. Market research and forecasting was another area of weakness. From the 1760s onward the Russian government systematically collected data on harvests, supplies, and market prices in all the provinces and towns of European Russia, but it made no effort to share that information with grain merchants, nor did those merchants seek to obtain it. Cooperation between government and private business occurred far less frequently or extensively in Russia than in Britain or the Netherlands. Depending on their own limited resources, Russian merchants pursued information about prices, supplies, and market trends haphazardly rather than systematically, depending on word of mouth and chance encounters rather than regular periodic reports from resident agents in designated locations. Tolchenov’s memoir provides an interesting example of the way grain merchants would try to gain advantage from information that they managed to pick up. In 1774 Tolchenov’s father heard that the grain harvest south of the Oka and along the middle Volga had been unusually small. Knowing that prices in St. Petersburg were bound to rise, he immediately set Ivan and a steward northward to purchase flour already on its way to the capital, but by the time they arrived at their destination, the news had spread, and it was already too late.148 When it came to foreign trade, the government and possibly some of the wealthier merchants saw the value of maintaining agents and agencies in key locations. Resident consuls in several foreign ports provided the Russian government with regular information on prices, demand, and opportunities for Russian goods, including cereals. The 1757 charter to the Temernikov Company called for it to maintain offices in Moscow, Temernikov, and Istanbul, and the 1772 charter to the Voronezh Company mentions resident agents in the Crimea. With a few exceptions, however, the grain merchants of the upper Volga towns had no fixed offices or resident agents either in St. Petersburg or in the regions of surplus production.149 Each winter they or their stewards set off anew from Dmitrov, Tver, Torzhok, and other northern towns to search for buying opportunities along the Oka, the middle Volga, and their tributaries. Experience, word of mouth, and chance encounters at fairs and taverns directed them to one trading wharf or village after another in search of good deals. The grain trade in Russia can hardly be characterized as primitive: it was commerce

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based on monetary exchange, with standardized monetary units, standardized weights and measures, credit instruments, contracts, and commercial courts, and it operated in accordance with nationwide rules established and enforced by social pressures and legal mechanisms. Even so, the grain trade remained relatively unsophisticated insofar as it failed to develop the specialized skills, such as accounting, market forecasting, banking, and insurance, that augment and sustain the basic operations of buying and selling. Their absence increased the risks of doing business, promoted rapid turnover in the ranks of the merchantry, and retarded the formation of a stable, enterprising middle class. These circumstances posed significant long-range problems for the development of Russia’s economy and its society. The Russian government was aware of the problems and tried repeatedly to resolve or reduce them, but it rarely, if ever, addressed the problems in the specific context of supplying cereals to St. Petersburg, for it was not at all apparent that the commercial success or failure of individual merchants had any significant effect on the provisioning of the capital. Whenever a grain merchant dropped out of the trade for whatever reason, someone else—another merchant, a peasant, maybe even a noble—could be expected to take up the slack. As long as grain remained abundant in the south and scarce in the north, the government could be sure that someone would try to make a profit from the corresponding disparity of prices. Doing so required only the freedom to trade and practical ways to move money from the capital to the provinces and cereals from the provinces to the capital. The first need was met over time by payments in advance, veksels, coins, and currency; the second, by improvements to the waterways that connected St. Petersburg with the surplus-producing provinces of the interior.

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CHAPTER 6

R

Transportation

T

hroughout the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial government worked to improve transportation from provincial Russia to St. Petersburg. Then, in the early nineteenth century, it expanded and intensified its undertakings by creating new routes and adding other ports to its list of destinations. The historical literature on transportation and waterways in eighteenth-century Russia has described those developments in considerable breadth and detail, but it has largely failed to connect them to the growth of St. Petersburg, the expansion of agriculture, the organization of the grain trade, and other subjects covered in this book.1 Improvements to the transportation infrastructure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries paralleled improvements to Russia’s commercial infrastructure. Together they enabled St. Petersburg to acquire the food, firewood, and building materials it needed to sustain its growing population; at the same time, they enabled Russia to increase its exports and augment its national income. Although bringing goods to market was left to private individuals, the government did direct its efforts toward making that task easier. Whereas British and U.S. entrepreneurs and investors constructed toll bridges, turnpikes, and canals with their own funds, private enterprise played no 147

part in creating or improving Russia’s roads, highways, and waterways. With the exception of the Serdiukov concession at Vyshnii Volochek, which the government finally bought up in 1774, transport facilities were the exclusive purview of the imperial government. For overland transport, it created and maintained thirteen highways, or “tracts,” that connected important cities and towns within the empire, and it ran the coaching stations, with their complements of coachmen (iamshchiki) and horses. Those highways carried state couriers and private travelers, messages, parcels, and light goods, and for limited distances they could also carry grain, flour, and other heavy goods if water transport was not available. For long distances, however, the availability of navigable waterways determined the movement of heavy commodities, such as grain and flour. Nature provided Russia with low elevations and relatively abundant precipitation, creating a plenitude of streams, rivers, and lakes. Russia’s network of natural waterways and portages had allowed merchants to transport their goods for at least a millennium before Peter I resolved to improve it. With two short canals at Vyshnii Volochek Peter succeeded in opening a continuous waterway from the Volga to the Gulf of Finland, but that was only the beginning of the government’s efforts to facilitate the movement of goods from the Volga Basin to St. Petersburg. The Ladoga Canal, from the Volkhov to the Neva, enhanced the safety and the value of the waterway Peter had created, and his successors made further improvements that increased the volume of traffic and decreased the difficulties and delays on the waterway to St. Petersburg. Commerce along the waterways increased from decade to decade, towns along the rivers grew in size and prosperity, and hundreds of thousands of Russians found employment as skilled and unskilled workers in the many trades and occupations that commerce required. For all its determination to improve what nature had created, the Russian government had to accept the limits that nature imposed, and nature could be harsh and difficult. Great distances and a severe climate with long frigid winters and summer droughts made water transport in Russia quantitatively and qualitatively different from water transport in western and central Europe. Nature set the terms; Russians could hope only to modify them. MOVING GRAIN AND FLOUR

On July 24, 1775, Prince A. A. Viazemskii, the procurator-general of the Senate, forwarded a directive from the empress to the governors of Voronezh and Kazan ordering each of them to purchase 25,000 chetverts of rye from the recent harvest and arrange for it to be milled and the flour delivered to the Provisions Chancellery in St. Petersburg by the spring of 1776. In separate responses, each governor explained the practical problems he faced in carrying out that order and the modifications he had been forced to make. Because it was too soon after the harvest for new grain to be threshed and 148

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milled, the governors found it necessary to purchase flour from merchants who could provide the desired quantity the following spring at the wharf in Nizhnii Novgorod. At 2.40 rubles a chetvert, however, the price would be higher than the governors had anticipated. In the meantime, the governors would make arrangements to transport the flour from Nizhnii Novgorod to Rybinsk and then from Rybinsk to St. Petersburg. If all went well, the flour would arrive in the capital no earlier than the autumn of 1776.2 The governors’ letters illuminate two basic facts about provisioning St. Petersburg: navigable waterways made it possible to transport cereals to St. Petersburg from surplus-producing provinces far to the south and east of Moscow, but distance, climate, topography, and the rhythms of nature also made that transportation difficult, time-consuming, and uncertain. From Nizhnii Novgorod, never mind Kazan or Voronezh, cargoes had to travel more than two thousand kilometers by boat, first against the current of the Volga and then across the low divide between the upper Volga and the Volkhov. Shallows, rapids, and a short navigation season presented additional difficulties. With good luck, a shipment from the middle Volga region could reach St. Petersburg in six months; with bad luck, it could take a year or more, provided it was not sunk or ruined along the way. The governors’ letters also show that although the government might buy grain and flour for shipment to St. Petersburg, it did so by making deals and signing contracts with private individuals. It usually relied on contractors to locate, process, and provide what it needed, and it always relied on them to transport the goods from the surplus-producing provinces, where they were cheap, to the capital, where they were far more expensive. The difference between the price of flour in St. Petersburg and the price of grain in the black-earth steppe created incentives and opportunities not only for the growers and merchants who produced and traded cereals commodities but also for the many thousands of entrepreneurs, artisans, and wage laborers needed to transport them. Their self-interested moneymaking activities contributed to the growth of the Russian economy, the vitality of numerous towns and settlements, the extension of market relations, and the spread of wage labor. On the other side of the ledger, those activities constituted the overhead of the cereals trade, a major component of the high price of flour in the capital, and the principal reason why a chetvert of rye flour that in 1766 cost 1.39 rubles in Tambov, 1.77 rubles in Kozmodem’iansk, or 1.87 rubles in Orel would sell for 3.20 rubles in St. Petersburg. The effect of that overhead can be clearly seen in the price gradient along the waterways from the surplus-producing regions to the capital, as shown in table 12. The imperial government worried continually about the price of rye flour in St. Petersburg, but even in times of famine, when it purchased grain and arranged for its transport, the government did not attempt to move the goods transportation

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Table 12. Price in kopecks of a chetvert of rye flour in selected locations, 1763–1773 1763

1764

1765

1766

1767

1768

1769

1770

1771

1772

1773

Tambov

58

51

60

139

127

158

161

122

84

74

68

Orel

65

70

105

187

191

183

158

132

121

141

?

Penza

60

70

80

181

189

210

223

207

75

56

76

Cheboksary

56

83

110

160

193

189

160

137

103

89

99

Kozmodem’iansk

63

76

120

177

219

129

165

152

?

107

120

N. Novgorod

72

86

118

261

265

194

?

233

149

130

136

Gzhatsk

115

136

163

283

294

265

?

197

228

189

244

Rybinsk

100

116

155

240

255

278

167

250

224

?

200

Moscow

104

157

?

274

?

258

202

157

157

163

176

Tver

101

131

185

287

302

221

185

250

250

233

250

St. Petersburg

172

221

170

320

389

365

233

328

244

255

275

Source: RGADA, f. 16, d. 496, ll. 52, 55. These figures, provided by local officials, were collected by a committee appointed by the Senate at the behest of the empress in April 1772 to investigate rising cereals costs in St. Petersburg.

under state command with its own boats and labor force, nor did it compel anyone to transport them involuntarily. Concerned though it was to facilitate the movement of grain and flour to the capital, the government limited its direct involvement to encouraging and organizing the activities of private individuals and to improving the infrastructure of commercial transport. It established official trading wharves (pristani; sing., pristan) along the waterways where boats could be hired and loaded and where a broker (makler) would record all contracts involving the renting of boats and the delivery of cargo. The government registered the boat owners, whose activities it prescribed in a series of laws that culminated in the Regulation on Merchant Shipping in 1781, as well as the pilots and even some of the less skilled and unskilled workers along the waterways. It created and maintained towpaths along the navigable rivers, and on the difficult stretch between the Volga and the Neva, it effected several physical improvements that made transportation faster, safer, and easier over time. Even so, the transportation of cereals and other goods to the capital remained an arduous and complicated undertaking. The movement of grain from the barns and threshing floors of the south to the markets and shops of St. Petersburg began in early winter. Nature dictated the timing: grain could not be moved until it had been threshed or before the boggy, often impassable roads of autumn had been covered with a firm layer 150

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of snow. From October or November until some time in April, teams of horses could pull heavy sledges laden with grain and flour over the so-called winter roads to trading wharves, where the cargoes would remain until the spring thaw. Deliveries of grain and flour filled the warehouses available at most trading wharves and piled up around them protected by containers and mats. While that was happening, merchants, boat owners, deckhands, laborers, stevedores, and other interested parties at the pristan negotiated deals and made arrangements to move the grain and flour to their next destination. To reach St. Petersburg, cargoes from the surplus-producing provinces of the south and southeast would go first to Rybinsk, Moscow, or Zubtsov and then to Tver, where they would leave the upper Volga and begin the still more difficult and hazardous stage of their long journey. THROUGH RYBINSK

The middle Volga provided transport for a vast and fertile region that encompassed all or parts of the provinces of Nizhnii Novgorod, Simbirsk, Kazan, Saratov, Tambov, and Penza and was accessible from several others. The region’s fertility and the relative ease of transport along its rivers made this the most important of the three main routes to the upper Volga. As agriculture in that region expanded and surpluses increased, so did the volume of traffic and cargo moving upriver to Rybinsk (Rybnaia Sloboda, Rybno). In a normal year the great quantity of grain coming to market in the region served by the middle Volga reduced prices to levels that could seem ridiculously low. In 1778 Ivan Tolchenov noted in his journal that wheat “sold for next to nothing” at Lyskovo and other wharves on the Volga below Nizhnii Novgorod.3 As they shifted more and more of their purchasing from the middle Oka to the middle Volga in the 1770s, the Tolchenovs and others who sought to profit from the region’s abundant supplies and low prices were betting that those factors would outweigh the risks and costs of transporting their goods to market. More often than not they were right, but sometimes they were wrong. In 1777, for example, Ivan Tolchenov recorded that he had failed to turn a profit on seven hundred kuls of rye flour that he had purchased at wharves along the Sura River in the previous year and then sold in St. Petersburg.4 Distance presented the most obvious challenge. Lyskovo, where Tolchenov found wheat so cheap in 1778, lies 500 kilometers downstream from Rybinsk and more than 1,900 kilometers by water from St. Petersburg. Kozmodem’iansk and Cheboksary, wharves that sent 100 to 200 boatloads of grain upriver each year, lie some 200 and 300 kilometers farther downstream from Lyskovo, and Samara, the ultimate town on the Volga from which it was profitable to transport grain and flour to St. Petersburg, is located 1,386 kilometers by water from Rybinsk and more than 2,800 kilometers from St. Petersburg. From Morshansk, a market town on the Tsna River in Tambov Province, grain and flour took an average transportation

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of fifty-six to sixty days to travel 1,067 kilometers via the Tsna, the Moksha, the Oka, and the Volga to Rybinsk, with another 1,440 kilometers still to go before they reached St. Petersburg.5 Distant as those wharves on the Volga and its tributaries were, they served as the collection points for grain transported from villages up to 300 kilometers away.6 As was mentioned previously, grain was often distilled into alcohol or milled into flour to facilitate transport. Because alcohol was easier to transport than grain or even flour, distilling acquired enormous importance in regions beyond or at the fringes of the normal cereals market.7 As the St. Petersburg market advanced farther and farther into the black-earth steppe, the relocation of distilleries moved ahead of it, making use of cheap and otherwise unusable grain. Between 1705 and 1715 the Russian government created or reorganized seven major distilleries along the middle Volga. By the end of the eighteenth century, approximately half of all the alcohol produced in Russia, excluding the Ukraine, came from the four provinces of Kaluga, Riazan, Tambov, and Penza.8 Within those provinces, moreover, the conversion of grain to alcohol occurred most commonly in regions with the poorest access to the Volga or the Oka. From such localities, alcohol could join grain and flour on their way to Moscow or St. Petersburg, and it could also find markets in even more remote regions of the empire along the Don or beyond the Urals. Distilling created additional opportunities for profits and employment. For example, in 1795 the province of Penza contained two large state distilleries and seventy-six smaller private ones. All together, they employed some 3,000 workers and consumed 100,000 chetverts (approximately 14,742 metric tons) of grain each year.9 Ever concerned about the supply of flour to St. Petersburg, the imperial government worried from time to time about the conversion of so much grain to alcohol but did nothing to restrict it.10 As a practical matter, however, distilling provided numerous benefits to the state and to the nobles who ran the state. In the second half of the eighteenth century, revenue from state distilleries, indirect taxes, and leases of the alcohol monopoly to tax farmers produced somewhere between 20 and 27 percent of the government’s annual income.11 Because distilling was concentrated in areas unprofitably placed for transporting grain to market, the trade in alcohol complemented rather than competed with the trade in flour. In the region served by the middle Volga, grain was usually milled near its source, but there were many exceptions. Some of the merchants from the upper Volga, including the Tolchenovs, operated gristmills in their home regions and preferred to purchase unmilled grain at the lower wharves. Merchants buying wheat for shipment overseas also wanted grain rather than flour. As a rule, unmilled grain available at the wharves along the middle Volga came from nearby villages, since producers at a greater distance found flour more convenient and

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economical to transport than grain despite the costs of milling and packing. Not surprisingly, in 1797, the province of Simbirsk, which then lay at the outer limit of the St. Petersburg market, contained more than one thousand wateror wind-driven gristmills. More than six hundred of them belonged to nobles; the rest belonged to peasant societies, individual peasants, and merchants.12 The neighboring province of Penza, home to many distilleries, counted 508 gristmills within its borders.13 Like distilling, milling added value to an inexpensive commodity and provided off-season employment for agricultural workers. Russia’s mills produced flour of varying grades and quality. The Treasury Chamber of Kazan Province reported in 1787 that the flour it had purchased for the Commission on Grain was “fresh flour, suitable for human consumption, with no foul odor, ground dry, with no sand or anything else mixed with it.”14 Another document praised flour from specific villages where the grain was customarily dried in storage barns after being threshed.15 Those qualities and others determined whether a particular batch of flour would trade as a specialty good or a bulk commodity. Specialty flours, whether rye or wheat, went into closely woven bags or sacks and received special handling. Although it was normally transported along with ordinary flour, bagged flour traded differently. It sold in five different grades at premium prices. Tolchenov traded in both kinds of flour, and in some years he recorded substantial or even handsome profits on bagged flour when his profit on ordinary flour was insignificant. In any event, bagged flour constituted only a small though often profitable part of the cereals trade. Ordinary flour went into larger sacks called kuls, which were made of bast, a material that figured prominently in Russian craft production. Bast was made by cutting the inner bark of trees, usually birch or willow, into strips that could be interlaced to make a number of useful items, from shoes to mats to various sorts of containers. In 1713 a decree stipulated that a kul of flour must weigh 7.5 puds (122.85 kg), but by the second half of the eighteenth century, a kul of rye flour was universally assumed to weigh nine puds (147.42 kg), and a kul of wheat flour, ten puds (163.80 kg). At those weights, a kul contained the amount of flour that could be milled from one chetvert of grain.16 A new kul weighed 12 funts (4.91 kg) empty, but by absorbing flour it would eventually weigh as much as 15 funts (6.14 kg). Because bast could not be woven tightly enough to prevent all leakage, a kul lost some flour along the way as it was handled, but that problem tended to correct itself as the kul let in moisture that hardened the surface of the flour. Covered with additional bast mats, flour packed in kuls needed no further protection; it could be stored in piles and transported in open wagons, sledges, and boats. In 1786 the Commission on Grain determined that flour could spend from one to three years in a kul before it began to go bad.17 The greatest advantage of the kul, of course, was its availability and low cost, so low in fact that neither Tolchenov nor the many government officials

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who recorded the costs of supplying flour to St. Petersburg ever mentioned the matter. Even so, the need for many thousands of kuls and bast mats each year provided an unknown number of peasants with off-season employment and additional cash income. For some peasants, building and equipping the thousands of riverboats that carried cargoes through the waterways of European Russia constituted their primary source of income. Within European Russia, the construction of riverboats employed some 20,000 workers in the 1760s and as many as 30,000 by the end of the eighteenth century.18 Those figures do not include the uncounted sail makers, blacksmiths, and others who produced the rigging, ropes, anchors, and so on that constituted 30 to 40 percent of a riverboat’s cost. Since the cereals trade accounted for more than half of all the river traffic in Russia, a comparable share of the money earned by building and equipping riverboats should also be included among that trade’s contributions to the provincial economy. All the vessels carrying cereals and other cargoes along the middle Volga and its tributaries were constructed with sawed planks of pine or fir, but they varied considerably in size and shape. For goods loaded on the Volga itself or on one of its deeper tributaries, the preferred carrier was the rasshiva, a round-bottomed craft that could hold up to 400 metric tons of freight. The government’s shipyards in Kazan built the first rasshiva in 1718, and in 1744 the state tried to standardize the dimensions of a rasshiva by decree. In practice, however, rasshivas varied in length from twenty-one to thirty-six meters and in width from six to ten meters. Fully laden, they drew from one and a half to two meters of water. The distinguishing features of a rasshiva were a round bottom with no keel, a tar-coated hull with a sharp prow, a single deck, and a sail. Such a boat could remain in service from five to eight years, but with each passing year, it carried less freight.19 Several villages in the northern districts of Nizhnii Novgorod and in the still more northerly province of Kostroma specialized in the construction of rasshivas and produced most of those in use on the middle Volga. The major tributaries of the middle Volga produced their own distinctive types of boats. Grain and flour from the provinces of Kazan and Viatka came down the Kama River to the Volga on a much smaller version of the rasshiva called a shitika. A shitika carried less than fifty metric tons of freight and lasted four to six years. From Penza Province, these commodities reached the middle Volga by way of the Sura on boats called suiarki or surski. These resembled rasshivas and carried as much freight, but because they made only one trip to Rybinsk before they were broken up, they were not built to last. They had no roofs and were not tarred. From the shallow Oka, cereals entered the middle Volga at Nizhnii Novgorod on large flat-bottomed boats that otherwise resembled rasshivas. Known generally as strugi (sing., struga), their specific names and sizes varied according to their places of origin. Kaluzhskie (sing., kaluzhka), from the province of Kaluga, were 154

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the largest with a maximum capacity of 655 metric tons and a draft of 146 centimeters. Mokshany (sing., mokshana) and kolomenki (sing., kolomenka), from the province of Tambov, carried up to 590 metric tons and drew even less water, and orlovtsy (sing., orlovets), from Orel, which were even smaller. All these lasted an average of four to five years. The smaller flat-bottomed boats, such as the barka, the kolomenka, and the gusianka, that dominated shallower waterways also appeared on the middle Volga, but their commercial role was overshadowed by that of the larger types of river craft. By the end of the eighteenth century, a fully rigged and fitted rasshiva cost up to 3,000 rubles; a shitika or a struga cost 2,000 to 2,500 rubles.20 Some of the merchants shipping grain and flour to Rybinsk owned their own boats, but most hired boats and crews under contract.21 The Regulation on Merchant Shipping of 1781 required boat owners to conclude written contracts with those who hired them and to register the signed contract with a broker at the trading wharf where the boat was to be loaded.22 Shippers normally charged merchants by the kul or chetvert according to the distance from the particular wharf to Rybinsk. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, when rye flour cost 8.10 rubles per kul in St. Petersburg, shippers were charging 0.55 rubles per kul to transport flour from Nizhnii Novgorod to Rybinsk and 1.20 rubles to do so from Simbirsk.23 Along the middle Volga, handling and shipping were sufficiently dependable and regularized that Tolchenov folded them into his purchase price and used the resulting “Rybinsk price” to calculate his profits and losses. Every boat carrying cargo to Rybinsk needed a pilot and two or more sailors (vodolivy). The Regulation on Merchant Shipping of 1781 stipulated that pilots and sailors were to be hired with written contracts that specified their duties and compensation, and it required anyone seeking employment in either capacity to be officially registered as a certified professional in his trade. Pilots, who might well be the owners of the boats, directed navigation. Sailors, who were required to know carpentry, handled the physical operation and maintenance of the boat, supervised the handling and storage of cargo, and directed the unskilled laborers (burlaki), whose principal task was to tow the boat whenever the sail could not be used. On the middle Volga and its tributaries, a riverboat needed three burlaks for every 100 kuls of cargo, which meant that a rasshiva carrying a reasonable load of 2,000 kuls of rye flour from Nizhnii Novgorod to Rybinsk would have needed at least sixty laborers. At the end of the eighteenth century, a boat owner charging a merchant 1,100 rubles would have paid out 664 rubles in wages to the crew (see table 13).24 Significant merchants, such as Tolchenov, frequently hired several boats at a time to transport large shipments of grain and flour. Then they would either accompany the shipment in person or send a trusted steward to act on their behalf. When that was the case, the merchant or merchant’s representative retained much of the responsibility that would otherwise have fallen to the crew transportation

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Table 13. Wages paid per trip to Rybinsk, circa 1800 Wharf of origin

Pilot

Sailor

Laborer

Nizhnii Novgorod

30

17

10

Lyskovo or Rabotki

40

20

13

Cheboksary, Kozlov, or Viazovka

45

22

14

Kazan, Ten’kova, or Spaskiii

50

25

18

Chistopol, Tetiusha, Laisheva, or Alekseevskii

52

26

20

Simbirsk or Novodevichii

55

30

25

Khvalynsk or Volsk

60

40

33

Elabuga, Sarapul, or Mamadysha

57

30

28

Promzino

50

25

20

Morshansk

120

50

15

Orel

150

60

28

Source: RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 10.

and managed various aspects of the trip in conjunction with them. This person might, for example, decide to hire additional laborers, pay bribes, or make other expenditures to avoid delays and speed the shipment along its way. Delay could be costly. Many of the shallower streams and tributaries leading to the middle Volga were navigable only at the time of the spring flood. On the Oka, the upper Volga, and the waterways from the upper Volga to St. Petersburg, a summer drought could stall progress for weeks at a time and prevent shipments originating at distant wharves from reaching St. Petersburg before the November freeze. For those reasons, loading began as soon as boats could tie up at the wharf. Laborers carried and hoisted kuls and sacks of flour into the hold and covered them with bast mats. For loose grain, they laid bast mats over the rough cargo deck, poured the grain directly onto them, and then covered the top with another layer of mats. Once all the cargo was onboard, the boats pushed off from the busy wharves in rapid succession. Launched within the space of a few days of one another, boats from the same wharf or same tributary tended to stay clustered throughout much of the journey, forming informal “caravans” that shared hospitality, information, and assistance. 156

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Under sail, grain boats could advance up the Volga at a rate of eight kilometers an hour. Much of the time, however, they had to rely on the muscle power of the burlaks to tow them upstream. Tow ropes from the boat were fastened to leather straps that the burlaks placed across their chests. Leaning into the straps, they moved along a prepared towpath (bechevnik) on the riverbank and dragged the boat behind them while the sailors tended the ropes and the pilot worked to keep the boat from running aground. Under tow a fully loaded grain boat could make one to one and a half kilometers an hour, or sixteen to twenty-four kilometers a day.25 The historians N. L. Rubinshtein, N. I. Pavlenko, and E. G. Istomina all estimate the total number of burlaks employed along the middle Volga and its tributaries in the last quarter of the eighteenth century at somewhat lower than 200,000.26 The number employed towing cereals to Rybinsk was obviously much smaller. Three different sources tell us that a grain boat required at least three burlaks for every 900–1,000 puds (14.74 to 16.38 metric tons) of freight.27 If so, then the annual delivery of 4.5 million puds of cereals grain and flour to Rybinsk in 1780–1784 would have required no fewer than 15,000 burlaks, and the estimated delivery of more than 11,548,000 puds by 1811 would have required at least 34,644.28 Those estimates are absolute minimums. The actual numbers would almost certainly have been higher, and the imaginable maximums, almost twice as high. Unlike teamsters and stevedores, who had finished their tasks by the start of the spring plowing, burlaks could be away from home for most or even all of the agricultural season. Some authors claim that burlaks came from the poorest stratum of peasants and that a significant but undetermined percentage were runaways estranged from their native villages.29 Lacking any other livelihood, such men congregated on the trading wharves in late winter and sold their labor at organized hirings called “burlatskie bazary.” In most cases, either before or after being hired, they would join other workers to form cooperative work gangs (arteli) that organized and distributed roles, responsibilities, food, and other aspects of life and labor. In other cases, however, burlaks are known to have organized themselves in artels in their villages in wintertime and to have negotiated employment with boat owners or stewards recruiting workers before the start of the navigation season. In such cases, the men who took up the occupation (burlachestvo) were most likely redundant workers whose families did not need their labor in the fields as much as they needed cash to meet their monetary obligations. Such a motive would explain why so many burlaks came from the provinces of Penza and Simbirsk, where grain was plentiful, easy to grow, and extremely cheap.30 From the opening of navigation in April until some time in July, boats encountered few problems ascending the middle Volga. The first boats from Nizhnii Novgorod and other nearby wharves normally arrived in Rybinsk in May transportation

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after as little as three weeks on the water. The first grain caravans from the Sura and the Oka entered the Volga in May and reached Rybinsk sometime in June. Grain caravans from more distant wharves continued to arrive throughout the summer, interspersed with caravans carrying salt, iron, and other cargoes. From July to September bigger, fully laden boats could find their passage up the middle Volga impeded by occasional shallows and sandbars that caused them to off-load part of their cargoes on to smaller boats, called pauski, and then reload beyond the shoal. At any time of year, boats on the middle Volga faced the additional and far more serious threat of being caught by a sudden storm in deep, open water. Tolchenov recorded the damage created by such a storm in April 1778 when one surprised a caravan of grain boats near Nizhnii Novgorod. His boats escaped unharmed, but thirty-six others sank, including four belonging to his uncle Ivan Il’ich and carrying 2,300 kuls of rye flour and “much wheat.”31 Grain and flour, especially rye flour dominated the river trade to Rybinsk. An isolated record for 1780 provides some rare and reasonably reliable data on the variety and dimension of the commercial traffic reaching Rybinsk from the lower wharves. Between April and November of that year, 1,328 cargo-carrying vessels arrived in Rybinsk: 115 “big boats,” 476 rasshivas, 333 kolomenkas, 334 barks, 40 half-barks, and 30 “small boats.” Together they carried more than 70,000 metric tons of rye flour, over 35,000 metric tons of iron, more than 30,000 metric tons of salt, some 7,000 metric tons of wheat, around 3,500 metric tons of rye, more than 3,000 metric tons of oats, some 850 metric tons of tallow, and over 950,000 liters of spirits, along with smaller quantities of other goods and commodities.32 By 1800 the number of arrivals from downstream had risen to an estimated 2,000; by 1811, to an estimated 2,500. For the latter year, the author of the anonymous description of Rybinsk estimated the quantity of rye flour at 147,420 metric tons, wheat flour at 2,457 metric tons, rye at some 9,800 metric tons, wheat at some 49,000 metric tons, fine flour at 491 metric tons, salt at 49,140 metric tons, and iron at 24,570 metric tons.33 Because Rybinsk stood on the dividing line between the deeper, broader waters of the middle Volga and the shallower, narrower course of the upper Volga, the rasshivas, strugas, and other large grain boats coming up the Volga had to stop there and unload their cargoes. Uncongenial to large transports pulled by men, the shallow waters of the upper Volga beyond Rybinsk required small, flat-bottomed vessels pulled by horses. Before 1809, all of the large and most of the small boats from the lower wharves ended their journey at Rybinsk. Even the minority of small boats that continued on toward St. Petersburg had to stop at Rybinsk to hire horses and unload at least some of their freight, for, as the anonymous description of 1810 put it, “above Rybinsk it is the depth of the water, not the vessel, that determines the carrying capacity.”34 In 1781, writing to Catherine II in his capacity as director of water communications, Jakob Sivers called Rybinsk “the second most important point of 158

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internal navigation after Vyshnii Volochek.”35 He in fact meant both the town of Rybinsk and several villages and wharves along the Volga and its tributary the Sheksna that lay outside the town. Government officials thought of them as one commercial complex, but the local inhabitants did not. In 1766 the merchants of Rybnaia Sloboda, as Rybinsk was called before it became an officially designated town, protested the commercial activities of peasants and others who were not members of the its urban commune, or posad. They asked that the boundaries of the settlement be extended to accommodate the growing volume of trade and that all extramural commerce be terminated.36 In 1777 the imperial government made Rybinsk a district town and extended its boundaries, but the ever-increasing number of boats that arrived each year generated commerce at a level beyond the handling capacity of the town, which had only 3,000 permanent residents and 243 registered merchants by the first decade of the nineteenth century. For that reason, crews needing only to transfer cargo to smaller vessels or store it over the winter normally docked at villages and trading wharves outside the town limits. Such cases included all the boats carrying iron and salt, as well as those carrying grain and flour with a predetermined destination. The town of Rybinsk, however, served as a commercial center for the cereals trade, providing facilities where grain and flour moving up the Volga could be bought and sold, sorted, rearranged, and sometimes processed before moving on to various destinations in northern Russia. In 1771 Tolchenov’s father bought more than 3,000 kuls of rye flour in Rybinsk, which was also where, in 1775, Tolchenov himself sold 840 of the 2,900 chetverts of wheat he had purchased in Orel and Promzino.37 By 1811 Rybinsk was accommodating such activities with its two covered markets built of stone, the greater parts of which were occupied by grain and flour dealers, and fifty-nine warehouses for storing grain and flour. Just outside the boundaries of the town lay two malting houses for rye and barley and five masonry flour mills.38 All this commerce created a corresponding demand for labor. In addition to the 140,000 to 160,000 burlaks who arrived over the course of the summer, many thousands of peasants came to greater Rybinsk to find seasonal employment as stevedores and teamsters. Feeding them created employment for others in the shops and stalls selling bread and other foodstuffs along the banks of the Volga. Less numerous but better paid were the uncounted numbers of millers, carpenters, blacksmiths, boat builders, and other skilled workers who settled in and around the town. A small portion of the goods arriving in Rybinsk from the lower wharves would be consumed in the city and the surrounding region, and another small portion would be sent overland in winter to Vologda for eventual shipment down the Northern Dvina to Archangel. Before 1809, all the rest had to be loaded on to small shallow-draft vessels capable of traversing the upper Volga and its tributaries. In 1780, the one year for which reliable, detailed figures are transportation

159

available, the wharves in and near Rybinsk sent to St. Petersburg 2,189 boats carrying 163,800 metric tons of freight worth 5 million rubles.39 Those figures do not include shipments destined for towns along the waterways leading to the capital or those headed up the Sheksna, the Mologa, and other important tributaries of the Volga. As the volume of trade increased steadily and significantly after 1780, so did the demand for boats. Upstream from Rybinsk, the dominant river craft was a crude flat-bottomed vessel called a bark (barka). Since boats crossing the divide at Vyshnii Volochek could not make a return trip, these barks were built with the expectation that they would be broken up for firewood at the end of their first journey. Constructed of rough-hewn fir logs joined by fir pegs, barks resembled rafts with straight sides about one and a half meters high, blunt bows and sterns, and short decks fore and aft. A long tree trunk trimmed at one end served as a tiller or steering oar, and a wooden scoop hung from a crossbar served as a bailer. Most barks had at least one rude mast fitted with cheap bast sails for moving with the wind. Their dimensions varied somewhat, but the imposition of stiff fines at Vyshnii Volochek on barks longer than seventeen sazhens (36.3 meters) or wider than four sazhens (8.5 meters) set limits that became the norm throughout northern Russia.40 Simple and crude, a bark needed only seventy to seventy-five centimeters of water to transport up to 1,000 kuls of flour, the equivalent of 147 metric tons. The shallow waterways between Rybinsk and St. Petersburg, however, seldom permitted loads that large, and so barks normally carried less than a full load.41 Though many were finished and rigged in Rybinsk, most barks were constructed upstream along the upper Volga and its northern tributaries, where forests predominated over agriculture and whole villages specialized in their construction. The other side of the coin, of course, was the intensified exploitation of Russia’s timber resources. The imperial government understood the problem and tried—ineffectually—to soften boatbuilding’s impact on the forests. To conserve wood, Peter I enacted a requirement that all riverboats be constructed of sawed planks rather than whole or hewn logs and imposed penalties of up to two hundred rubles for the first violation and ten years in Siberia for a second.42 The government repeated Peter’s requirement many times during the next half century, sometimes annually, but enforcement yielded to Russia’s burgeoning need for riverboats. Sporadic attempts to enforce the law contributed to rising prices and potential shortages, especially of rye flour, in St. Petersburg.43 In 1781 the Regulation on Merchant Shipping once again stipulated that all riverboats were to be constructed with sawed planks.44 In that same year, however, the government closed the provincial offices charged with supervising the building of riverboats and allowed enforcement to lapse. At the same time, it exempted state peasants engaged in the construction of riverboats from the fee charged for cutting timber in state forests.45 The subsequent Regulation on Forests of March 13, 1785, provided detailed rules for managing state forests and conserving timber, 160

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but boatbuilding retained its priority as the state’s more urgent concern.46 By 1800 the number of barks delivering goods to St. Petersburg required the annual felling of some 1,200,000 trees, but since barks were broken up for firewood after their arrival in St. Petersburg, in effect they replaced an equivalent number of trees that would have otherwise been felled to heat buildings in the city.47 Between 1760 and 1811, the growing demand for boats and the diminishing supply of accessible timber caused the price of boats to rise more rapidly than the price of cereals did and thus contributed to the rising cost of flour in St. Petersburg. In 1783 A. R. Vorontsov, writing as the president of the Commerce College, reported that the price of a bark on the upper Volga had risen from 25–35 rubles in the 1740s to 110–120 rubles by 1783 and was continuing to rise at the rate of 10–15 rubles each year.48 At that rate, the rising cost of barks would have added only 1.5 to 2.3 kopecks each year to the price of a kul of rye flour in St. Petersburg, but over the fifty-year period ending in 1811, that would have amounted to 0.75 to 1.15 rubles, a small but significant contributor to the rising cost of flour and bread that troubled officials in the capital. In fact it was and still is impossible to determine the price of a bark in any given year. Even though prices trended sharply higher overall, as Vorontsov observed, the market, the season, local conditions, and special arrangements caused them to fluctuate widely even within a given year. A study of the cereals trade conducted by the government in the early nineteenth century found that at the time of the spring thaw, barks purchased on the open market cost up to 30 percent more than those that had been ordered, constructed, and delivered under contracts concluded in advance, and the description of Rybinsk written in 1810 reported that the price of a bark ranged between 250 and 400 rubles at times of peak demand but fell to 150 rubles or less toward the end of the navigation season.49 On at least one occasion speculators also managed to drive up the price of barks by cornering the market in a given area. In the winter of 1770–1771 a merchant from Rybinsk by the name of Popov and several associates bought all the barks in the Rybinsk region and then resold them at prices that other merchants found exorbitant. A governmental inquiry concluded that they had done nothing illegal.50 Beyond Rybinsk, a bark needed a team of ten horses to pull it through the shallow waters of the upper Volga. From the opening of navigation in April until midsummer, a bark could traverse the 367 kilometers to Tver in one to two weeks. The only serious impediment at that time lay at the mouth of the Mologa, where floodwaters could submerge the towpath and force the barks to wait at anchor or move forward with the aid of poles. From midsummer until autumn, low water slowed and in many years halted progress for weeks at a time. Any delay of that sort was likely to keep shipments from reaching St. Petersburg before the end of navigation in October or November and force them to winter over along the waterway, and that in turn could block the movement of barks transportation

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setting out from Rybinsk in the spring of the following year. In 1773 the newly organized Directorate of Water Communications began blasting and digging a channel through the more than thirty shoals and shallows that lay between Rybinsk and Tver and removing a number of large rocks and other hazards. Those efforts ultimately facilitated the movement of barks and enabled them to carry more cargo, but low water—often as little as thirty-six centimeters, or fourteen inches—still brought movement to a halt in July and August.51 Many of the smaller rivers that fed the upper Volga also powered gristmills where merchants who had purchased unmilled grain at wharves downstream converted it to flour on the southern side of the divide. The topographical description of the Kashin district of Tver composed in the early 1780s noted, “The Kashinka and other rivers are dammed for flour mills, and the mills return a sufficient profit to their owners.”52 In most cases the “owners” referred to in the document did not in fact own the mills they operated. They leased them from the nobles, monasteries, town magistracies, and state agencies that held title to the land and all the structures built on it. Under long-term contracts, they paid a fixed annual rent, ran the mill, assumed the risks, and absorbed the profits or losses. According to the topographical description, the millers they employed earned twenty to thirty rubles a year, which was about five rubles more than the local carpenters who constructed barks.53 The significant grain merchants who operated gristmills on the tributaries of the upper Volga in the second half of the eighteenth century included the Pirogovs of Tver, the Popovs of Rybinsk, and the Tolchenovs of Dmitrov. From 1761 until 1794, the Tolchenovs leased a gristmill on the Medveditsa River in the Kashin district on land belonging to the Shirinskii Monastery. In 1775 they abandoned the mill they had long leased from the town magistracy of Dmitrov and acquired a second mill on the Medveditsa on land belonging to Prince S. M. Golitsyn.54 Their decision reflected the shift in purchasing that they made at approximately the same time: whereas the mill in Dmitrov had processed grain transported to the upper Volga overland through the Moscow region, the two mills on the Medveditsa could more easily accommodate the increasing amounts of grain they were shipping from the middle Volga. Until the 1790s, when he failed to renew the leases, Ivan Tolchenov made regular use of the “medveditskie mills” in the annual routine of his business operations. Having purchased both grain and flour at the lower wharves, he would have the flour shipped directly from Rybinsk to St. Petersburg but divert the wheat and rye to his mills. If the milling went quickly, the bags of fine flour and kuls of ordinary flour and bran would be reloaded and shipped to St. Petersburg later the same year; if not, they would be wintered over at the mill and shipped the following spring. Although less is known about mills belonging to other grain merchants, available evidence indicates that they functioned in the same manner as Tolchenov’s.55

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THROUGH MOSCOW

Many of the barks that entered the upper Volga from wharves along its southern shore carried cereals from the basin of the Oka and its southern tributaries, a region that encompassed all or parts of the provinces of Orel, Tula, and Riazan and could be reached by winter roads from the upper basins of the Desna and the Don in the provinces of Kursk and Voronezh. With access to Moscow via the Oka and the Moskva, that region had long served as the granary of the old capital. By the second half of the seventeenth century, its producers and Moscow’s consumers had already developed the kind of symbiotic relationship that St. Petersburg and the mid-Volga region would form in the following century.56 Lying at the head of navigation on the Oka, the town of Orel received grain and flour from a vast territory to the south and west that had no other access to markets. Orel’s merchants and to a lesser degree those of Kaluga dominated the cereals trade along the Oka. Describing Orel in his agricultural atlas of 1810, Ziablovskii wrote, “The location of the town in grain-growing country and in the presence of navigable rivers gives it great advantages, and it might call itself the granary of both capitals.”57 In the 1720s and 1730s rye and rye flour accounted for most of the cereals loaded at the wharf in Orel. Most of these goods went directly to the city of Moscow, where they were either consumed or redirected to other destinations. By the 1780s wheat had surpassed rye as the leading commodity shipped from Orel, and despite the presence of 979 mills in the province of Orel, all the wheat was shipped unmilled (see table 14). By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, 200 to 250 boats a year left the wharf at Orel, carrying not only grain and flour but also hemp, hempseed oil, lard, wax, and other goods. Most were strugas, tarred, flat-bottomed vessels with regional variations. Those loaded at Orel were commonly known as orlovetses. They were smaller and drew less water than the mokshanas commonly found on the lower Oka and its tributaries, but different sources give different figures for their draft and carrying capacity, figures that range from 72 to 150 for draft and 164 to 491 metric tons for capacity. Most were built in the village of Dedinovo, which lay on the Oka near the mouth of the Moskva, and brought to Orel empty in the autumn. Fully equipped, an orlovets cost about 2,200 rubles in 1801 and lasted four to five years. The only other boats normally loaded in Orel were barks identical to those used on the upper Volga and capable of carrying a maximum of 147 metric tons while needing only one meter or so of water.58 Despite their shallow draft, such vessels could depart from Orel only in the spring and autumn and then only with periodic releases of water from reservoirs upstream. The imperial government ignored repeated petitions from Orel’s merchants for improvements to the waterways, leaving the town struggling to increase its trade at a time when demand in the north and supply in the south transportation

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Table 14. Grain and Flour loaded at the wharf in Orel, 1784–1786 (in chetverts) 1784

1785a

1786

Wheat

111,274

41,131

146,978

Rye

28,951

25,265

13,441

Rye flour

37,719

37,119

34,749

Total

177,944

103,515

195,168

Source: These figures were compiled from data collected by the Commission on Grain, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 411, l. 324. a

A crop failure occurred in 1785.

were both rising rapidly.59 Shipments from Orel remained steady or increased moderately, but Orel’s share of the cereals trade along the upper and middle Oka declined from 75 percent in the 1730s to approximately 10 percent by 1811–1813. Wharves downstream at Mtsensk, Kaluga, Serpukhov, Aleksin, and other towns handled most of the additional shipping, though none surpassed Orel in total volume.60 With the help of sails and oars, fully laden boats could move down the Oka with relative ease in the spring and autumn. By late spring, however, shallowing water forced them to reduce the amount of cargo they carried, and by June it brought their progress to a halt. Then began the mezhen’, an interval lasting as long as four months, when nothing moved along the river and carts could ford it at will. Struggling to complete their passage as the water level dropped, merchants often had to pay unexpectedly large sums to teamsters and burlaks eager to profit from their plight. At Kolomna most boats carrying grain and flour down the Oka turned into the Moskva and headed upstream toward Moscow, 148 kilometers away. Others continued down the Oka to Nizhnii Novgorod, 806 kilometers away, and joined the traffic moving up the Volga to Rybinsk. The reasons behind this choice remain a mystery. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Ziablovskii surmised that such decisions depended on prices, but since all merchants were operating with the same set of prices, additional considerations must have played a role.61 The decision may have hinged on merchants’ information about current prices or their calculations of future prices. Some had probably contracted to deliver their wares to a specific destination well ahead of time. In some cases the decision may have depended on the merchant’s hometown or intention to use a particular mill. After entering the Moskva, cereals cargoes from the Oka were dispersed and reorganized. Rye flour proceeded all the way to the head of navigation on the Moskva, to the cereals market on Bolotnaia Square across the river from the 164

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Kremlin. Unmilled rye and wheat might also pass through that market, or they might be unloaded at wharves along the way, but sooner or later they would go to one of the many gristmills operating in the Moscow region. A description of Moscow in 1785 noted this process: “The wheat that arrives here is converted by mills in nearby districts into fine flour with which almost the entire realm is supplied. This processing constitutes a noteworthy trade belonging almost uniquely to Moscow because they rarely process wheat into flour in other towns, and then in small quantities.”62 Carts and sledges transported flour destined for St. Petersburg from the mills to a wharf on a tributary of the upper Volga. Although Peter I had considered creating a canal between the Moskva and the Volga, serious work on it did not begin until 1825. Instead, grain, flour, and other goods destined for St. Petersburg proceeded overland by one of two routes. The first passed through the appropriately named town of Khlebnikov (khleb can mean “bread,” “grain,” or “cereals”) and then followed the Iakhroma River to Dmitrov, some sixty kilometers from Moscow. The Iakhroma had been navigable in the distant past, a fact that probably explains the presence of the Tolchenovs and other grain merchants in Dmitrov, but by the eighteenth century it had become too shallow for commercial use. Merchants occasionally petitioned the government to dredge the river, but nothing came of their efforts. Instead, goods went overland through Dmitrov to Rogachevsksaia Pristan, a wharf on the Sestra, thirty-five kilometers beyond Dmitrov.63 From there barks launched in the spring could float downstream another thirty-five kilometers to the upper Volga and join others moving up that river to Tver. The other route followed the Moscow–St. Petersburg highway to the Shoshinskaia Pristan, a wharf on the Shosha River 115 kilometers northwest of Moscow. At a cost of four to five kopecks per pud in the 1780s, merchants could transport goods to that wharf during the winter, load them on barks brought up the Sosha River from the upper Volga in the spring, and embark at the end of May or the beginning of June. For twice that amount, merchants could also transport their goods all the way from Moscow to Tver, which lay forty-eight kilometers farther along the same road. That alternative offered a slightly reduced cost of shipping to help balance the greater cost of overland carriage, but more important, it offered the promise of earlier delivery and potentially higher prices.64 The same calculation would explain why this route outstripped the route through Dmitrov over the course of the eighteenth century. THROUGH ZUBTSOV

Between 1715 and 1719 Peter I opened a third route by which grain and flour could be transported to the upper Volga and onward to St. Petersburg. He ordered his officials to construct a trading wharf and warehouses at Gzhatsk, 160 kilometers west of Moscow, and to create a boat way from that wharf along the transportation

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rivers Gzhat and Vazuza to the upper Volga at Zubtsov.65 In 1719, with those works completed, Peter ordered his agents to move the markets in the neighboring district of Mozhaisk to Gzhatsk and to publicize the new trading wharf widely so that more grain dealers would bring their wares to Gzhatsk and send them by boat to St. Petersburg.66 The new route thus enabled St. Petersburg to tap the agricultural resources of the fertile region southwest of Moscow that included the provinces of Kaluga, Orel, and Kursk, and the northern reaches of Chernigov, Kharkov and Poltava.67 At the same time, it offered producers and merchants access to the northern market. For some it provided the only access; for others it provided an alternative route to St. Petersburg that could be cheaper, faster, and more profitable than the route down the Oka. Tolchenov’s memoir illustrates the alternatives available for shipping grain from the Oka Basin. In 1770 his family purchased 7,500 kuls of rye flour in Orel, paying 1.40 to 1.60 rubles a kul for it. For an additional 50 kopecks per kul, they had 4,500 kuls hauled overland to Gzhatsk to be loaded on ten barks destined for St. Petersburg. They loaded the remaining 3,000 kuls of rye flour and small quantities of other cereals commodities on three strugas at Orel and sent them down the Oka to Rybinsk. In some years the Tolchenovs also shipped their goods from Orel through Moscow, but Tolchenov provides no information about the considerations that prompted them to choose one route over another.68 The Tolchenovs, moreover, were not alone in doing this. In 1785 merchants transporting grain and flour from Orel sent all their wheat and most of their rye flour down the Oka, but they sent more than half their rye overland to Gzhatsk.69 Gzhatsk could not handle large volumes of cereals. The shallowness of the Gzhat and Vazuza rivers, which led to the upper Volga, restricted commercial traffic to a period of two to four weeks at the time of the spring thaw in late March and early April. To meet that challenge, barks were constructed and loaded directly on the ice at Gzhatsk and readied to move as soon as it began to break. Even so, Gzhatsk could load and launch no more than one hundred or so barks a year, and cereals had to compete for space with hemp, a valuable cash crop and export commodity produced in abundance in the empire’s western and southwestern provinces. Because shipping space at Gzhatsk was limited, many sledges delivered their loads directly to Zubtsov, at the confluence of the Vazuza and the Volga, or to the neighboring town of Rzhev. The topographical description of Zubtsov produced in 1783–1784 remarked on this activity: “The location of the wharf is most advantageous because it lies at the mouth of the Vazuza River where barks are built and can be loaded on dry land that is flooded in springtime and encourages merchants to bring their goods to this wharf on winter roads.”70 Most of the merchants who traded at the wharf in Zubtsov resided in Rzhev, twenty kilometers farther up the Volga, where the land was less marshy and the air more salubrious. In 1761, 1,826 merchants registered themselves in Rzhev, while only 219 regis166

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tered themselves in Zubtsov. Among those registered in Rzhev were sixty-three first guild merchants who traded “at the port” and possessed 299,800 rubles of capital, an impressive figure for the time.71 In 1783, after a reform of merchant registration, 1,475 merchants were listed for Rzhev but only 121 for Zutsov.72 The merchants of both towns made their living supplying cereals commodities and hemp to St. Petersburg. They often cooperated with one another, encouraged not only by their common business interests but also by adherence to Old Belief, which was notably strong in both communities. In 1768 the province’s governor reported that the merchants of Rzhev had pooled their capital to create a fund of 200,000 rubles to purchase grain and hemp in the Ukraine.73 In a joint petition to the Senate in 1767, the merchants of Rzhev and Zubtsov explained, “All their goods and trade, partly hemp and partly cereals[,] go down the river through Tver and Novgorod to St. Petersburg.”74 In addition to the merchants, many other inhabitants of Rzhev and Zubtsov earned at least part of their livings from the waterway: carting, hauling timber, building barks, or working as laborers on the boats. The topographical description of 1782 mentioned such workers: “Even before the thaw they go in crowds to Gzhatsk and there, having settled on barks, they float to Tver whence they return once more on foot to the Gzhat and go again to Tver, and in a good spring they do this three or four times. At that time a worker who made three such trips could earn four rubles in a season.”75 From Gzhatsk, Rzhev, and Zubtsov, barks could float downstream to Tver in three to six days. Arriving in April, just as the waterways between Tver and St. Petersburg began to open, they could set out for the capital with little or no delay and be among the first to deliver new supplies of flour. Therein lay the importance of the route through Zubtsov. Although the grain and flour it shipped to St. Petersburg could not begin to match the volume of those coming through Rybinsk or through the wharves in Moscow Province, they entered the market when supplies were at their lowest and prices at their peak. Only cereals merchants who had stored goods along the waterways between Tver and St. Petersburg over the winter and those who had purchased them in that grain-deficient region could deliver flour to the capital at that crucial time, and because their costs were greater, they could not reap the same profit. Each year the imperial government waited anxiously for news that the caravan from the “upper wharves” had reached Tver and then followed its progress through the waterways leading to the capital. A final comparison illustrates the unique advantage of the route through Gzhatsk and Zubtsov. As was discussed previously, in July 1775, when the imperial government ordered the governors of Voronezh and Kazan to provide rye flour for the Provisions Chancellery, the governors replied that it would not reach St. Petersburg before autumn 1776 at the earliest. In November 1785, however, when the government ordered the governor-general of Orel to provide rye flour for the St. Petersburg granary, he replied that he would have it sent to transportation

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Gzhatsk during the winter and arrange for it to go on the first barks from that wharf and arrive in St. Petersburg in May or early June.76 FROM TVER TO ST. PETERSBURG

At Tver the various routes by which grain and flour reached the upper Volga converged into a single passage over the divide at Vyshnii Volochek and onward to St. Petersburg. Sledges brought goods to Tver throughout the winter, followed in the early spring by barks from Zubtsov, Rzhev, Gzhatsk, and other wharves upstream and then by barks from Rybinsk, after which came those from wharves farther and farther downstream, the procession continuing until the close of navigation in October or November. Some of the individuals in charge of those goods stopped in Tver to process or transfer their cargoes or to wait out the winter, and others hastened on, but they all had to make preparations for the next leg of their journey. As the traffic through Tver increased with the growth of St. Petersburg, the city flourished. From 3,300 permanent inhabitants of both sexes in 1709, its population grew to some 10,000 by 1762 and 15,095 by 1782.77 After the disastrous fire of 1763, government architects directed the planning and reconstruction of Tver as a model for other provincial towns. The state erected palaces and public buildings; prosperous merchants built substantial masonry houses and opened commercial enterprises. According to the topographical description prepared in 1782, the total trade of Tver’s 3,838 merchants and its 2,401 simple townsmen (meshchane) was worth 1,034,847 rubles.78 Most of that money derived in some way from the shipping of goods to St. Petersburg. According to the same topographical description, 57 families engaged in wholesale trade, “buying hemp and grain . . . and sending it to the port of St. Petersburg.” Another 127 families owned factories and processing plants, including six gristmills, thirteen malting houses, and a ropewalk. Another 365 owned shops that sold fabrics, hardware, bread, foodstuffs, and alcohol. Below the merchantry, 462 of the 754 families registered as artisans earned their income as blacksmiths and another 47 did so as bakers. The city had three trading wharves surrounded by warehouses.79 The topographical description found the peasants in the surrounding province to be fairly prosperous despite a remarkably low ratio of agricultural land to population because they earned income from craft production and other nonagricultural employments. It identified horse driving and carting as the greatest occupation outside of agriculture, but it also noted that “many” peasants worked at wind- and watermills, while the inhabitants of twenty-two villages specialized in building barks.80 Although the topographical description failed to mention it, 700 residents of Tver Province—economic peasants and nobles’ serfs as well as townsmen—were officially registered as river pilots.81 Until 1809 the only continuous water passage between the Volga and St. Pe168

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tersburg began at Tver. Running 980 kilometers, it led barks through a series of rivers, lakes, and canals that were far more difficult and dangerous to navigate than any of the waterways used to bring goods to Tver. Because the capital depended so heavily on the waterways between Tver and St. Petersburg, the imperial government gave them more attention and resources than any others in Russia and worked to reduce the hazards and bottlenecks that impeded the flow of goods on them. Peter I created the Ladoga Canal and an agency to run it, he granted the works at Vyshnii Volochek to Mikhail Serdiukov as a concession, and he created offices at the rapids on the Msta and Volkhov to assist boats in their passage. A second round of improvements began in the 1760s amid increasing complaints from merchants and intensified concern about the volume of goods reaching the capital. The government responded by authorizing and financing a series of expensive improvements that lasted well into the next century. In November 1773 Catherine II appointed Jakob Sievers, the governor of Novgorod, to lead the Directorate of Water Communications and gave him authority over the upper Volga and all the waterways between it and the Ladoga Canal.82 Until his resignation in 1781, Sievers combined that role with his post as governor of Novgorod and then as governor-general of Novgorod and Tver, as did his successors, Ia. A. Bruce (1782–1784) and N. P. Arkharov (1784–1797). In 1798 Paul replaced the directorate with the greatly expanded Department of Water Communications, with Sievers as its chief director, and effectively ended that organization’s connection to the governor-generalship of the northwestern provinces. Through those agencies the imperial government maintained the canals and repaired their locks; it augmented and regulated the flow and depth of water in shallow passages; it removed rocks and cleared passages through rapids; it created towpaths; and at times, it organized and directed traffic. Those efforts ultimately reduced the dangers and delays and increased the carrying capacity of the waterways connecting the upper Volga with the Neva. As a result, the number of boats arriving in St. Petersburg and the quantity of goods they delivered increased from one decade to the next. Before the 1760s, boats leaving Tver encountered serious delays ascending the Tvertsa River to the divide at Vyshnii Volochek, 180 kilometers upstream. Ten horses led by four teamsters—the same numbers needed on the upper Volga— could pull a bark through the easy stretches when there was sufficient water, but the Tvertsa had many trouble spots that required additional horsepower. A government survey in 1765 reported that the Tvertsa contained eighteen rapids and seven sand spits.83 Fifteen to twenty-five horses could pull a loaded bark through the rapids, but up to sixty horses and a hundred men might be required to pull one fully loaded bark across a sandbar when the river was low.84 Such an effort cost money and time, as did the other available solution, which was to hire additional boats and lighten loads. At some point in the summer, however, the water transportation

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level would fall below the 70 centimeters needed to float a bark carrying cargo, and all movement would stop for weeks on end. Low water also created an excessive demand for horses and workers that deprived the next caravan of the help it needed even when the water level rose again. Until the late 1770s, delays and stoppages in the dry summer months forced many barks to spend seven to eight weeks traversing the 180 kilometers from Tver to Vyshnii Volochek. Their slow progress usually prevented the autumn caravan, including boats carrying iron from the Urals, from crossing the divide before the waters froze. In 1774 such delays forced 1,277 barks to winter over in the Tvertsa, blocking the progress of the spring caravan from Gzhatsk and the upper Volga.85 By then improvements were already under way. In the 1760s the Senate, worried about St. Petersburg’s ever-increasing demand for supplies, approved several recommendations for augmenting the flow of the Tvertsa. On the advice of hydroengineers, it authorized the construction of dams on several tributaries of the Tvertsa. It also approved the creation of reservoirs to collect water along the divide so that it could be used to work the locks at Vyshnii Volochek and then be released into the Tvertsa. In the 1770s employees of the Directorate of Water Communications began to organize the caravans ascending the Tvertsa and coordinate their movement with the release of water into the river. By 1781 those improvements enabled the autumn caravan carrying iron from the Urals to pass Vyshnii Volochek in September, clearing the Tvertsa for the spring caravan and its goods. An obviously proud Sievers informed the empress of his agency’s success, adding, “St. Petersburg needs food in the spring more than it needs iron.”86 By the 1790s the normal amount of time a boat spent ascending the Tvertsa had been drastically reduced, dropping from seven or eight weeks to between ten and fourteen days, and the maximum amount of freight it could carry had doubled, going from 65.5 to 131 metric tons.87 The canals at Vyshnii Volochek constituted the major bottleneck on the route to St. Petersburg. After receiving Vyshnii Volochek as a private concession in 1719, Mikhail Serdiukov managed it with great success until his death, in 1757. He built reservoirs to supply the canals with water, charged tolls to finance repairs and improvements, and effectively directed traffic through the locks. By putting up mills and factories on the sluices and selling goods and services to the boats and their crews, Serdiukov became a wealthy man who built himself a mansion at Vyshnii Volochek. He arranged the marriage of his son Ivan to the daughter of the wealthy industrialist Akinfii Demidov and lived to see his children enter the ranks of the nobility. By 1774 the Serdiukov concession included four sawmills, five gristmills, a distillery, a brewery, eight houses, seventeen huts, and sixty-three other structures. The family further owned twenty-two taverns in the surrounding district. Although they owned agricultural villages with 88 male and 104 female serfs, they were well-known for using wage labor in their business enterprises.88 170

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Table 15. Number of barks paying tolls at Vyshnii Volochek Period

Number of Barks

1765–1773 (average)

2,350 per year

1776–1786 (average)

2,846 per year

1787–1797 (average)

3,326 per year

1800–1836 (average)

4,000 per year

Sources: The figures for 1765–1773 are from Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 28 (Bernshtein-Kogan gives a range of 2,400 to 3,000 for all boats; allowing for the usual proportion of half-barks and small boats, the range for barks would be 2,100– 2,600). The amount for 1776–1786 reflects my calculation based on Oddy, European Commerce, 1:70, and the reports of Governors-General Sievers, Bruce, and Arkharov, RGADA, f. 16, d. 788, part 3, ll. 250–250ob.; d. 974, l. 126; and d. 975, ll. 27, 190– 190ob. The figures for 1787–1797 come from Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 28 (Oddy [European Commerce, 70] gives figures for the individual years that yield an average of 3,232 barks per year; the closeness of the two separate averages inspires confidence in both). Those for 1800–1836 are from Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 30 (Bernshtein-Kogan gives a range of 4,000–4,600 for all boats; the lower figure should be approximately right for barks, especially since Bakhturin, whose study of Russia’s waterways was published by the Department of Water Communications in 1802, concluded that the water route through Vyshnii Volochek could not accommodate more than 4,000 barks “under the best of conditions” [Bakhturin, Kratkoe opisanie vnutrenniago, 6]).

In 1761 Ivan Serdiukov drowned after falling into one of the reservoirs that fed the canals. Before long merchants began to complain that his heirs were allowing the waterways to deteriorate. In 1765, after investigating those complaints, the Senate put Colonel N. I. Pisarev in charge of the works at Vyshnii Volochek, but it failed to authorize and fund the needed repairs and improvements. In 1773 Sievers, acting in his capacity as the governor of Novgorod, had Pisarev arrested for incompetence and malfeasance, charging him with, among other misdeeds, having ruined the Serdiukovs.89 In 1774 the Senate bought the concession back from the Serdiukov family for 174,000 rubles.90 Upon his appointment as director of water communications in 1773, Sievers hired Johann Konrad Gerhard as chief engineer and began a series of improvements to the works at Vyshnii Volochek. Using revenue from tolls on the canals, Sievers repaired and extended Serdiukov’s complex of dams and aqueducts for capturing and holding water at the summit. He also authorized schemes to use the water more effectively, both to operate the locks on the canals and to augment the flow of the Tvertsa. He failed, however, to secure the additional funding needed to rebuild Serdiukov’s wooden locks in stone. By the 1770s they were leaking badly and threatening to collapse. Warnings and pleas from Sievers, Bruce, and Arkharov produced no results until 1785, when the empress visited Vyshnii Volochek on her way from St. Petersburg to Moscow, examined the transportation

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Table 16. Origins of boats passing Vyshnii Volochek in 1786 Barks

Half-barks

Small boats

Upper wharves

563

120

11

Lower wharves

2,749

243

52

Tver and the Tvertsa

208

22

22

3,520

385

85

Totals

locks in person, and finally agreed to fund Arkharov’s latest proposal to rebuild them in stone. By October 1786 the locks had been rebuilt and additional repairs were in progress.91 From decade to decade the state’s improvements to the works at Vyshnii Volochek and to other sections of the waterway increased the number of barks passing through the canals and paying tolls on their way to St. Petersburg (see table 15). Arkharov’s report of November 6, 1786, provides important details about boat traffic through the canals at Vyshnii Volochek. Counting boats according to the wharves from which they embarked, he grouped the latter into the following categories: upper wharves, lower wharves, and Tver and the Tversa (see table 16). Boats from the upper wharves included all those loaded upstream from Tver through Zubtsov and Rzhev to Gzhatsk. Boat from the lower wharves included all those loaded downstream from Tver to Rybinsk plus a small number of barks that had passed through Rybinsk from the middle Volga. An undetermined number of those that had embarked from Tver and from wharves along the Tvertsa carried cargo that did not originate locally but had been brought to those wharves by sledge or boat from distant locales, stored or processed, and then reshipped. More important than where the boats were loaded was what they carried. With bread prices in St. Petersburg at unprecedented heights in 1786, Arkharov paid particular attention to boats transporting cereals to the capital. From that perspective he grouped all of the river craft into the following categories: carrying only cereals, carrying cereals and other cargo, and carrying no cereals. Arkharov’s figures show that almost all cereals went through Vyshnii Volochek in barks (see table 17). The smaller half-barks and small boats were mostly used for other goods. More important, they show that cereals accounted for approximately 58 percent of all the cargo shipped through Vyshnii Volochek in that year.92 Arkharov’s report also contained information that provides a closer look at the cereals trade to St. Petersburg. Compiling data collected at Borovichi, the

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Table 17. Boats with grain, flour and other cargo passing Vyshnii Volochek in 1786 Barks

Half-barks

Small boats

Carrying only grain and flour

1,863

78

16

Carrying grain and flour with other cargo

360

44

2

Carrying no grain or flour

1,297

263

67

Total

3,520

385

85

Source: Arkharov to Catherine, Nov. 6, 1786, RGADA, f. 16, d. 975, l. 190.

next toll station beyond Vyshnii Volochek, Arkharov reported that some 165,257 metric tons of grain and flour had passed through it during the navigation year (see table 18). Arkharov did not say who owned the oats, but he did state that except for the rye flour belonging to the government, “almost all” of the other commodities (71 percent not counting oats) were privately owned. In most years, when the government was not making extraordinary purchases for the St. Petersburg granary, the proportion of such commodities en route to the capital that was privately owned would almost certainly have been even greater. The money that merchants and boat owners paid out at Vyshnii Volochek created jobs and opportunities for the local population. First, a toll was assessed for every vessel—five kopecks per sazhen (2.134 meters) of length until 1744 and ten kopecks per sazhen thereafter—that went to maintain and repair the waterways. Then laborers had to be hired to help maneuver the craft through the canals and locks. A bark carrying grain or flour needed twelve to fourteen laborers, but a bark carrying hemp might need as many as twenty-six. Finally, each bark required a pilot and ten to twelve workers for the next leg of the voyage, with their wages adding to the total costs.93 All told, every bark passing through Vyshnii Volochek in the last decade of the eighteenth century entailed the expenditure of twenty to twenty-five rubles on tolls and wages and almost certainly additional sums on food, drink, and other supplies. The need for ready cash persuaded the government to open an office of the Assignats Bank in Vyshnii Volochek in the 1770s and to keep that branch open even when it decided to close similar offices in other provincial towns. The settlement at Vyshnii Volochek officially became a town in 1773. A decade or so later it had a permanent registered population of 5,109 of both sexes, including 1,250 first and second guild merchants. Five merchant families traded at the port; the others ran local businesses, including eleven taverns and two flour mills. A large but undetermined number of the nonmerchants worked for the Directorate of Water Communications, while others built and equipped and re-

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Table 18. Cereals shipments passing Borovichi in 1786 Quantity

Metric equivalent

Rye flour belonging to the government

249,105 kuls

36,723 metric tons

Rye flour, privately owned

335,384 kuls

49,442 metric tons

Other kinds of grain and flour

202,403 kuls

29,838 metric tons

Fine bagged flour

620,807 puds

10,169 metric tons

Oats

265,111 kuls

39,083 metric tons

Source: Arkharov to Catherine, November 6, 1786, RGADA, f. 16, d. 975, ll. 190–190ob.

paired boats. According to the topographical description produced in 1782–1784, the inhabitants of Vyshnii Volochek built and sold approximately sixty barks, thirty half-barks, and two hundred small boats each year.94 During the navigation season, nonresidents far outnumbered the permanent population of Vyshnii Volochek. In addition to boat crews and teamsters coming up the Tvertsa, thousands of peasants piled into the town to work for wages.95 On one occasion the laborers on the canal tried to organize and bargain collectively with the merchants. On May 8, 1775, Ivan Tolchenov arrived at Vyshnii Volochek with a shipment of flour but found the way blocked by boats unable to move because the workers were demanding higher wages. Coincidently, Sievers happened to be on the scene at that moment and intervened to organize the merchants and break the strike. As Tolchenov tells it, Sievers, “the true patron of merchants trading to St. Petersburg by water, convening all the merchants, gave an order that the line of barks . . . [including Tolchenov’s] was to hire only workers on the float to Gorodka and to take those from the Vyshnii Volochek district and no others.” Seeing this, the workers from other districts lost heart and agreed to work for the standard wage.96 Beyond Vyshnii Volochek boats moved downstream using oars rather than horses. A short passage of 6.5 kilometers through the Tsna River plus 12 kilometers across Lake Mstino brought them to the Msta, which they would follow for 445 kilometers to Lake Il’men. The Msta was naturally shallow, like the Tvertsa, but whereas the climb up the Tvertsa was slow and tedious, the descent of the Msta on the steeper, northern slope of the divide was swift and dangerous. In 1720 Peter I created the Borovichi Rapids Office to guide caravans through the Msta and reduce the dangers it posed, but over forty years it accomplished little.97 Until the 1760s low water frequently halted caravans on this watercourse for weeks at a time in summer and autumn. Then, in May 1765, amid growing concern about provisioning St. Petersburg, the Senate approved plans to augment the flow of the Tvertsa and Msta rivers. On the Msta it authorized the Borovichi Rapids Office, now under the direction of General N. E. Murav’ev, to undertake 174

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several improvements, including a dam to regulate the flow of water from Lake Mstino into the Msta and smaller dams on several of its tributaries to retain water from the spring thaw.98 Completed by 1768, Murav’ev’s improvements reduced the normal travel time through the Msta to only fourteen days. Waterfalls and rapids posed a greater and more intractable problem. Four steep descents along the Msta created some forty rapids and falls, at least ten of which were serious hazards to navigation. All four descents required crews to take special measures and get extra help, but the eighteen-kilometer stretch of white water at Borovichi, which comprised seventeen points with falls or rapids, presented the greatest danger. A decree dated January 22, 1719, noted, “Boats with all cargoes suffer great harm from the rapids and the sinking of boats, and even the Provisions Chancellery suffers losses affecting the state.”99 As part of his effort to improve navigation on the Msta in the 1760s, Murav’ev placed buffers of floating logs bound with rope around the most dangerous rocks to create protected channels through the rapids. Even so, the rapids destroyed more than 200 boats each year in the 1770s. By 1809, however, the number of wrecks had fallen to 76 while another 4,443 vessels descended the Msta successfully.100 James Walker, an English engraver working for Catherine II, observed the passage of barks through the rapids at Borovichi in the 1780s: The various cataracts and sluices upon the rivers render it absolutely necessary that the vessels should be light and shallow, yet at the same time capable of carrying a considerable cargo. The largest barks carry above 100 tons, and when loaded, their gunwale in the middle of the bark rises but a few inches out of the water. The cargo, when consisting of light and dry goods, such as hemp and flax, is divided into three parcels, afore, middle, and aft; between each parcel a distance is left of about three feet, in order to ease the bark when it rushes down the cataracts, where it often bends in such a manner, that the tops of the parcels will sometimes meet together, and at others separate much beyond their usual distance.101

To support the Borovichi Rapids Office and its works, every boat was assessed a fee of so many kopecks per unit of cargo, but it cost far more to hire the pilots and workers it needed to descend the Msta. At Vyshnii Volochek each bark’s permanent crew of three was supplemented with two additional pilots and ten to twelve rowers. They would stay with the boat all the way to Novgorod, beyond the mouth of the Msta, but at each of the four sets of rapids, a bark also needed a special pilot and additional workers to guide it through that particular stretch of white water. The state did not organize or register the pilots at Vyshnii Volochek until 1799, but from 1720 on it treated the pilots on the Msta as skilled professionals. Even though most pilots were seigniorial serfs, the Borovichi Rapids Office and its successor agencies gave them licenses and employment and forbade their masters to send them as military recruits. Finally, in the early ninetransportation

175

teenth century, it bought the pilots—in some cases whole villages of them—and made them state employees.102 By the late eighteenth century, a pilot at Borovichi received five rubles, and those at the other rapids were paid fifty kopecks to one ruble. “On top of that,” a government report noted, “the owner of the cargo gives them an equal amount from his own pocket.”103 Even with pilots and improved channels, crews needed additional workers to ease the boats through the most dangerous rapids with ropes and poles. For every bark, at least fifteen workers were hired at the first set of rapids, a number that doubled at the second set, and still more were hired at Borovichi. Under good conditions, a bark needed a minimum of forty workers to pass Borovichi and as many as seventy if the water was unusually high or low.104 Merchants accepted those expenses as the price of avoiding disaster, but they complained vociferously when local landowners and state officials tried to gouge them for more. Although barks were strong and flexible, more than a few suffered damage that required them to stop for repairs. When they did, local landowners sometimes tried to seize the boat or its cargo, or they demanded a cash payment for use of their land. Officials empowered to enforce a myriad of rules and regulations for the sake of orderly navigation could also use their power to extort money from merchants and boat owners. In the 1760s the Senate explicitly endorsed the merchants’ complaints, and the government tried repeatedly to end such abuses.105 The diminution of complaints toward the end of the eighteenth century suggests that they may have had some success. Barks could traverse the lower Msta from Borovichi to Lake Il’men with ease and without additional help, but the lake presented them with a new set of problems. Built to slide over the shoals of the Tvertsa, barks were literally out of their depth on the lake, and a sudden storm could easily swamp the flat-bottomed river craft. Nonetheless, low water, a common occurrence in the late summer and fall, could prevent them from entering the lake and strand them at the mouth of the Msta waiting for a storm that would allow them to proceed. In 1804 the Department of Water Communications created a short canal between the Msta and the Volkhov and made it possible for river craft to circumvent Lake Il’men. At Novgorod boats from several other rivers that emptied into Lake Il’men joined those that had come down the Msta. Loaded in grain-deficient districts of Novgorod and Pskov, they carried relatively insignificant amounts of cereals among their cargoes of building materials, hay, hemp, linen, flax seed, leather, fruits, vegetables, vinegar, salt, and pottery, but they added significantly to the water traffic between Novgorod and St. Petersburg. From the 1780s on they numbered approximately one thousand vessels a year, crowding the waterways and increasing the demand for pilots and workers.106 At Novgorod the boats that had come down the Msta regrouped, made necessary repairs, and purchased supplies for the final stages of their journey. After the workers from the Msta had been paid, each bark took on a new pilot and 176

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seven workers who would accompany the permanent crew St. Petersburg. When the wind was right, the crews would set sail; otherwise they relied on oars and the current to move the boats 224 kilometers down the Volkhov River to the Ladoga Canal. Three sets of rapids interrupted an otherwise smooth and uneventful voyage down the Volkhov. Less dangerous than the cataracts of the Msta, they presented few problems in the spring and early summer, but as the waters receded, the difficulties increased. The rapids damaged or sank several boats each year, and they delayed and raised expenses for many more. The most difficult, known simply as the Volkhov Rapids, could not be passed at all from late summer into autumn and sometimes beyond. In the 1750s and 1760s more than a hundred boats a year failed to pass the Volkhov Rapids before the close of navigation, leaving them with three expensive alternatives: unload the cargo and reload it below the rapids, unload the cargo and send it to St. Petersburg overland, or winter over and pass the rapids the next spring. In the 1760s, as part of its broader effort to improve navigation to the capital, the imperial government authorized a “cleaning” of the Volkov Rapids that removed a number of large rocks from the main channel. In 1781 Sievers informed Catherine II of positive results: “The cataracts of the Volkhov are much improved. Of 4,000 boats only five or six suffer damage, and that is usually the owner’s fault.”107 At Novaia Ladoga, near the mouth of the Volkhov, boats on their way to St. Petersburg entered the Ladoga Canal. When large numbers of boats arrived at the same time, they first had to line up and wait to enter the canal, but then they could traverse its 104 kilometers in just three days and exit through the Shlissel’burg lock into the Neva River. For more than half a century after it opened in 1731, the Ladoga Canal provided a safe and easy passage between the Volkhov and the Neva, but by the late eighteenth century it was clearly showing its age. Silt had reduced its depth, forcing some boats to unload parts of their cargoes, and Münnich’s wooden locks were rotting and leaking. In 1794 Catherine II commissioned Johann Konrad Gerhard, the engineer who had rebuilt the locks at Vyshnii Volochek, to renovate the canal and appropriated 216,688 rubles in assignats for that purpose.108 For the next twelve years Gerhard managed to keep the waterway in full operation while he directed the dredging and deepening of the canal and the construction of new stone locks. For merchants and crews, the passage of the Ladoga Canal marked the beginning of the end of their journey. Shops and stalls lining both sides of the waterway sold food and drink and offered them amusement and temptation. At the far end of the canal, boats were assessed a toll and the crews had to show their manifests and declare their cargoes to the chancellery officials stationed there. After passing through the Shlissel’burg lock, they had only to sail and float another seventy kilometers down the broad, deep, and swift-flowing Neva to their final destination. Accidents could still happen—in 1770 two of Ivan Tolchenov’s transportation

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Table 19. Quantity of cereals delivered to St. Petersburg in given years, expressed in metric tons Rye flour

All cereals

1775

34,283

72,988

1776

26,650

68,334

1777

85,592

161,366

1778

50,977

119,248

1779

32,934

101,749

1780

54,545

132,710

1781

57,155

143,469

1782

68,181

143,027

1783

53,248

132,678

1784

63,464

159,892

1785

57,081

130,113

1801

117,559

249,434

1802

81,441

178,263

1803

65,421

125,975

1804

98,935

214,119

1805

146,683

263,669

1806

127,862

240,032

1807

89,516

196,085

1808

76,216

?

1809

?

173,775

1810

191,252

353,873

Average 1775–1786

52,994

125,092

Average 1801–1810

110,543

221,692

Sources: For 1775 through 1785, the figures come from a report of data from the Chancellery of the Ladoga Canal forwarded to the Commission on Bread 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 232; for 1801–1806, from an unidentified document in RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 14, corrected for total grains in 1804 and 1806 with more detailed and more precise data given in reports of the Chancellery of the Ladoga Canal (RGADA, f. 16, d. 309, part 10, l. 586; RGIA, f. 156, op. 2, d. 8, l. 5); for 1807, from a report of the Chancellery of the Ladoga Canal, RGIA, f. 156, op 2, d. 35, l. 259; for 1808, Shapiro, “O roli Peterburga,” 389, even though it does not correspond to the source he cited; for 1809, Istomina, Vyshnii Volotskii Put’, 203 (the figures given for that year by Shapiro are actually for 1807, according to the source he cites); for 1810, from a report of the Department of Water Communications, RGIA, f. 156, op. 1, d. 518, ll. 113–18, correctly cited and used by Shapiro.

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boats, sailing in thick fog, struck a submerged wreck, split open, and sank—but barring some extraordinary occurrence of that sort, they could expect to arrive in St. Petersburg within a day or two at the most. From the 1770s on, the government’s official newspaper, Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti, using information collected at Borovichi, would already have announced the anticipated arrival of boats and caravans delivering cereals. SUCCESS AND ITS LIMITS

Under Catherine II piecemeal improvements to the waterways linking the Volga with the Neva through Vyshnii Volochek proved their worth. Between the 1770s, when those improvements began to make a significant difference, and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the total number of river craft reaching the capital in a given year more than doubled, and the number of barks, the largest vessels and the principal carriers of grain and flour through those waterways, rose from a yearly average of 2,652 to a yearly average of 3,800, an increase of 43 percent.109 Thanks to deeper channels, stronger locks, and a steadier flow of water, the average load a bark could carry through the waterways also increased by some 40 percent. Travel times between the upper Volga and the Neva shrank, and the number of accidents fell.110 As a result, the amount of rye flour delivered to St. Petersburg in an average year in the first decade of the nineteenth century was more than twice the amount delivered between 1775 and 1785, and the delivery of all cereals rose by more than 75 percent. As can be seen by comparing the data in table 19 with the information in table 4 (in chap. 1), the delivery of cereals to St. Petersburg managed to keep pace with and in some years to outrun the rapidly increasing demand for them. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, almost all the major improvements that could be made to the Vyshnii Volochek System had already been made. Aqueducts brought water to Vyshnii Volochek along the crest of the divide from as far away as Lake Seliger to work the canals and increase the flow of the Tvertsa and the Msta, but the extension of those aqueducts had reached its practical limits. St. Petersburg was receiving enough grain and flour to feed itself, the forts in Finland, and the surrounding districts but not enough to export on a regular basis. Moreover, as shipments of grain and flour increased from decade to decade to meet the demands of a growing population, they began to interfere with the transport of other goods that the city could and did export. For close to a century, the system of waterways that connected the Volga to the Neva through Vyshnii Volochek had enabled St. Petersburg to grow and prosper, but by 1800 its ability to do so was coming to an end.

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CHAPTER 7

R Exports

P

eter’s primary motive for seizing and holding the delta of the Neva was to open a path through which Russia’s abundant and relatively inexpensive commodities could enter the European and world markets. For most commodities, his plan succeeded, but for cereals, Russia’s most abundant and relatively inexpensive commodity, it failed. As a capital city and metropolis, St. Petersburg consumed nearly all the grain and flour it received from the interior provinces. Managing the grain balance and moderating flour prices in the city under those conditions led the imperial government to restrict and even prohibit the export of grain and flour from St. Petersburg even though it wanted very much to improve Russia’s balance of payments and increase the treasury’s income from the tariff. Russia as a whole had an abundance of grain, some of it aching for a market at home or abroad, but in most years St. Petersburg received approximately enough of it—more than enough in some years but barely enough, if that, in others—to feed itself. Eighteenth-century Russians generally assumed that exports depleted supplies and raised domestic prices and that cereals prices could be influenced though not precisely controlled by permitting or restricting their export. As a result, policy disputes over exporting grain divided those who favored higher 180

prices from those who favored lower ones. For most of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, those who wanted to moderate domestic prices by limiting exports from St. Petersburg usually prevailed, but prices rose nevertheless, advancing in intermittent surges from the 1760s through the first decade of the nineteenth century and reaching once unimaginable heights. Did exports from St. Petersburg and other Russian ports lie behind the rise in Russia’s domestic grain prices? The distinguished Russian historian Boris Mironov has argued that they did and that Russia’s entry into the European market elevated Russian prices to levels elsewhere in Europe. Based on a detailed analysis of grain prices in European Russia over more than a century, his argument deserves serious attention, but it assumes the existence of a unified “all-Russian market” and ignores the difficulty and in important cases practical impossibility of transporting grain from one locality to another. But if exports did not cause the rise in Russian grain prices, what did? For decades eighteenth-century Russians attempted to answer that question and in the process exposed their biases, their ideologies, and the influence of contemporary economic theories. Prisoners of their time, they overlooked a causal explanation that seems obvious to a modern understanding of economics. EXPORT POLICY

On November 28, 1744, the Senate decreed a ban on the export of grain and flour from St. Petersburg. After a substandard harvest in the interior provinces, the price of flour was rising in St. Petersburg, but the Senate did not present its ban on exports as a response to the temporary decline in supply. Instead, it cited the long-term structural problem of transporting enough grain and flour from the interior to satisfy the city’s needs as its population continued to increase. St. Petersburg, it explained, was now the residence of the imperial court, the garrison, the guards regiments, the fleet, office workers, important personages, and “others of all ranks and worth,” but its grain supply was constrained by the city’s location: Cereals come to St. Petersburg from interior Russian towns by one route only, and cereals do not come from elsewhere by other routes; as is known to all, very little grain is grown in the area around St. Petersburg: and thus for such a multitude of residents, for filling the treasury’s storehouses, and for the sustenance of private people a great quantity of cereals is required. But in years past when the export of cereals from St. Petersburg was permitted, it was observed that the price rose in St. Petersburg because of such shipments, which was not without harm to those residing there.1

The Senate’s decree emphasized the peculiar situation of St. Petersburg with respect to its supply of grain and flour. The balance of supply and demand in that city did not replicate the grain balance in Russia as a whole; instead, it was exports

181

a balance between the limited quantity of these foodstuffs delivered each year through the single waterway over the divide and the growing number of residents who would consume it. The resulting dilemma came with the territory. In October 1701 (i.e., before the St. Petersburg was founded), Peter I had prohibited the export of Russian grain whenever the price of rye in Moscow exceeded one ruble per chetvert.2 Because the price in Moscow never fell to that level, Peter’s decree effectively banned the export of cereals from St. Petersburg in all years prior to 1740. For Archangel Peter’s rule on exports was quickly superseded by a series of ad hoc decrees allowing or forbidding the export of grain on a oneyear basis.3 Riga and the other ports in Lifland and Estland were not affected and continued to export as usual. In 1741 the government revisited the issue. Its concern then as later was to raise much-needed revenue and improve Russia’s balance of payments by exporting cereals without adversely affecting prices in St. Petersburg. To those ends, it authorized the export of no more than 100,000 chetverts of rye and 15,000 chetverts of rye flour in future years subject to a duty of fifty kopecks per chetvert.4 Just two years later, however, the Senate concluded that the decision to export cereals from St. Petersburg had been a mistake. It found that the duty on exported cereals had indeed raised revenue, but higher food prices, which the Senate attributed to exports, had forced the government to spend a still greater sum on provisions for the court, the army, the fleet, and other dependents. In 1748 the government extended the embargo on cereals to Archangel and then, after the outbreak of war in 1756, to Riga and Reval. Still seeking revenue, it then began to sell licenses to export grain on a case-by-case basis, but the cost of the license and the payment of duty at the new rate of one ruble per chetvert kept exports to a minimum.5 From the 1720s through the 1750s St. Petersburg’s failure to export large quantities of grain and flour contrasted sharply with its great success in exporting hemp, flax, tar, iron, and other natural products, and the disparity did not pass unnoticed.6 On December 19, 1760, Dmitry Volkov, secretary to the Conference of Ministers, fired the opening volley in what would become a decades-long battle over the export of Russian grain. In a letter to Ivan Chernyshev, president of the Commission on Commerce, Volkov proposed several measures aimed at promoting economic growth by repealing regulations that he considered unnecessary and harmful. The most far-reaching and controversial of those proposals urged the elimination of restrictions on the export of Russian grain, including those that applied to St. Petersburg. Volkov argued that government regulations kept Russian grain out of the international market, lowered prices, and discouraged production to the detriment of producers, merchants, and the state, even though, he said, the grain trade was “the most natural of all” for the country. He contrasted the export policy of the Russian Empire with that of Poland-

182

exports

Lithuania, whose grain found a profitable market in western Europe without creating shortages at home, and went on to assert that “Russian grain could feed the world” if only it were allowed to do so.7 Although Volkov explicitly denied any foreign influence on his thinking, the similarities between his ideas and those of Hébert, Quesnay, Mirabeau, and other French Physiocrats were too close and too numerous to be coincidental. Like them, he contended that higher agricultural prices did more to promote national prosperity than low ones and urged the elimination of legal restrictions that kept them below their natural levels. For Volkov, however, the most important of these restrictions were those that applied to exports. Unlike France, Russia imposed almost no restrictions on the wholesale grain trade and comparatively few on retail sales, but grain prices in Russia nevertheless remained low because Russia’s smaller urban population could not consume all the grain its more extensive agriculture normally produced. Given those circumstances, Volkov wanted to broaden the demand for Russian grain beyond the domestic market. If Russian grain were allowed to enter the international market, he argued, it would earn foreign exchange and generate income for peasants, landowners, and ultimately the Treasury. He pointed out that such a reform would cost the government relatively little, since the existing rules kept it from collecting the tariffs and license fees on grain that allowing export would generate, and the national economy, the ultimate source of government revenue, would gain and grow. Chernyshev endorsed Volkov’s proposals. Now paying for the fourth year of a costly war, the government was dealing with a deficit in both its budget and the country’s balance of payments, and Russia’s credit was in peril. A sense of impending crisis opened the way for attacks on mercantilist regulations in Russia just as it had in France. Court politics also came into play: in the factional struggles within Elizabeth’s government, Chernyshev and Volkov supported Chancellor M. L. Vorontsov in opposition to Count P. I. Shuvalov, the author and champion of Russia’s mercantilist policies. The Conference of Ministers heard Chernyshev and Volkov on January 5, 1761. Although it amended Volkov’s other points, the conference adopted his proposals for increasing grain exports and forwarded them to the Senate with a recommendation that they be implemented before the opening of navigation, that is, by April. Opposition from Shuvalov’s faction kept the Senate from acting, however, and the deteriorating health of Empress Elizabeth brought decision making to a halt. Elizabeth died on December 25, 1761, and a new ruler with different ideas and a radically different approach to governing ascended the throne. Whereas Elizabeth may have seemed passive and lethargic, her successor, Peter III, struck many as headstrong and impetuous. Keeping established governmental leaders

exports

183

and institutions at arm’s length, he centralized authority and decision making in his own circle of friends and relatives. He made Dmitry Volkov his private secretary and gave him broad responsibility for domestic reforms. Since Peter III, unlike his successor, left little evidence of his own thoughts on domestic policy, it is unclear how large a role, if any, he played in formulating the legislation he enacted; in any case, he did take quick and decisive steps to cut expenses, increase revenue, and promote economic expansion.8 One of those steps was a decree based on Volkov’s proposals for ending restrictions on exports, including those of grain and flour. On March 28, 1762, Peter III sent the Senate a manifesto proposing a new policy on commerce and exports. Though it dealt with a number of commodities, including cloth, rhubarb, tallow, and potash, its principal concern was cereals. Calling for increased prosperity through freer trade, the preamble complained that Russia was failing to make the most of its commercial advantages, for although Russia could supply much of the world with grain, its own laws kept it from doing so, and as a result, fertile fields lay fallow, and peasants lacked money to pay their taxes. To correct that failing, the manifesto called for lower export duties and the elimination of restrictions on the export of various commodities, including cereals, from ports in Russia and the Baltic provinces and across borders into Poland-Lithuania, Persia, and China. It declared the new emperor’s intent to abolish chartered trading companies as well as government and private monopolies on foreign trade, and it concluded with the words “all trade should be unhindered.”9 The Senate disagreed. It prepared a report objecting to the proposed reforms and defending the status quo. It informed Peter that his manifesto contradicted the laws of Peter I and then proceeded in a tone of cautious conservatism to critique specific points within it: the abolition of monopolies and trading companies would violate contracts; the repeal of tariffs and duties would upset existing arrangements and further deplete the Treasury; the free and unrestricted export of grain would drain the country’s reserves and imperil the population. It questioned the putative benefits of those measures and argued that they would not justify the more certain losses.10 When the Senate asked Chancellor Vorontsov to cosign its report, he declined, and the Senate, unwilling or afraid to stand alone in opposition to the monarch, did not forward it to the emperor. Peter was aware of the Senate’s undelivered report, but instead of having to reject it, he could simply ignore it. On June 1, 1762, Peter III issued a personal decree allowing “grain to be sent overseas for sale from all ports without hindrance” but stipulating that he was to be informed if prices rose sharply.11 Little if any grain left Russia as a result of that decree. On June 28, 1762, a coup d’état overthrew Peter III and placed his estranged wife, Catherine, on the throne. Three days later the new empress suspended all her predecessor’s legislation pending a review, and that same day, citing the high price of cereals within 184

exports

Russia, she banned the export of grain from all ports of the empire, including Riga and Reval.12 She appointed Volkov governor of the far-off province of Orenburg and set the Senate to work revising the manifesto of March 28. On July 31 Catherine promulgated a revised version of Peter III’s manifesto. With respect to monopolies, tariff reductions, trading companies, and various commercial privileges, it reaffirmed many of the points in the earlier document, albeit with some modifications. Its treatment of grain exports, however, was quite different. Catherine had already granted Riga and Reval permission to export Livonian and Polish grain, and the new law allowed the export of grain from Russia’s Ukrainian provinces. When it came to the northern ports, however, Catherine’s manifesto imposed restrictions on the export of grain and created safeguards for domestic consumers. Catherine’s manifesto agreed in part with that of her predecessor, but it also echoed some of the concerns raised by the Senate. More important, it embodied Catherine’s personal convictions on the benefits and limitations of free trade. She agreed with the Physiocrats and Volkov in their opposition to monopolies and other restraints on manufacturing and commerce. She recalled Volkov from Orenburg in 1763, appointed him to the Manufacturing College, and subsequently made his its president. Working together, Catherine and Volkov proceeded to eliminate numerous restrictions on manufacturing and internal trade, but their collaboration stopped at the water’s edge. Catherine shared Volkov’s belief that export policy enabled governments to influence cereals prices, but in diametrical opposition to Volkov, Catherine believed that the government should allow the export of grain and flour only when abundant supplies provided a guarantee of low and stable prices at home.13 Working from that premise, Catherine’s manifesto of July 31, 1762, proceeded to set benchmark prices for determining when cereals were cheap and plentiful and could legally be exported. It explicitly criticized the law of Peter III for authorizing the free export of Russian grain from all ports. Instead, it praised Peter I’s law forbidding the export of grain from Archangel whenever the price of rye in Moscow exceeded one ruble per chetvert and said that it would remain in force. Then it created similar price ceilings for St. Petersburg, Riga, and Reval. For St. Petersburg, it set the limits at one ruble, fifty-six kopecks, for a kul of rye flour and two rubles, fifty-five kopecks, for a chetvert of wheat and stipulated that overseas exports stop when cereals exceeded those prices.14 Prices never fell to those levels. On the contrary, the price of rye flour in the markets of St. Petersburg rose steadily and dramatically over the next five years. In that context, the law of July 31, 1762, effectively prohibited the export of grain and flour from St. Petersburg (see table 20). Even though the government allowed the law to be breached temporarily in 1765, cereals exports from St. Petersburg from 1762 through 1765 amounted to only 1,322 metric tons, worth 19,137 rubles. Catherine and many of her officials soon realized that restrictions on cereexports

185

Table 20. Export of grain and flour from St. Petersburg, 1762–1765 (in metric tons) 1762

1763

1764

1765

0

0

0

268.55

260.34

0

0

792.09

Wheat

0

0

0

0

Wheat flour

0

0

0

0

Rye Rye flour

Source: Report prepared by the Commission on Commerce in response to questions posed by Grigorii Teplov at the behest of Empress Catherine II, December 28, 1771, RGADA, f. 19 (Finantsy), d. 314 (O torgovle khlebom), ll. 8–11.

als exports conflicted with their goal of increasing Russia’s exports generally, raising additional revenue, and promoting economic development. The empress understood the potential benefits of exporting more grain, but she wanted assurances that those exports would not harm consumers. She therefore quickly agreed to allow exports of cereals from Russia’s Ukrainian and Livonian provinces, albeit with restrictive safeguards in the case of Livonia, and in succeeding years she gradually and cautiously agreed to amend and then abandon her original policy on the export of grain and flour. LIBERALIZATION

The new Commission on Commerce that Catherine appointed in December 1763 led the way in advocating increased exports of grain. The empress assigned many responsibilities to the commission, including that of proposing ways to increase the export of Russian goods in general.15 Although the empress did not say so explicitly, the commission’s members clearly understood that any proposals they might make to increase the export of grain would also have to assuage Catherine’s fear of domestic shortage and high prices. In June 1764 the commission presented its first attempt to reconcile those aims: it recommended that Archangel and the much smaller port of Narva be allowed to export a specified amount of grain each year as long as they maintained large reserves to protect the local populace from shortage and high prices. In addition, the exported grain would have to come from specifically designated regions that had little or no access to domestic markets. In its supporting arguments, the commission’s report went far beyond its specific and fairly modest proposals to argue the general case for increased cereals exports and higher agricultural prices. Like Volkov, the commission emphasized Russia’s potential to enrich itself by exporting grain. It argued that agriculture, the foundation of Russia’s economy, was currently languishing because insufficient demand had depressed prices and discouraged labor

186

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and investment. As a result, fields were lying fallow and peasants were abandoning agriculture for more rewarding pursuits. New markets, greater demand, and higher prices, it argued, would cure those ills by rewarding agricultural labor.16 Whatever the empress thought of the commission’s reasoning, she found its specific recommendations acceptable. Her decree of September 23, 1764, allowed Narva to export a maximum of 5,000 chetverts of rye each year and exempted those exports from duty whenever the export price in Narva exceeded the price in the ports of Poland and Livonia. It allowed Archangel to export up to 200,000 chetverts of rye each year but stipulated that all the exported rye had to come exclusively from the provinces of Viatka and Kazan. The decree also required both cities to maintain large reserves against the threat of future shortage.17 Less than two years later the Commission on Commerce scored another victory when it persuaded the empress to allow the export of wheat from all ports of the empire, including St. Petersburg. With the support of the Free Economic Society, the commission presented the idea of exporting wheat as yet another solution to the dilemma of conflicting goals: on the one hand, the export of wheat could dramatically improve Russia’s balance of payments because there was a strong demand for wheat on the European market; on the other hand, it could do so without causing shortages and higher prices at home because the demand for wheat in Russia was weak. For want of consumers, growers with access to the northern ports had not grown much wheat in the past, but the commission expected that to change as the export trade developed and the growers discovered a new source of income.18 The commission’s report did not mention the possibility that growers might sow wheat as a replacement for rye and simply assumed (or at least implied) that they would grow it as an additional crop by putting fallow land and redundant labor to work. Catherine’s decree of April 13, 1766, followed the commission’s recommendations and its reasoning: In comparison to the expanse of Russia, very little wheat is sown, and, therefore, it needs encouragement to make it profitable to the growers, for whose sake the All Gracious Sovereign orders: (1) wheat and wheat flour may be exported to other states without duty for six years from all ports, except those in Lifland, Estland, and Finland, which retain their rights and privileges; and (2) wheat and wheat flour may be brought to those ports from all provinces and districts regardless of the price there or of the quantities involved, but at Archangel twenty percent must be held as a reserve.19

At the end of December 1771, with the six-year trial period about to end, the empress asked the Commission on Commerce to evaluate the experiment and advise her about extending it. The commission replied that exports of wheat had begun to increase because of both foreign demand and expanded cultiva-

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tion at home, adding that the latter “should be increased” because it had “never been very great.” To restrict the export of wheat at that point, it argued, would destroy the efforts of cultivators who had begun to grow wheat. Accordingly, the commission recommended that the unrestricted export of wheat continue. “In a word,” it wrote, “the Commission on Commerce created by Your Imperial Highness considers the permission to export this particular kind of grain a sure means of bringing the working people into prosperity.”20 After reading the commission’s report, Catherine extended the decree on exporting wheat until November 2, 1780.21 In the early 1770s Russia’s exports of wheat continued to surge in response to a shortage of grain on the European market. Eager to drive its point home, the Commission on Commerce sent the empress a new and unsolicited report on October 12, 1775, showing the rapid and impressive growth of Russia’s exports of wheat since 1766 (see table 21). In 1775, however, the international demand for Russian grain fell sharply, and merchants who brought wheat to St. Petersburg for export in that year found themselves unable to sell it.22 Unabashed by the temporary setback, the Commission on Commerce, the Senate, and the Free Economic Society continued to push for greater freedom to export grain and to champion higher agricultural prices. Many, if not all, of the advocates of increased grain exports and higher agricultural prices owned large estates in regions that produced a surplus of grain, and they could expect to benefit personally from the policies they promoted. Their arguments, however, emphasized the benefits that would accrue to the peasants and the state. Low grain prices, they argued, prevented peasants from earning enough to pay their taxes and serf dues and led them to abandon agriculture for other work that separated them from their villages and families.23 That argument won them a sympathetic hearing because on one level, educated, upper-class Russians of the 1760s and 1770s deplored the movement of peasants from agriculture to other employments. They took it for granted that peasants were meant to till the soil and believed that their failure to do so was a violation of the natural order. The empress herself expressed those sentiments in no uncertain terms in 1767 in her widely circulated instruction to the Legislative Commission.24 By arguing that higher grain prices would keep peasants in the fields, where they belonged, the advocates of higher prices were offering a cure for something widely perceived as a social ill. Beyond that, they also emphasized the financial benefits that increased exports and higher prices would confer on a government struggling to finance a costly war against the Ottoman Empire (1768–1774), arguing that exports of grain would earn foreign exchange to support the declining value of the ruble and that higher grain prices would ease pressures on the state budget by enabling peasants to pay their taxes on time. As one might well expect, opposition to liberalized exports and higher prices came from those who had to purchase grain and grain-based products on the 188

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Table 21. Exports of wheat from St. Petersburg and Archangel, 1766–1774 From St. Petersburg

From Archangel

Quantity in chetverts

Value in rubles

Quantity in chetverts

Value in rubles

1766

1,371

4,863

14,633

43,465

1767

4,661

18,644

30,115

93,085

1768

7,448

30,536

30,495

102,185

1769

40,642

166,632

42,392

133,585

1770

21,383

85,532

13,006

35,435

1771

43,129

172,715

23,196

67,851

1772

47,470

213,615

9,552

36,094

1773

35,532

168,778

39,585

133,698

1774

68,390

307,775

52,871

181,856

Source: RGADA, f. 19, d. 314, ll. 8–11.

domestic market. In 1767, when prices were rising sharply, the army asked the empress to control grain prices for the sake of the military budget. When the townsmen of St. Petersburg met in that same year to draft their instruction to the Legislative Commission, they included a request that exports of cereals from their city be halted whenever rye flour cost more than one and a half rubles a chetvert, a price that had not been seen for years.25 In their instructions to the commission, the nobles of several districts in northern and central Russia also called for a ban on the export of cereals commodities and advocated low or at least stable prices for grain. In such districts, where the returns on agriculture were usually low, the inhabitants normally had to purchase grain on the market to supplement their own harvests.26 Increasingly, the nobles in northern and central Russia were responding to the low returns from agriculture by demanding cash payments (obrok) rather than labor service (barshchina) from their peasants, but a surprising number of instructions to the Legislative Commission from such districts also deplored obrok because it separated peasants from the land, and some even proposed that it be banned.27 Reversing the argument of their opponents, who contended that higher prices would keep peasants on the land, they proposed that keeping peasants on the land would result in increased agricultural output and lower agricultural prices. In her own instruction to the commission, the empress presented similar arguments and made it clear that she disapproved of obrok and the separation of the peasants from agriculture. Like many other critics of obrok, however, she also felt herself pulled in different directions by her ideology and her economic interest, condemning obrok in principle but applying it in practice to the peasants under her direct control.28 exports

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Whether high or low, the price of grain, flour, bread, and the like touched the personal interests of virtually everyone in Russia in some way and often in a major way. What is more, the arguments of the 1760s and 1770s led to an increasing awareness that grain prices could affect other issues, such as urban discontent, peasant mobility, population growth, the state budget, and national income, in complicated and often intertwined ways. Exports played such a prominent role in the controversy over prices because virtually all the participants assumed that exports would increase demand and raise prices. They also understood that the state could control exports more effectively than it could control other factors that might influence the price of grain, such as agricultural productivity or the demands that landlords levied on their serfs. Over two decades Catherine II considered the arguments for and against eliminating restrictions on the export of cereals and gradually changed her mind. She followed the controversy both at home and in foreign states such as France, Tuscany, and the Habsburg dominions, where the liberalization of the grain trade had similarly become an issue of great contention. By the early 1780s she had been persuaded that allowing increased exports of grain, including rye, would produce significant benefits while causing little harm. Prices had remained relatively stable for nearly a decade, and the creation of public granaries in St. Petersburg and Archangel provided insurance against future shortages. Her growing confidence in the stability of supply and prices encouraged a further relaxation of precautionary restraints. In a personal decree dated February 25, 1781, the empress rescinded the requirements that any grain exported from Archangel come exclusively from the provinces of Viatka and Kazan and that 20 percent of the intended exports be kept in the city as a reserve. The decree explained that those requirements should be eliminated because they were no longer necessary and because “agriculture should without doubt be encouraged and multiplied all the more by free export beyond the realm and by advantageous sale.”29 The concluding step in Catherine’s progression to a liberal export policy came on September 22, 1782, when she promulgated a decree authorizing the export of all cereals without exception or limitation. The only remaining requirement would be the payment of an appropriate duty.30 Although the decree did not mention St. Petersburg by name, the export of rye from the capital began with the opening of navigation in 1783 and amounted to 20,414 chetverts by the time the harbor froze in November. By 1784 the figure had risen to 65,953 chetverts, the largest amount of rye to be exported from St. Petersburg in any year of the eighteenth century. Although rye and wheat still ranked well down the list of St. Petersburg’s exports, they were recent additions to that list and could be expected to increase significantly in coming years.31

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REVERSAL

In 1784 it seemed that the proponents of exporting rye had finally won the argument, but their apparent victory was quickly reversed, overturned by the disastrous harvest of 1785, which reduced supplies, raised prices, and inspired fears of famine. As in other states that had liberalized the grain trade, critics of the new policy insisted that the subsequent shortage and high prices had proven them right. Under those circumstances, Catherine’s Commission on Grain felt obliged to rebut the allegation that exports were responsible for the increased prices. In its first report to the empress, the commission, at least two of whose members were staunch supporters of the new policy, insisted that other factors were to blame: “The assertion that the export of grain contributes to the rise in prices is disproved by actual experience . . . because only 15,111 chetverts have been exported in the present year.”32 In another paragraph, however, that report stated that one cause of the recent rise in prices was the fact that too little of the previous year’s flour had been retained in the city. In its report, the commission endorsed the empress’s recommendation that the export of rye and rye flour be halted, but it said it did so “only because of the extreme urgency of the situation.” Given that urgency, the commission had no difficulty concurring with her recommendation that any rye already contracted for export from St. Petersburg be bought and redirected to the domestic market.33 On June 22, 1786, just two days after the commission submitted its report, the empress ordered the governor of St. Petersburg Province to implement emergency measures to counter rising prices and a possible shortage of grain and flour in Russia’s capital. Among those measures was a directive to stop the export of rye and rye flour—but not other cereals—and to seize any rye and rye flour destined for export, even if it had already been loaded on ships. The governor was instructed to send the confiscated goods to the state granary and compensate its owners for the seizure.34 In the midst of crisis, even the strongest proponents of a liberal export policy could agree to a temporary suspension of exports of rye and rye flour from St. Petersburg. Even so, two members of the Commission on Grain advised the empress that a formal ban on exports was unnecessary because the high prices in St. Petersburg and the mechanisms of the international grain market were working toward the same result.35 Between 1782 and 1785 poor harvests in Denmark and Sweden and war preparations in the Netherlands had created a profitable market for Russian, Livonian, and Polish grain, but by 1786 Denmark and Sweden had recovered, and the threat of war had passed. The Dutch were selling off the reserves they had accumulated, depressing international prices at the same time that grain prices in St. Petersburg were rising week by week. Even Riga, where prices rose more slowly than in St. Petersburg, was experiencing a sharp decline in its overseas shipments of rye.36 In 1786 exports of rye from St. Petersexports

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burg stopped because the conditions that had allowed and encouraged them had changed, but it would have been reasonable to assume, as the Commission on Grain had done, that the change was only temporary because the crop failures in Russia and the recession in the Baltic grain market would eventually run their course, the price of flour in St. Petersburg would fall, and exports of rye and rye flour from St. Petersburg would resume. Only two of those four expectations were fulfilled: Russians harvested a better than average crop of rye in 1788, and by that time prices on the Baltic grain market were already on the rise. The price of flour in St. Petersburg, however, never fell back to the levels recorded between 1775 and 1785, and St. Petersburg would not export rye or rye flour again until 1801. In 1789–1790 rye flour in St. Petersburg cost approximately twice as much as it had in the decade before 1786, and by the last years of the eighteenth century, monetary inflation and another run of substandard harvests had driven it back to the levels it had reached in 1786–1787 (see table 22). Catherine’s decree of June 22, 1786, prohibiting the export of rye and rye flour from St. Petersburg had stated that the ban would remain in force until a future decree modified or repealed it. The Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, compiled in the 1830s, contains no such decree, but the “Economic Observations of St. Petersburg” compiled by state officials in 1793 reveals that a new set of price ceilings had come into force in the interim. Less stringent than the absolute prohibition on the export of rye, the new rules nevertheless produced the same result. The “Economic Observations” of 1793 explained the prevailing rules on exporting cereals commodities from St. Petersburg: “Wheat and other cereals may be exported, but rye only when the price of a chetvert does not exceed two rubles fifty kopecks, but Russian merchants have not been able to sell it at that price for a long time.”37 For all practical purposes, the prohibition on exporting rye from St. Petersburg remained in effect throughout the last ten years of Catherine’s reign. It had taken twenty years to persuade the empress to permit the free export of grain from St. Petersburg but only two years of crisis to persuade her that her conversion had been a mistake. Whatever her reason— war, inflation, the French Revolution—the empress would not allow rye to be shipped out of her capital city while its residents were paying twice as much for their daily bread as they had just a few years earlier. That policy, unlike many others, did not change with Catherine’s death, in 1796. If anything, her son and successor, Paul, was even quicker than his mother had been to respond to local conditions by forbidding or allowing exports of grain. In 1798, when the region that supplied Archangel harvested less grain than usual, Paul halted shipments of grain and flour from that port. When conditions improved in the following year, he allowed Archangel to export wheat but not rye. In the spring of 1799 Paul responded to a meager harvest in Belorussia and the Baltic provinces by banning cereals exports from the Baltic ports, but after 192

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Table 22. Market price of a chetvert of rye flour in St. Petersburg, 1778–1801 (in kopecks per chetvert) 1778 (Aug.)

210

1780 (June)

250

1786 (March)

500

1786 (June)

650

1786 (Aug.)

637

1786 (Oct.)

558

1786 (Dec.)

675

1787 (late)

500–83

1796

664

1797

615

1798

664

1799

736

1800

645

1801

760

Source: For 1778 and 1780, the figures come from a report of General-Politseimeister Volkov to Catherine II, RGADA, f. 16, d. 504, part 1, l. 18; and part 4, l. 67; for April and June 1786, from reports submitted to the Commission on Grain, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 394, 396; for August 1786, Semenova, “Snabzhenie khlebom,” 11–13; for October and December 1786 and for 1787, from Munro, “Feeding,” 506; for 1796– 1801, Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, table 5.

a better harvest in the fall, he permitted them once again. Then, when supplies ran low in January 1800, he restored the earlier prohibition.38 For St. Petersburg, however, the established rule remained unaltered: wheat could be exported with the payment of duty, but rye and rye flour could not be exported at all.39 Change came swiftly after Paul’s overthrow and subsequent assassination on March 12, 1801. Twelve days later Paul’s son and successor, Alexander I, signed a decree allowing the free and unrestricted export of cereals commodities and spirits from the Russian Empire. Ignoring the many concerns that had troubled the governments of Catherine and Paul, Alexander’s decree of March 21, 1801, expressed a generalized ideological commitment to free trade as part of a general program of liberal reform. In that context, the law’s implicit permission to export rye from St. Petersburg received no specific thought or attention; it was only one barely noticed item in one section of the liberalizing agenda put forward by the leaders of the conspiracy against Paul. It had no connection to the reasons for Paul’s overthrow, nor did it express any particular interest or involvement on the part of the new emperor. Even so, Alexander did not explicitly disavow that exports

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policy after he wrested control of the government away from the conspirators and exiled its leaders. On the contrary, when the governor of Archangel reacted to a poor harvest in 1803 by halting exports of grain from that city, Alexander responded with a personal decree citing the law of March 21, 1801, and telling the governor not to violate its provisions.40 The export of rye from St. Petersburg, however, stopped without explanation. In the same year that Alexander instructed the governor of Archangel not to interfere with the export of wheat and rye from that city, no rye was exported from St. Petersburg. After exporting 39,976 chetverts of rye in 1801 but only 5,027 chetverts in 1802, St. Petersburg exported no rye at all in 1803.41 Subsequently, with Russia at war in November and December 1806, Alexander banned the export of grain and flour from all Russian ports on the White and Baltic Seas and across the western border.42 Then, after signing the Treaties of Tilsit with Napoleon I in July 1807, Alexander ended the embargo. His decree of October 29, 1809, permitted the export of all cereals from all the northern ports except St. Petersburg but required them to retain 20 percent of the exported amounts. It imposed a tariff of fifty kopecks per chetvert on exports of rye and restored the former rates for other grains. From St. Petersburg the decree permitted the export of wheat but not rye.43 Exports of rye from St. Petersburg did not resume until after 1815, and cereals exports would not play a major role in the city’s commerce until the late 1830s.44 EXPORTS AND PRICES

With few exceptions, from 1703 to 1811 the Russian government assumed that exporting rye and rye flour from St. Petersburg would raise their prices in the city’s markets. The repeated bans and restrictions that the government imposed on exports of those commodities may have helped to stabilize their prices in years when supplies were particularly tight, but they clearly failed to prevent those prices from rising over longer stretches of time. During the first century and more of St. Petersburg’s existence, the export of rye and rye flour was almost always prohibited or else so severely restricted as to make it impractical. Only in three brief periods, 1741–1744, 1783–1785, and 1801–1802, amounting to eight out of more than one hundred years, did St. Petersburg export more than negligible quantities of those foodstuffs, yet during that same century the price of rye and rye flour in St. Petersburg more than quadrupled. In the period from 1744 and 1800 alone, the price of rye flour in St. Petersburg more than tripled despite the fact that the export of rye and rye flour was negligible in all but three of those fifty-six years. Exports of rye from St. Petersburg did not cause the price of rye flour in the city’s markets to rise, and banning its export did not keep the price from rising. The long-term discontinuity between exports and prices contradicts Boris Mironov’s claim that grain exports to western Europe after 1762 were responsi194

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Table 23. Average yearly export of rye and rye flour from St. Petersburg, 1762–1805 (in chetverts) Amount

1762–1770

1771–1780

1781–1790

1791–1801a

1801–1805

243

115

12,952

9,787

10,659

Source: Mironov, “Eksport,” 158, table 3. Mironov included the figure for 1801 in both of the last two time periods. Because 1801 was a record year for grain exports from St. Petersburg, its inclusion inflates the totals for both periods. Without it, the total for the period 1802–1805 would be only 876 chetverts.

a

ble for the dramatic rise in Russian cereals prices in the following half century. While allowing that poor harvests and monetary inflation also played a role in raising these prices, Mironov has argued that even though Russian cereals exports in that period were not large, “they nevertheless have great significance.” He has stated that Russian grain exports after 1762 “are connected to” the moderation of grain prices in western Europe and, more relevantly, to a “price revolution” in Russia that encouraged a great expansion of cultivated land, the replacement of obrok with barshchina, the growth of the national market, and the commercialization of agriculture. In his estimation, “Russia’s foreign trade through the Baltic and White Sea ports became the Archimedes’ Lever by means of which higher prices in the western European market raised the prices in Russia to their own level.”45 Unquestionably, the price of cereals and other goods increased dramatically in Russia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nor can anyone disagree with Mironov’s assessment of the consequences of those higher prices. Nonetheless, several considerations undermine his contention that exports were the primary or even a major cause of the increase in cereals prices. In the first place, the overall volume of those exports was quite small in relation to the domestic market. Mironov points out that the export of all cereals commodities from St. Petersburg in 1796–1800 were seven times greater than they had been in 1762–1770, but the comparison is misleading because the base was so small. Table 23 shows Mironov’s calculations of the average yearly export of rye from St. Petersburg in the last four decades of the eighteenth century and the first five years of the nineteenth. The quantities of rye and rye flour exported from St. Petersburg amounted to only a tiny fraction of the quantities the city received through the Ladoga Canal. Gaps in the yearly record of deliveries preclude exact comparison for all periods, but A. L. Shapiro managed to compile figures on deliveries for thirty-three years between 1741 and 1839. With respect to the one period for which he had complete figures, 1801–1805, Shapiro calculated the average yearly delivery to have been 830,400 chetverts.46 That figure is highly credible in the light of data from other exports

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sources; reports from the Ladoga Canal Office, for example, show that 867,389 kuls (or 1,040,866.6 chetverts) of rye flour arrived in Shlissel’burg in 1806 and 607,196 kuls (728,635 chetverts) arrived in 1807.47 That would mean that between 1801 and 1805, when St. Petersburg’s exports of rye and rye flour were at their highest, they amounted to slightly more than 1 percent of the rye and rye flour brought to St. Petersburg. The broader picture is even more revealing. It would be illuminating to compare Russia’s exports with Russia’s total production of rye, but estimates of total production are unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, we can compare the amount of Russian rye and rye flour shipped overseas from all the ports in the Russian Empire in 1801–1805 with the amount of rye and rye flour delivered to St. Petersburg: an average of 517,655 chetverts a year sent abroad versus an average of 820,000 chetverts delivered to St. Petersburg but not exported.48 In other words, the demand in St. Petersburg alone required deliveries equal to almost two-thirds of all Russia’s exports of rye and rye flour, and that calculation does not include the demand created by Moscow, other towns and cities, and the many provinces of Russia that consumed more grain than they harvested. The conflict between St. Petersburg’s experience with the export and price of rye and Mironov’s hypothesis is neither direct nor complete and requires further explanation of its dimensions and significance. In the first place, Mironov based his theory on the export of all grains, not just rye, which raises the possibility that the export of wheat and other cereals commodities contributed to the rising cost of rye flour in St. Petersburg. When the Commission on Commerce proposed legislation to allow the export of wheat, it argued that Russians did not consume much wheat, which could therefore be treated as a commodity destined for the foreign market, like flax or hemp. The domestic market for wheat grew dramatically, however, not only in Moscow, where it had always played a role in provisioning that city, but also in St. Petersburg. At the end of the eighteenth century, Heinrich Storch recorded that white bread had replaced dark bread on the tables of the capital’s high society and that even the lowest and poorest classes in the city ate white bread occasionally.49 Although wheat flour always cost more than rye flour in St. Petersburg, the higher price did not deter increased consumption and may even have encouraged it by giving white bread a higher status than dark. Since those who preferred wheat could always purchase rye at lower cost, whereas those who ate rye of necessity had no such alternative, the government did not worry about the price and availability of wheat and wheat flour, as it did about rye. Moreover, it saw no correlation between exports of wheat and the price of rye. A comparison of the figures on wheat exports with rye prices supports the government’s position. Table 21 shows that while exports of wheat from St. Petersburg began in 1766, they did not become significant until 1769, after which they averaged 35,577 chetverts a year during 1769–1774, but the price of rye flour remained stable through that period and on into the mid-1780s. More significant, 196

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Table 24. Export of wheat from St. Petersburg, 1790–1804 Chetverts

1790

11,004

1791

11,380

1792

11,316

1793

17,813

1794

11,361

1795

43,000

1796

98,147

1797

18,616

1798

2,026

1799

11,331

1800

?

1801

187,198

1802

69,144

1803

52,698

1804

38,920

Sources: Mironov, “Eksport,” 157, table 2; Oddy, European Commerce, 1:123; I. M. Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli, 218–19.

the quantity of wheat exported from St. Petersburg between 1790 and 1799 was actually lower than in 1769–1774, averaging only 23,600 chetverts a year, but the price of rye flour in St. Petersburg increased by more than 20 percent during those ten years (see table 24). For comparison, note that in a list of twenty-one commodities exported from St. Petersburg in 1795, wheat ranked fifteenth in value and twentieth in volume.50 In terms of value it ranked twelfth in 1802 and thirteenth in 1803.51 No other cereals made the list. Because some producers did switch from rye to wheat instead of bringing unused fields under the plow, and because wheat did occupy transport that might have been used for rye, it is impossible to state categorically that exports of wheat from St. Petersburg had absolutely no effect on the price of rye and rye flour in the city’s markets, but it is possible to conclude that any effect it could conceivably have had was minuscule compared to the overall rise in prices. Second, it must be pointed out that Mironov did not base his theory on the experience of one specific port or locality. Instead, he attributed the rise in cereals prices to exports from all the northern ports and even from all the ports within the empire. Analyzing data on prices from the various provinces and districts, he concluded that a “unified, all-Russian market” for agricultural commodities linked exports from Riga, Reval, St. Petersburg, and Archangel, exports

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as well as, subsequently, ports on the Black Sea, to prices and production in all areas of European Russia.52 If such a market existed, the export of grain and flour from any port in Russia could have worked to raise their prices in St. Petersburg, but its existence is far from proven. Disputing Mironov’s claim, I. D. Koval’chenko and L. V. Milov have argued that an all-Russian market for grain did not exist before the 1880s, when the construction of railroads began. Like Mironov, Koval’chenko and Milov base their conclusion on price correlations, and their principal disagreement with him concerns the accuracy and use of primary data.53 But even if cereals prices in different regions of Russia did move in the same direction at the same time, that would not prove the existence of an all-Russian market, because prices were further influenced by common nationwide occurrences, such as population increase and currency inflation, that would have produced similar effects on separate regional markets within the empire. Beyond the issue of price correlations, another question about the existence of an “all-Russian market” should be raised: did cereals move about the Russian Empire among regions and along established trade routes in such a way that those going to other ports for shipment abroad could instead have gone to St. Petersburg for consumption? To put it another way, is it possible that the market translated exports from Riga and the Black Sea ports into higher prices in St. Petersburg? In 1721, when Peter I called for legislation that would direct Russia’s export trade to his new capital, the Senate responded with a decree requiring that all goods destined for export be brought to St. Petersburg except those originating in the natural hinterlands of other ports. Specifically, the law allowed Archangel to export goods produced within the watershed of the Northern Dvina, it allowed Riga to export goods produced in the western regions of Russia and the Ukraine that could not ship goods to St. Petersburg from the wharf at Gzhatsk, and it allowed Narva to export goods from the district of Pskov.54 In similar fashion, the law of 1764 allowing the export of rye from Archangel specified that the exported grain had to come from the provinces of Kazan and Viatka.55 The authors of those laws understood that the availability of water transport determined the movement of heavy, bulky goods, such as grain and flour. Water transport connected specific regions with specific ports. The law of 1744 quoted at the beginning of this chapter acknowledged the same basic fact of commerce when it explicitly connected its ban on grain exports from St. Petersburg to that city’s dependence on a single trade route for its supplies and made it clear that no grain or flour came from other sources by other routes. The government rediscovered the importance of that critical fact during the crisis of 1786–1787 when it tried to relieve pressure on the city’s food supply by bringing grain and flour from unusual sources only to find that it entailed extraordinary difficulties and extraordinary expenses that could be justified only by the extraordinary circumstances. In normal times consumers in St. Petersburg could pay high prices and 198

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fear shortages while producers in other regions of European Russia, such as the province of Chernigov, were wondering what to do with an unmarketable surplus of grain. Russia did increase its grain exports in the 1770s and thereafter, but the increase in quantities shipped from ports on the White Sea and the Baltic Sea was erratic and too small to have caused the price increase that occurred in that same period. The really dramatic increase in exports came after the acquisition of ports on the Black Sea in the mid-1770s and especially after the founding of Odessa in 1795. Responsible for only minimal exports before 1780, those ports accounted for 70 percent of Russia’s cereals exports in 1801–1805.56 But those exports also had little or no effect on prices elsewhere in Russia. The cereals shipped from the newly acquired ports on the Black Sea came from crops grown on the newly acquired lands of Novorossiia adjacent to that sea. They did not come from the areas that supplied central and northern Russia and so did not raise prices there. Conversely, there was no way to bring them to those markets, and so they could not have lowered prices in central and northern Russia if their export had been banned.57 If exports did not cause the extraordinary rise in the price of Russian cereals, what did? If increased demand was primarily responsible for higher prices, the growth of domestic demand, which far exceeded the growth of exports, appears to have been a likely factor. As table 25 shows, the male population of central and northern Russia grew from 5,162,638 in 1719 to 9,142,149 in 1811, an increase of 77 percent. Assuming that the increase in the female population was at least as large, which is an inexact but conservative and reasonable procedure, the total population increase can be estimated as 7,922,947. Then, by using the Russian government’s standard that every man, woman, and child on average required a minimum of 2.25 chetverts (approximately 292.5 kilograms) of grain per year, we can estimate the minimum internal demand at each revision as shown in table 26. Those figures represent the minimums needed to prevent famine and malnutrition. Normal consumption would certainly have been higher but would presumably have increased at approximately the same rate. For peasants fully engaged in agriculture, the increased need could probably be matched by increased production, but those who were totally divorced from agriculture added only to the demand side of the balance. Consumption of cereals by the military, for example, increased from 600,000 chetverts in the time of Peter I to 1,000,000 chetverts by the end of the century.58 Even greater was the increased demand from city dwellers. The population of St. Petersburg grew by 336,000 between 1703 and 1811 and by 241,000 between 1750 and 1811, and its demand for rye flour and other cereals commodities grew proportionately (see table 4, in chapter 1). The population of Moscow increased by approximately 120,000 inhabitants of both sexes between 1725 and 1811, and with a population almost as large as St. Petersburg’s by 1811, it consumed almost as much grain and flour. To the demand exports

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Table 25. Male population of the four regions of central and northern Russia at each revision of the tax rolls Regiona

Central industrial Central agriculture Lake Middle Volga Total

Revision 1 Revision 2 Revision 3b Revision 4 Revision 5 Revision 6 1719

1744

1762

1782

1795

1811

2,278,535

2,333,605

2,540,465

2,938,056

3,063,913

3,271,515

1,561,417

1,890,003

2,095,453

2,712,640

2,963,872

3,505,803

553,897

697,343

723,754

872,177

920,833

991,773

768,789

825,242

882,632

1,081,076

1,182,399

1,373,058

5,162,638

5,746,193

6,242,304

7,603,949

8,131,607

9,142,149

Source: Kabuzan, Izmenenie, 59, 71, 83, 95, 107, 119. In compiling this table, I have retained Kabuzan’s groupings of provinces into regions as follows: central industrial: Moscow, Vladimir, Kaluga, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tver; central agricultural: Voronezh, Riazan, Tambov, Orlov, Kursk, Tula; lake: St. Petersburg, Novgorod, Pskov, Olonets; middle Volga: Kazan, Penza, Simbirsk. b Beginning with the third revision, Kabuzan included tax-exempt males in the totals. a

created by those two large cities, which grew little if any of their own cereals, one must also add the demand of 165 provincial towns that may have grown some of their own cereals, as well as that of the many peasants in northern and central Russia who distressed the upper classes by performing wage labor and purchasing cereals grown by others. Nonetheless, attempts to connect increased domestic demand to higher prices faced their own problems. Above all, population and consumption increased gradually and steadily over the course of the century while cereals prices remained stable within a narrow range for periods of time and then suddenly surged to unprecedented levels, as they did in the 1760s and the mid-1780s. In the first case, a disappointing harvest may have contributed to the surge in prices, and in the second, a disastrous harvest clearly triggered it, but in neither case did prices fall to their previous levels when supplies improved. After the first surge, they remained much higher than they had been, and after the second, they continued to rise to higher levels over the next two decades. Among the many reasons given for the rise in cereals prices, one has gone almost unnoticed: a simultaneous and dramatic increase in the supply of money that led to inflated prices for almost everything. In his description of St. Petersburg written in 1794, Georgi attributed the higher prices not just to increased demand and a higher, more luxurious standard of living but also to “the [growing] quantity of money” available, and Mironov noted in passing that the prices of 200

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Table 26. Minimal demand for rye flour within the central Russian grain market at each revision, 1719–1811 Revision 1 Revision 2 Revision 3 Revision 3 Revision 5 Revision 6 1719

1744

1762

1782

1795

1811

Chetverts

23,231,871

25,857,868

28,090,368

34,217,770

36,592,231

41,139,670

Metric tons

2,853,906

3,176,945

3,450,745

4,203,463

4,495,152

5,053,780

other agricultural commodities and of manufactured goods rose almost as much as the prices for grain and flour, but almost all other attempts to explain the rise in cereals prices have failed to connect it to the increased supply of money or to place it in the context of overall price inflation.59 Instead, explanations at the time and ever since have focused on the balance between supply and demand as the sole determinant of prices while paying little or no attention to the supply and value of money. The monetary reforms of 1727 and 1731 ended the period of confusing changes that had characterized the Petrine era and established a solid, stable coinage that remained unchanged until 1757.60 In that period cereals prices remained low and generally stable, fluctuating within a narrow range in response to the harvest. In 1757 Elizabeth’s government devalued the copper coins that peasants used almost exclusively in their transactions and began to mint sixteen kopecks from a pud of copper in place of the previous ten. In 1764 Catherine II authorized a much more modest devaluation of the silver ruble by reducing the content of pure silver from 77 to 72 percent. More importantly, the government increased its profitable minting operations. In 1764–1765 the government minted 80 percent more silver than in the two preceding years. Most of the increase consisted of small silver coins and was accompanied by a comparable increase in the minting of copper coins.61 Over the next ten years cereals prices rose by more than 50 percent, alarming the government and inspiring a search for explanations. By focusing narrowly on the cereals trade, those explanations ignored the fact that the prices of other goods were rising as well.62 They also ignored the sudden and dramatic change in the quality and quantity of money, which far exceeded any comparable change in production, consumption, exports, or any other causes they identified. The relationship between the money supply and the inflation that began in the mid-1780s is even clearer. From the date of their first issue in 1769 until 1787, Russia’s assignats, or paper currency, never fell more than a kopeck or two below their face values. In that sixteen-year period the government issued a total of 46,219,250 rubles’ worth of assignats, but in 1787 it responded to budget deficits, the grain crisis of 1786–1787, and preparations for war by issuing 53,780,750 rubles’ worth of assignats in a single year. As the expedient printing of money exports

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continued, the government put 212 million rubles’ worth of paper currency into circulation by 1800 and 836 million by 1817. The value of paper rubles declined in consequence, falling to 92.75 silver kopecks in 1788, to 70.5 in 1795, to 66.25 by 1800, and to 25 kopecks by 1817.63 Because assignats were freely exchangeable for copper but not silver, copper coins declined along with paper rubles, while silver all but disappeared from circulation. The conclusion that cereals prices rose because of monetary inflation rather than exports, population growth, or some other disruption of the balance between supply and demand gains its strongest support from Mironov’s data on the price of rye in terms of gold. While the market price of a chetvert of rye flour in St. Petersburg doubled between 1801 and 1811, its price in relation to gold actually fell by more than one-third.64 Of course, grain and flour were being sold not for gold or silver but for paper and copper. Between 1787 and 1793 Catherine’s government also inflated the supply of money in Russia by borrowing 42.8 million rubles from the Netherlands through its English bankers Henry Hope and Company to finance its military engagements with Turkey, Sweden, and Poland. As a direct result of that borrowing, the value of the silver ruble also declined, falling from 38 Dutch stuivers in 1788 to only 22.5 Dutch stuivers in 1793.65 Monetary inflation thus caused cereals prices to rise everywhere in Russia, which explains the price correlations that led Mironov to assert the existence of an all-Russian market, but they did not rise more conspicuously in St. Petersburg than in distant inland areas, as one would expect if increased exports had caused the rise. Cereals commodities did cost more in St. Petersburg and other regions near the Baltic and White seas, but that did not result from their access to the European market and competition from foreign consumers, as Mironov asserts.66 Instead, the increase resulted from those regions’ inability to grow enough grain for themselves and from their distance from the sources of surplus production. The cost and difficulty of transporting grain and flour to St. Petersburg raised the price of those commodities in St. Petersburg. It also placed severe restrictions on St. Petersburg’s ability to export surplus grain produced in fertile but far away regions of the empire. In the 1790s, before the great surge in grain exports through the Black Sea ports, St. Petersburg handled more than 55 percent of Russia’s exports overall but less than 5 percent of its exports of grain.67 The dramatic increase in shipments of grain from the Black Sea ports that began at the turn of the nineteenth century further reduced St. Petersburg’s percentage of Russia’s cereals exports to a tiny fraction of 1 percent.68 St. Petersburg’s location at the end of a continuous waterway from the Volga Basin to the sea made it the busiest and most important port in Russia through the second half of the eighteenth century. As such, it provided access to the international market for many Russian goods and commodities, such as hemp, tallow, and linen, but its ability to export cereals was severely limited by the difficulty of transporting grain and flour from their distant sources and by the need to feed 202

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its large and growing population. The problem of provisioning St. Petersburg and the problem of realizing Russia’s potential as an exporter of grain were thus intertwined throughout the eighteenth century, and it was not until the first decade of the nineteenth century that the Russian government managed to solve each of those problems in its own way. In the early 1760s, when Dmitry Volkov argued that Russia should remove restrictions on cereals exports and allow Russian grain “to feed the world,” he knew that Russia produced more grain than it consumed, and he believed that other countries would buy at least some of that surplus at a premium to the domestic price. The problem, as he saw it, was to remove the barriers between supply and demand, and he thought he could accomplish that by ending the prohibition on exporting grain from St. Petersburg. Volkov was right about the potential value of exporting Russian grain but wrong about St. Petersburg’s ability play the role he envisioned for it. St. Petersburg’s exports of other goods contributed mightily to Russia’s national income, but the realization of Russia’s potential as an exporter of grain would have to wait for the acquisition of a more suitable port in a very different location.

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CHAPTER 8

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hroughout the eighteenth century Russia’s rulers struggled to cope with a fundamental problem of economic geography: its best farmland, capable of producing a great surplus of grain, lay in the steppes to the south and southeast of the central and northern provinces where the great majority of Russians lived and far from Russia’s imperial capital and fastest-growing metropolis. As a result, northern consumers had to pay high prices for grain and flour transported over long distances while many southern producers had difficulty finding a market for the grain they grew, never mind the still larger quantities they could and would have grown if the market had been larger, and some had no market at all. In some important respects, though by no means all, Russia’s difficulties in connecting its real and potential agricultural surpluses with accessible markets resembled those of the early United States. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the American War of Independence, awarded the United States land extending west all the way to the Mississippi River, thus including the fertile territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi, but most of the new nation’s population and all of its seaports lay on the other side of the Appalachians, while the more easily accessible seaports on the Gulf of Mexico belonged to foreign 204

empires. The possible solutions in both cases were equally obvious: find ways to bring more of those surpluses to the cities and seaports on the other side of the troublesome divide or acquire the more accessible ports from the foreigners who held them. The United States accomplished those aims in fairly short order, though not without disappointments and controversy. The Russian Empire, operating in a different set of circumstances, started sooner and needed more time, but both counties finished at about the same time, and both would reap enormous benefits that did much to shape their futures. PLANS FOR NEW CANALS

On January 20, 1798, Emperor Paul appropriated 250,000 rubles in assignats to begin work on a second waterway from the Volga to St. Petersburg.1 Two years later he provided another 250,000 rubles to develop a deep-water port on the Black Sea at Odessa. Those two decisions and the determination with which Paul and Alexander carried them out resolved the interconnected problems of provisioning St. Petersburg and exporting Russia’s surplus grain, problems that the imperial government had wrestled with since the time of Peter I. For ninety-five years Paul’s predecessors had struggled to supply St. Petersburg by creating and improving the single water route through Vyshnii Volochek. In the latest phase of that effort, Catherine II had established the Directorate of Water Communications in 1773 and created the Corps of Hydrologic Engineering in 1782 to provide it with technical expertise. Under Sievers, Bruce, and Arkharov, the directorate constructed aqueducts and reservoirs to provide additional water for the canals at Vyshnii Volochek and to augment the flow of the Tvertsa and Msta, it organized caravans of barks and coordinated their movement with the release of water at the summit, and it removed rocks and other hazards from the most dangerous rapids to reduce accidents. After considerable hesitation, Catherine had provided funds for rebuilding the locks at Vyshnii Volochek in stone and for renovating the Ladoga Canal. Through such efforts, the government ultimately made the passage from the Volga to the capital faster, easier, and safer. The number of boats and the amount of cargo reaching St. Petersburg in an average year more than doubled during Catherine’s reign, and the supply of grain, flour, and other necessities had kept pace with the city’s growing demand. By the end of the century, however, the waterway through Vyshnii Volochek was reaching the limits of its capacity. The imperial government had repeatedly considered and sometimes even approved plans for a second waterway from the Volga to St. Petersburg, but sooner or later it had always found them too expensive. In 1753 P. I. Shuvalov had responded to merchants’ complaints about the route through Vyshnii Volochek by commissioning a study of possible alternatives. The commission reconsidered the different routes that Perry and Korchmin had identified in 1702 and recommended spending an estimated 968,480 rubles to open a new waterway resolution

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from the Volga to St. Petersburg through the Mologa and Sias rivers. The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War sidetracked that proposal until 1762, and when it was revived, it failed to win the Senate’s approval.2 In 1764 General L. M. Golenishchev-Kutuzov put forward a plan to make the Volga navigable to its source, Lake Seliger, and then open a waterway from that lake through a canal and the Pola River to Lake Il’men. After a lengthy investigation, the Senate rejected Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s project on the grounds that it was too costly and the proposed route was too long and too perilous.3 Instead, the Senate approved a proposal from Senator M. A. Dedenev to connect the Sheksna with the Sias at an estimated cost of 5,175,092 rubles.4 The Senate endorsed Dedenev’s proposal, and in its report to the empress dated October 9, 1774, it praised the new route’s projected benefits with these words: [We find the proposed route] most convenient and useful to the state and indispensably necessary for the city of St. Petersburg, not only because of its short length, but also because of the difficulties and misfortunes often encountered by boats passing Lake Il’men, the dangerous Lake Mstino, and the rapids at Borovichi, and also because boats can return in one piece and therefore the wood that is used annually for boats can be diverted to other uses. And above all, merchants will not only be able to carry cereals and other goods from the interior, but they will also be able to sell their imported goods that until now have had to be sent overland, and they will be cheaper.5

At the time, Russia was recovering from war, plague, and rebellion and preparing to settle and develop the territories acquired from the Ottoman Empire under the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji, and Catherine refused to fund Dedenev’s project. Eleven years later, however, she approved a proposal to open a canal between the Kovzha, a tributary of the Sheksna, and the Vytegra along the third route that Perry and Korchmin had identified. Catherine ordered the State Assignats Bank to provide 1,944,436 rubles for the project and then changed her mind, countermanding the order before any work had begun.6 Other projects to improve water transport from the interior to the northern ports had similar histories. In 1784 Catherine approved a project to connect the middle Volga to the Northern Dvina with a canal between two of their tributaries. Work began in 1786, but it was halted in 1788 when the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia and never resumed. Studies of a possible link between the upper Dnieper and the Western Dvina began in 1778 and finally led to a proposal, submitted to the Senate in 1786, that would have cost an estimated 4 million rubles. The Senate rejected it. The clearest example of indecision, however, involved a proposal to extend the Ladoga Canal along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga to the mouth of the river Sias in order to facilitate the delivery of wood and other building materials to St. Petersburg. In the first year of her reign, Catherine approved the plan and agreed to fund it. Work began in 1765, stopped 206

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in 1766, started again in 1774, stopped in 1781, started again in 1782, and stopped in 1783. By then three kilometers of the projected canal had been completed at a cost of 147,440 rubles.7 Like the funding of banks, the funding of canals gave way to higher priorities, often, but not always, war and expansion. THE SOUTHERN ALTERNATIVE

Although Catherine was genuinely concerned about provisioning St. Petersburg and was willing to spend whatever was needed to ensure sufficiency, she was far less willing to spend money on additional waterways to St. Petersburg or, for that matter, to Riga or Archangel. When forced to choose, she gave priority to the acquisition, settlement, and development of territories adjacent to the Black Sea and ultimately to the export of Russian goods through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Catherine knew that such a policy would almost certainly lead to further war against the Ottoman Empire, and she knew that it was expensive and unpopular, but she was convinced that money spent to develop the south and open the Black Sea to Russian exports would eventually bring greater returns than money spent to bring those goods to northern ports or to develop the already settled regions of her empire.8 Responding to criticism of her actions in the south, Catherine went to the Black Sea region in 1788 to judge the results for herself. En route she wrote a series of letters to Moscow’s governor, P. D. Eropkin, in which she explained and defended her policy there, telling him, “Its benefit will be proven in time as with all great undertakings whose benefits at the beginning are not apparent to the understanding of the majority. St. Petersburg provides one-eighth of the revenues of the empire. It has existed for eightyfour years, and the court is located there. Let us see how financially profitable the ports here will be in a short time.”9 In the same series of letters, she wrote, “They know very little of the value of things, they who defame the acquisition of this region and the Tauride [i.e., Crimea]. In time they will not only pay for themselves, but one may hope, if St. Petersburg brings in one-eighth part of the revenue of the empire, then the above-mentioned places will surpass it in terms of rewards.”10 Catherine’s son and successor, Paul, came to power as an unwavering opponent of Catherine’s expansionist policies in the south. In a memorandum he composed in 1774 entitled “A Consideration of the State in General,” Paul stated his opposition to war in principle and to the recently concluded war against Turkey in particular. He admitted that the war had produced some gains, but he found the costs in money, men, and disorder excessive. He went on to argue that disproportionate spending on the military upset the necessary balance among the concerns of the government and undermined the stability of the state.11 As Catherine’s letters to Eropkin acknowledge, a significant segment of the Russian nobility shared Paul’s opposition to her expansionist policies in the south. At various points in time it included such luminaries as Nikita Panin, resolution

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Alexander Vorontsov, Michael Shcherbatov, Alexander Radishchev, and Jakob Sievers. Like Paul, these men believed that Catherine and G. A. Potemkin, her lover, favorite, and plenipotentiary in the south, were wasting money that would be better spent on domestic improvements such as schools, banks, roads, bridges, and canals.12 CREATING NEW WATERWAYS

Convinced that his mother’s policies and priorities were all wrong, Paul immediately set out to reverse them when he finally came to power in November 1796. Within weeks of Catherine’s death, Paul recalled the troops that she had sent to assist Austria in its war against revolutionary France and canceled the extra military recruitment she had ordered to support it. He terminated her plans to invade Persia and normalized relations with the Ottoman Empire. Closer to home, Paul curtailed further expenditures on projects in the Black Sea region and set in motion an ambitious program to develop water transport from the interior to the Baltic ports. To organize and direct that program, Paul recalled Jakob Sievers, the former director of water communications, from retirement, put him in charge, and assured him of support. In addition to being a longtime personal friend of Paul and his wife, Maria Fedorovna, Sievers shared their disapproval of Catherine’s policies and priorities. As governor and then governor-general of Novgorod and as director of water communications, Sievers had chafed at the diversion of funds from his projects to the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. Afterward he became increasingly resentful of the money that Potemkin spent—or in Sievers’s opinion squandered—on the territories Russia had gained from that war. Frustrated and feeling that Catherine neglected him and his projects to improve the waterways and provinces under his authority, Sievers resigned his offices in 1781. When Paul offered him a second chance, Sievers accepted with alacrity. Paul restored Sievers to his former post with the Directorate of Water Communications on February 27, 1798. One year later he approved Sievers’s plan for an expanded and upgraded agency, now called the Department of Water Communications, with authority over all waterways and navigation within the Russian Empire.13 Under Sievers and his successors, G. G. Kushelev (1800–1801) and N. P. Rumiantsev (1801–1809), the Department of Water Communications directed a vast and expensive program of improvements to Russia’s water transport. Its highest priority, however, was to facilitate the movement of goods from the Russian interior to St. Petersburg and Riga. When Sievers returned to office in 1797, his foremost concern was to improve water transport from the Volga to the capital. After a personal inspection tour of 2,500 kilometers from Gzhatsk to St. Petersburg, Sievers quickly won Paul’s approval for three projects to improve the existing waterway through Vyshnii Volochek: an aqueduct (the Velevskii Canal) to bring water from Lake Veli to 208

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Vyshnii Volochek, a canal to connect the Msta directly to the Volkhov in order to avoid the dangers of Lake Il’men, and a further “cleaning” of the rapids on the Volkhov. Those were long-standing proposals left over from Sievers’s previous service as director of water communications, and he did not refrain from telling the emperor, “Of everything that I considered necessary, nothing has been done.”14 Paul agreed to all those proposals, and he and Sievers developed a scheme for funding them that became a precedent for future projects: the government would pay the initial costs of construction, but it would recoup its outlays from new or additional tolls. Far more ambitious was Sievers’s proposal to open a new water route between the Volga and the Neva by connecting the Kovzha, a tributary of the Sheksna, with the Vytegra, a river whose waters eventually reached St. Petersburg. Like other officials with responsibility for the waterways and for supplying St. Petersburg, Sievers had concluded that the route through Vyshnii Volochek had reached or would soon reach the limits of its capacity. Without additional water at the summit to operate the locks at Vyshnii Volochek and to augment the flow of the Tvertsa and Msta rivers, there could be no increase in traffic through those waterways. The proposed aqueduct to Lake Veli would tap the last source of available water, but it would only postpone the inevitable for a few years more. A drought in the summer of 1798 drove that point home by delaying and threatening to strand more than 200 barks carrying flour to Provisions Chancellery. In September the chancellery began borrowing emergency supplies from the public granary to feed the garrisons in St. Petersburg and Finland, and it appealed to the newly created Department of Water Communications for assistance in moving its flour. By then Sievers was already in Vyshnii Volochek trying to cope with the snarl of traffic caused by the shortage of water. Without hesitation he gave priority of passage to the caravan carrying the chancellery’s flour and dispatched special agents to guide it through the waterways. Despite what those agents termed “extraordinarily low water” at the Borovichi Rapids, Lake Il’men, and the Volkhov Rapids, 99 of the barks managed to reach St. Petersburg before the close of navigation, but another 115 of them were forced to winter over at Vyshnii Volochek and along the Tvertsa. On top of that, the Admiralty complained that because of the low water and the priority given to flour, it would have to wait another six months for shipments of oak and iron that it urgently needed for the fleet.15 Paul had already approved Sievers’s proposal for a second waterway from the Volga to St. Petersburg as well as a waterway from the Dnieper to Riga. He had come in person to meet Sievers at Vyshnii Volochek in May 1798 and in Rybinsk one month later. From there they returned together through Tikhvin and Shlissel’burg, where they inspected the works underway on the Ladoga Canal. The emperor’s interest and enthusiasm were evident, but his resources were now under strain. resolution

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Paul had changed his mind about sending troops to support Austria against revolutionary France. Still trying to put the state’s finances in order but having decided to wage war, Paul found himself short of funds for domestic projects, just as Catherine had.16 At that point Empress Maria Fedorovna suggested a way out of the difficulty. The empress was a close personal friend of Sievers and was well informed about his projects. As the “supreme director” of the Moscow and St. Petersburg foundling homes, she had appointed Sievers chair of those institutions’ governing council. Whether on her own initiative or, more likely, at Sievers’s instigation, Maria Fedorovna came forward with a proposal to lend the treasury 400,000 rubles from the capital of the St. Petersburg Foundling Home to finance the next stage of work on the new waterway. Paul accepted the offer enthusiastically, agreed to add whatever funds the Treasury could provide, and ordered Sievers to prepare a plan of construction and an estimate of expenses for his approval. In recognition of his wife’s assistance, he also decreed that the canal be named the Mariinskii in her honor.17 Sievers turned the task of planning and creating the new waterway over to Frantz Devolant, an engineer from Brabant who had come to Russia in 1787 to work on projects in the Black Sea region. Devolant had been working on the harbor at Odessa until the end of 1796, when Paul stopped that work and brought him and others engaged in it to the North. Recognizing Devolant’s professional and personal abilities, Sievers took him into the Department of Water Communications and put him in charge of the Mariinskii Canal. For the construction of its locks, Sievers turned once again to Johann Gerhard, the acknowledged master of that specialty. He met with Devolant and Gerhard on site in May 1799 and reported their information to the emperor: the new waterway could be opened with a single canal only five kilometers long, but more than twenty-five locks would be needed in the canal and the adjoining rivers. Unfortunately, the locks would have to be built of wood because there was no suitable stone to be found in the vicinity, and it would cost too much to transport it there. Fortunately, however, there was no shortage of water to operate the locks. Sievers expressed hope that the entire work could be completed in three to four years.18 From the site of the new canal, Sievers traveled along the future water route to the capital and concluded that Lake Onega and Lake Ladoga should be circumvented by additional canals. Paul had already agreed to extend the Ladoga Canal to the mouth of the Sias River. Sievers now proposed that it be extended another thirty-nine kilometers, to the mouth of the Svir, at an estimated cost of 1,325,355 rubles and that a second canal twenty-seven kilometers long be dug around the southern end of Lake Onega to the Vytegra at a cost of 1,840,785 rubles. He pointed out that the constant level of both canals made locks unnecessary and estimated that these projects could be completed within six years.19 Between 1797 and 1800 Sievers converted Paul’s intention to improve Russia’s waterways into a number of specific, practical plans, and he created an orga210

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nization and hired a staff capable of implementing them. But Sievers was always sensitive to criticism, and Paul, unlike his mother, was often disastrously insensitive in his relationships with other people. When Paul publicly reprimanded Sievers over a minor personnel issue, Sievers retired for good in March 1800. Work on the waterways, however, continued unabated. Despite their wars against Napoleonic France, Sweden, and Turkey, Paul and Alexander continued to push for the completion of that work rather than abandon or suspend it, as Catherine had repeatedly done. Between 1802 and 1810 the Department of Water Communications finished the separate components of a new waterway between the Volga and St. Petersburg: the extension of the Ladoga Canal to the Sias in 1802; the renovation of the Ladoga Canal, in 1807; the Mariinskii Canal, in 1809; and the extension of the Ladoga Canal to the Svir, in 1810. The author of the anonymous description of Rybinsk written in 1810 recorded the first passage of a vessel through the new waterway as a major event in the history of that city. In 1809 a rasshiva carrying grain and flour from the middle Volga passed through Rybinsk instead of stopping there to offload its cargo onto barks. It continued on through the Sheksna River and the Mariinskii Canal all the way to St. Petersburg and then returned to Rybinsk through those same waterways just a few months later.20 For vessels transporting grain and flour from the middle Volga to St. Petersburg, the Mariinskii System offered significant advantages over the route through Vyshnii Volochek. It was 297 kilometers shorter than the older waterway, its maximum elevation was lower, and the slope on the St. Petersburg side of the summit was less hazardous. With deeper rivers and an ample supply of water at the summit to fill the locks, it was unaffected by summer droughts. Those features eliminated the need to hire extra teams of horses to drag boats through shallows and special pilots to guide them through rapids as well as the need to wait out periods of low water. Boats could carry more cargo, and some could make two trips from Rybinsk to St. Petersburg in a single season.21 The new waterway also had a number of disadvantages. It led vessels through remote, sparsely populated districts with little agriculture and few towns worthy of the name. Captains and crews could not easily resupply themselves with food, drink, replacement parts, or workers and so were forced to bring much of what they might need with them. They also found it an unwelcoming place to spend a winter. When laborers from Rybinsk refused to go beyond Beloozero, as they sometimes did, boat owners would find themselves stranded or forced to pay much higher wages. Officials in charge of the canal also had difficulty finding workers to operate the locks and keep the waterway in repair. Because the climate was more severe in that region, the navigation season on the new route was also shorter than on the old one, lasting only from mid-May until late October. Frequent fog and sudden storms on Lake Beloe and Lake Onega deterred barks and other smaller craft from using the waterway and posed a serious resolution

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challenge even to the larger, round-bottomed boats. Lake Beloe would not be circumvented by a canal until 1844; Onega, not until 1851. Even though the new route allowed boats to make a return trip from St. Petersburg to the Volga, it did not allow them to carry heavy cargo in that direction. For those reasons and others, the Mariinskii System complemented but did not replace the older route through Vyshnii Volochek. Nonetheless, it almost immediately became the preferred route for the shipments of cereals and other commodities from the middle Volga that had previously made up most of the summer caravan through the older waterway. By allowing boats to avoid the upper Volga, the Tvertsa, the locks at Vyshnii Volochek, and the Msta during the midsummer drought, the new waterway spared them many difficulties and delays and enabled them to reach St. Petersburg within a single season. That cleared the way for shipments of other goods through the older waterway not only in the summer and autumn but also in the following spring. Because it opened a month earlier than the Mariinskii System, the Vyshnii Volochek System continued to be used by boats from Gzhatsk and the upper Volga, from the Moscow region, and from wharves too distant to reach St. Petersburg in a single season. The number of boats passing through Vyshnii Volochek continued undiminished until 1836, when it began a gradual but steady decline that led to the official closing of that waterway in 1887.22 A third waterway between the Volga and St. Petersburg opened in 1811. Started in 1802, it replaced a portage of ninety kilometers between a wharf on the Tikhvinok, a tributary of the Sias, and the Charodoshcha, a tributary of the Mologa along another of the routes identified by Perry and Korchmin. Known as the Tikhvinskii System, it offered the shortest, most direct route from the Rybinsk to St. Petersburg, running 924 kilometers rather than the Mariinskii’s 1,143 and the Vyshnii Volochek route’s 1,440 kilometers.23 Its lower elevation allowed boats to carry cargo in both directions, although its shallow waters restricted the sizes of the boats and the weights of their loads. Still, light craft pulled by horses could travel from one end of the Tikhvinskii System to the other in as little as three weeks. Its principal function was to transport imported goods from St. Petersburg to Moscow and central Russia, which had the effect of making them less expensive and more common throughout the Russian interior. For boats going in the opposite direction, from the Volga to St. Petersburg, its main use was to carry light and perishable goods, such as butter and caviar, to the capital. It played only a small role in the normal operation of the cereals trade, but it could be called into service in an emergency. Other waterways authorized by Paul and Alexander included the Berezina, connecting the Dnieper with the Western Dvina and the port of Riga; the Oginskii, connecting the Dnieper with the Niemen and the Prussian port of Königsberg; and the Severo-Ekaterinskii, connecting the Kama with the Northern Dvina and the port of Archangel. At one point Alexander even revived Peter 212

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the Great’s plans for canals to join the Don with the Oka and the lower Volga, but he eventually abandoned them. His government also carried out projects to improve navigation through important rivers by dredging, embanking, removing hazards, constructing towpaths, and so on.24 By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, European Russia had one of the most extensive and successful networks of inland waterways in the world, a fact that was sometimes raised in opposition to the introduction of railroads.25 PROVISIONS FOR ST. PETERSBURG

The effect of the new and improved waterways can be seen in the increased quantity of grain and flour delivered to St. Petersburg after their completion. In 1810, the first full year of operation of the Mariinskii System, St. Petersburg received nearly twice the amount it had in 1809 and far more than it had ever received before. Deliveries declined somewhat in 1811 but still exceeded any previous year. The war against Napoleon I (1812–1815) significantly altered the pattern of sales and deliveries, with the result that deliveries of grain and flour to St. Petersburg fell back to their pre-1810 levels in 1813 and below them in 1814. By 1818, however, they had fully recovered, and by the 1820s they had reached a new plateau from which they never again receded (see table 27). If nothing else had changed, the increased deliveries of rye flour after the opening of the Mariinskii waterway should have reduced prices and provided a comfortable surplus for export. According to Mironov’s figures, the price of rye flour in terms of gold (not assignats) did fall sharply in 1810 and remained significantly lower for the next six years (see table 28). It returned to its previous levels in the later years of that decade; then it fell back and remained lower through out the first half of the century. A second, almost simultaneous change affecting the provisioning of St. Petersburg was a dramatic, unexplained increase in the city’s population. In 1803 officials counted 214,919 people of both sexes as residents of the city. The next year they counted 271,137. By 1815 the number had risen to 385,994, and by 1825 it stood at 444,324. In just twenty-two years the city’s population had more than doubled. Then, just as suddenly, it stabilized and remained essentially unchanged, despite yearly fluctuations, over the next twenty years.26 The resulting increase in consumption negated some, if not all, of the potential benefits from the increased supply. The two competing forces pulled prices in opposite directions and prevented either supply or demand from overwhelming the other for long. The new waterway enabled the city to grow rapidly, and combined with the reserves held by the public granary, it ensured the availability of flour and removed the fear of shortage. By 1811 three complementary waterways connected St. Petersburg with the Volga, and most of the serious obstacles that had hindered the passage of grain and flour from the surplus-producing regions of central Russia to the northern capital had either been eliminated or circumresolution

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Table 27. Deliveries of rye flour and cereals commodities of all kinds reaching St. Petersburg, 1801–1839 (in metric tons) Rye flour

All cereals commodities

1801

115,299

245,700

1802

81,900

176,904

1803

65,520

126,126

1804

98,280

180,180

1805

147,420

262,080

1806

127,764

214,578

1807

90,090

183,456

1808

76,986

?

1809

90,090

185,094

1810

191,646

353,808

1811

?

299,754

1812

?

?

1813

119,574

253,890 or 281,736

1814

72,072

168,714

1818

?

286,650 or 357,084

1828

?

380,016

1837

142,506

393,120

1839

198,198

586,404

Sources: For all cereals commodities in 1811 and the higher figures for 1813 and 1818, Koval’chenko, “O tovarnosti zemledeliia,” 475 (for the years in dispute, Koval’chenko cites official government documents that give his figure credibility); for oats and for all cereals commodities in 1809, report of the Ladoga Canal Office to the Department of Water Communications, RGIA, f. 156, op. 2, d. 35, l. 259ob.; for all other figures, Shapiro, “O roli Peterburga,” 389–90.

vented. Barring a crop failure of catastrophic proportions, the city’s provisioning seemed secure. Given those new circumstances, Alexander I made no exception for St. Petersburg in 1813 when he authorized the export of grain and flour from Russia’s ports and across its frontiers.27 Even so, grain exports from St. Petersburg did not rise appreciably for more than two decades after the opening of the new waterways. Population growth and increased domestic consumption played a role in limiting those exports, but the more significant limitation was reduced demand in the countries of northwestern Europe. With the return to peace in 1815, European governments turned their attention to lowering expenses and raising revenue to pay down their debts. 214

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Table 28. Average price of rye flour in St. Petersburg in gold kopecksa per pud 1803–1807 1809 1810 1811–1815 1816–1820 1821–1830 1831–1840 1841–1850

Price

67

86

56

47

68

43

54

58

Source: Mironov, Khlebnye tseni, table 9. Mironov does not give a price for 1808. Gold kopecks were never minted or circulated; they were an accounting unit. One gold kopeck was set at one-tenth of a gold imperial.

a

They reduced the size of their armies and sold off stockpiles of grain and flour. In a reversal of eighteenth-century policies, they encouraged exports of cereals and discouraged imports with tariffs that were virtually prohibitive. At the same time, improved agricultural practices and the adoption of the potato reduced the demographic pressure to import grain. Those conditions kept St. Petersburg’s grain exports from increasing until the 1830s, and even then they constituted only a tiny portion of its foreign trade. Significant change came only in the 1850s and 1860s, when population pressures in Europe combined with railroad construction in Russia to make St. Petersburg a significant exporter of grain for the first time in history.28 EXPORTS FROM THE SOUTH

Russia nevertheless succeeded in becoming a major exporter of cereals by the first decade of the nineteenth century. It did so because Catherine II’s expenditures on the Black Sea region finally began to produce the returns the empress had anticipated. Through Catherine’s insistence, reminiscent of Peter I’s insistence on gaining and retaining possession of the area that would become St. Petersburg, Russia acquired ports and navigation rights on the Black Sea in 1774, but it was repeatedly frustrated in its efforts to make full use of them. The Ottomans continued to impose restrictions on trade through the Turkish Straits, but the greater handicap was Russia’s lack of a suitable deep-water port. All the Black Sea ports Russia had acquired in 1774—Taganrog, Kerch, Kinburn, Mariupol, Nikolaev, and Kherson—turned out to have serious defects that prevented them from developing a large export trade. They were icebound for five months out of twelve, and their harbors and the approaches to them were too shallow and treacherous for large merchant ships. Even smaller seagoing vessels had to drop anchor offshore and load and unload cargo with the help of flat-bottomed barges, doing so without shelter or protection from the violent storms common in that region. Sevastopol, which Russia acquired when it annexed the Crimea in 1783, had a much better harbor, but it lacked practical connections with the places were Russia’s exports were produced. Sevastopol had great potential as a naval base, as Catherine and Joseph II realized when they visited it in 1787, but not as a commercial port. Despite its enormous cost, Catherine’s second war with the Ottoman Emresolution

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Table 29. Grain exports from Russian ports on the Black Sea and from all other ports (yearly average in metric tons) 1776–1780 1781–1790 1791–1801 1801–1805

Black Sea ports

Other ports

Total

27 2,129 12,482 139,375

3,691 22,564 28,742 59,470

3,718 24,694 41,224 198,845

Source: Mironov, “Eksport,” 162–64, 168.

pire (1788–1792) produced a solution to those problems by bringing Russia the harbor it needed. The Treaty of Jassy, which ended the war in 1792, extended Russia’s frontier to the Dniester River. In terms of territory, that was a modest and indeed disappointing result, but the land gave Russia a splendid natural harbor where it could create the city and port of Odessa. Located in a protected bay with a bottom of sand and gravel, Odessa’s harbor could accommodate the largest commercial and military vessels. The tides were insignificant, and ice was a problem for only a month or so at most. Accessible from sea and land, it was also well situated to provide the desired connection between producers in the fertile Pontic Steppe and consumers overseas. Coastal vessels could reach Odessa without delay from the mouth of the Dniester, forty-eight kilometers to the west, and from the mouth of the Dnieper, seventy-five kilometers to the east, and seagoing ships could sail from Odessa to Constantinople in two to five days. J. Jepson Oddy, a British expert on international trade, visited the site in the early stages of its development and was so impressed by its many advantages that he thought Odessa was likely to become a second St. Petersburg.29 To achieve its potential, Russia’s newest port on the Black Sea required expensive improvements. Catherine, who had already spent vast sums to finance her southern project, was prepared to spend still more. In May 1794 she appropriated funds to begin the construction of a suitable harbor with the understanding that much more would be needed. Paul initially vented his disapproval of his mother’s southern project by ordering a halt to all present and future construction at Odessa and removing all the responsible administrators, from the governor to the director of the harbor works, Frantz Devolant.30 By February 1800, however, Paul had changed his mind, as he frequently did, and agreed to lend Odessa 250,000 rubles for the development of the city and its harbor.31 From that point on, the development of the Pontic Steppe and the port and city of Odessa proceeded at a phenomenal pace. Russia’s provinces north of the Black Sea became one of the great wheat-producing regions of the world, and Odessa quickly became Russia’s leading exporter of grain. Odessa’s wheat exports averaged 636,000 chetverts in 1803, 1804, and 1805.32 Phenomenal in itself, that figure gains added importance when it is viewed in 216

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Table 30. Exports of wheat and rye from the Russian Empire, 1824–1847 (cumulative, in metric tons) Exit port

Wheat

Rye

Total

Percent of total

Archangel

84,898

254,587

339,485

4.0

St. Petersburg

280,902

283,337

564,239

6.6

Riga

124,468

665,040

789,508

9.2

Other Baltic ports

10,724

334,773

345,497

4.0

Odessa

3,374,147

163,928

3,538,075

41.2

Other Black Sea ports

2,345,064

73,155

2,418,219

28.2

232,142

356,623

588,765

6.9

6,452,345

2,131,444

8,583,789

100.1

Overland shipments Total

Source: Nobol’sin, Statisticheskoe obozrenie vneshnei torgovli Rossii, 1:12. I have converted his figures in chetverts to metric tons, setting one chetvert equal to 147.42 kilograms.

the context of Russia’s cereals exports from the Black Sea ports and from all the ports in the Russian Empire, as shown in table 29. In the early nineteenth century, Odessa alone accounted for two-thirds of Russia’s cereals exports through the Black Sea and for more than 40 percent of all cereals exports from the Russian Empire as a whole.33 With the return of peace in 1815, Odessa and Russia’s other Black Sea ports found themselves in highly favorable situation. The Ottomans allowed ships to carry Russian grain through the straits with minimal restrictions, and the Mediterranean world beyond the straits was literally hungry for the grain Russia could provide. A devastating famine in the western Mediterranean in 1816 and 1817 created a huge and valuable market for imported grain, and prices in the Black Sea ports immediately soared to extraordinary heights before falling back to more moderate but sustainable levels in the 1820s.34 From 1824 to 1847 grain prices in the port cities on the Black Sea were usually 25 percent to 40 percent lower than in St. Petersburg, Riga, and the other Baltic ports.35 In those years Odessa alone shipped out more than 40 percent of all the wheat and rye exported from the Russian Empire, and Odessa and the other Black Sea ports together accounted for just under 70 percent of those exports (see table 30). St. Petersburg, in contrast, accounted for less than 7 percent of the wheat and rye exported from the Russian Empire in that same period. By exporting so much grain, Odessa and the other Black Sea ports enabled Russia to maintain a favorable balance of trade throughout the first half of the resolution

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nineteenth century, and that in turn made it possible for Russia to import foreign goods, stabilize its currency, and fight its wars without the inflation it had experienced under Catherine and Alexander. If Russian grain did not “feed the world,” as Dmitrii Volkov had said it could, it did proceed to feed much of southern Europe until it began to encounter competition from North and South America and Australia. St. Petersburg, however, remained Russia’s busiest port and dominated Russia’s export trade in every major category except cereals. Between 1824 and 1850 the value of Russian goods of all kinds shipped from St. Petersburg and the other Baltic ports amounted to three times the value of goods shipped from Odessa and other ports on the Black Sea.36 Seen in that perspective, Odessa became not so much a second St. Petersburg as the complement to that port, fulfilling the one function that St. Petersburg could not satisfactorily perform. Under Paul and Alexander, the creation of new canals and the development of Odessa altered the geography of the Russian grain trade. With a more direct line to St. Petersburg, the provinces along the middle Volga increased their role as the principal supplier of grain and flour to the capital, its environs, and the grain-deficient provinces of the northwest. Some of the surplus produced in those provinces, especially from the regions north of Kazan and Nizhnii Novgorod, also went to Archangel. Surplus grain from the basin of the Oka and its southern tributaries continued to move to Moscow, with a smaller proportion than before passing on through to the upper Volga and St. Petersburg. Surplus grain from districts on or near the upper reaches of the Oka, the Moskva, and the upper Volga continued to move to Gzhatsk, from which it was shipped in the spring to Tver and, via the waterway through Vyshnii Volochek, to St. Petersburg. Farther to the west, growers in Belorussia and the northwestern Ukraine had gained improved and extended access to the Western Dvina and could ship surplus grain to Riga whenever the market could absorb it. Surplus wheat from the fertile steppe north of the Black Sea moved down the rivers to Odessa and the other ports for shipment abroad. Very little, if any, of that surplus ever found its way to markets in the north. Indeed, growers in provinces of the northern Ukraine, especially Chernigov and Poltava, still could not find a market for much of the surplus grain they were capable of producing. As refined and extended in the first decade of the nineteenth centuries, the geography of Russia’s grain trade continued unaltered for more than half a century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, railroads severed the tie that had bound the movement of cereals to waterways. Railroads made it possible for such goods to move quickly, directly, and economically from places of surplus production to places of excess demand along paths designed by humans rather than by nature. Railroads made it possible to send grain from Simbirsk to St. Petersburg in less than one month instead of one year, which was the required time as late as the 1850s. With railroads, grain and flour could travel from Simbirsk or 218

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the Black Sea provinces to St. Petersburg; St. Petersburg could become a major exporter of Russian cereals for the first time in its history, and an all-Russian market for cereals could finally come into being. None of those desirable goals could be achieved as long as Russia had no alternative but to send its grain and flour by water. A new set of possibilities and their attendant problems would arise once Russia was able to cast its bread upon the rails.

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Conclusion

R

T

he creation of the Mariinskii Canal and the port of Odessa closed a chapter in Russian history that had begun with the siege of Azov in 1695 and the founding of St. Petersburg eight years later. Together they finished essential components of Peter the Great’s agenda for making Russia a major European power. The Mariinskii Canal put an end to St. Petersburg’s dependence on the single, tortuous waterway through Vyshnii Volochek and solved the problem of supplying Russia’s capital with grain and flour, while Odessa enabled Russia to export unprecedented quantities of grain at low cost. By removing the constraints that geography had imposed on Russia’s grain market in the eighteenth century, the new canal and the new port cleared the way for future growth. By 1850 St. Petersburg would become the second-largest city on the continent of Europe after Paris, and the Russian Empire would become the single greatest supplier to the European cereals market. In contrast to the many accounts of imperial Russia after 1815 that emphasize failure and incompetence, this book has covered subjects that represent significant success. Indeed, it was Russia’s success in meeting its eighteenth-century goals that magnified its later faults and shortcomings in the eyes of its foreign and domestic critics. One obvious success was the transformation of St. Peters220

burg from a minor Swedish outpost into a flourishing seaport and the capital of the Russian Empire with a population larger than that of Berlin or Amsterdam. Less obvious but nonetheless impressive was Russia’s success in supplying St. Petersburg with goods for export and flour with which to feed its rapidly increasing population. St. Petersburg grew and thrived because it could draw on resources from as far away as the Ural Mountains, the middle Volga, and the northern Ukraine. This book has emphasized the difficulties of provisioning St. Petersburg in order to put that achievement into perspective, but it should not fail to remind readers that despite continual apprehension and one or two close calls, the imperial government managed to cope with those difficulties. Once the supply system became fully operational in the late 1720s, St. Petersburg never ran out of flour, nor did it experience food riots of the sort that were common elsewhere in Europe. The imperial government’s success in supplying St. Petersburg with flour amid the crisis of 1786–1787 stands in sharp contrast to the ineffectiveness of later regimes when they were challenged by a famine in the Volga region in the 1890s and a bread shortage in St. Petersburg in February 1917. During the period this book covers, the government’s role in provisioning St. Petersburg was crucial but limited. Government agencies improved and managed the all-important waterways between the upper Volga and the Neva. The Provisions Chancellery provided flour for military personnel and their dependents. After 1775 the St. Petersburg granary provided security against a poor harvest, a brake on prices, and a safety net for the poor. The granary purchased cereals “at first hand” in the provinces, and the Provisions Chancellery advanced capital to grain merchants. Nonetheless, government agencies did not grow the grain St. Petersburg needed or mill it or transport it with their own personnel and resources, nor did they require Russians to deliver grain to St. Petersburg as an unpaid obligation, as Peter I had initially done. Instead, the imperial government relied on the self-interested participation of landowners, peasants, merchants, and laborers and the workings of the free market. The government’s indirect role in provisioning St. Petersburg was embodied in its many measures to support and assist commerce, private enterprise, and free markets. Those measures were intended to encourage economic activity and economic growth in general, and in general they were quite successful. In particular, they created a flourishing and sustainable cereals trade that connected flour merchants in the stalls and shops of St. Petersburg with landowners and peasants one or even two thousand kilometers away through price signals and other market mechanisms as opposed to exactions and commands. By 1815 Russia’s wholesale trade in cereals constituted a free market by any standard. It was not constrained by monopolies; it was not subject to internal tariffs; it was not taxed; and despite the protests of registered merchants, it was open to all categories of Russian subjects. But an advanced free-market economy requires more than freedom; it requires a supporting framework of laws, insticonclusion

221

tutions, and practices that together form a system, just as they do in other economic systems. On that score, Russia still lacked banks and insurance, but in the veksel it had a convenient, empire-wide medium of exchange that also allowed for money transfers and credit; it had formalized contracts and brokers (maklers) and notaries to negotiate, formulate, and register them; it had a recognized and accepted system of weights and measures; it had well-defined procedures for bankruptcy; and it had commercial courts to enforce all the above. Within the economic system it had created, the imperial government could and did depend on profit-seeking individuals to locate surplus grain, transport it, process it, and present it for sale in St. Petersburg and wherever else it might be needed. This study of the Russian grain market clearly conflicts with Richard Pipes’s assertion that Russia was a “non-western” society and state because it did not recognize private property or distinguish between sovereignty and ownership.1 On the contrary, Russian laws on inheritance, commerce, contracts, and bankruptcy took private property for granted and sought to clarify and strengthen it, as did the laws on nobles’ estates and the work of the General Survey.2 In practice, the government was surprisingly scrupulous about property rights even in times of crisis. Facing a shortage of flour in 1786, the government took inventory of the flour in stalls and shops of retail vendors, but it did not confiscate it or claim it for the public granary, and when it did take possession of rye contracted for export, it paid the owners the price specified in their contracts plus an additional 10 percent.3 In 1812, with Napoleon’s armies marching toward Moscow, Russia’s army requisitioned food in private hands before the invaders could seize it, but it paid for what it took with receipts that it honored and redeemed after the war.4 Instead of substantiating Pipes’s clear differentiation between Russia and “the west,” this study of the grain trade and the Russian economy, though more limited in the time period and subject matter it covers, supports Boris Mironov’s contention that imperial Russia was a normal country following the same path to modernity as other European countries.5 That certainly was the way educated Russians from the middle of the eighteenth through the early nineteenth century understood Russia’s place in the world. In that period, Russia had patriots, nationalists, and even xenophobes who mocked and deplored excessive francophilia, anglophilia, and the like, but they did not insist on Russian exceptionalism or make a rigid distinction between Russia and “the West,” as some of their ancestors had done on religious grounds in centuries past, as the slavophiles would begin to do in the 1830s, or as the Communist regime would do throughout most of the twentieth century. In the period this book covers, educated Russians thought of their country as a European state, different from the others just as they were all different one from another.6 Scholars who present similarities between seventeenth-century Russia and post-1917 Russia as evidence of historical continuity should be asked

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to explain how that continuity lasted through the eighteenth century and how eighteenth-century Russia differed from other European states.7 When Alexander I arrived at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the rulers and diplomats there regarded him not only as a member of the European community but also as the ruler of the strongest power within that community. In contrast, the European rulers never accepted the Ottoman sultan, even at his most powerful, as a member of their community.8 Russia’s success in destroying Napoleon I’s Grande Armée in 1812 and then leading the coalition that drove Napoleon into exile had demonstrated Russia’s military might for all to see, but it was Russia’s size and population and its ability to mobilize its human and natural resources that made it truly powerful. Russia’s management of its food resources contributed to its victory in 1812. In contrast to Napoleon’s starving troops, Russia’s soldiers and its civilians could count on ample supplies of grain, flour, and groats. The French emperor had to march his army through the grain-deficient provinces west of Moscow, while Alexander’s forces and his civilian subjects received shipments from the forested steppe to the south and east that the invaders could never hope to occupy. The Mariinskii Canal kept St. Petersburg’s supply line far beyond the reach of the French army, which otherwise could have severed it at Tver. The St. Petersburg granary provided security against shortage, as did the granary in Moscow before that city’s evacuation. No less important were the many granaries and storehouses on noble estates and in peasant villages that were emptied to feed the Russian army as it retreated or else were destroyed before they could fall into enemy hands. Catherine II and Paul had seen to the creation of those reserves for domestic reasons, but they proved their worth in time of war. Similarly, when Alexander gave his provincial governors the responsibility for gathering and providing supplies for his armed forces, he assigned them a task they had long experience in performing for the Provisions Chancellery and the St. Petersburg granary. A second success connected to the grain trade was the extension of grain-growing and settled agriculture into the steppe all the way from the Dniester River to the Ural Mountains (see map 3, in chap. 3). For centuries the steppe had been the domain of nomads and Cossacks, whose raids had kept Russian farmers out of the region and confined them to the forest and the taiga, with their poor soils and low agricultural productivity. The Russian advance into the steppe had begun in the sixteenth century and accelerated in the seventeenth, but it accelerated further in the eighteenth as it approached completion. The Russian advance into the steppe and its effects on the indigenous peoples there has been the subject of several recent works, but the important point here rests in its consequences for Russia. Most significant, the settlement and cultivation of the steppe enabled Russia, outside the lands acquired from the partitions of Poland,

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to double its population between 1703 and 1811. It did so not only by providing a living for those who settled there but also by producing surplus grain that fed St. Petersburg and the grain-deficient provinces of northern and central Russia. It resolved Catherine’s complaint of 1767 about underpopulation—“Russia not only has not Inhabitants enough, but it contains immense tracts of Land neither peopled nor cultivated”—and it expanded the demographic and financial bases of Russian military power, which reached new heights in the early nineteenth century. Many modern readers might not consider territorial expansion and demographic growth to be proper measures of success, but to apply that judgment to earlier history is anachronistic. In the period at issue here, political leaders and many intellectuals assigned a high priority to territorial expansion and demographic growth. Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain expanded by creating empires overseas; the Austrian Hapsburgs expanded their realm by conquering much of southeastern Europe; and Frederick II increased his by seizing and holding Silesia and participating in the partitions of Poland. Russia joined Prussia and Austria in partitioning Poland, but more important, it expanded much as the United States of America did at approximately the same time: it incorporated and populated the fertile and underpopulated territory beyond the settlement lines of 1763. From that date on, Russia’s expansion to the east and south has many parallels with the American republic’s expansion to the west and south, including the creation of canals and the acquisition of seaports, most notably Odessa and New Orleans, respectively, that enabled the newly settled regions to market their surplus production. In his “Political Testament” of 1768, Frederick II of Prussia wrote that “the real strength of a state consists in the number of its subjects.” Puffendorff, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other eighteenth-century European intellectuals concurred, though they emphasized prosperity and happiness over state power. In almost every instance, those same leaders and intellectuals linked population growth to the food supply and ultimately to agriculture.9 Starting with low agricultural productivity and distances that were incomprehensible to western Europeans, Russia had met those challenges successfully. Otherwise, it could not have become the dominant power on the continent of Europe in 1815. As impressive as they were, Russia’s achievements between 1703 and 1815 could not guarantee continued success in the century to come. In the nineteenth century rapid population growth ceased to be the unmitigated blessing it had seemed to be before 1815 and became a source of new problems as well as continuing advantages. While providing the state with soldiers and taxes, Russia’s surging population also generated underemployment and social unrest. In time the fertile steppe lands that fed northern and central Russia with their surplus grain and provided an outlet for its surplus population became overpopulated,

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consumed more of what they produced, and suffered environmental damage from continuing efforts to extract still more grain from their soil. As expansion of the arable land approached the point of diminishing returns, farming could not employ all the young men whose numbers increased from one generation to the next, and they became a social problem and a danger. Russia’s increasing population and its ability to feed expanding numbers of people in St. Petersburg also diluted the dominance of the imperial government and its military forces in that city and weakened their ability to control it. Despite some worries, the provisioning crisis of 1786–1787 had not shaken the imperial government’s rule, but the provisioning crisis of February 1917 in a much larger and very different St. Petersburg would destroy the imperial regime. Throughout the nineteenth century, exports of grain from Odessa and the other Black Sea ports brought in revenue and foreign exchange that the government desperately needed to service its foreign and domestic debts and pay for Russia’s imports, especially the growing list of industrial goods. Still, as long as the Ottoman Empire controlled the straits between the Black Sea and the wider world beyond them, it could strangle Russia’s exports of grain to the Mediterranean. By closing the straits, as it did in 1806, 1810, 1827, 1853–1856, 1877–1878, and 1914, the Ottoman Empire could deprive Russia of the revenue it depended on to balance its imports, maintain the value of the ruble, and finance its industrialization. The constant threat that Turkey’s control of the straits posed to Russia’s finances was a major, though still underresearched, component of the so-called eastern question that bedeviled Russian and European diplomacy from the 1770s through the end of World War I. Russia’s successes from the turn of the eighteenth century up to 1815 generated new challenges, but even more important were the challenges from beyond Russia’s borders, as developments elsewhere in Europe redefined the terms that measured success in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The agricultural-industrial revolution in Britain and the social-political revolution in France opened new paths to wealth and power that Russia, organized in a way that had produced success in a different context, was not prepared to follow. Size, population, and grain exports kept Russia in the ranks of the great powers, but as the nineteenth century progressed, changes in Russia and the world reduced their value in comparison to other assets, such as productivity, technology, and education. Railroads superseded canals, and steamships brought grain from the United States, Canada, and Argentina into competition with grain from the Russian steppes. In the eighteenth century Russia transformed itself into a European state on the model of Louis XIV of France and Frederick II of Prussia, but by 1815 that model was already being referred to as the ancien régime. New models of government and social order, as well as new definitions of power emanating from

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Britain, France, and the United States, had threatened the established order in Europe from 1789 to 1815 and would continue to do so throughout the nineteenth century. Having met the challenges of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic era, Russia and its rulers would soon find themselves confronted with a new set of challenges and the prospect of yet another transformation.

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NOTES

R Abbreviations Used in Notes CASS CMRS EPAIVE IHR IZ JEEH JfGO JIH PSZ RA RES RGADA RGIA RGVIA RH RR RS SEER SIRIO SPFIRI. RAN SR TVEO VI

Canadian American Slavic Studies Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy International History Review Istoricheskie Zapiski Journal of European Economic History Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas Journal of Interdisciplinary History Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii Russkii Arkhiv Revue des Études Slaves Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv Russian History Russian Review Russkaia Starina Slavonic and East European Review Sbornik imperatorskogo rossiiskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva Sankt-Peterburgskii Filial Instituta Rossiiskoi Istorii. Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk Slavic Review Trudy Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva Voprosy Istorii

Archival citations are given in the following form: fond (“category” or “collection,” abbreviated f.), delo (“file” or “matter,” abbreviated d.), and list (“sheet,” abbreviated l.). The abbreviation ob., for oborot, has been used when necessary to indicate the verso of a numbered page. The abbreviation op., for opis’ (“inventory”), has been used when necessary to indicate a specific listing of archival holdings.

Introduction 1. On China, see Pierre-Étienne Will and R. Bin Wong, with James Lee, Nourish the People: The State Granary System in China, 1650–1850, Michigan Monographs in Chinese 227

Studies, vol. 60 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1991). On ancient Greece and Rome, see Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Geoffrey Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). On Constantinople, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 1:348–51. On medieval and renaissance Europe, see A. B. Hibbert, “The Economic Policies of Towns,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3, Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages, ed. M. Postan, E. E. Rich, and Edward Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 157–229; and Braudel, Mediterranean, 1:328–30. The French monarchy’s heavy involvement in provisioning Paris is described in great detail in two books by Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) and Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). Two significant articles on the political and social importance of the grain supply in eighteenth-century France are O. H. Hufton, “Social Conflict and the Grain Supply in Eighteenth Century France,” JIH 14 (1983): 303–31; and Louise Tilly, “Food Entitlement, Famine, and Conflict,” JIH 14 (1983): 333–49. For a broader European perspective and information on other states, see Charles Tilly, “Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 380–455. 2. Orlando Figes, A Peoples’ Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), 307–8; Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 66–69. 3. Carol Belkin Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 92–95. 4. Two outstanding examples, one Russian and one not, are L. V. Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow, 2006), on peasant agriculture; and Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon (New York: Viking, 2009), on war and diplomacy from 1812 until 1815. 5. Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 55–95. 6. David L. Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov, Based on His Diary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), xix. 7. Ester Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 34–60. 8. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1957); A. V. Chayanov, A. V. Chayanov and the Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. and trans. D. Thorner, R. E. F. Smith, and B. Kerblay (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). 9. George Munro, “Feeding the Multitudes: Grain Supply to St. Petersburg in the Era of Catherine the Great,” JfGO 35 (1987): 481–508; L. N. Semenova, “Snabzhenie khlebom Peterburga v XVIII v. (pravitel’stvennaia politika),” in Peterburg i guberniia. Istorikoetnograficheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. V. Iukhneva (Leningrad, 1989), 5–20; A. L. Shapiro, “O roli Peterburga v razvitii vserossiiskogo rynka v XVIII–pervoi polovine XIX v.,” in Goroda feodal’noi Rossii, ed. V. I. Shunkov (Moscow, 1966), 386–96. 10. B. N. Mironov, “Eksport russkogo khleba vo vtoroi polovine XVIII–nachale XIX v.,” IZ 93 (1974): 149–88; Mironov, “Prichiny rosta khlebnykh tsen v Rossii XVIII v.,” EPAIVE, 1969 (Kiev, 1979), 109–25; Mironov, Vnutrennyi rynok Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII–pervoi polovine XIX v. (Leningrad, 1981); Mironov, Khlebnye tseni v Rossii za dva stoletiia (XVIII–XIX vv.) (Leningrad, 1985). 228

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11. M. P. Viatkin, ed., Ocherki istorii Leningrada, vol. 1, Period Feodalizma 1703–1861 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1955). 12. Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, The Hammer, and the Knout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 267–82. 13. N. L. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v. (Moscow, 1957); Michael Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du 18e siècle (Paris: Institutes des Études Slaves de l’Université de Paris, 1963); E. G. Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’ vo vtoroi polovine XVIII–nachale XIX v.,” in Istoricheskaia geografiia Rossii XII–nachalo XX v.: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu professor Liubomira Grigor’evicha Bezkrovnogo, ed. A. L. Narochnitskii (Moscow: 1975, 193–206; E. G. Istomina, Vodnye puti Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII– nachale XIX veka (Moscow: 1982); E. G. Istomina, Vodnyi transport Rossii v doreformennyi period (Moscow, 1954); A. I. Iukht, Russkie den’gi ot Petra Velikogo do Aleksandra I (Moscow, 1994).

Chapter 1. Founding and Feeding an Imperial City 1. There are, of course, several different ways of periodizing Russian history according to different criteria. The one described here is still the most common, but it has been challenged and contested since the late nineteenth century by historians such as Kliuchevskii and Platonov, who stressed the continuity between Peter’s reign and the period or periods that preceded it. The summer 2010 issue of Slavic Review includes two recent schemes of periodization. Russell Martin, in “The Petrine Divide and the Periodization of Early Modern Russian History,” SR 69 (2010): 410–25, periodizes Russian history on the basis of succession politics and royal marriages. Donald Ostrowski, in “The End of Muscovy: The Case for circa 1800,” SR 69 (2010): 426–38, places Peter’s reign in the context of historical developments across Eurasia and Africa. Both men argue against the “Petrine divide” as a major turning point in Russian history. I find it significant that none of the many efforts to deny or deemphasize the Petrine divide have much, if anything, to say about St. Petersburg, which I see as one of Peter’s most significant and certainly his most enduring innovation. 2. Zhurnal ili podennaia zapiska blazhennyie i vechnodostoinnyia pamiati gosudaria imperatora Petra Velikogo s 1698 goda dazhe do zakliucheniia Neishtatskogo mira, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1770– 1772), 1:57. 3. Several issues of the Vedomosti published in Moscow between May and August 1703 announced Peter’s plans to build a “stronger and more powerful fortress” on the newly conquered site, to make “that place great and populous,” and “to establish trade” there. See Pervyia russkiia vedomosti, pechatavshiiasia v Moskve v 1703 godu (St. Petersburg, 1855), 124, 155, 175, 180, 202. The vedomosti were printed bulletins resembling an official newspaper or newsletter. One thousand copies of each issue were printed. Arcadius Kahan called St. Petersburg “the single most massive Russian investment of the century” (Kahan, Plow, 247). 4. I. G. Georgi, Opisanie rossiisko-imperatorskogo stolichnogo goroda Sankt-Peterburga i dostopamiatnostei v okrestnostiakh onogo, s planom (1794; repr., St. Petersburg, 1996), 61–62; James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 173. 5. Denis Shaw, in “Geographical Practice and Its Significance in Peter the Great’s Russia,” Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 160–76, emphasizes and documents Peter’s deep concern with geography and its importance for commerce. 6. I. I. Rostunov, Istoriia severnoi voiny 1700–1721 (Moscow, 1987), 20. In 1707 Peter was willing to buy peace with Sweden by returning all the Swedish territory he had conquered since the outbreak of the war except St. Petersburg; of that, he instructed his diplomats, there was “to be no thought” (Pis’ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikago, 13 vols. [St. Petersburg and Leningrad, 1887–1992], 5:61). 7. Pervyia russkiia vedomosti, 124, 180. 8. Mironov (Khlebnye tseny, 45) argues that the effect of joining Russia to the European notes to pages

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market initiated a price revolution between 1707 and 1810 that brought Russian prices into line with European prices by raising them 400 to 570 percent. He notes that grain prices in western Europe and specifically in England were approximately ten times higher than in Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century (52). According to S. Malinin, “Ten’ Leforta,” Moskovskii Zhurnal 2 (1991): 64–70, Frantz Lefort, the Swiss soldier of fortune, supposedly extolled Russia’s riches to Peter: “The abundance of products of all kinds in Russia that are vitally needed by all countries, will attract trading nations to your quays.” In the light of Peter’s lifelong interest in commerce and trade routes, it is hard to imagine that he needed Lefort’s instruction. On Peter’s economic and commercial policies, see Alexander Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror: Four Lectures in Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), especially “Russian Mercantilism” (69–96). 9. While Ivan IV held Narva from 1563 to 1581, it flourished as the commercial gateway between Muscovy and northwestern Europe; see Walter Kirchner, Commercial Relations between Russia and Europe, 1400–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 59–77. 10. Artur Attman, “Swedish Aspirations and the Russian Market during the 17th Century,” Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiarum et Litterarum Gothoburgensis, vol. 24 (Göteborg: Royal Swedish Academy of Science and Letters, 1985), 15–33. Faced with Russian obstinacy, one member of the Swedish trade delegation proposed that Sweden send a fleet to seize the entrance to Archangel’s harbor and bar it. 11. Ibid., 32–33. On the disadvantages of Archangel for European shippers, see also J. Jepson Oddy, European Commerce, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1807), 1:91–95. 12. Frederick C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 410. Venice was Russia’s ally in the war against Turkey. 13. S. M. Zhitkov, Istoricheskii obzor ustroistva vodnykh putei i portov v Rossii za stoletnii period 1798–1898 (St. Petersburg, 1900), 6. 14. Cracraft, Petrine Revolution, 114–21. 15. PSZ 5, no. 1826 (Jan. 17, 1701): 152. 16. V. F. Gnucheva, Geograficheskii departament Akademii Nauk XVIII veka (Moscow, 1946), 16–18. 17. On the shortcomings of Azov and Taganrog, see Oddy, European Commerce, 1:171– 74; and Robert E. Jones, “Opening a Window on the South: Russia and the Black Sea: 1695–1792,” in A Window on Russia, ed. Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice Edizioni, 1996), 128–29. 18. Oddy, European Commerce, 1:145. 19. Ibid., 1:146. 20. N. N. Repin, “Izmenenie ob”ema i struktury eksporta Arkhangel’skogo i Peterburgskogo portov vo pervoi polovine XVIII v,” in Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia v Rossii XVII– XVIII vv., ed. A. A. Preobrazhenskii (Moscow, 1983), 186. In 1721 Peter ordered Ukrainian merchants sending goods to Riga to use a new route that avoided as much Polish territory as possible; see PSZ 6, no. 3860 (Dec. 2, 1721): 462. 21. Oddy, European Commerce, 1:102. Nearly a century later Oddy noted that prudent shippers obtained insurance policies that indemnified them against the dangers of loading and unloading goods at all of Russia’s Baltic ports except Reval. 22. Quoted in Istomina, Vodnye puti, 105. 23. Ibid., 26, 134. 24. Stephen Velichenko, “Cossack Ukraine and Baltic Trade, 1600–1648: Some Observations on an Unresolved Issue,” in Ukrainian Economic History: Interpretive Essays, ed. I. S. Koropeckyj (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 161–62. 25. M. S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1987), 94. According to an article in the New York Times dated November 3, 2008, one gallon of diesel fuel can pull one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train, and 514 miles 230

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by canal barge. A single barge on the Erie Canal can carry as much cargo as one hundred trucks can. 26. John Perry, The State of Russia under the Present Czar (London, 1716), 40–41, 261–62. 27. Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk razvitiia i deatel’nosti vedomstva putei soobshcheniia za sto let ego sushchestvovaniia 1798–1898 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1898), 3. 28. I. A. Tolchenov, Zhurnal ili zapiska zhizni i prikliuchenii Ivana Alekseevicha Tolchenova, ed. N. I. Pavlenko (Moscow, 1974), 106. 29. Oddy, European Commerce, I:71. 30. S. V. Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’ (Moscow, 1946), 7–9; V. A. Gorelov, Rechnye kanali v Rossii (Leningrad, 1935), 19–74; Dmitri Dubenskii, Razsuzhdenie o vodianykh soobshcheniakh v Rossii (Moscow, 1825), 21–23. According to I. I. Liubimenko (“Torgovle v Peterburg,” in Peterburg Petrovskogo vremeni, ed. A. V. Predtechenskii [Leningrad, 1948], 88), as many as 40,000 men worked on the construction of Hauter’s canal. The chronology of Peter’s actions raises the suspicion that Peter’s first concern may have been to transport military supplies across the divide for his campaign against Sweden, but he knew the canal would not be usable for several years, and the very fact that he directed his military operations toward the Neva, not toward Riga or the Swedish armies in Poland, suggests that Peter envisioned a port at the mouth of the Neva well before he ever set eyes on it. 31. Gorelov, Rechnye kanali v Rossii, 79–88. Dubenskii, Razsuzhdenie o vodianykh soobshcheniakh v Rossi, 27. The terms of the concession are set forth in Peter’s decree of June 6, 1719, PSZ 5, no. 3397 (June 6, 1719): 718–20. 32. Liubimenko, “Torgovle v Petersburg,” 88. 33. Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 466. 34. Quoted in S. M. Troitskii, “Zapiski senatora N. E. Murav’eva o razvitii kommertsii i putei soobshcheniia v Rossii (60e gody XVIII v.),” in Istoricheskaia geografiia Rossii, ed. Narochnitskii, 238. Within a year after receiving his memorandum, Catherine had named Murav’ev a senator (Jan. 1764) and appointed him to the Directorate of the Chancellery for the Construction of State Roads (Feb. 1764), the Commission for the Masonry Construction of St. Petersburg and Moscow (Aug. 1764), and the Commission on Commerce (early 1764) (ibid.). In June 1765 the Vyshnii Volochek System, the Ladoga Canal, and the Neva River were placed under Murav’ev’s authority “for their better maintenance” (Istomina, Vodnye puti, 5). 35. RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 10. 36. Quoted in Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 206. 37. In 1713 and 1714 Peter prohibited the export of hides, hemp, and some other goods (but not cereals) from ports other than St. Petersburg (PSZ 5, no. 2732 [Oct. 31, 1713]: 66; no. 2737 [Nov. 16, 1713]: 67–69, and no. 2760 [Jan. 16, 1714]: 77). In 1715 and 1719 Peter ordered the creation of a waterway along the Gzhat River into the upper Volga through which goods, especially hemp and grain, could be brought to St. Petersburg rather than to Riga from the western edge of Russia and the Ukraine (PSZ 5, no. 2946 [Oct. 28, 1715]: 180; and 6, no. 3415 [Nov. 11, 1719]: 752–53). 38. The figures for 1712–1719 and for the 1750s are from Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 21–26. The figure for 1722–1731 has been calculated by combining the average number of boats per year passing through the locks given in Gorelov, Rechnye kanali v Rossii, 167n205, with the capacity of 90 to 100 tons per boat given in Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 28. Since 90 tons per boat was the minimum capacity, the estimate of 156,000 tons of cargo per year is conservative. 39. An updated and more sophisticated restatement of the gradualist interpretation of the transfer of the capital is presented in Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter, 214–15. 40. Pis’ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikago, 3:162. Peter refers to the city as the capital notes to pages

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in remarks alerting Menshikov of his travel plans: “In three or four days we will be in the capital, Piterburkh.” 41. On the various names applied to the new settlement, including that of “the Holy City of Peter” (sviatoi gorod Petra) see O. G. Ageeva, Grad Sviatova Petra (St. Petersburg, 1999), 210–11; and Cracraft, Petrine Revolution, 174. 42. Ageeva, Grad Sviatova Petra, 211. Among the first to connect the founding of St. Petersburg with Constantinople and Alexandria was I. G. Fokkerodt, a translator in the Prussian embassy in St. Petersburg. See I. G. Fokkerodt, Rossia pri Petre Velikom (Moscow, 1974), 94. 43. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). In the first paragraph of his introduction, Wortman writes that the ceremonies he describes were intended to impress foreigners and Russians with “the loftiness of the monarch’s power” (3). That was equally true of St. Petersburg. 44. RGADA, f. 397 (Komissiia o kommertsii), d. 226 (Dela o borovitskikh porogakh i o vyshnee voloshchikh sliuzakh. 1761), l. 3ob. Preserved in the papers of the Commission on Commerce, this decree was not included in the PSZ. 45. This is apparent in the correspondence between Jakob Sievers, the director of Water Communications, and various officials of the imperial government. See RGIA, f. 156, d. 1 (Departament vodianykh kommunikatsii), ll. 90–105. 46. Robert E. Jones, “Getting the Goods to St. Petersburg: Water Transport from the Interior, 1703–1811,” SR 43 (1984): 413–14. George Munro points out the problems with the accepted figures on the population of St. Petersburg: police counts failed to keep up with growth, suburban settlements were not included, and the population fluctuated with the movement of many transients and seasonal workers. Munro estimates the population of St. Petersburg’s metropolitan area as approximately 100,000 in 1762 and approximately 250,000 in 1796. See Munro’s book The Most Intentional City: St. Petersburg in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 50–53. At the end of the eighteenth century, Heinrich Storch, in The Picture of St. Petersburg (London, 1801), 86, put the total population of St. Petersburg at 230,000 and ranked it behind Constantinople, London, Paris, Naples, and Vienna. 47. These generalizations, which will be illustrated in detail in the paragraphs that follow, reflect the findings of other scholars. See L. N. Semenova, Rabochie Peterburga v pervoi polovine XVIII veka (Leningrad, 1979), 164–66; Semenova, Ocherki istorii byta i kulturnoi zhizni Rossii: Pervaia polovina XVIII v. (Leningrad:, 1982), 214–19; Semenova, “Snabzhenie khlebom,” 5; and R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 26, 358–59. Their findings in turn are based on contemporary records and are corroborated by my own findings. A decidedly different and, in my judgment, erroneous characterization of the eighteenth-century Russian diet is given by Ian Blanchard in Russia’s “Age of Silver”: Precious Metal Production and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), 239–42; Blanchard argues that eighteenth-century Russians consumed on average only twelve ounces of bread per day and that meat, especially beef, played a much larger role in their diet. Blanchard’s estimates are based on idiosyncratic data on the grain trade published by B. F. J. Hermann, who claimed the existence of a large Russian trade in cattle and oxen. Hides and tallow were produced and exported in large quantities in eighteenth-century Russia, but I have found no evidence that Russians, other than the very wealthy, ate more than minimal amounts of beef. On the range of food sold in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, but not the quantity thereof, see George Munro, “Food in Catherinian St. Petersburg,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 31–48. 232

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48. “Topograficheskoe i kameral’noe opisanie gorodov i uezdov Tverskoi gubernii,” RGVIA, f. Voenno-ucheny arkhiv, d. 19088, pt. 1, ll. 18 and 55 ob. 49. Semenova, Ocherki istorii byta, 215. 50. Carol Stevens, writing in “Why Seventeenth-Century Muscovite Campaigns against Crimea Fell Short of What Counted,” RH 19 (1992): 494, says that late seventeenth-century Russia adhered to the general European norm of providing 2.2 pounds (1 kg) of bread per soldier per day. According to Semenova (Ocherki istorii byta, 218), at the end of the Great Northern War the Russian government established a yearly ration for each soldier of 3 chetverts of rye flour, 1.5 chetveriks of groats, 24 funts of salt, and 72 kopecks’ worth of meat. A rate of 3 chetverts per year would equal 24 chetveriks per year, or 2 chetveriks per month, an amount equal to approximately 31 kilograms per month. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, in “The Lower Ranks of the Russian Army, 1796–1855,” SEER 64, no. 1 (Jan. 1986): 44, says that about 1800, each soldier was to receive 68.5 lbs. (31.1 kg) of flour and 7.5 lbs. (3.4 kg) of groats each month plus 72 kopecks for meat and 24 kopecks for salt each year. John Shelton Curtiss, in The Russian Army under Nicholas I, 1825–1855 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965), 246, says that at the time of the Crimean War, each soldier’s monthly ration was to include 67.5 lbs. (30.7 kg) of flour and 6.75 lbs. (slightly over 3 kg) of groats. 51. Semenova, Rabochie Peterburga, 163–66. 52. Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, 330, 258. 53. Report of the Commission on Grain to Empress Catherine II, dated June, 20, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 37, 37ob. The commission’s Russian-language designation is komissiia o khlebe. The Russian word khleb encompasses the English words “grain,” “flour,” and “bread.” 54. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 36. The commission did not say why the influx of seasonal workers was so much greater than usual. Most likely it was a reaction to the bad harvest in rural Russia. 55. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 38ob. 56. Semenova, “Snabzhenie khlebom,” 5. Semenova calls the levy in kind “zaprosnyi khleb” and implies that the actual payment was made by peasants, but a decree dated April 20, 1708, refers specifically to “streletskoi khleb” and assumes that the responsibility for paying it lay with “pomeshchiks, votchiniks, and monasteries” (PSZ 4, no. 2196 [Apr. 20, 1708]: 410). In fact, “streltsy grain” had been converted to a cash payment in the late seventeenth century, and Peter’s levy was “zaprosnyi khleb,” as Semenova states, but the law employed the traditional terminology even though it was technically incorrect. Stevens (Soldiers, 94) notes that the names of the various collections had changed so often that even the record keepers occasionally mislabeled them. 57. G. D. Kapustina, “K istoriii khlebnogo rynka Moskvy v nachale XVIII v.,” in Goroda feodal’nnoi Rossii, ed. V. I. Shunkov, 376–78. 58. Thus the decree cited in note 56 calls on officials in the towns of Voronezh, Belgorod, Briansk, Putivl, and Sevsk to exercise greater vigilance in collecting the tax of five den’gi per ruble from contractors purchasing streltsy grain on behalf of landowners (PSZ 4, no. 2196 [Apr. 20, 1708]: 410). 59. PSZ 5, no. 3124 (Nov. 1717): 522–23. 60. PSZ 5, no. 3245 (Nov. 26, 1718): 597; 5, no. 3287 (Jan. 22, 1719): 619; 6, no. 3481 (Jan. 5, 1720): 1; and 6, no. 3830 (Sept. 26, 1721): 436–37. The poll tax combined in one payment a number of taxes and ad hoc “collections” that Peter had imposed during the war. It also extended tax obligations to many social-legal categories, such as that of slaves, whose members had not paid such taxes previously. 61. PSZ 23, no. 17248 (June 23, 1794): 529. In eighteen provinces the poll tax was raised to one ruble per soul. In eighteen others it was raised to eighty-five kopecks plus a collection notes to pages

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of agricultural products. In four provinces it remained at seventy kopecks, but a collection of grain was added. In four other provinces it was changed into a collection of grain. See V. I. Neupokoev, Gosudarstvennye povinnosti krest’ian evropeiskoi Rossii v kontse XVIII–nachale XIX veka (Moscow, 1987), 22, 25. 62. PSZ 6, no. 3670 (Oct. 29, 1720): 252–53; Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, 190. 63. Storch, Picture of St. Petersburg, 85. They were included, however, in Storch’s estimate of the population of St. Petersburg in 1800. In 1786 the Commission on Grain put the number of military personnel and their dependents in St. Petersburg at 125,996 out of a total population of 241,754, but that does not square with its estimate of the civilian population as 180,000 (SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 334–44, 336ob., and d. 412, l. 46). 64. Shapiro, “O roli,” 394. 65. This traffic is described in a decree dated January 22, 1719, that instructed transporters to bring their cargoes all the way to Borovichi, beyond the rapids in the Msta, where warehouses would be constructed for them at state expense; see PSZ 5, no. 3288 (Jan. 20, 1719): 620. Some of the teamsters hired to do this work found it so profitable that they tried to sabotage Serdiukov’s work on the canals. 66. PSZ 5, no. 3203 (May 25, 1718): 570. 67. Semenova, “Snabzhenie khlebom,” 7. 68. PSZ 7, no. 4193 (Apr. 13, 1723): 46–47. The decree made it clear that imported cereals were intended to supplement those brought from the Russian interior on the other side of the divide. 69. Shapiro, “O roli,” 386. 70. PSZ 4, no. 1872 (Oct. 25, 1701): 174–75; and 5, no. 2672 (Apr. 24, 1713): 26–27. 71. On Peter’s attempts to combat famine throughout Russia by restricting the grain trade in response to poor harvests, see P. V. Bezobrazov, “Neurozhai proshlago veka,” Nabliudatel’ 12, no. 7 (July 1893): 61–68. Those restrictions remained in effect until Catherine II eliminated virtually all restrictions on the grain trade within the empire but not across its borders. 72. Jennifer Newman, “The Russian Grain Trade, 1700–1779,” in The Baltic Grain Trade: Five Essays, ed. Walter Minchinton (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1985), 55. According to Newman, when measured in grams of silver, the average “real price” of flour in St. Petersburg fell more than 40 percent from the 1720s to the 1730s. John Keep, in Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1985), 184, found that the price of a chetvert of rye in comparison to the pay of an army private held steady from 1711 to 1731, declined from 1731 to 1763, and then increased significantly between 1763 and 1796.

Chapter 2. Selling Flour in St. Petersburg 1. PSZ 7, no. 4634 (June 14, 1725): 402–4. The published decree is misnumbered as 4633, but it clearly falls between a previous no. 4633 and no. 4635. 2. Diocletian’s decree of September 301 is the best attested decree of antiquity. For a translation from the Latin, see R. Rees, Diocletian and the Tetrarchy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 139–46. According to a New York Times report of August 28, 2012, Prime Minister Putin responded to public distress over higher bread prices by stating, “Someone is simply cashing in on the circumstances” (B3), and prosecutors raided several bakeries in Moscow in response to accusations of price gouging. To continue the analogy with oil, many Americans believed that the oil crisis and high fuel prices of the 1970s resulted from big oil companies withholding available supplies from the market. 3. M. D. Chulkov, Istoricheskoe opisanie Rossiiskoi kommertsii pri vsekh portakh i granitsakh ot drevnykh vremen do nyne nostoiashchago i vsekh preimushchestvennykh uzakonenii po inoi gosudaria 234

notes to pages

28–34

imperatora Petra Velikago i nyne blagopoluchnoi tsarstvuiushchie gosudaryni imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikoi, 7 vols. (Moscow, 1781–88), vol. 1, pt. 1, 744–46; Liubimenko, “Torgovlia v Peterburg,” 90. 4. Andrei Bogdanov, Istoricheskoe, geograficheskoe i topograficheskoe opisanie Sanktpeterbruga ot nachala zavedeniia ego s 1703 do 1751 god (Moscow, 1903), 16–17; Chulkov, Istoricheskoe opisanie Rossiiskoi, vol. 4, pt. 1, 744–47; P. N. Petrov, Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga s osnovanniia goroda do vvedenniia v deistvie vybornogo gorodskogo upravleniia po ucherezhdeniam of guberniakh 1703–1782 (St. Petersburg, 1884), 319; Georgi, Opisanie, 104–6; RGADA, f. 248, d. 4227, ll. 618–618ob. (this archival document is a report from the Commission on Commerce to the Senate on the distribution and construction of stalls and markets in St. Petersburg after the fire of May 16, 1782). 5. As explained in a report of the Commission on Grain in 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 38ob. 6. M. I. Sizkov, “Torgovyi nadzor politsii v Rossii 40–60kh godov XVIII v.,” in Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia v Rossii XVII–XVIII vv.: Sbornik statei, ed. A. A. Preobrazhenskii (Moscow, 1983), 241. 7. The quotation appears in RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 5. V. A. Butenko, Kratkii ocherk istorii russkoi torgovli v sviazi s istoriei promyshlennosti (Moscow, 1910), 212, says that weights and measures were standardized in practice by 1747. No document or source on the grain trade that I have ever read suggests that there was any disparity of weights and measures after the mid-eighteenth century or that it was ever a problem. However, Peter Hoffmann, Handbuch der Geschichte Russlands, vol. 6f (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2004), 200, states that weights and measures were officially standardized throughout the empire by Nicholas I’s law of October 11, 1835. 8. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511 (O khlebnykh karavanakh prikhodiashchikh v S. Peterburg), l. 1, a report on the delivery of cereals to St. Petersburg dated Nov. 22, 1781. 9. Kh. D. Sorina, “Mesto tveri i drugikh gorodov tverskoi gubernii v vlozhskoi vodnoi sisteme vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka,” in Iz istorii kalininskoi oblasti: Stat’i i dokumenti (Kalinin, 1960), 94. For example, see the instruction (nakaz) of the merchants of Tver to the Legislative Commission of 1767, SIRIO, 148 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1876–1918), 107:428. 10. Ransel, Russian Merchant’s Tale, 57–58. 11. PSZ 22, no. 16023 (June 23, 1784): 181. 12. Report of the Commission on Grain dated September 15, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 399. 13. Report of the Commission on Grain dated June 20, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 38ob. 14. Bogdanov, Istoricheskoe, geograficheskoe i topograficheskoe opisanie, 155. On the sale of prepared food and drink in St. Petersburg, see also Munro, “Food,” 41–45. 15. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 2–3. According to the report, the city received 374,332 kuls of ordinary flour and 63,030 sacks of fine flour in 1781, of which 115,000 kuls went into the baked goods sold in the 498 retail outlets of various types. The round number 115,000 suggests an estimate rather than an actual count was used in that case. 16. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter, 171; Chulkov, Istoricheskoe opisanie Rossiiskoi, vol. 1, pt. 1, 779–80. 17. Munro, “Feeding the Multitudes,” 491. 18. Bogdanov, Istoricheskoe, geograficheskoe i topograficheskoe opisanie, 155. 19. Munro, “Feeding the Multitudes,” 491. 20. PSZ 9, no. 7035 (Aug. 17, 1736): 902–3; and 10, no. 7267 (June 1, 1737): 160. 21. Semenova, Rabochie Peterburga, 161–62; Sizkov, “Torgovyi nadzor,” 242–44. 22. RGADA, f. 16, d. 504, part 1, ll. 2–18; part 2, ll. 6–18, 109–88.

notes to pages

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235

23. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 394–95. A shortage of flour in 1786 brought on the most severe food crisis in St. Petersburg since the 1720s, and prices were exceptionally volatile. 24. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 53–58, 111–12. 25. Ibid.; Kaplan, Bread, 90–107, 236. 26. Paul Dukes, ed. and trans., Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 1767 (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 83 (article 317), 114 (article 590). 27. PSZ 20, no. 14275 (Mar. 17, 1775): 82–86. 28. Robert E. Jones, “Morals and Markets: The Conflict of Traditional Values and Liberal Ideas in the Economic Thought and Policies of Catherine II,” JfGO 45 (1997): 526–40; Charles Emil Strangeland, Premalthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (1904; repr., New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1966), 198–307; Mikhail Shpilevskii, “Politika narodonaseleniia v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny II,” in Zapiski Imperatorskago Novorossiiskago Universiteta, vol. 4 (Odessa, 1871), 1–178. The quotation is from “Besedy imperatritsy Ekateriny II s Dalem,” RS 17 (1786): 5. 29. RGADA, f. 16, d. 481, part 1, l. 1. This delo in four parts contains Chicherin’s reports from November 1764 through 1773. 30. PSZ 18, no. 12900 (May 29, 1767): 132; and no. 12902 (May 31, 1767): 134. 31. RGADA, f. 16, d. 496 and f. 1261, d. 158. On the survey of 1767, see also B. N. Mironov, “Sel’skoe khoziaistvo Rossiii v 60kh godakh XVIII veka,” Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR 9 (1980): 224–28. 32. Mironov, “Sel’skoe khoziaistvo,” 230–32. 33. PSZ 20, no. 14425 (Jan. 22, 1776): 343. The reports of General-Politseimeister D. V. Volkov for 1778 and 1779 show that this order was carried out; see RGADA, f. 16, d. 504, parts 1–4. 34. PSZ 20, no. 15095 (Dec. 9, 1780): 1022. 35. The first reports arrived within months. They provided not only the requested information for 1782 but also comparisons with 1781, which implies that provincial officials were already collecting at least some of the information prior to the decree; see RGADA, f. 16, d. 383, “Izvestie ob urozhae po guberniam 1782.” The reports from the governor-general of Kharkov and Voronezh (l. 13) and the governor-general of Kaluga and Tula (l. 16) state that they are in response to Catherine’s decree of August 26, but the decree is not included in the PSZ. For a discussion of the reliability of figures provided by the governors and governors-general, see V. K. Iatsunskii, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVIII–XIX vv. (Moscow, 1973), 268–97. 36. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 1–5ob. 37. Ibid., ll. 6–12ob. This archival document in delo 511 follows the previously mentioned reports written in 1781 and precedes others written in 1807, but it contains no information as to when it was written or by whom. The preceding document in the delo is dated 1781, while the following document contains information dating from 1801 through 1807. Sorina (“Mesto Tveri,” 79) confidently provides a date of 1781 without explanation. Like the other documents in the delo, it is clearly official in form and style and was composed in response to a set of questions posed by someone. The document runs to twenty-five pages and provides important information that I have not found in any other source. 38. PSZ 7, no. 4420 (Jan. 20, 1724): 204–5. 39. PSZ 16, no. 11649 (Aug. 20, 1762): 57. 40. PSZ 17, no. 12351 (Oct. 3, 1765): 84–85; no. 12662 (May 26, 1766): 1794–95; and 18, no. 13017 (Nov. 26, 1767): 392. P. V. Bezobrazov, “Neurozhai proshlago veka,” 211–12. 41. For example, in the early 1780s seventy treasury villages in the district of Bezhetsk, 236

notes to pages

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located within Tver Province, maintained granaries holding 3,621 chetverts of grain, while eight villages that the College of Economy administered in the district of Kaliazin, in the same province, maintained granaries holding 2,877 chetverts; see RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, ll. 146 and 109ob. 42. Wilson Augustine, “The Economic Attitudes and Opinions Expressed by the Russian Nobility in the Great Commission of 1767” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969), 138–39. 43. PSZ 17, no. 12612 (Apr. 6, 1766 ): 632–51; and no. 12718 (Aug. 8, 1766): 922. 44. PSZ 18, no. 13238 (Jan. 21, 1769): 808–10. 45. RGADA, f. 16, f. 502, l 51. Report of Chicherin’s successor A. M. Golitsyn on the operations of the St. Petersburg granary 1775–81, dated January 4, 1781. 46. Ibid. 47. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, ll. 221ob.–222 and 229. 48. Ibid. 49. PSZ 21, no. 15379 (Apr. 8, 1782): 463–64, chap. 33. 50. Describing the retail trade in the 1730s, the Swedish traveler Karl Reinhold Berk noted that many Courlanders and other foreigners had been allowed to sell from shops in their homes for class-based reasons: “Court personages want to shop in peace and quiet for rich fabrics and ornaments (which only those shops sell) without bumping up against the unwashed crowds that loiter in public places” (K. R. Berk, “Putevye zametki o Rossii,” in Peterburg Anny Ioannovny v inostrannykh opisaniiakh, ed. Iu. N. Bespiatykh [St. Petersburg, 1997], 219). In 1741 the Senate, approving a recommendation from the Commerce College, ordered foreign merchants to stop selling from their homes and to move their goods to the gostinyi dvor within two months (PSZ 11, no. 8399 [July 16, 1741]: 441–42), but the practice continued. 51. RGADA, f. 248, d. 4227, ll. 609–29. 52. Ibid., ll. 609–610. 53. Ibid., 616–20, 660–66. 54. Munro, Most Intentional City, 158–59. 55. PSZ 21, no. 15451 (July 28, 1782): 616. 56. Ibid., no. 15576, 737–41. 57. Ibid.; Georgi, Opisanie, 106. 58. Report of the Governor P. Konovnitsyn to the Commission on Grain dated June 20, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, 365, 370. According to the same report, 65 of the city’s 130 stalls selling flour were located in the Third Admiralty District. 59. Reports of Politseimeister D. V. Volkov, RGADA, f. 16, d. 504, parts 1–4; register of cereals and other foodstuffs delivered via the Ladoga Canal in 1785 through October 30 and in 1786 through September 12 and the prices at which they were sold, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 396; note of Governor P. P. Konovnitsyn on flour prices on June 25, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 396, 394. 60. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, l. 5. 61. Ibid., ll. 11–12ob., 40–42. 62. Ibid., ll. 17ob., 25ob., 142, 149–49ob., and d. 412, l. 314. The commission submitted those recommendations between June 22 and the end of October 1786. 63. Report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the history of the St. Petersburg granary, PSZ 30, no. 23255 (Aug. 28, 1808): 560. 64. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, ll. 141–48. 65. Report of the Commission on Grain, June 20, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, l. 37. 66. Report on the Management of the St. Petersburg Granary to the Commission on Grain, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, l. 230ob. notes to pages

44–51

237

67. PSZ 30, no. 23255 (Aug. 28, 1808): 561. Pages 556–65 of this law provide a history of the St. Petersburg public granary compiled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. 68. Semenova, “Snabzhenie khlebom,” 10, 13–15. 69. PSZ 30, no. 23055 (June 2, 1808): 285; and no. 23255 (Aug. 28, 1808): 564–65. 70. According to Munro (Most Intentional City, 53–54, 65), the proportion of the city’s population associated with the military was about 20 percent throughout Catherine’s reign. 71. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, l. 371. The document identified the eight by name: Ozerov, Shustin, Galaktinov, Avvakum Dmitriev, Grechushnikov, Ivan Gutuev, Khailov, and Solovev. 72. Ibid., ll. 334–48. In addition to Dmitriev, the other flour merchants with whom the commission signed contracts were Anikii Lebedev, Grigorii Obrosimov, Mikhail Kusovinkov, Ivan Khlebnikov, and Ivan Gutuev. 73. Ibid., d. 412, ll. 400–402. 74. Ibid., l. 364. 75. Ibid., ll. 5–6; Munro, “Feeding the Multitudes,” 502. 76. The commission read Catherine’s note at its meeting on June 22. It sent the official upriver on June 26 and reported his findings to the empress immediately after his return on July 29; see SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, l. 15 and d. 412, ll. 12–15. 77. Ibid., d. 410, l. 147. 78. Munro, “Feeding the Multitudes,” 505. Munro’s source, which I have not seen, is RGADA, f. 16, d. 533, part 1, ll. 6–6ob. 79. PSZ 21, no. 16143 (Feb. 3, 1785): 297. 80. Catherine to Brius from Belgorod, June 13, 1787, RA (1865), 1280. 81. Quoted in Bezobrazov, “Neurozhai proshlago veka,” 61. In imposing such a ban, the Senate was in fact reiterating what had been official policy since 1723 (V. N. Shchepkin, “Goloda v Rossii,” VI 24 [1886]: 500). After reading Catherine’s dispatch, the Senate reversed itself with a decree dated only “September 1787” (PSZ 22, no. 16581 [Sept. 1787]: 915–16). 82. PSZ 24, no. 17604 (Dec. 3, 1796): 215. 83. PSZ 30, no. 23055 (June 2, 1808): 285. The memorandum became a law when the emperor approved its recommendation to repeal the ban on sending flour from the city to the surrounding provinces imposed in 1807. 84. PSZ 30, no. 23255 (Aug. 8, 1808): 557. 85. Ibid., 554–62. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 564. 88. PSZ 31, no. 24881 (Nov. 18, 1811): 905–8.

Chapter 3. Sources of Supply 1. “Doklady Grigoriia Teplova o vozvyshaiiushcheisia dorogovizne s estnykh pripasov v Peterburge,” RGADA, f. 16, 496, l. 39ob. 2. Ageeva, Grad Sviatova Petra, 74. 3. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, l. 36ob. 4. A. L. Shapiro, “Zapiski o peterburgskoi gubernii A. N. Radishcheva,” IA 5 (1950): 257. In 1751 Bogdanov had used almost identical terms to describe the soil of St. Petersburg Province: “the quality of the soil in this place is for the most part marshy or damp and clayish and in part stony and sandy” (Istoricheskoe, geograficheskoe i topograficheskoe opisanie, 11). 5. Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 226–27. See also L. V. Milov and L. N. Vdovina, “Kul’tura sel’skokhoziaistvennogo proizvodstva,” in Ocherki russkoi kultury XVIII veka, ed. V. A. Aleksandrov, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1985), 1:120. 6. As quoted in Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 258. According to Milov and Vdovina (“Kul’tura,” 238

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51–61

93), rye and barley required heavy manuring in St. Petersburg Province to produce a return of even two or three times the seed planted. 7. Ia. E. Vodarskii, Dvorianskoe zemlevladenie v Rossii v XVII–pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow, 1988), 133. 8. PSZ 17, no. 12790 (Nov. 27, 1766): 1065. After a particularly bad harvest in the region in 1768, the Senate temporarily suspended its earlier decree and allowed peasants in the St. Petersburg region seeking food or seed to borrow cereals from the state granaries (PSZ 18, no. 13238 [Jan. 21, 1769]: 808–12). 9. Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 258, 272. 10. Max Engman, St. Petersburg och Finland, migration och influens 1703–1917: Bidrag till kannedom ore Finlands natur och folk, no. 130 (Helinksi: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1983), 446. 11. Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 256. The estimate for Vyborg is based on the figure of 92,904 “revision souls” (taxable males) given in V. M. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v naseleniia Rossii v XVIII–pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow, 1971), 111. 12. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, op. 1, d. 410, ll. 334, 334ob., 434. 13. PSZ 30, no. 23055 (June 2, 1808): 285; and no. 23255 (Aug. 28, 1808 ): 554. 14. Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 266. 15. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 107–9. Kabuzan puts the number of revision souls according to the fifth revision of 1795 at 98,765. 16. E. G. Istomina, “Novgorodskaia guberniia vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka: Opyt istoriko-geograficheskogo issledovaniia” (Kandidatskaia disertatsiia, Moscow State University, 1969), 274. Until 1781 the territory that became Olonets Province was included in Novgorod Province. 17. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 209. 18. Istomina, “Novgorodskaia guberniia,” 284. 19. Ibid., 265; Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 267, 276, 278. 20. Istomina, “Novgorodskaia guberniia,” 275. See also Mironov, Khlebnyi tseny, 67. 21. This estimate is based on the population data for the city of St. Petersburg given in chapter 1, table 3, combined with the data for the four provinces of St. Petersburg, Vyborg, Olonets, and Novgorod from the revisions of 1744, 1762, 1782, and 1795 taken from Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 71, 75, 83, 87, 95, 99, 107, 114, 119, 123. The revisions counted only taxpaying males. The northern parts of Olonets and the eastern end of Novgorod were not part of the natural hinterland of St. Petersburg, which I have defined as the area drained by rivers flowing into Lake Ladoga and the Neva. 22. Evdokim Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie Rossiiskoi Imperii dlia vsech sostoianii, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1810), 3:331, 352. 23. Report of the Commission on Commerce on increasing grain exports from Narva dated February 1, 1779, RGADA, f. 19, d. 286, part 2, ll. 19–20. At the end of the eighteenth century, James Oddy itemized Narva’s exports without mentioning grain (Oddy, European Commerce, 1:145). 24. Mironov, Khlebnye tseni, 52. 25. Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience, 1560–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 149; M. V. Klochkov, “O khlebnoi torgovle v kontse XVIII veka,” Zapiski Khar’kovskago universiteta 5, pt. 4 (1917): 8. Since the grain was not being poured into kuls, I am assuming that it comprised eight chetveriks rather than nine. At nine chetveriks to the chetvert, the equivalent in metric tons would have been 7,371 metric tons. 26. Jake V. T. Knoppers, Dutch Trade with Russia from the Time of Peter I to Alexander I: A Quantitative Study in Eighteenth Century Shipping (Montreal: Interuniversity Centre for European Studies, 1976), 214. 27. Report of the Commission on Commerce on grain exports from St. Petersburg, notes to pages

61–66

239

Archangel, Riga, Reval, and Pernau in 1771. Riga, Reval, and Pernau accounted for more than two-thirds of the empire’s exports of rye in that year. St. Petersburg exported no rye in that year, and Archangel exported 163,534 chetverts. Rye accounted for 77 percent of Russia’s grain exports in 1771. See RGADA, f. 19 (Financy), d. 314 (O torgovle khlebom), ll. 5–5ob. 28. Report of the Commission on Commerce, dated April 15, 1779, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, f. 410, l. 133. This report also provided the information that 349,550 chetverts of Russian grain had been transported to Riga between 1774 and 1779. 29. Bezobrazov, “Neurozhai proshlago veka,” 206–8. In 1735, to relieve famine in the provinces of Pskov and Smolensk, the imperial government also allowed grain to be imported across the Polish border free of duty under the law promulgated by Peter I in 1723 (ibid., 201). 30. Knoppers, Dutch Trade with Russia, 214. 31. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 223ob. The document does not specify the amount purchased. 32. Ibid., ll. 149–51. 33. Ibid., ll. 191–92, 360. 34. Ibid., l. 46. 35. Ibid., d. 412, l. 128ob.; d. 413, ll. 144, 194ob. 36. Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 266. 37. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 413, l. 130. 38. Ibid., ll. 167–68. 39. Storch, Picture of St. Petersburg, 112. 40. Qtd. in Shapiro, “Zapiski,” 266. 41. A study of crop failures by the Senate in 1767 concluded that they were most common in the provinces of Archangel, Novgorod, Moscow, and Smolensk (Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 363). 42. Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’, 376–77. 43. Ibid., 357. 44. “Topograficheskoe i kameral’noe opisanie gorodov i uezdov Tverskoi gubernii,” RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, ll. 6–9. 45. F. M. Listengurt, “Rol’ ekonomiko-geograficheskogo polozheniia v razvitii gg. Iaroslavlia, Tveri i Rybinska v epokhu feodalizma,” Ekonomicheskaia geografiia Rossii XII– nachalo XX v.: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu professora Liubomira Grigor’evicha Bezkrovnogo, ed. N. L. Narochnitskii (Moscow, 1975), 112. 46. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 43–6. 47. Ibid., 4:5; L. V. Seretinskii, “Pomeshchich’ia votchina Iaroslavlskoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka,” Uchenye zapiski Iaroslavlskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta imeni K. D. Ushinskogo 25 (gumanitarnye nauki [humanities studies]) (1958): 478. 48. Seretinskii, “Pomeshchich’ia,” 481–82; Wallace Daniel, “The Conflict between Economic Vision and Economic Reality: the Case of M. M. Shcherbatov,” SEER 67, no. 1 (Jan. 1989): 57. 49. Daniel, “Conflict,” 56–57. E. N. Marasinova, writing in “Mentalitet rossiiskogo dvorianstva poslednei tret’i XVIII veka,” CASS 36, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 271, found that in their letters to one another, eighteenth-century nobles regularly attributed peasant poverty to laziness, drunkenness, and other character failings. 50. Roger Bartlett, “Defences of Serfdom in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in A Window on Russia, ed. Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice Edizioni, 1966), 73. 51. The standard work on migration from New England to the Midwest is Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry, The Expansion of New England: The Spread of New England Settlement and Institutions to the Mississippi River, 1620–1865 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962). 52. TVEO 1, pt. 2 (1765): 202; 11, pt. 10 (1776): 87. 240

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53. L. K. Bakmeister, Topograficheskoe opisanie Rossiiskoi Imperii, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1771– 74), vol. 1, pt. 1, 50. Bakmeister also noted that in good years the inhabitants of the Volokolamsk region had surplus grain to sell. 54. V. A. Federov, Pomeshchich’i krest’iane tsentral’nogo-promyshlennogo raiona Rossii kontsa XVIII–pervoi polovini XIX v. (Moscow, 1974), 56–58. 55. The estimate of slightly more than 2,000,000 inhabitants is based on the data of the sixth revision, as organized by Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 119, which put the tax-paying male population in the province of Moscow at 520,166 and that of Vladimir at 486,822, giving a combined total of 1,006,988. I simply doubled that figure and rounded it off to give a rough but conservative estimate of the total population, which I then multiplied by the 2.25 chetverts per person that the Commission on Grain and other officials of the eighteenth century used to estimate demand for cereals in a given area. Some officials used a minimum of three chetverts, which would make the deficit even larger. Using different estimates, Rubinshtein (Sel’skoe khoziaiastvo, 373), calculated that in the 1780s, the seven provinces of the Central Industrial Region needed to import 5,000,000 chetverts per year, but that figure fell to 4,000,000 chetverts by 1800. 56. Vasilii Zuev, Puteshestvennyia zapiski Vasil’ia Zueva ot S. Peterburga do Khersona v 1781– 82 godu (St. Petersburg, 1787), 8, 27, 39. 57. Ibid., 27. 58. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 5:177–79. 59. Ibid., 4:126, 160, 5:128, 149. 60. V. M. Vazhinskii, “Khlebnaia torgovlia na iuge Moskovskogo gosudarstva vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka,” Uchenye zapiski moskovskogo oblastnogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 127:8–11. The decree of Peter I imposing taxes on contractors supplying zaprosnyi grain specifically mentions purchases in the towns of Voronezh, Belgorod, Briansk, Putivl, and Sevsk in this region. See PSZ 4, no. 2196 (Apr. 20, 1708): 410. 61. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 35–95. Sunderland’s work is more concerned with the assimilation and organization of the steppe and with Russians’ treatment of the native peoples than with economics. Its tone, much like that of Kingston-Mann, is generally critical of Russia’s application of European economic thought and policies, and it emphasizes the defects of those policies while ignoring their successes. 62. Roger Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 66 (quotation from Catherine), 105. Colonization was one aspect of Catherine’s adherence to “populationism,” the belief that a large and growing population was essential to a state’s power and prosperity. Another was her desire to keep domestic grain prices low and affordable. 63. Kahan, Plow, 45. On the expansion of plow land and grain growing in the forested steppe, see R. A. French, “Russians and the Forest,” in Studies in Russian Historical Geography, ed. James H. Bater and R. A. French, 2 vols. (London: Academic, 1983), 1:451–81. 64. Rubinshtein, Vneshnaia torgovlia, 343. 65. The most comprehensive and accurate figures for the period under discussion were compiled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the years 1802, 1803, and 1804. They are published in Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, for each of the provinces described. For example, Ziablovskii (Zemleopisanie, 3:214–15) calls the harvest of 1802 “bad” in Moscow Province and gives the figure of 1,332,648 chetverts of spring and winter grains sown but only 1,817,570 harvested. The next year was much better: 1,206,282 chetverts were sown and 3,506,044 were harvested. Ziablovskii’s data for the three years 1802–1804 show that in non-blackearth Iaroslavl 3,276,947 chetverts were sown and 7,906,755 were harvested, a ratio of 1:2.4. Compare those results with Ziablovskii’s data for the black-earth provinces in those years, as shown in table 7. 66. Milov and Vdovina, “Kul’tura,” 96–97. notes to pages

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67. E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries, vol. 1, Russia, Tartary, and Turkey (London, 1800), 189. 68. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 4:179. 69. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 52–54. 70. E. Samoilov, Penzenskii krai v kontse XVIII veka, 1776–1800 gg. (Penza:, 1954), 33–36; Bezobrazov, “Neurozhai proshlago veka,” 56. 71. E. I. Indova, Krepostnoe khozhaiastvo v nachale XIX veka (Moscow, 1955), 22. 72. A. S. Kotsievskii, “Evolutsiia form zemlepol’zovaniia i gosudarstvennykh krest’ian iuzhnoi ukrainy v kontse XVIII–pervoi treti XIX v.,” EPAIVE, 1963 (Vilnius, USSR, 1964), 420–26. 73. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 6. On the dating of this document, see chapter 2, note 37. 74. Ibid., ll. 6–8. 75. Vazhinskii, “Khlebnaia torgovlia,” 16–17. 76. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 103–6; Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 4:215, 241; Kahan, Plow, 59. 77. L. N. Engel’gardt, Zapiski 1766–1836 (Moscow, 1868), 4. 78. Afanasii Shafonskii, Chernigovskago namestnichestva topograficheskoe opisanie s kratkim geograficheskim i istoricheskim opisaniem Maliia Rossii (Kiev, 1851), 19. 79. Qtd. in Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 188. 80. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 5: 270–72. 81. Robert E. Jones, “Ukrainian Grain and the Russian Market,” in Ukrainian Economic History: Interpretative Essays, ed. I. S. Koropeckyj (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214–15. 82. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 411, l. 324. Briansk lies in the western end of Orel Province and just north of Chernigov Province. In 1784 it sent some 600 chetverts of grain southward to Kremenchug, and in 1786 it sent a similar amount southward to Kherson. 83. RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 11. 84. D. Bakhturin, Kratkoe opisanie vnutrenniago Rossiiskoi Imperii vodokhodstva (St. Petersburg, 1802), 6. 85. M. A. Rakhmatullin, “Khlebnyi rynok i tseny v Rossii v pervoi polovine XIX v.,” in Problemy genezisa kapitalizma, ed. S. D. Skaskin (Moscow, 1970), 348–49. The author adds that in 1843 a chetvert of rye that sold for twenty rubles in Pskov could be purchased for less than one ruble in many localities in the Ukraine. 86. William Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 95. 87. Colum Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment: The Free Economic Society in EighteenthCentury Russia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 150–52. On the difficulties of transporting grain from the central Ukraine to markets in central and northern Russia, see Jones, “Ukrainian Grain,” 210–27.

Chapter 4. Production 1. RGADA, f. 248, d. 6017, ll. 331ob.–342. This information was conveyed in a series of reports from the Provisions Chancellery to the Senate on the prices of rye and rye flour in Moscow and several provincial towns for the years 1757 through 1766. 2. Ibid., f. 248, op. 113, d. 1651, part 3, l. 374. For more on the term raznochinstsy, which is usually translated as “people of various ranks” or “people of various origins” but lacks a clear definition or adequate English translation, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994). 3. RGADA, f. 248, op. 113, d. 1651, part 3, l. 259. 4. Ibid., l. 359. 242

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5. Catherine II, Nakaz, chapter 15, articles 358, 363–64, in Catherine the Great’s Instruction, ed. Dukes, 90–91. From her extensive study of letters from nobles, E. N. Marasinova concluded that the notion of distinct social categories with distinct social roles dominated the nobility’s thoughts on many issues; see Marasinova, Psikologiia elity rossiiskogo dvorianstva poslednei treti XVIII veka (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999), 210–12. 6. Michael Confino, “Le paysan russe jugé par la noblesse au XVIII siècle,” RES 38 (1961): 51–63. In December 1762, in a decree on peasant disorder, Catherine II characterized peasants as “these simple and irrational people” (qtd. in Carol Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 86). For the expression of similar sentiments by Catherine, A. N. Radishchev, and others, see Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 526–29. On the image of the peasant in eighteenth-century Russian literature, see J.-L. Van Regemorter, “Deux images idéales de la paysannerie russe à la fin du XVIII siècle,” CMRS 9 (1968): 5–19. 7. Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment, 32–33. From his study of nobles’ instructions to their stewards from 1724 to 1764, Leckey found that landowners emphasized closed-estate farming. The extent to which they were able to put that principle into practice is unknown. 8. TVEO 18 (1771): 127. 9. On the basis of the topographical descriptions compiled in the 1770s and 1780s, Rubinshtein (Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 360) estimated that the “average” harvest in the central non-black-earth region returned twice to thrice the planted seed. Michael Confino (Domaines, 123) reported the Free Economic Society’s finding that over the course of twenty years and more, landowners did not harvest a total of more than three times the seed planted. A study of nineteen court villages in the vicinity of Moscow found that over a ten-year period from 1750 to 1759, the harvest in four villages returned less than the seed; in eight villages it returned one to two times the seed; in four villages, two to three times the seed; and in three villages, three and a half to five times the seed. See S. I. Volkov, Krest’iane dvortsovykh vladenii podmoskov’ia v seredine XVIII veka (Moscow, 1959), 135–37. According to L. V. Milov (Velikorusskii pekhar’, 376–77), the return on seed in the non-black-earth provinces in the first half of the nineteenth century ranged on average from 1:2.3 to 1:2.8. 10. Rubinshtein (Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 360) estimates the harvest in the black-earth provinces as 1:3–3.5 and up to 1:5–6. 11. TVEO 16 (1770): 137. 12. Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 528–29. 13. B. N. Mironov (“Prichiny,” 113) estimates that only 2 percent of the peasantry abandoned agriculture completely. But according to Rubinshtein (Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 247) the topographical description of Iaroslavl produced in 1797 reported that many inhabitants in summer and almost all in winter left on passport to work in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Riga, Kazan, or some other town. According to Daniel Morrison, in “Trading Peasants and Urbanization in Eighteenth Century Russia” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1981), 316, approximately 70 percent of the peasants in the province of Nizhniy Novgorod during the late eighteenth century were engaged to some degree in a nonagricultural occupation. Morrison cites L. F. Zakharova, “Pomeshchich’i krest’iane Nizhegorodskoi gubernii” (doctoral diss., Gorky State University, 1954). 14. The term odnodvortsy is sometimes translated literally as “one-yarders.” Settled in the forested steppe in the seventeenth century, they were allowed to own serfs, as were the nobles, but they paid the poll tax, as did peasants. See Thomas Esper, “The Odnodvortsy and the Russian Nobility,” SEER 45 (1967): 124–34. 15. Mironov, “Prichiny,” 113. 16. Polanyi, Great Transformation; Chayanov, Chayanov and the Theory of Peasant Economy. 17. Confino, “Le paysan russe,” 55–58. 18. V. I. Prokrovskii, ed., General’noe soobrazhenie po Tverskoi gubernii izvlechennoe iz podnotes to pages

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robnago, topograficheskago i kamernal’nago po gorodam I uezdam opisaniia 1783–1784 (Tver, Russia, 1873), xiv. 19. RGADA, f. 248, d. 4227, l. 465; Mironov (Vnutrennii rynok, 122) counted more than 3,000 fairs that occurred annually in the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century. 20. John P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 251–52. Without explanation, LeDonne states that in practice the state collected seventy-one kopecks before 1794 and 1.02 rubles thereafter. Because only the lower orders of society paid the poll tax, it became a kind of social stigma that separated them from the privileged orders—the nobility, the clergy, and wealthy merchants—which were not included in the poll tax registers. 21. Neupokoev, Gosudarstvennye povinnosti, 67. 22. Seretinskii, “Pomeshchich’ia,” 199. In Novgorod Province during the late 1770s, Governor-General Sievers used troops in such a manner to collect the tax arrears in three districts and expected to collect 200,000 rubles by the time he was finished (Sievers to Catherine II, Mar. 3, 1781, RGADA, f. 16, d. 788, part 3, l. 212). 23. Neupokoev, Gosudarstvennye povinnosti, 70. 24. These figures are from an unsigned and undated document included among the papers of G. N. Teplov. It lists the recruitment rates and the total number of inductees for the years 1767–1773 inclusive (RGADA, f. 16, d. 496, l. 57). 25. Report of Governor-General Shcherbinin of Smolensk and Orel, dated 1779, RGADA, f. 16, d. 951, ll. 115–115ob. 26. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 9–20; Rodney D. Bohac, “The Mir and the Military Draft,” SR 47 (1988): 652–66. 27. Nicholas Karamzin, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis, ed. and trans. Richard Pipes (New York: Atheneum, 1959), 162. 28. V. A. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII–nachalo XIX v.) (Moscow, 1976), 253. 29. Ibid., 253, 261. 30. Seretinskii, “Pomeshchich’ia,” 199–200. 31. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina, 249. 32. Edgar Melton, “Enlightened Seignorialism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 1750– 1830,” JMH 62 (1990): 703. 33. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina, 263, 268–69. 34. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 91–93. Percentages here are taken from the third revision, conducted in 1762, because that marks the approximate midpoint of the period under discussion. Although the percentages varied somewhat between the first revision (1719) and the sixth revision (1811), primarily because newly annexed regions differed from the core regions, the percentages for 1762 are in the middle of the range for the entire period. The percentages in 1719 and 1811 for the various categories are as follows: noble’s serfs: 53.85 and 57.40; ecclesiastical (economic) peasants: 12.42 and 8.55; court peasants: 7.77 and 3.33; and state peasants: 25.95 and 30.75 (ibid., 67–69, 127–29). 35. E. V. Anisimov, Podatnaia reforma Petra I (Leningrad, 1982), 173–74. 36. These are the figures from the third revision (1762) as compiled by Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 83–84. The percentage in the provinces of the far north is as follows: Archangel, 55 percent; Vologda, 43 percent; Olonets, 85 percent; Viatka, 75 percent; and Perm, 59 percent. Thus state peasants occupied some of the best agricultural land in Russia and much of the worst. 37. I. A. Bulygin, “Monastyrskoe khoziaistvo v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v.,” in Istoricheskaia geografia Rossii XII–nachalo XX v.: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu professora Liubomira 244

notes to pages

86–90

Grigor’evicha Beskrovnogo, ed. A. L. Narochnitskii (Moscow, 1975), 168; Bulygin, Polozhenie krest’ian i tovarnoe proizvodstvo v Rossii (Moscow, 1966), 152. 38. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, l. l63. 39. Seretinskii, “Pomeshchich’ia,” 492–96. 40. Confino, Domaines, 92–93; Steven Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 134–35. 41. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 159. 42. Report of Governor-General Repin to the Senate dated November 1786, RGADA, f. 16, d. 952, part 3, l. 80. Prices rose in 1786 as the result of a bad harvest and would have been lower in previous years but not necessarily in subsequent ones. The prices given here for Smolensk as well as for Kazan and Penza are in line with the more general and vague figures given in Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 476–78. 43. Reports of Governor-General Novosil’tsev to the Commission on Grain, dated October 5, 1786, and September 29, 1787, SPFIRI. RAN f. 36, d. 12, ll. 115, 447. 44. After describing the performance of barshchina, the topographical description of Tver Province noted that obrok was variable in the district of Tver: “Some pay three rubles per revision souls; others pay ten rubles per venets.” Of the district of Bezhetsk, it remarked, “For the most part they pay obrok by labor units [s ventsa] and not by souls, some from seven to nine rubles and others from five to seven” (RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, ll. 57ob., 143ob.; similar statements are made in part 2, ll. 42, 67, 90ob., 109ob., 134, 168). As for the monetization of obligations, on October 26, 1780, Governor-General Sievers of Novgorod wrote to Catherine II to protest a decree from the Senate ordering that roads be constructed and repaired with compulsory labor rather than cash assessments and hired labor. Arguing that cash assessments were fairer and more efficient, Sievers wrote, “Corvée, moreover, is always converted to cash contributions within the commune. I saw examples of that last summer” (qtd. in Karl Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann: Des Grafen Jakob Johann Sievers Denkwürdigkeiten zur Geshchichte Russlands, 4 vols. [Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1857], 2:360). 45. The discussion of tiaglo presented here and the close relationship between the division of obligations and the division of the land is based on the topographical description of Tver, RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, l. 57ob.; see also Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 153–59. In dividing the land, allowance had to be made for the quality as well as the quantity. The topographical description of Tver noted as much: “Where the land is poor, more of it is given out to fewer people, but where the land is better, less land is given to more people” (RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 2, l. 169ob.). In effect, therefore, what the commune was trying to divide equitably was not land but income from the land. 46. Confino, Domaines, 108. 47. In 1800, when the provincial governor of Kursk asked why ninety-seven young noblemen in his province had never entered the service, the marshal of the nobility informed him that the men in question were too poor to purchase the necessary boots and uniforms. They had an average age of twenty-three and owned an average of 4.3 male serfs apiece (report from the governor of Kursk to the procurator-general of the Senate dated May 31, 1800, RGIA, f. 1374, d. 2219, l. 4). 48. K. V. Sivkov, ed. and comp., Materialy po istorii krest’ianskogo pomeshchich’ego khoziaistva pervoi chetverti XVIII v. (Moscow, 1951), 18–19, 48, 56, 62. 49. V. V. Kafengauz, “Khlebnyi rynok v 20–30x godakh XVIII stoletiia,” Materialy po istorii zemledeliia SSSR, ed. B. D. Grekov (Moscow, 1952): 493–94. 50. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 172. 51. For example, on February 22, 1722, P. P. Shifirov informed the steward on his estate in the district of Azarmas that in addition to paying a cash obrok, the peasants were to provide him with 100 puds of pork, 100 geese, 100 ducks, 5 puds of cows’ butter, and 2,000 notes to pages

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eggs, all of which they were to deliver on their own carts to his house in St. Petersburg by Christmas. He further required that the grain from his own plow land be delivered either to his house in Moscow or his house in St. Petersburg. The peasants were to cart it to Moscow at their own expense, but if they carted it to St. Petersburg, they were to be paid for the additional work and expense. See Sivkov, Materialy po istorii, 18–19. 52. Storch, Picture of St. Petersburg, 113. 53. Arcadius Kahan, “The Costs of ‘Westernization’ in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” SR 25 (1965): 44–46. 54. From the 1760s to the 1820s very wealthy Russian nobles built palaces in neoclassical style with exquisite furnishings and extensive gardens. The less wealthy followed that example as well as they could. See Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), xii, 37–73, 165–73; Albert J. Schmidt, The Architecture and Planning of Moscow: A Cultural History (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), 84–99. 55. Daniel, “Conflict,” 50, 58. 56. Ibid., 58–67. 57. These were the two largest holdings of serfs according to Semevskii, who identified more than twenty noblemen who either individually or jointly with one or two brothers owned more than 10,000 revision souls. See V. I. Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Ekaterine II, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1901), 1:23–35. For different figures from the end of the eighteenth century, see Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 370. 58. Blum, Lord and Peasant, 370. 59. Seretinskii, “Pomeshchich’ia,” 483–96; E. I. Indova, “Instruktsiia kniazia M. M. Shcherbatova prikazchikam ego iaroslavskikh votchin,” Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR 6 (1965): 450–53. 60. Neupokoev, Gosudarstvennye povinnosti, 91. On the failure of ecclesiastical estates as agricultural enterprises, see N. I. Pavlenko, “Monastyrskoe khoziaistvo XVIII v. po votchinnym instruktsiiam,” in Problemy obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Rossii i slavianskikh stran: Sborknik statei k 70-letu akademika M. N. Tikhomirova, ed. V. I. Shunkov (Moscow, 1963), 313– 18; and A. M. Borisov, “Krizis tserkovnogo i monastyrskogo zemlevladeniia i khoziaistva v 40–60x godakh XVIII v.,” Istoriia SSSR (1968): 142–51. 61. Volkov, Krest’iane dvortsovykh, 135–37; Neupokoev, Gosudarstvennye povinnosti, 91. 62. Edgar Melton, “Proto-industrialization, Serf Agriculture and Agrarian Social Structure: Two Estates in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Past and Present 115 (1987): 75–76. According to Melton’s calculations, based on the data of Federov and Kabuzan, obrok in the non-black-earth region had increased from 20 percent to 63 percent “early in the nineteenth century.” 63. Semevskii, Krest’iane, 1:492. 64. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 99–112; Confino, Domaines, 186–96. Confino makes the further point that Semevskii saw a gradual linear trend toward obrok as a precursor to emancipation and slanted his data to support that argument. 65. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 167. 66. Ibid. 67. Bulygin, Polozhenie, 96–97, 105–6, 110–11. 68. Confino, Domaines, 196–252. See also Semevskii, Krest’iane, 1:44; Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 156–66. Confino points out that Semevskii deemphasized such fluctuations in order to show a steady, gradual trend from barshchina to obrok from the mideighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and that he skewed his data by counting mixed obligations as obrok. Rubinshtein (97) points out that conversion to barshchina was especially common in the black-earth region, in such provinces as Penza, Orlov, and Voronezh, 246

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but it was not limited to that region and occurred to a lesser extent in the northern and north-central regions as well. 69. L. V. Milov, Issledovanie ob “Ekonomicheskikh Primechaniiakh” k general’nomu mezhevaniiu (Moscow, 1965), 308. 70. K. N. Shcheptov, Krepostnoe pravo v votchinakh Sheremetevykh (Moscow, 1946), 71; Melton, “Proto-industrialization,” 77–78. In 1788 N. P. Sheremetev owned 91,440 souls on 128 estates in seventeen provinces. 71. LeDonne, Ruling Russia, 253. 72. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, ll. 54ob.–55. 73. Ibid., part 2, l. 108. 74. For examples of such complaints, see Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 254. 75. Federov, Pomeshchich’i krest’iane, 236–42. 76. A. V. Kleiankin, Khoziaistvo pomeshch’ikh i udel’nykh krest’ian Simbirskoi gubernii v pervoi polovine XIX v.: Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskii ocherk. Aftoreferat (Saransk, USSR, 1974), 25. 77. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 160–62. 78. Confino, Domaines, 142–43, 163. The author gives no concrete examples and no indication of the incidence of this practice. 79. On the poverty and low educational levels of the provincial nobles who signed the nobles’ instructions to the legislative commission in 1767, see Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 56–62, 68–71. Roosevelt (Life, 157–58) distinguishes between the “aristocratic” estates of the very wealthy and the “patriarchal” estates of substantial landowners who lived on their estates year round and often took a close personal interest in the various aspects of estate management. 80. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina, 320; Melton, “Enlightened Seignorialism,” 681; Leckey, Patrons, 32–33. 81. Colum Leckey, “Patronage and Public Culture in the Russian Free Economic Society 1765–1796,” SR 64 (2005): 355–79; John H. Brown, “The Publication and Distribution of the Trudy of the Free Economic Society, 1765–1796,” RR 36 (1977): 341–50; P. N. Berkov, “Histoire de l’Encyclopédie dans la Russie du XVIII siècle,” RES 44 (1965): 47–58; Philip H. Clendenning, “Eighteenth-Century Russian Translations of Western Economic Works,” JEEH 1 (1972): 745–53. According to Milov and Vdovina (“Kul’tura,” 129), six different journals on agriculture and related subjects were published in Russia between 1766 and 1800. Those years saw the publication of fifty-two volumes of Trudy and forty volumes of Ekonomicheskii magazin. 82. Brown, “Publication and Distribution,” 342–45; Milov and Vdovina, “Kul’tura,” 129. 83. Rubinshtein (Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 133) found little concern with agronomy in the nobles’ instructions from this period. N. I. Pavlenko (“Monastyrskoe khoziaistvo,” 314–18) found some concern with agronomy on the part of the nobles and state officials. Rubinshtein was concerned with contrasting the nobles’ instructions of the first half of the century with those written later, whereas Pavlenko was concerned with contrasting them to the instructions written by ecclesiastics in the same period. 84. Vodarskii (Dvorianskoe zemlevladenie, 228), estimates that between 1701 and 1749 the state distributed 500,000 desiatines of state land to nobles, mostly to those who were already rich and powerful. 85. Robert E. Jones, Provincial Development in Russia: Catherine II and Jacob Sievers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 108–11. 86. A. N. Gur’ev, Ocherk razvitiia kreditnykh uchrezhdenii v Rossii (Moscow, 1904), 1–9; I. I. Levin, Aktsionernye kommercheskie banki v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1917), 2–8; S. Iu. Borovoi, “Voprosy kreditovaniia torgovli i promyshlennosti v ekonomicheskoi politike Rossii XVIII veka,” IZ 33 (1950): 114–15. notes to pages

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87. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 136–37. 88. Confino, Domaines, 131–36. 89. TVEO 16 (1770): 95, qtd. in Confino, Domaines, 137. 90. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 171–72, 264; Indova, “Instruktsiia,” 450–52. 91. Melton, “Enlightened Seignorialism,” 677. According to F. I. Lappo and V. I. Samsonova, in “Dnevnik kurskogo pomeshchika I. D. Annenkov,” Materialy po istorii SSSR 5 (1957), 798–99. Annenkov, who was rapacious about increasing his income by fair means and foul, spent money to improve the processing of agricultural products from his estates but not to increase productivity. He spent much larger sums acquiring lands and serfs. 92. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19008, part 1, l. 49; Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 3:214. According to Confino (Domaines, 150–52), an article in Trudy had recommended the riga in 1766. Nonetheless, in their instruction to the Legislative Commission convened in 1767, the nobles of the Dorogobuzh district of Smolensk protested against the efforts of local officials to introduce the riga as a replacement for the older type of drying barn, the ovin (SIRIO 14 [1875]: 440). Over the intervening twenty or so years, nobles in central Russia had apparently followed the familiar pattern of opposing innovation and then gradually adopting it. 93. The Sheremetevs were particularly active in promoting serf enterprises, but they were hardly alone. V. G. Orlov lent the peasants on one of his Volga estates 25,000 rubles to transport commodities to St. Petersburg, and when the St. Petersburg magistracy tried to prevent them from selling their goods in that city, he used his money and influence to defend them (Aleksandrov, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 184). 94. Hubert C. Johnson, Frederick the Great and His Officials (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), 11, 237–38. 95. Qtd. in Roosevelt, Life, 98. 96. When instructing his steward about sending peasants to transport grain, Shcherbatov said he was willing to pay the peasants who performed this obligatory work so as to unite their interests with his own and so that they would fulfill their commission faithfully and diligently (Indova, “Instruktsiia,” 451). See also Daniel, “Conflict,” 63, on Shcherbatov’s discovery that it was to his advantage to pay wages to the serfs who worked in the factories he opened on his estates. I know of no instance where this insight was carried over into agriculture. 97. For examples of peasants resisting their owners’ demands, see Kingston-Mann, In Search, 58–60; Rodney Bohac, “Everyday Forms of Resistance: Serf Opposition to Gentry Exactions, 1800–1861,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia 1800–1821, ed. Ester Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 236–60; and Roger Bartlett, “J. J. Sievers and the Russian Peasants under Catherine II,” JfGO 32 (1984): 19–33. 98. Bartlett, “J. J. Sievers,” 1–33. These events occurred in the very same region where the peasants later rebelled against the military colonies introduced by Alexander I and Arakcheev in the 1820s. 99. Aleksandrov, Sel’saia obshchina, 127. 100. According to Milov and Vdovina (“Kul’tura,” 106–7), a cow required one pud of fodder per day for two hundred days, and to produce that amount of hay required 3.2 desiatines of land. As a result, they conclude, the norm in Russia was one cow for every person on tiaglo. 101. Speaking of Iaroslavl Province, Ziablovskii noted, “Fertilizer is very important, but because there is not enough, many fields go unfertilized” (Zemleopisanie, 4:6). The topographical description of Tver recorded that the inhabitants “put manure only on rye” (RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 1900, 8, part 1, l. 49). Living in exile on his estate in the Dorogobuzhskii district of Smolensk in 1879, the chemist, landowner, and agriculturalist A. N. Engel’gardt wrote, “In the non-Black Earth Region, the size of the crops is determined by the 248

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amount of manure that one can gather; the amount of manure is itself determined by the amount of feed; the amount of feed is determined by the quantity of hay which the couple can prepare” (A. N. Engel’gardt, Alexandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt’s “Letters from the Country, 1872–1887,” trans. and ed. Cathy A. Frierson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 170. 102. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 4:99–100, 179; 5: 128, 152, 209. 103. Milov and Vdovina, “Kul’tura,” 134. 104. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, ll. 52–52ob.; Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 3:334–35; Michael Confino, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricoles: L’assolement triennal en Russie aux XVIIIe– XIXe siècles: Etude d’économie et de sociologie rurales (Paris: Mouton, 1969); 78; Kahan, Plow, 47–48; Hoch, Serfdom, 91–92. 105. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 143; Hoch, Serfdom, 92. 106. Milov and Vdovina, “Kul’tura,” pt. 1, 51. 107. Ibid., 55. 108. Bulygin, Polozhenie, 53–54; Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 171–72, 346–47; Samoilov, Penzenskii krai v kontse XVIII veka, 54–56. 109. Milov and Vdovina, “Kul’tura,” 61–62. 110. Ibid., 78–79; Rubinshtein (Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 171) discusses the Kurakins’ experiments with English and Arabian oats, Turkish millet, and English peas. 111. Milov and Vdovina, “Kul’tura,” 100; Bulygin (Polozhenie, 54, table 8) shows that in Penza Province during the five years for which he has sufficient data (1782, 1790, 1792, 1795, and 1796), the average return on rye was 1:3.7, while that on wheat was 1:2. The ratio varied little in each of the five years. 112. M. M. Iakubtsiner, “K istorii kul’tury pshenitsy v SSSR,” Materialy po istorii zemledeliia SSSR 5 (1956): 48–49. 113. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 172, 338. 114. In a report to the empress dated December 28, 1771, the Commission on Commerce recommended renewing the decree of April 13, 1766, permitting the duty-free export of wheat and wheat flour for five years. Along with making other arguments, the commission urged Catherine “not to destroy the efforts of cultivators who [had] begun to grow wheat in response to the export market.” The report also noted that exports of wheat had started to increase “in part in response to foreign demand and in part because of its increased cultivation at home, which in the opinion of the commission should be increased to the extent that it has never been very great.” The report was signed by Count Ernst Minnikh, Grigory Teplov, and Prince M. M. Shcherbatov. See RGADA, f. 19 (Financy), d. 314 (o torgovle khlebom), ll. 1–4. 115. Ibid. 116. Bulygin, Polozhenie, 96–97. 117. Iakubtsiner, “K istorii kul’tury pshenitsy v SSSR,” 48–49; Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 170, 253; Kleiankin, Khoziaistvo pomeshchich’ikh, 21. 118. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 411, l. 324; J. G. Georgi, records similar data for Orel in the 1790s; see Georgi, Geographisch-physikalische und naturhistorische Beschreibung des russischen Reiches, 10 vols. [Königsberg, 1797–1802], 2:553, 601). About 80 percent of Orel’s wheat went to Moscow, where consumers who could afford it had apparently acquired a taste for white bread and were willing to pay a premium for it. 119. Storch, Picture of St. Petersburg, 113. 120. Bulygin (Polozhenie) concluded that Polianskii’s efforts to improve crop yields succeeded over time. Most assessments of the effects of eighteenth-century agronomy on Russian agriculture are, however, negative. See P. I. Liashchenko, “Krepostnoe sel’skoe khoziaistvo Rossii v XVIII v.,” IZ 15 (1945): 122; Confino, Domaines, 153; Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 343. notes to pages

106–108

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121. Mironov, Khlebnyi tseny, 171. Both Kahan (Plow, 45) and M. A. Tsvetkov (Izmenenie lesistosti evropeiskoi Rossii s kontsa XVII stolestiia po 1914 god [Moscow, 1957], 110–14) calculate that plow land in Russia increased by more than 150 percent between 1696 and 1796, but unlike Mironov’s figures, theirs do not pertain to a constant area and include territory acquired after 1696. 122. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia, 59, 63, 107. 123. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 330–31. 124. Bulygin, Polozhenie, 41–45. 125. Samoilov, Penzenskii krai, 55. 126. E. I. Indova, “Urozhai v tsentral’noi Rossii za 150 let (vtoraia polovina XVII– XVIII v.),” EPAIVE, 1965 (Moscow, 1970), 146–51; I. Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the European Forest Steppe,”in Studies in Russian Historical Geography, ed. James H. Bater and R. A. French, 2 vols. (London: Academic, 1983), 1:45–63. 127. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina, 74. 128. Istomina, “Novgorodskaia guberniia,” 265 (Prokrovskii, in General’noe soobrazhenenie, v, says that 30 percent of the area of Tver Province was plow land; I am assuming that only two-thirds of it was sown in a given year); Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 330. 129. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 330. 130. A. Liakhov, Osnovnyia cherti sotsial’nykh i ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii v Rossii v epokhu Imperatora Aleksandra I (Moscow, 1912), 46–47.

Chapter 5. Commerce 1. Istomina (Vodnye puti) often mentions grain merchants as using the waterways and grain and flour as cargoes but no more. Indova (“Instruktsiia”) discusses Shcherbatov’s involvement in the cereals trade in connection with his efforts to increase his income. The same is true of Bulygin (Polozhenie), writing on Polianskii, and Lappo and Samsonova (“Dnevnik kurskogo pomeshchika I. D. Annenkov”), writing on Annenkov. N. V. Kozlova and V. R. Tarlovskaia provide important information on some aspects of commerce, but they say nothing specific about the grain trade (see Kozlova and Tarlovskaia, “Togovlia,” in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVIII veka, ed. V. A. Aleksandrov, 4 vols. [Moscow, 1985], 213–56). The same is true of S. Iu. Borovoi, Kredit i banki Rossii (seredine XVII v.–1861 g.) (Moscow, 1958), on credit and banking. In his biography of the grain merchant Tolchenov, Ransel pays greater attention to the grain trade than almost anyone else does, but his subject is Tolchenov’s life, not the grain trade. The only work focused directly on the grain trade itself is Munro, “Feeding the Multitudes.” In his several works on grain prices and the grain market, Mironov assumes that grain and flour moved from place to place but says nothing specific about who transferred it or how it was transferred. 2. Wirtschafter, Structures, 19. 3. The following works have made extensive use of the townsmen’s instructions, mainly as sources of information about urban government and social organization but also about their economic status and attitudes: F. X. Coquin, La grande commission législative 1767–1768: Les cahiers de doléances urbains (Province de Moscou) (Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1972); Bernd Knabe, Die Struktur der russischen Posadgemeinden und der Katalog der Beschwerden und Forderungen der Kaufmannschaft (1762–1767) (Berlin: Osteuropa-Institut, 1975); and Manfred Hildermeier, Bürgertum und Stadt in Russland 1760–1870 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1986). 4. SIRIO 107 (1899): 290. 5. SIRIO 117 (1904): 487. 6. SIRIO 107 (1899): 589–90. 7. Kafengauz, “Khlebnyi rynok,” 486–89. One peasant from Serpukov delivered 201 chetverts of various grains. Another, from Epifan, delivered 375 chetverts (Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 3:218, 246, 258). 250

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8. Kapustina, “K istoriii khlebnogo,” 381, 385; M. Ia. Volkov, “Privoz khleba, v raion Peterburga v 20e gody XVIII v.,” in Voprosy sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii i istochninikovedeniia perioda feodalisma v Rossii. Sbornik statei k 70 letuiu A. Ia. Novosel’skogo, ed. N. V. Ustiugov (Moscow, 1961), 123. 9. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 39. 10. SIRIO 107 (1899): 133–34. 11. Coquin, La grande commission, 119. 12. Ibid., 114–23. 13. PSZ 23, no. 16914 (Oct. 26, 1790): 181. 14. According to Aleksandrov (Sel’skaia obshchina, 184), V. G. Orlov lent the peasants on one of his Volga estates 25,000 rubles to finance their commercial activities and defended them when the St. Petersburg magistracy tried to prevent them from engaging in retail trade in that city. 15. V. A. Iakovetskii, Kupecheskii kapital v feodal’no-krepostnicheskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1953), 43–44; G. L. Vartanov, “Gorodskie iamarki tsentral’no chasti evropeiskoi Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v.,” Leningradskoe gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institute imenii A. I. Gertsena: Uchenye zapiski 194 (1958): 138–48; Mironov, Vnutrennii rynok, 112, 178. 16. Eliza Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 63; George Munro, “The Role of the Veksel’ in Russian Capital Formation: A Preliminary Inquiry,” in Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roger Bartlett, Anthony Cross, and Karen Rasmussen (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988), 556–57. 17. Morrison, “Trading Peasants,” 348–50. 18. Rubinshtein, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 264. 19. Bulygin, Polozhenie’, 110–12. 20. Lappo and Samsonova, “Dnevnik kurskogo pomeshchika I. D. Annenkov,” 670–71. 21. Kafengauz, “Khlebnyi rynok,” 493–94. 22. Indova, “Instruktsiia,” 450–53. 23. Volkov, “Privoz khleba,” 122–24. 24. Kh. D. Sorina, “K voprosu o protesse sotsial’nogo rassloeniia goroda v sviazi s formirovaniem kapitalisticheskikh otnoshenii v Rossii v XVIII–nachale XIX v. (g. Tver’),” Uchenye zapiski Kalininskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut 38 (1964): 283–84. 25. Liubimenko, “Torgovle v Peterburg,” 91. 26. M. Ia. Volkov, “Goroda tverskoi provintsii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v.,” in Istoricheskaia geografia Rossii XII–nachalo XX v.: Sbornik stat’ei k 70-letiiu professora Liubomira Grigor’evicha Beskrovnogo, ed. A. L. Narochnitskii (Moscow, 1975), 162. 27. Ibid. 28. Report from the Commission on Commerce to the Senate dated January 5, 1765, RGADA, f. 397, d. 445/55, ll. 2–3ob. In 1797 the Vagins and the Sobolevs were listed as two of the five wealthiest families in Tver, but the Aref’evs were no longer listed among the merchants of Tver (Istomina, Vodnye puti, 114). 29. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 114. 30. D. I. Karmanov, Sobranie sochinenii otnosiashchikhsia k istorii Tverskogo kraia, ed. V. I. Kolosov (Tver, Russia, 1893), 116. As the first notary public in Tver, Karmanov notarized contracts and cargo shipments along the waterway to St. Petersburg and thus had an intimate acquaintance with the city’s trade. He wrote this manuscript in late 1770s and 1780s. A little more than a century later, another local historian, Vladimir Kolosov, discovered the manuscript and published it with his own introduction. 31. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, l. 43. Citing a different, local source, Sorina (“K voprosu”) found that in 1785 the number of families in Tver trading “at the port” was eighty. 32. Istomina, Vodnye puti Rossii, 114. notes to pages

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33. Volkov, “Goroda,” 158. 34. Topograficheskoe i kameral’noe opisanie gorodov i uezdov Tverskoi gubernii, RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 2, ll. 153–55. 35. Volkov, “Goroda,” 154–55. 36. Kh. D. Sorina, “Ocherki sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii goroda ostashkova v kontse XVIII–pervoi chetverti XIX v.,” in Iz proshlego i nastoiashchevo kalininskoi oblasti, ed. Kh. D. Sorina (Moscow, 1965), 7. 37. Communication from Governor Sievers to the Senate dated November 16, 1767, RGADA, f. 248, d. 3716 (Pervyi Departament za 1765–1767), l. 224. 38. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 2, ll. 78ob.–80. In these comments on the merchants of Rzhev, the topographical description also noted that one of them, Sergei Chupatov, regularly sent goods abroad on his own ships, sometimes to France. 39. Ibid., ll. 122, 50ob., 27–27ob., 94. 40. Ibid., part 1, l. 4. 41. G. F. Müller, “Puteshestvie v gorod Dmitrov istoriografa G. F. Millera 1779 goda,” in Istoriko-statisticheskoe i arkheologicheskoe opisanie goroda Dmitrov s uezdom i sviatynami, ed. I. Tokmakov, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1893), 2:9. 42. According to table 4, in chapter 1, St. Petersburg required 53,063 metric tons of rye flour in 1784. Doubling that figure for an estimate of grain and flour of all kinds as explained in chapter 1 indicates that the merchants of Dmitrov were supplying slightly more than 4 percent of the city’s minimum needs. The calculation is admittedly imprecise but reasonable for gauging Dmitrov’s role in the grain trade. 43. Investigating this subject in 1786, the Commission on Grain found only eight St. Petersburg merchants active in the grain trade, and one of them, Sobolev, was in fact a member of an important grain-trading family in Tver who lived in St. Petersburg to carry on the family’s activities in that city (SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 36, 371; and d. 412, l. 41). A report of the Commission on Commerce stated, “Clearly the merchants of Moscow are the great merchants of the empire, possessing up to 116,000 rubles of capital in one case and trading as far away as China and Kamchatka” (RGADA, f. 397, d. 445/28, l. 2). A description of Moscow in 1785 added that the great merchants of Moscow did business with St. Petersburg, China, Orenburg, Turkey, Persia, Poland, and Archangel, mainly in luxury goods, especially silk, cotton and woolen textiles, paper, and tea, and conducted an important business in international and domestic finance (Sostoiane stolichnago goroda Moskvy 1785g. [Moscow: M. P. Shchepkina, 1879], 7–8). This informative document was published without attribution or identification of any kind, but much of its information clearly comes from official sources. 44. Sostoiane stolichenago goroda Moskvy 1785g., 8–9. 45. Volkov, “Privoz khleba,” 124. 46. RGADA, f. 397, d. 445/18, ll. 9–10; and d. 445/21, ll. 3–12. 47. RGIA, f. 1350, op. 312, d. 158, l. 3. 48. Report of Governor-General Shcherbinin dated simply “1779,” RGADA, f. 16, d. 951, l. 125. According to Kafengauz (“Khlebnyi rynok,” 507–9), merchants from Orel dominated the delivery of grain and flour to Moscow by water in the 1720s and 1730s. 49. An inquiry by the Commission on Grain in 1787 determined that grain dealers from Orel had shipped some 35,000 chetverts of grain and flour to St. Petersburg in 1784 (as opposed to 127,000 chetverts to Moscow) but none in the famine years of 1785 and 1786 (while smaller than usual shipments to Moscow continued); see SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 411, l. 324. A Senate study of the grain trade to St. Petersburg in 1766 found that nineteen of the forty-two boats wintering over at Vyshnii Volochek and awaiting the spring thaw belonged to merchants from the Oka Basin (RGADA, f. 248, d. 6444, ll. 770–71ob.). The proportion of southern boats in this group is not typical of traffic through the canal because boats from 252

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the Oka were usually among the last to reach the canal in the autumn and were far more likely to winter over than those from most other embarkation points. 50. RGADA, f. 248, d. 6444, l. 777. 51. PSZ 6, no. 3708 (Jan. 17, 1721): 291–309; 20, no. 14275 (Mar. 17, 1775): 82–86; and 22, no. 16188 (Apr. 21, 1785): 358–84. The principal concern of Peter’s legislation was to regularize the townsmen’s financial and service obligations to the state. Catherine’s reforms combined that concern with a greater interest in creating an active and productive middle class. 52. J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 44. 53. Ibid. 54. E. V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great, trans. John T. Alexander (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 79. 55. Wallace Daniel, “Grigorii Teplov and the Conception of Order: The Commission on Commerce and the Role of Merchants in Russia,” CASS 16 (1986): 419–20; Wallace Daniel, Grigorii Teplov: A Statesman at the Court of Catherine the Great (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1991), 50–54. 56. Chulkov’s statement is recounted in I. M. Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli (St. Petersburg, 1923), 223. 57. Hugh D. Hudson Jr., The Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1986), 102. These remarks are contained in a letter to Ivan Betskoi dated March 5, 1772, in which Demidov proposed to found and finance school for the education of merchants’ sons. 58. N. V. Kozlova, Rossiiskii absoliutizm i kupechestvo v XVIII veke (Moscow, 1999); O. E. Nilova, Moskovskoe kupechestvo kontsa XVIII–pervyi chetvert’ XIX veka: Sotsial’nye aspekty mirovospriatiia i samosoznaniia (Moscow, 2002); David L. Ransel, “Russian Merchants: Citizenship and Identity,” in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy, ed. Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehman-Carli (Berlin: Lit Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, 2007), 417–28. 59. Kingston-Mann (In Search of the True West) identifies England, France, and Germany as the Russians’ model of what they should become, although she could have included the Netherlands and northern Italy as well. She criticizes the Russians for trying to follow the examples set by those countries, but that was really the other side of Russia’s sense of inadequacy, which revealed itself in caustic criticism of its people and institutions. Both the tendency to borrow from other countries and the tendency to castigate Russia stemmed from the assumption that Russia needed to improve itself. 60. The classic statement of that position is by E. V. Tarle in “Byla li Ekaterininskaia Rossiia otstaloiu stranoiu?” in Zapad i Rossiia, ed. E. V. Tarle (Petrograd, 1918), 122–49. Paul Bushkovich (The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 169) argues that Russian merchants of the seventeenth century should also be compared to those of central and eastern Europe rather than those of England and the Netherlands. 61. Elizabeth Harder-Gersdorff, “The Baltic Provinces—‘Bridge’ or ‘Barrier’ to Russian Engagement in Western Trade? A Study of Russians at Reval during the Reign of Catherine II,” JfGO 45 (1997): 561–76. 62. Jakob Sievers to Catherine II, October 1768, RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 150. 63. According to Daniel Roche, those elements of Tolchenov’s background— entering a family-owned business and on-the-job training under the supervision of close relatives—were also typical of eighteenth-century French merchants; see Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 161–63. 64. The published version of Tolchenov’s diary-memoir used here was edited and introduced by N. I. Pavlenko, A. I. Kopanev, and V. Kh. Bodisko. David Ransel’s biography, notes to pages

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A Russian Merchant’s Tale, is based on his study of the complete manuscript in the St. Petersburg archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It presents a far richer and more complex view of Tolchenov’s life, especially his life beyond the grain trade. 65. In the 1760s the Tolchenovs were shipping at least 1,000 to 2,000 metric tons of flour annually through the canal at Vyshnii Volochek, an amount equal to 3 percent to 6 percent of St. Petersburg’s minimum demand for flour at that time. PSZ 17, no. 12656 (May 22, 1766), mentions twelve boats owned by the Tolchenovs under the command of a steward, Mikhailo Belavinskii, passing through the canal at Vyshnii Volochek in 1765. RGADA, f. 248 (Dela Senata), d. 6448, ll. 786–87, lists eight boats (barki) belonging to the Tolchenov brothers passing through the canal between April 18 and May 1, 1766. 66. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 75–86, 160–62. 67. On Tolchenov’s profits, see the list compiled by the editors and published in the introduction to Zhurnal, 16–17. 68. Ibid., 14, 166–90, 228–30, 293; Ransel, Tale, 266–72. 69. On Tolchenov’s ambitions, expenditures, and financial struggles, see David Ransel, “An Eighteenth-Century Russian Merchant Family in Prosperity and Decline,” in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, edited by Jane Burbank and David Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 256–80. For a list of merchants who were ennobled over the course of the eighteenth century, see Kahan, Plow, 278. Moving in the opposite direction, the majority of families registered as first guild merchants in Moscow 1767 had disappeared from the merchantry by 1800, and the majority of families registered as first guild merchants in 1800 had disappeared from the merchantry by 1815 (A. I. Aksenov, Genealogiia moskovskogo kupechestva XVIII v. [Moscow, 1988], 61, 85). 70. Hittle, Service City, 137–39. 71. RGADA, f. 291, op. 3, d. 15127, ll. 11–12ob.; and f. 397, d. 445/32, l. 3. 72. Hittle, Service City, 138. 73. Coquin, La grande commission, 96–97. 74. Robert E. Jones, “Jacob Sievers, Enlightened Reform, and the Development of a ‘Third Estate’ in Russia,” RR 36 (1977): 424–37; David Griffiths, “Eighteenth-Century Perceptions of Backwardness: Projects for the Creation of a Third Estate in Catherinian Russia,” CASS 13 (1979): 452–72. 75. Iu. V. Klokman, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia istoriia russkogo goroda (Moscow, 1967), 91. A report of the Commission on Commerce to the Senate dated June 10, 1765, based on numbers provided by provincial chancelleries throughout Russia, put the number of legally registered merchants in 1765 at 152,262, a figure significantly lower than the one given by Klokman (RGADA, f. 397, d. 445, l. 139). 76. PSZ 20, no. 14274 (Mar. 17, 1775); no. 14327 (May 25, 1775); no. 14392 (Nov. 7, 1775); and 22, no. 16188 (Apr. 21, 1785). The specific provisions of these laws reforming the merchantry and the towns are discussed in Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 299–303; and Jones, Provincial Development, 104–8. 77. Hudson, Rise of the Demidov Family, 102–5. Coquin (La grande commission, 140, 168–69) found that the urban instructions to the Legislative Commission of 1767, which in almost all cases were composed by merchants, almost never mentioned education among their many concerns. It is worth noting that historians have found similar attitudes and behavior in eighteenth-century French merchants. See, for example, Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 159–63. 78. Jakob Sievers to Catherine II, RGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 3, l. 211ob.; Jones, Provincial Development, 138–39. The negative comments of Sievers and his successor Jakob Bruce on the local merchantry are especially pertinent to this study because the provinces they adminis254

notes to pages

125–128

tered lay between St. Petersburg and the Volga and contained many of the merchants active in transporting grain (and other goods) to the capital. 79. Robert E. Jones, “Merchant Bankruptcy and the Courts, 1649–1800,” in EighteenthCentury Russia: Society, Culture, Economy, ed. Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Berlin: Lit Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, 2007), 529–30. 80. Nilova, Moskovskoe kupechestvo, 89–91. Nilova attributes the merchants’ change of attitude toward commercial education to the “formation of a new bourgeois stratum” among the nobility rather than to the government’s new requirements for financial records in civil court proceedings, as I have done. 81. Hildermeier, Bürgertum und Stadt (102–23), provides a detailed discussion of merchants’ envy of noblemen and their privileges. 82. Ransel, Tale, 274. 83. Blanchard, Russia’s “Age of Silver,” 172. 84. Kahan, Plow, 340, table 8.19. 85. Iukht, Russkie den’gi, 110. 86. I. I. Kaufman, Serebriannyi rubl’ v Rossii ot ego vozniknovenniia do kontsa XIX veka (St. Petersburg, 1910), 161, 169. 87. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 412, l. 407. 88. D. I. Rostislavov, Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. and ed. Alexander Martin (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 51. 89. PSZ 14, no. 10777 (Nov. 6, 1757): 807–16; Petrov, Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga, 584–85; Iukht, Russkie den’gi, 128–29. 90. Iakovetskii, Kupecheskii kapital, 39. The original source is cited as RGADA, f. 19, d. 419, part 1, l. 55. 91. Report from Governor-General N. V. Repin to A. A. Bezborodko dated August 24, 1780, RGADA, f. 16, d. 952, part 1, l. 62ob. 92. Iakovetskii, Kupecheskii kapital, 39. The original source is cited as RGADA, f. 19, d. 297b, l. 20. 93. PSZ 8, no. 5410 (May 16, 1724): 147–97. The text of the law together with a history of subsequent legislation on the veksel and a commentary by P. G. Diltei (Philip Heinrich Dilthey) was published by the Moscow University Press in 1768 under the title Nachal’naia osnovaniia veksedl’nogo prava dlia upotrebleniia v iuridicheskom fakultete moskovskom. 94. Munro, “Role,” 551–64. 95. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 132–36, 155. 96. Borovoi, “Voprosy,” 113. 97. PSZ 18, no. 13219 (Apr. 27, 1769): 787–92. 98. Borovoi, Kredit, 91. 99. In 1780 in response to an inquiry about the need for an office of the Assignats Bank in Orel, the provincial chancellery informed Governor-General V. V. Repin of an insufficiency of copper coins throughout the province, making it difficult for district treasurers to convert silver money into copper. In some cases the availability of copper coins for conversion depended on the receipts of the salt tax. See RGADA, f. 16, d. 952, part 1, l. 62ob. 100. Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, 37. By that time silver kopecks were not actually minted but were used as an accounting unit. 101. Ibid., 36. 102. Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli, 244. 103. PSZ 9, no. 6300 (June 8, 1733): 6. 104. Borovoi, Kredit, 101. 105. The large and important topic of state loans to nobles lies outside the focus of this work. For further information, see the works of Borovoi and Kahan cited previously, as

notes to pages

128–134

255

well as Butenko, Kratkii ocherk istorii torgovli, 70–85; see also Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 476–85; and Roderick McGrew, Paul I of Russia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 244–57. 106. Borovoi, Kredit, 104. The institution became known as the Commercial Bank because its director was the president of the Commerce College. According to Borovoi, the decree stipulated collateral requirements so stringent that the merchants of St. Petersburg organized a boycott of the bank and persuaded the government to reduce them. 107. Borovoi, Kredit, 105–6. 108. PSZ 19, no. 13681 (Oct. 18, 1771): 341; and 21, no. 15534 (Oct. 6, 1782): 695. 109. PSZ 22, no. 16407 (June 28, 1786): 614–27. 110. Borovoi, Kredit, 115. 111. Iakovetskii, Kupecheskii kapital, 40–41. 112. Sostoiane stolichenago goroda Moskvy 1785g., 8. A report of the Commission on Commerce dated March 1770 claimed that “powerful English companies” made great sums of money in the veksel trade while undermining the exchange rate of the ruble (RGADA, f. 19, d. 240, part 2, ll. 25–26). On the use of foreign bills of exchange to finance Russia’s internal and external trade, see also Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli, 238; Oddy, European Commerce, 1:93; and Kozlova and Tarlovskaia, “Togovlia,” 233. The best account explaining how money moved from the centers of European finance and back again is to be found in V. N. Zakharov, Zapadnoevropeiskie kuptsy v rossiiskoi Torgovle XVIII veka (Moscow, 2005), 550–51. 113. Zakharov, Zapadnoevropeiskie, 550–55. Zakharov calls this relationship “hegemony” and explains the comparative advantages on both sides. 114. Quoted in Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli, 224. 115. F. G. Virst, Razsuzhdeniia o nekotorykh predmetakh zakonodatel’stva upravleniia finansami I kommertsieiu Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi tipografii, 1807), 184–85. 116. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 37. 117. Ibid., 102. 118. George G. Weickhardt, “The Commercial Law of Old Russia,” RH 25 (1988): 375–76. 119. N. I. Pavlenko, introduction to Tolchenov’, Zhurnal, 17. 120. Diltei, Nachal’naia osnovaniia, 53. The law specified a number of state officials who could certify the veksel if no notary public was available. 121. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 307. 122. Iakovetskii, Kupecheskii kapital, 39. 123. Munro, “Role,” 554; Diltei (Nachal’naia osnovaniia, 229–331) lists fifty-nine rulings, amendments, and so on that clarified or modified the Veksel Regulation between 1729 and 1768. 124. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 347–48. 125. A contract between the Tver merchant Semen Petrovich Arefiev and a group of boat workers for the delivery of rye purchased in Nizhnii Novgorod was exhibited at the Kalininskii Oblastnoi Muzei in 1989. A contract between the Treasury Office and the Tver merchant Peter Pigorev in 1787 for delivery of saltpeter from Tver to St. Petersburg called for Pigorev to load the saltpeter on his own boat at his own expense, hire a pilot and boat hands, and deliver it by a certain deadline. That contract was guaranteed by nine signatories in addition to Pigorev himself (Sorina, “Mesto Tveri,” 86–87). Munro (Intentional City, 166) quotes a significant portion of a contract for delivery of cereals from Iaroslavl to St. Petersburg. 126. PSZ 17, no. 12459 (Aug. 24, 1765): 253–54, chapter 9, article 10. 127. PSZ 8, no. 5410 (May 16, 1729): 147–97, article 8. 128. Munro, “Role,” 558. 256

notes to pages

134–139

129. Jones, Emancipation, 77–82. 130. Coquin, La grande commission, 133–37. 131. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 307–22; Ransel, Tale, 179–84. 132. Coquin, La grande commission, 137–40. 133. PSZ 26, no. 19692 (Dec. 19, 1800): 440–74; Jones, “Merchant Bankruptcy,” 521–30. 134. PSZ 26, no. 19692 (Dec. 19, 1800): 440–74, sect. 25. 135. Paul J. Best, “Insurance in Imperial Russia,” JEEH 18 (Spring 1989): 139–45. According to Best, Dutch and then British insurance companies offered maritime insurance to Russian merchants engaged in overseas trade. No such insurance was available to merchants engaged in internal commerce. 136. Ibid. 137. Iakovetskii, Kupecheskii kapital, 40–41. 138. Best, “Insurance,” 141. 139. A. I. Iukht, “Torgovye kompanii v Rossii v seredine XVIII v.,” IZ 111 (1984): 238–95. 140. PSZ 18, no. 12904 (June 1, 1767): 134–37. 141. PSZ 19, no. 13886 (Oct. 18, 1772): 597–602. 142. RGADA, f. 16, d. 952, part 1, l. 5. 143. Ibid., ll. 2–3ob. The proposal, with twenty-seven signatures, was transmitted by Governor-General V. V. Repin to Senate Secretary A. A. Bezborodko on June 30, 1778. 144. Report on the administrative duties of Governor-General Evdokim Shcherbinin on the provinces of Smolensk, Orel, and Voronezh for 1779, RGADA, f. 16, d. 951, l. 125ob. 145. PSZ 29, no. 22418 (Jan. 1, 1807): 971; Thomas Owen, The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9–14. Corporations were not all that common in western Europe in the eighteenth century, but historians studying Russia can only smile at Daniel Roche’s statement that in no city in eighteenth-century France did joint stock companies outnumber family-owned businesses (Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 159). 146. Kozlova, Rossiiskii absoliutizm, 134–36, 151, 181, 184–85, 191, 197, 221. 147. Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 159. According to Steven L. Kaplan (Provisioning Paris, 147–53, 354), much of the cereals trade to Paris in the eighteenth century was conducted on credit between buyers and sellers who were well known to each other, and contracts between millers and bakers were usually oral and backed by powerful moral sanctions. In Zapadnoevropeiskie (548), however, Zakharov emphasizes the differences between British “firms” and Russian family businesses. 148. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 54–55. 149. Exceptions were few, and evidence of them is scarce. The Sobolevs of Tver had a close relative who was a grain dealer in St. Petersburg and very likely handled the family business at that end. George Munro has found evidence that Ivan Khlebnikov, a grain merchant registered in the second guild of St. Petersburg merchants, had a resident agent in Iaroslavl who on one occasion arranged for the shipping of Khlebnikov’s grain from Iaroslavl to St. Petersburg; see Munro, “Glimpses into the Lives of the Merchants of Iaroslavl in the Eighteenth Century,” in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy, ed. Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Berlin: Lit Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, 2007), 520.

Chapter 6. Transportation 1. In additional to the institutional histories by Bakhturin, Dubenskii, Zhitkov, and the Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia already cited, this statement applies as well to Bernshtein-Kogan’s book on the waterway through Vyshnii Volochek, to Gorelov’s book on Russian canals, and to Johann Stukenberg’s monumental study of Russian hydroengineering, Hydrographie des russischen Reichs, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1844–49), as well as to the notes to pages

139–147

257

article by R. A. French entitled “Canals in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” in Studies in Russian Historical Geography, ed. James H. Bater and R. A. French, 2 vols. (London: Academic, 1983), 1:23–44, which is the best and almost the only treatment of the subject in English. The several works of E. G. Istomina citied in this book give more attention to the waterways’ role in the Russian economy, but again, they focus on the projects and their use rather than their context or their consequences. 2. RGADA, f. 16, d. 502, ll. 2–4. 3. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 130. 4. Ibid., 105. Seven hundred kuls of flour would weigh approximately 103 metric tons. The flour had failed to make it to St. Petersburg before the rivers froze and had to be wintered over near Lake Ladoga. 5. Listengurt, “Rol’ ekonomiko-geograficheskogo polozheniia,” 115–16. 6. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 8ob. 7. A set of instructions from a nobleman to his steward published in the journal of the Free Economic Society in 1769 claimed that one horse could transport the alcohol produced from a quantity of grain that would require six horses to transport (TVEO 12 [1968]: 27). Even so, teamsters who transported alcohol from distilleries to shipping wharves in the frontier province of Viatka in the 1750s received between one-third and one-half of the selling price at the wharf (A. I. Komissarenko, “Khlebnye resursy Viatki v seredine XVIII v,” in Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia v Rossii XVII–XVIII vv.: Sbornik statei, ed. A. A. Preobrazhenskii [Moscow, 1983], 227). 8. Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, 201; Kahan, Plow, 56. 9. Samoilev, Penzenskii krai, 40, 67. According to Kahan (Plow, 55), 1,200,000 chetverts of grain were converted to alcohol each year in the Russian provinces of the empire. 10. See, for example, the letter of Catherine II to Grigorii Teplov in which she tentatively suggested restricting distilling as a way to increase the supply of grain and flour (RS 12 [1875]: 385) and the Senate’s query of 1767 whether increased distilling had contributed to the shortage and rising price of cereals (SIRIO 10 [1872]: 215). 11. These percentages are my calculations based on the estimates of revenues from alcohol and of total state revenues in Kahan, Plow, 325, 341. 12. Kleiankin, Khoziaistvo pomeshch’ikh, 19. 13. Samoilev, Penzenskii krai, 58. 14. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 412, l. 406ob. 15. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 7ob.–8. 16. PSZ 5, no. 2655 (Mar. 9, 1713): 21. According to Butenko (Kratkii ocherk istorii torgovli, 71), weights and measures were revised and standardized in 1747, but Peter Hoffmann (Handbuch der Geshchichte Russlands, 200) contends that weights and measures were not standardized before the law of Nicholas I in 1835. In studying the grain trade I have not found this to be problem after the 1730s, as every source I have used assumes that the weights and measures were consistent, and the police were repeatedly instructed to enforce the recognized standard to prevent cheating. The unidentified document on the grain trade in RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, notes that a chetvert of rye contains nine chetveriki of grain rather than the normal eight and that this standard was recognized “almost everywhere,” “probably because from that quantity of rye grain comes nine pud of flour without remainder, which usually constitutes the size of a kul.” Officials without exception assumed a kul to weigh nine puds, and in numerous instances officials treated a kul of flour and a chetvert of grain as equivalent units when totaling amounts of cereals, as shown in RGADA, f. 248, d. 6444, ll. 712–12ob. 17. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 229. 18. N. L. Rubinshtein, “Nekotorye voprosy formirovaniia rynka rabochei sily v Rossii 258

notes to pages

149–154

XVIII v.,” VI 2 (1952): 182. A disproportionate number of these workers appear to have been state peasants. 19. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 9–9ob.; L. M. Marasinova, “Puti i sredstva soobshcheniia,” in Ocherki istorii russkoi kultury XVIII v, vol. 1, ed. A. V. Aleksandrov (Moscow, 1985), 265; F. N. Rodin, Burlachestvo v Rossii (Moscow, 1975), 65; D. Zolotarev, ed., Opisanie goroda Rybinska (Rybinsk, Russia, 1910), 31. 20. Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 30–32; RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 8ob.–9ob. These two sources agree on most points but differ on some details and in some cases give different names for what is clearly the same kind of boat. One reasonable inference is that the typology of riverboats was less clear than either source would make it, and there were numerous variations on the typical forms. 21. Munro (“Glimpses,” 520) provides the translated text of such a contract between a grain merchant and a boat owner to deliver cereals from Iaroslavl to St. Petersburg. 22. Ustav kupecheskogo vodokhodstva, ch. 2, art. 17 and 18, repeated in ch. 7, art. 146–47, PSZ 21, no. 15176 (June 25, 1781): 157–87. Chapter 9 of the same statute specifies the duties of a makler. In short, he was to record all contracts relating to boats and shipping. 23. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 10–10ob. 24. These calculations are based on the figures given in RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, ll. 10– 10ob. The figure for the number of burlaks needed is consistent with other evidence, but the figure for the wages of a burlak may be too high. Rodin (Burlachestvo v Rossii, 93) says that in 1797 a burlak would have received 7.50 rubles for a trip from Nizhnii Novgorod to Rybinsk, which would reduce the cost of wages to 514 rubles, or 46.7 percent of the money received. Both of these are estimates of normal wages because in practice wages were negotiated. They also included food. Except for suiarkii or surskii, boats carrying cereals to Rybinsk could make a return trip carrying cargo southward. Some could also make a second trip later in the year carrying other goods. 25. Rodin, Burlachestvo v Rossii, 71–72; Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 33; Listengurt, “Rol’ ekonomiko-geograficheskogo polozheniia,” 115. 26. Rubinshtein, “Nekotorye voprosy,” 95; N. I. Pavlenko, Ocherki Istorii SSSR XVIII v. (Moscow, 1962), 182; Istomina, Vodnye puti, 92. Rodin (Burlachestvo v Rossii, 76–82) gives a much higher estimate; see Istomina, Vodnye puti, for a discussion of this problem. 27. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 10, says that three laborers were needed for every 100 kuls (900 puds); Zolotarev (Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 3) says that “generally” three laborers were needed for every 1,000 puds. Listengurt (“Rol’ ekonomiko-geograficheskogo polozheniia,” 115) says that three to five burlaks were needed for every 1,000 puds of freight. 28. The figure for 1780 is from Listengurt, “Rol’ ekonomiko-geograficheskogo polozheniia,” 113; the figure for 1784 is from Istomina, Vodnye puti, 113. The estimate for 1811 is from Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 35. 29. Rodin, Burlachestvo v Rossii, 76; Iulii Gessen, “Burlaki v pervoi polovine 19ogo veka,” Arkhiv istorii truda v Rossii 2 (1921): 27. 30. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 73–76. 31. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 130. 32. Listengurt, “Rol’ ekonomiko-geograficheskogo polozheniia,” 113; Istomina, Vodnyi puti, 113. Their source is a document in the local archives of Iaroslavl that I have not seen. The figures I am quoting are approximate because I am converting various Russian units of volume to metric tons and liters. 33. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 113; Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 35. Although these figures are only estimates, they are in line with the data for 1780 and in accordance with the independent observations of Ziablovskii in 1810; see Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 4:30. However, they conflict with the reports of Governor Stupishin, of Nizhnii Novgorod, who

notes to pages

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259

claimed that 2,200 boats with a total of 70,000 workers passed Nizhnii Novgorod each year during the 1770s and 3,000 boats with 80,000 workers passed it each year in the 1780s. He may have been counting boats going downstream as well as those going upstream to Rybinsk; see RGADA, f. 16, d. 777, part 1, ll. 83–84. 34. Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 39. 35. Jakob Sievers to Catherine II, December 24, 1781, RGADA, f. 16, d. 788, part 3, l. 258ob. 36. SIRIO 107 (1900): 135–38. 37. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 36, 68–69. He does not explain these decisions. 38. Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 12, 16. 39. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 113. 40. Vladimir Potresov, Nadeius’ ekhat’ vodoiu iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Moscow, 1989), 33. Those figures are very close to the dimensions given by Munro (“Feeding the Multitudes,” 488) and Rodin (Burlachestvo v Rossii, 65) and in the eyewitness description of James Walker (Walker, Engraved in the Memory: James Walker, Engraver to the Empress Catherine the Great, and His Russian Anecdotes, ed. by Anthony Cross [London: Berg, 1993], 182–83). In 1989 the Kalininskii Oblastnyi Muzei displayed a model of a bark and gave the dimensions of the actual bark as seventeen sazhens, two arshins (37.63 meters) long and four sazhens (8.52 meters) wide. In a letter to Catherine II quoted by K. Blum (Ein russischer Staatsmann, 2:71), Sievers, writing as the director of water communications, noted that most barks were slightly longer than the legal limit yet were allowed to pass through the canals without being fined. 41. Munro (“Feeding the Multitudes,” 448) says a bark normally carried 650 to 700 kuls, the equivalent of 85–92 metric tons. Zhitkov (Istoricheskii, 10) gives a somewhat lower figure of 73.7 to 91.2 metric tons and states that even that was reduced to 49.1 to 65.5 in midsummer. Istomina (“Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 203) says that improvements to the waterways enabled barks to increase their loads, from 82 metric tons in the 1760s to 115 metric tons by the early nineteenth century. 42. PSZ 4, no. 2956 (Nov. 1715): 183. 43. Victor Kamendrowski, “State and Economy in Catherinian Russia” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1982), 116. 44. Ustav kupecheskogo vodokhodstva, ch. 1, art. 1, PSZ 21, no. 15176 (July 25, 1781): 157–81. 45. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 58. 46. PSZ 21, no. 15518 (Sept. 22, 1782): 676; Tsvetkov, Izmenenie, 73. 47. Dubenskii, Razsuzhdenie, 55. 48. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 62; Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 29–30. Vorontsov’s calculations fit nicely with Bernshtein-Kogan’s findings that the price of a bark in Rybinsk rose from a maximum of 30 rubles in 1764 to a maximum of 350 rubles in 1794. 49. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 11; Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 40. 50. Istomina, Vodnyi puti, 60. 51. Rodin, Burlachestvo v Rossii, 62; L. M. Marasinova, “Puti i sredstva soobshcheniia,” 259; Istomina, Vodnye puti, 58–59; Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 39, 42–43. 52. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, l. 78ob. 53. Ibid., l. 160. 54. According to an editor’s note in Tolchenov, Zhurnal (426n32). Both mills were easily accessible from the Volga. In 1779 Tolchenov informed the town magistracy of Dmitrov of his intention to lease a mill on the Nerl River, in the nearby district of Koliasin, from the College of Economy, but there is no evidence that he ever did so; see RGADA, f. 724, op. 1, d. 5991, ll. 1–2. Tolchenov terminated his lease of the mill in Medveditskoe in 1791 and his lease of the mill on the Shirinskii Monastery in 1794. The latter was taken over by another grain merchant, Pavel Pirigov of Tver. Tolchenov (Zhurnal, 70, 87) also mentions a 260

notes to pages

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third mill in the Kashin district that he rented in the 1770s, but the terms and exact location are unknown. 55. In October 1784, with the empress personally instructing officials to move as much flour as possible through the waterways to St. Petersburg before the coming of winter, the governor of Tver informed her that twenty-two barks carrying rye belonging to the Rybinsk merchant Popov had stopped at his mill near Tver. Governor Arkharov promised that once the milling was completed, he would hurry the boats up the Tvertsa in hopes of getting them through the canal and the rapids before the freeze, but he also noted that it would depend on the weather (RGADA, f. 16, d. 975, part 1, ll. 3–3ob.). “The Rybinsk merchant Popov” is the same man who cornered the market on barks in the Rybinsk region in the winter of 1770–71. 56. Carol B. Stevens, “Trade and Muscovite Economic Policy toward the Ukraine: The Movement of Cereal Grains during the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” in Ukrainian Economic History: Interpretive Essays, ed. I. S. Koropeckyj (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 178–79; Jones, “Ukrainian Grain,” 215–16. 57. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 5:214. Kafengauz (“Khlebnyi rynok,” 472) found that almost 75 percent of the grain and flour reaching Moscow by water in 1737 had been shipped from Orel and that merchants from Orel and Kaluga accounted for more than half of all such commodities delivered by water. 58. According to Zolotarev (Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 30), an orlovets could carry as much as 491 metric tons, but that seems highly unlikely for the shallow upper Oka. Istomina (Vodnye puti, 58) puts the capacity of an orlovets at only 164 to 327 metric tons. The report on the cereals trade in RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 9ob., puts the figure at 386 metric tons. An orlovets was one of several regional variants of the struga, the wide, tarred, flatbottomed craft used everywhere on the Oka and its tributaries and also on the middle Volga. 59. In 1737 shipments of grain and flour from Orel to Moscow reached 134,200 chetverts (Kafengauz, “Khlebnyi rynok,” 503–4). According to Istomina (Vodnye puti, 104), they totaled 125,328 chetverts in 1779. 60. Kafengauz, “Khlebnyi rynok,” 472; Istomina, Vodnye puti, 105. 61. Ziablovskii, Zemleopisanie, 5:184. It is worth noting that some shipments of grain and flour to Moscow came from the lower Oka and tributaries even though most shipments from that region went downstream to Nizhnii Novgorod. 62. Sostoiane stolichenago goroda Moskvy 1785, 8–9. A similar but independent description appears in Istoricheskoe i topograficheskoe opisanie gorodov moskovskoi gubernii s ikh uezdami (Moscow, 1787), 12. 63. I. Tokmakov, Istoriko-statisticheskoe i arkheologicheskoe opisanie goroda Dmitrov s uezdom i sviatynami, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1893), 1:30–32, 2:4–5. Tokmakov’s principal source is G. F. Müller’s account of his journey to Dmitrov in 1779. 64. SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 412, l. 361. The document containing this information, entitled “Perevoz tovarov iz Moskvy v Peterburg,” was found among the papers of the Commission on Grain and was presumably written during the life of the commission in the mid-1780s, but it might have been written earlier. The author is unknown. 65. PSZ 5, no. 2946 (Oct. 28, 1715): 180. 66. PSZ 5, no. 3451 (Nov. 11, 1719): 752–53. See also the Senate’s address to Empress Anna on the purpose and utility of Gzhatsk, PSZ 5, no. 6752 (June 23, 1735): 533–34. 67. Dubenskii, Razsuzhdenie, 77; Chulkov, Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi, vol. 6, pt. 2, 37; instruction of Gzhatsk to the Legislative Commission, SIRIO 93 (1894): 231–32; Sostoiane stolichenago goroda Moskvy, 13, 19, 22, 26, 32. 68. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 34. In 1770 the Tolchenovs purchased goods in Orel and shipped them to St. Petersburg by all three routes: through Rybinsk, through Moscow, and through Gzhatsk (33). notes to pages

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69. The comparable figures, given in a report from Governor Frantz Klichka dated May 16, 1785, are 26,835 chetverts shipped down the Oka and 36,629 chetverts sent overland by winter roads to Gzhatsk (RGADA, f. 16, d. 827, l. 9). 70. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088 (“Topograficheskoe i kameral’noe opisanie gorodov i uezdov Tverskoi gubernii 1783–1784”), part 2, l. 99. 71. Report of the Main Magistracy to the Commission on Commerce dated April 1764, RGADA, f. 397, d. 445/22, l. 43ob.; Kh. D. Sorina, “Ocherk,” 7. At that same time, Tver had eighty-nine first guild merchants with a total capital of only 91,700 rubles. 72. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 2, l. 27ob. 73. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann, 1:268. 74. RGADA, f. 248, d. 3716, l. 224. 75. Ibid., l. 107. 76. Governor-General Nepliuev to Catherine II, November 21, 1786, RGADA, f. 16, d. 829, l. 179. 77. Sorina, “K voprosu,” 287; Karmanov, Sobranie sochinenii otnosiashchikhsia, 115; RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 1, ll. 43–44. 78. Ibid., ll. 43–43ob. 79. Ibid., ll. 42–43ob. 80. Ibid., ll. 16, 53–53ob. 81. Sorina, “Mesto tveri,” 86. 82. PSZ 19, no. 14070 (Nov. 22, 1773): 865. As governor of the surrounding territory, Sievers had been seeking that authority for a number of years. In a letter to the empress dated October 23, 1768, in which he complained about the confused and uncoordinated administration of the waterways, Sievers recommended that the existing agencies at Vyshnii Volochek and Borovichi and on the Volkhov be transferred from the Senate to him. 83. Report of General Dedenev to the Senate, RGADA, f. 16, d. 292, l. 2. A map of the Tvertsa from the same era shows the rapids in the upper reaches of the river and the sandbars in the lower river starting just above its juncture with the Volga at Tver (RGIA, f. 1487, d. 658, l. 1). 84. Sorina, “Mesto tveri,” 84; Rodin, Burlachestvo v Rossii, 73; Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 75. 85. Sievers to Catherine, May 18, 1774, RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 282. 86. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann, 2:139. 87. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 141; Zhitkov, Istoricheskii obzor ustroistva vodnykh putei, 60. 88. Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 21; Gorelov, Rechnye kanaly v Rossii, 91–95, 105–7. 89. Sievers to Catherine, October 18, 1773, RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 244. In a decree dated May 22, 1766, the Senate had already charged Pisarev with negligence in a small incident. While he argued for two hours with the steward of Alexander Tolchenov of Dmitrov, Pisarev allowed all the water to drain out of the locks and ground the boats (PSZ 17, no. 12656 [May 22, 1766]: 702–3). Sievers’s charges against Pisarev produced fifteen years of litigation that ended inconclusively. 90. Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 198. 91. Sievers to Catherine, November 19, 1772, RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 242; Bruce to Catherine, January 23, 1783, RGADA, f. 16, d. 974, l. 124; Arkharov to Catherine, January 7, 1785, RGADA, f. 16, d. 975, ll. 31–36. Istomina (Vodnyie puti, 138), citing an archival source that I have not seen, says Catherine’s visit resulted in an appropriation of 40,000 rubles a year but does not say for how many years. However, in a letter to Catherine, undated but obviously written in 1786, Arkharov recalled that on January 7, 1785 (i.e., before her visit), the empress had agreed to appropriate 35,000 rubles immediately and had promised 262

notes to pages

166–172

an additional 20,000 a year for five years (RGADA, f. 16, d. 975, l. 106). Bernshtein-Kogan (Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 27) says that the repairs authorized in 1785 went on until 1797 and ultimately cost 1,475,000 rubles. 92. Arkharov to Catherine, November 6, 1786, RGADA, f. 16, d. 975, l. 190. The figure of 59 percent excludes all half-barks and small boats as well as the 360 barks with mixed cargo of unknown proportions. It also assumes that a bark carrying grain and flour is the equivalent of a bark carrying other cargo. In other words, the unit of comparison is not one of value, volume, or weight; rather, it is the boatload, or more precisely, the bark load. 93. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann, 2:71; Dubenskii, Razsuzhdenie, 28; RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 11ob. 94. RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 19088, part 2, ll. 23–34ob. 95. According to the Economic Observation of the Vyshnii Volochek district composed in the early nineteenth century, “more than nine thousand” workers came to the canals each year (RGIA, f. 1350, op. 312, d. 164, l. 3). 96. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 61–62. 97. A copy of Peter’s decree of April 1, 1720, was forwarded to the Senate by Empress Elizabeth’s commission on commerce in 1761, along with another decree, this one dated June 26, 1720, calling cereals and timber the most important commodities en route to St. Petersburg (RGADA, f. 397, d. 226, ll. 1–3ob.). 98. For the dam at Lake Mstino, the Senate appropriated 30,000 rubles to be borrowed from the Commercial Bank (RGADA, f. 16, d. 292, l. 10). 99. PSZ 5, no. 3288 (June 22, 1719): 620. To reduce such losses, the decree ordered anyone hauling goods to Vyshnii Volochek by winter roads to take them all the way to Borovichi, below the rapids, where the state would provide warehouses to store them. 100. Dubenskii, Razsuzhdenie, 39; Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 194, 202. 101. Walker, Engraved in the Memory, 184–85. 102. Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 204–5. According to Istomina, there were more than 2,500 registered pilots on the Msta in the 1750s. She does not say how many there were by the early nineteenth century, but an estimate of 5,000 would certainly be reasonable. 103. RGADA, f. 16, d. 511, l. 12. 104. Ibid., l. 11ob.; Sorina, “Mesto Tveri,” 88; Rodin, Burlachestvo v Rossii, 73. 105. RGADA, f. 397, d. 226, l. 56; Istomina, Vodnye puti, 32–33; Sorina, “Mesto Tveri, 90–100; Coquin, La grande commission, 204. 106. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 151; Istomina, “Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’,” 202. 107. RGADA, f. 16, d. 788, part 3, l. 252. 108. RGADA, f. 16, d. 309 (“peripiska po ekspeditsii Ladozhkogo Kanala iz bumag Fedora Gerarda”), part 1, l. 1. 109. These are my calculations based on figures provided by the Chancellery of the Ladoga Canal to the Commission on Bread in 1786 (SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 232) and to the Department of Water Communications in 1806 and 1807 (RGIA, f. 156, op. 2, d. 8, l. 4; and d. 35, l. 259). 110. French, “Canals in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” 23–44.

Chapter 7. Exports 1. PSZ 12, no. 9077 (Nov. 28, 1744): 276. 2. PSZ 4, no. 1872 (Oct. 25, 1701): 174–75. Peter repeated the stipulation in 1713 (PSZ 5, no. 2672 [Apr. 24, 1713]: 26–27). 3. R. I. Kozintseva, “Russkii eksport sel’skokhoziaistvennoi produktsii v pervoi polovine XVIII veka,” Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR 9 (1980):

notes to pages

172–182

263

246–50. Mironov (“Eksport,” 154) says that St. Petersburg exported small quantities of grain, mostly rye, in 1717, 1729, and 1731, the total for all three years amounting to 7,453 metric tons. 4. Kozintseva, “Russkii eksport,” 250. 5. Kamendrowsky, “State and Economy,” 10. In 1757 M. L. Vorontsov purchased a license to export specified amounts of grain over a period of eight years, but he soon found the arrangement unprofitable (ibid., 21n47). 6. On the expansion of exports, see S. M. Troitskii, Finansovaia politika russkogo absoliutizma v XVIII v. (Moscow, 1966), 185–86; and Kozintseva, “Russkii eksport,” 234–54. 7. Arkhiv Kniazia Vorontsova, ed. P. Bartenev, 40 vols. (Moscow, 1870–1895), 24:117–26. 8. After Peter’s death, Catherine II, M. M. Shcherbatov, and others portrayed him as a fool and a drunkard with no time or interest for policy making. Carol Leonard (Reform and Regicide), however, argues that Peter was an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-read monarch who played a central role in his own government, but she assumes rather than demonstrates that his reforms sprang from his own thinking. Leonard (90–91, 104–6) does explain the fiscal problems that confronted his government and the steps it took to deal with them. 9. PSZ 15, no. 11489 (Mar. 28, 1762): 959–66. The manifesto was also published in the government’s official bulletin along with editorial comments praising its content and urging swift action by the Senate (Sanktpeterburgskie Vedomosti, Apr. 5, 1762, special supplement, 1). 10. Senatskii Arkhiv, 15 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1888–1913), 12:150–67. 11. PSZ 15, no. 11557 (June 1, 1762): 1028–29. 12. Kamendrowsky, “State and Economy,” 53. 13. Shpilevskii, “Politika narodonaseleniia,” 4–10. Catherine was eager to increase Russia’s exports and improve its balance of payments, but not at the cost of higher grain prices for her own subjects. 14. PSZ 16, no. 11630 (July 31, 1762): 31–38. 15. Catherine did not mention exports or cereals in her formal charge to the commission when she appointed it on December 8, 1763 (see PSZ 16, no. 11985 [Dec. 8, 1763]: 452– 53), but in a secret instruction to her newly appointed procurator-general, Prince Alexander Viazemskii, in 1764, she emphasized the need to attract silver into her realm “by all possible means such as, for example, the grain trade, as the Commission on Commerce has already been instructed” (N. D. Chechulin, A. E. Nold’e, M. A. Polievktov, and A. E. Presniakov, eds., Istoriia Pravitel’stvuiushchego senata za dvesti let, 1711–1911, 5 vols. [St. Petersburg, 1911], 2: appendix xvi, point 5). 16. RGADA, f. 397, d. 25, ll. 69–73ob. 17. PSZ 16, no. 12247 (Sept. 25, 1764): 914–15. Exports from Archangel did not rise significantly until 1771, but according to a report by the Commission on Commerce in 1775, they thereafter averaged 200,000 chetverts of rye per year for the next several years (RGADA, f. 19, d. 314, l. 9). According to another of the commission’s reports, this one dated February 1, 1779, Narva managed to export only 2,960.8 chetverts of rye between 1764 and 1776 (RGADA, f. 19, d. 286, part 2, l. 19ob.). 18. Kamendrowsky, “State and Economy,” 120–29. The proposal to export wheat originated with Timofei von Klingstaedt, a member of both the Free Economic Society and the Commission on Commerce. 19. PSZ, 17, no. 12623 (Apr. 13, 1766): 663–64. 20. RGADA, f. 19, d. 314, ll. 1–4. The commission’s recommendation was signed by Grigorii Teplov, Count Ernst Minnikh, and Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov. 21. According to a report of the Commission on Commerce, Catherine approved the extension on January 27, 1772 (RGADA, f. 19, d. 314, l. 6ob.); however, the decree itself does not appear in the PSZ. 264

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22. Tolchenov, Zhurnal, 85–86. 23. Report of the Commission on Commerce to the empress dated February 1, 1799, RGADA, f. 19, d. 286, part 2, l. 21ob.; Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, 174; Mironov, “Sel’skoe khoziaistvo,” 230–33; Mironov, “Eksport russkogo khleba,” 174–75. 24. Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 526–36. 25. Catherine sent the army’s request to the Senate, which opposed the request and argued for higher prices (Kamendrowsky, “State and Economy,” 138–40). The townsmen included the request for export controls in their instruction to the Legislative Commission (SIRIO 108 [1900]: 214–15). 26. Augustine, “Economic Attitudes,” 129–42. 27. Ibid., 132–33. 28. Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 528, 532–33. 29. PSZ 21, no. 15123 (Feb. 5, 1781): 69. 30. PSZ 21, no. 15517 (Sept. 22, 1782): 675. 31. Georgi, Opisanie, 178. 32. Report of the Commission on Grain to Empress Catherine II, June 20, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, ll. 38ob. 33. Ibid., l. 40. 34. PSZ 22, no. 16406 (June 22, 1786): 613–14. Russian merchants who had delivered rye to St. Petersburg on contract for export were to be paid a premium of ten to twenty kopecks a chetvert. 35. Munro, “Feeding,” 505n60. 36. Letter from A. A. Bekleshev of Lifland to A. R. Vorontsov, member of the Commission on Grain, dated June 27, 1786, SPFIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 412, ll. 242–43. 37. RGIA, f. 3500, op. 312, d. 126, l. 75ob. 38. PSZ 25, no. 18445 (Mar. 18, 1798): 169; no. 18843 (Feb. 3, 1799): 550; no. 18930 (Apr. 12, 1799 ): 614; no. 18942 (Apr. 19, 1799): 622; and 26, no. 19252 (Jan. 23, 1800): 17. 39. Klochkov, “O khlebnoi torgovle,” 15–16. On September 13, 1800, Paul authorized the export of wheat from all ports in the Russian Empire while tripling the amount of duty from ten to thirty kopecks a chetvert. The decree stated, “To export wheat does no harm to internal provisioning but on the contrary provides grain growing with incentive, gives trade a new and highly important branch, and opens a new route to attracting foreign money for state finance” (PSZ 26, no. 19554 [Sept. 13, 1800]: 292). 40. PSZ 27, no. 20832 (July 1, 1803): 720–21. 41. The figures for rye exports in 1801 and 1802 are from Oddy, European Commerce, 1:103. According to his figures, those were the only two years between 1787 and 1805 in which St. Petersburg exported rye. F. G. Virst provides a detailed list of exports from St. Petersburg in 1803 through 1806 that includes wheat but not rye; see tables 8 and 25, published in an unpaginated supplement to the main volume identified as Tablitsy k razsuzhdeniia F. G. Virsta (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi tipografii, 1807). Though he does not mention it otherwise, Mironov implicitly acknowledges the disappearance of exports of rye after 1802 by giving an average figure for the period 1800–1805 that correlates with the totals for 1801 and 1802 divided by five (see “Eksport russkogo khleba,” 159). 42. PSZ 29, no. 22349 (Nov. 11, 1806): 863; and no. 22396 (Dec. 11, 1806): 932. 43. PSZ 30, no. 23940 (Oct., 29, 1809): 1232–33. 44. Colin White, “The Impact of Russian Railway Construction on the Market for Grain in the 1860s and 1870s,” in Russian Transport, ed. Leslie Symms and Colin White (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1975), 29. 45. Mironov, “Eksport russkogo khleba, 149–88; Mironov, “Prichini rosta khlebnykh tsen,” 124; Mironov, “Sel’skoe khoziaistvo Rossii,” 229; Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, 45–52. 46. Shapiro, “O roli Peterburga,” 390. notes to pages

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47. RGIA, f. 156, op. 2, d. 28, l. 5; and d. 35, l. 259ob. As noted in chapter 2, the minister of internal affairs and the military governor of St. Petersburg informed the emperor in 1808 that they were expecting 450,000 kuls (roughly 540,000 chetverts) to be delivered that year. The context indicates that they were referring only to flour to be sold on the open market and did not include flour shipped on consignment to the St. Petersburg granary and the Provisions Chancellery. 48. Mironov, “Eksport russkogo khleba,” 169, table 8; Shapiro, “O roli Peterburga,” 390. 49. Storch, Picture, 113. The report of the minister of the interior and the military governor in 1808 cited in chapter 2 conveys the same impression but provides no specifics. 50. Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli, 218. 51. Virst, Tablitsy, tables 7, 8. 52. Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, 101. 53. I. D. Koval’chenko and L. V. Milov, Vserossiiskii agrarnyi rynok XVIII–nachala XX veka: Opyt kolichestvennogo analiza (Moscow, 1974); Mironov, Vnutrennyi rynok Rossii, 21–22. 54. PSZ 6, no. 3860 (Dec. 2, 1721): 462. 55. PSZ 16, no. 12247 (Sept. 25, 1764): 914. 56. Mironov, “Eksport russkogo khleba,” 165 and 169. 57. Jones, “Ukrainian Grain,” 210–27; Jones, “The Dnieper Trade Route in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Note,” IHR 11 (1989): 303–12. 58. Kahan, Plow, 52–53. 59. Georgi, Opisanie, 599; Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, 46. According to Iukht (Russkie den’gi, 136–37, 262–63), two procurators-general of the Senate, Ia. P. Shakhovskoi and later A. A. Viazemskii, opposed increasing the quantity of money in circulation on the grounds that it would lead to inflation, but both stood alone in their opposition. 60. PSZ 7, no. 5003 (Jan. 26, 1727): 729; and 8, no. 5677 (Jan. 22, 1731): 366. See also Iukht, Russkie den’gi, 65–77. 61. Iukht, Russkie den’gi, 131–40, 186, 215–21. 62. A. Semenov pointed out that the prices of all natural commodities experienced inflation in that same period; see Semenov, Izuchenie istoricheskikh svedenii o rossiiskoi vneshnei torgovle i promyshlennosti s poloviny XVII-go stoletiia po 1858 god (St. Petersburg, 1859), pt. 3, 33. Among those who suffered from inflation were the employees of the national mint and the mint itself. The mint’s director repeatedly complained that the rising costs of supplies and labor were outpacing the budget of the mint and threatening its operations (ibid., 239–46). Nevertheless, the ruble retained its value in international trade during that period, rising or falling from one year to the next but exhibiting no clear trend comparable to the change in domestic prices; see Virst, Tablitsy, table 2. 63. Iukht, Russkie den’gi, 259–27. 64. Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, table 9. Mironov’s data show that in relation to gold, the price of rye in St. Petersburg fluctuated from year to year between 1802 and 1859 without trending either higher or lower over longer periods of time such that by 1859 it stood almost exactly where it had been in 1802. 65. M. P. Pavlova-Sil’vanskaia, “K voprosu o vneshnykh dolgakh Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v.,” in Problemy genezisa kapitalizma, ed. S. D. Skaskin (Moscow, 1970), 307; Semenov, Izuchenie istoricheskikh svedenii, pt. 3, 48; Virst, Tablitsy, table 1. 66. Mironov, Khlebnye tseny, 52. 67. According to Virst (Tablitsy, table 19), 59 percent of Russia’s exports were shipped from St. Petersburg in 1789–1793, 56 percent in 1794–1798, and 48 percent in 1799–1803. The percentage is of value in rubles, not volume or weight. According to Oddy (European Commerce, 2:89), the value of Russia’s grain exports totaled 3,121,597 rubles in 1793, but the value of St. Petersburg’s grain exports was only 136,780 rubles, or 4.38 percent of the total. 68. Kulisher, Ocherki istorii russkoi torgovli, 221. 266

notes to pages

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Chapter 8. R esolution 1. Communication from Paul to Procurator-General Kurakin, RGIA, f. 156, op. 1, d. 1, l. 27. 2. Zhitkov, Istoricheskii, 19. 3. RGADA, f. 16, d. 785, l. 10ob.-11; and d. 299 (“O novom vodianom soobshchenii chrez Lidsko Ozero po proektu Senatora Mikhaila Dedeneva”), l. 1ob. 4. RGADA, f. 16, d. 290 (“Predstavlenie General-Poruchika Dedeneva o vodianom puti mezhdu rr. Volgoiu I Volkhovym”), ll. 1–20ob. Dedenev’s proposal included twentytwo maps of the proposed route, which ran “from Lake Ladoga through the rivers Sias and Tikhvin to the Tikhvin Monastery and then through a canal to Lake Lidskoe and the River Lida to be joined by a canal with the Kopia, which joins the Suda, which joins the Sheksna, which joins the Volga.” 5. RGADA, f. 16, d. 299, ll. 11–11ob. 6. Zhitkov, Istoricheskii, 26. 7. Ibid., 22–32; Bakhturin, Kratkoe opisanie, 8. 8. Jones, Provincial Development, 170–78. 9. Catherine to General P. D. Eropkin, May 12, 1787, collected in Iakov Rost, ed., Vysochaishiia sobstvennoruchnyia pis’ma i poveleniia blazhennoi i vechnoi slavy dostoinoi pamiati gosudaryni imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikiia k pokoinomu Generalu Petru Demitrievich Eropkinu I vsepodanneishiia ego donosheniia v trekh otdeleniiakh (Moscow, 1808), 247. Moscow was the center of opposition to Catherine’s policies in the south. 10. Catherine to Eropkin, May 20, 1787, ibid., 248. 11. David L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), 224. 12. Robert E. Jones, “Opposition to War and Expansion in Late Eighteenth-Century Russia,” JfGO 32 (1984): 34–51. 13. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann 4:297; PSZ 25, no. 18043 (Feb. 28, 1798): 109–10. 14. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann 4:351. To back up that statement, Sievers submitted a copy of the memorandum on the waterways that he had written for his successor at the time of his retirement in 1781. 15. Correspondence of the Department of Water Communications, RGIA, f. 156, op. 1, d. 1, esp. ll. 91–92 (Peter Obolenskii to Sievers, Sept. 4, 1798), ll. 93–93ob. (Grigorii Kushilev to Sievers, Sept. 9, 1798), l. 96 (to Sievers, date and signature missing), and ll. 97–103ob. (Kushilev to Sievers, Nov. 3, 1798). 16. The contradictions and vacillations of Paul’s well-intended and often intelligent policies are presented in McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 192–323. 17. PSZ 25, no. 18825 (Jan. 20, 1799): 541. 18. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann, 4:513. The new waterway required twelve locks for the canal over the divide and another nineteen locks and several bypassing canals in the Vytegra River (Bakhturin, Kratkoe opisanie, 4–6). 19. K. Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann, 4:533–37. 20. Zolotarev, Opisanie goroda Rybinska, 36. 21. Istomina, Vodnye puti, 155. 22. Bernshtein-Kogan, Vyshnevolotskii vodnyi put’, 30; Gorelov, Rechnye kanaly v Rossii, 12. 23. French, “Canals,” 2: 411–79. 24. Ministerstvo Putei Soobshcheniia, Kratkii istoricheskii, 19–20. 25. Richard Haywood, The Beginnings of Russian Railway Development in Russia in the Reign of Nicholas I, 1835–1842 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969), 180, 218–21. 26. A. I. Kopanev, “Naselenie Peterburga ot kontsa XVIII v. do 1861,” in Ocherki istorii Leningrada, vol. 1, ed. M. P. Viatkin (Moscow, 1955), 507. notes to pages

205–213

267

27. PSZ 32, no. 25396 (June 3, 1813): 575; and no. 25498 (Dec. 16, 1813): 699–700. 28. Kopanev, “Naselenie Peterburga,” 498–500; White, “Impact of Russian Railway Construction,” 29–37. 29. Oddy, European Commerce, 1:160–61. 30. PSZ 24, no. 17544 (Nov. 12, 1796): 3; and no. 17686 (Dec. 26, 1796): 225. 31. Zhitkov, Istoricheskii, 58–59. Zhitkov attributed Paul’s change of mind to a gift of 3,000 oranges that the merchants of Odessa sent to Paul in early February 1800. Given Paul’s character, that is possible, but Russia’s participation in the Second Coalition, its alliance with the Ottoman Empire, its involvement in the Ionian Islands, Paul’s personal interest in Malta, and the very real prospects for Russia’s Black Sea trade provide ample justification for him to have changed his mind about Odessa. 32. A. M. Stanislavskaia, Russko-angliskie otnosheniia i problemy sredizemnomor’ia (1798– 1807) (Moscow, 1962), 34. Exports of cereals other than wheat were negligible. 33. M. Vol’skii, Ocherki istorii khlebnoi torgovli Novorossiiskago kraia (Odessa, 1854), 77–78. 34. Ibid., 88–93. 35. G. P. Nobol’sin, Statisticheskoe obozrenie vneshnei torgovli Rossii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1850), 1:60–62. 36. A. Semenov, Izuchenie istoricheskikh svedenii (St. Petersburg, 1859), pt. 3, 65.

Conclusion 1. In Russia under the Old Regime (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974), Richard Pipes declares that his analysis of Russian history lays “heavy stress on the relationship between property and political power” (xxi); see also Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990), 112. In those writings Pipes is not at all clear about what constitutes private property or its relationship to political power, and he offers no specific facts to substantiate his contentions. In Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), Pipes repeats his contention that the absences of private property distinguished “Russia” from “the rest of Europe” but seems to limit the argument to property in land, or land and real estate, as he puts it (xi–xii, 159–61, 180, 184). He further states (Property and Freedom, 185–86) that peasants had de facto ownership of personal goods and of what they produced and that Catherine II gave Russian nobles rights to property in land (191–94). George Weickhardt has argued that the concept of private property was recognized and respected in the laws of pre-Petrine Russia; see Weickhardt, “The Pre-Petrine Law of Property,” SR 52 (1993): 663– 79; and idem, “The Commercial Law of Old Russia,” RH 25 (1988): 361–85. Pipes criticized Weickhardt’s Slavic Review article in “Was There Private Property in Muscovite Russia?”, SR 53 (1994): 524–30. The enormous exception to private property, of course, was peasants’ property, subject to the control of the serf owner and the commune, generally respected in part and de facto but not de jure in the period covered here. 2. On the consolidation and definition of nobles’ estates as private property, see Jones, Provincial Development, 108–11. 3. SPIRI. RAN, f. 36, d. 410, l. 16ob. 4. Lieven, Russia against Napoleon, 225–26. 5. B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (VXIII–pervaia polovina XIX veka), 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999). 6. This conception of Russia’s relationship to Europe permeates Russian discourse of the eighteenth century, less as an argument than as an accepted assumption. A good example is Shcherbatov’s essay “Primernoe vremiaischislitel’noe polozhenie, vo skol’ko by let pri blagopoluchneishikh obstoiatel’stvakh, mogla Rossiia same soboiu, bez samovlastiia PETRA VELIKOGO, doiti do togo sostoianiia, v kotorom ona nyne est v rassuzhdeniiprosvesheniia i slavy,” which can be found in Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov, Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 2010), 132–36. The most recent and in my estimation one of the best 268

notes to pages

214–222

arguments that well-educated Russian nobles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw no contradiction in identifying themselves as both Europeans and Russians is Michelle Lamarche Marrese, “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior Revisited: Lotman, Gender, and the Evolution of Russian Noble Identity,” Kritika, n.s., 11, no. 4 (2010): 701–39. 7. The most recent example of a work that links a non-Western Russia prior to 1800 to a non-Western Russia after 1917 through a continuous “Russian tradition” is Ekaterina Brancato, Markets versus Hierarchies: A Political Economy of Russia from the 10th Century to 2008 (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2009). It emphasizes the continuity of prerevolutionary Russia’s political economy from the tenth to the twentieth century. 8. The spring 2011 issue of Kritika contains two articles comparing and contrasting the evolution of Russia and the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. They show considerable similarity in their discussions of events up to the eighteenth century but much greater divergence from that point on. See Gábor Ágoston, “Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500–1800,” Kritika, n.s., 12, no. 2 (2001): 281–319; and Victor Taki, “Orientalism on the Margins: The Ottoman Empire under Russian Eyes,” Kritika, n.s., 12, no. 2 (2010): 321–51. 9. Bartlett, Human Capital, 23–30; Shpilevskii, “Politika narodonaseleniia,” 4–42; Strangeland, Premalthusian Doctrines, 118–315. Bartlett calls populationism “the conventional wisdom of the day.” Strangeland makes the point that only at the end of the eighteenth century did a few writers begin to question and dispute populationism.

notes to pages

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269

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289

INDEX

R admiralty, 51, 209 agriculture, abandonment of: as reaction to low grain prices, 62–63, 69, 78, 82, 114, 187–88, 243n13; as cause of high grain prices, 42, 114 alcohol, 66, 115–16, 154, 168, 258n7. See also distilleries Alexander I (emperor/tsar), 20, 56, 144, 193–94, 212, 214, 218, 223 all-Russian market, 77, 181, 197–98, 202, 219 American Republic. See United States Amsterdam, 4, 13, 59, 65–66 Anna (empress), 34, 38, 46–47, 261 Annenkov, I. P. (pomeshchik), 116, 248n9 Archangel: as predecessor of St. Petersburg, 11–12, 230n10; banks in, 132; compared to St. Petersburg 13, 20, 23, 230n11; exports from, 187, 192, 198, 239n27, 264n17; granary in, 190; hinterland of, 67–68, 79, 192, 198, 218; restrictions on exports from, 20, 28, 67, 182, 185, 193–94 Aref’ev (family), 118, 251n28 Arkharov, Nikolai Petrovich (governorgeneral), 169, 171–74, 205, 261n55, 262n91 army: financing of 4–5, 27–28, 79, 182; grain purchases by, 52, 57, 66, 110, 113, 189, 199, 222; rations of, 25, 28, 221, 234n72 assignats, 132–35, 177, 201–2, 205, 213 Azov, 12–15, 17, 20, 22–23, 77–79, 220, 230n17 Azov, Sea of, 13, 76, 79

bakers, 37–38, 56, 168 balance of payments, 180, 182–83, 187 Baltic provinces, 65–66, 108, 192. See also Livonia; Livland; Estland Baltic Sea, 10–11, 194, 199 banks, 102, 130, 133–35, 207–8, 222 bankruptcy, 128, 140–41, 145, 222 barks, 158, 160–76, 179, 205, 209–12, 260nn40–41, 260n48 barley, 24, 27, 61, 64, 73, 106–7, 118, 159, 239n6 bast, 46, 86, 153–54, 156, 160 Belorussia, 78–79, 118 black earth. See chernozem Black Sea, 13–14, 79, 207, 215, 225, 268n31 Black Sea ports, 132, 198, 202, 215–17, 225. See also Azov; Odessa Black Sea region, 14, 208–9, 210, 215 boats: crews needed for, 154–56, 158; types of, 154–56, 158. See also names of individual types of boats Bolotov, Andrei Timofeevich, 70, 84, 102, 106 Borovichi Rapids, 169, 175–76, 206, 209, 234n65, 263n95 Borovichi Rapids Office, 174–75, 262n82 Briansk, 73, 77–78, 233, 241–42 Britain, 32, 133, 145, 224–26 Brius (Bruce), Iakov Aleksandrovich (governor-general), 54–55, 238 broker. See makler buckwheat, 24, 105–7 burlaks, 155, 157, 159, 164, 259 canals. See names of individual canals Catherine II (empress): and canals, 79, 177, 179, 205–8, 211; and free markets, 40,

291

46–48, 54–55, 185, 234n71; and grain exports, 107, 185–87, 190, 192; and grain prices, 39–41, 40, 55, 186; and provisioning, 39, 41, 44–46, 52, 207, 223; and southern expansion, 5, 207–8, 215–16 central Russian grain market: and profitability of grain-growing, 74, 83, 108–9; attachment of St. Petersburg to, 77, 83, 115; expansion of, 68, 80 Charter to the Nobility, 40, 102 Chayanov, Aleksandr Vasil’evich (sociologist), 6, 85 chernozem, 69, 71–72, 106 Cheboksary (town), 62, 113, 150–51, 156 Chernigov Province, 62, 72, 78–79, 84, 166, 199, 218 Chernyshev, Ivan Grigor’evich (statesman), 182–83 Chicherin, Nikolai Ivanovich (official), 41–42, 45, 236n29 coins: copper, 130–32, 201–2, 255; silver, 129–34, 201–2, 232, 255, 264 China, 2, 11, 44, 184 Chulkov, Mikhail Dmitrievich (writer), 38, 122 Commission on Commerce: actions before 1763, 182, 263n97; and grain exports, 186–88, 196, 239n27, 249n114, and 264n15; and merchants, 118, 120, 122; and retail trade, 47–48, 86; before 1763, 182, 263n97; members of, 46, 60, 231n34 Commission on Grain: and grain exports, 191; and sale of flour in St. Petersburg, 27, 51, 53–54; and grain procurement, 57, 60, 67–68, 78–80, 153, 252n49, 261n64; calculations and findings of, 25–27, 37, 50–51, 53; membership of, 49 commune, peasant, 87–92, 105, 245 commune, urban. See posad Confino, Michael (historian), l, 7, 97–98, 102 conscription, 87–88. See also recruits Constantinople, 2, 13, 22–23, 216 contracts: enforcement of, 138–40, 144, 222; examples of, 138–39, 161–62, 238n72, 251n30; recording of, 150–55, 222, 259n22; with government agencies, 29, 53, 149 corporations, 142–44, 271n145 courts, 137–40, 146, 222 credit, 4–5, 102, 122, 125, 131–38, 144, 146 crop failure, 44, 164, 192, 214, 240n41

292

index

Danzig, 30, 59 Dedenev, M. A. (senator), 206, 262, 167n57 Demidov, Prokofii (industrialist, writer), 122–23, 127, 243n57 Department of Water Communications, 79, 169, 171, 176, 178, 208–11 deregulation, 40–41 Devolant, Frantz (engineer), 210, 216 Desna River, 73, 76, 78–79, 163 Directorate of Water Communications, 162, 169–70, 173, 205, 208 distilleries, 78, 98, 110, 113, 116, 152–53, 170. See also alcohol Dmitrov (town): and the grain trade, 113, 120, 145, 165; and the Tolchenovs, 124– 25, 127, 131–32, 140, 162, 260n54 Dmitriev, Avvakum (grain merchant), 138, 238nn71–72 Dnieper River, 61, 66, 78, 206, 209, 212, 216 Don River, 12–14, 76–77, 107, 152–53, 213 Elizabeth (empress), 38, 116, 183, 201 England, 103, 230n8, 253nn59–60. See also Britain Eropkin, Petr Dmitrievich (governorgeneral), 207 Esipov, Andrei (entrepreneur), 116, 141 estates (pomestii): management of, 87, 102, 107–8, 131, 248n91; ownership of, 86, 102, 104, 107, 115, 222, 268n2 Estland: and Sweden, 2, 59, 65; and surplus grain, 29, 30, 59, 65–66; as supplier of grain to St. Petersburg, 29–30, 50, 66; legal status of, 10, 15, 66, 187 exports: and prices, 180–82, 188–91, 194–96, 198–99, 202; benefits of, 5, 147, 180, 182–83, 186, 188, 207, 255; elimination of restrictions on, 26, 43, 107, 182–85, 186, 190, 193–94; in general, 12, 14–15, 17, 20, 23, 28–30, 207; of non-cereal commodities, 20, 23, 68, 166, 179, 182, 231n37, 232n47; of rye, 26–27, 30, 39– 41, 46, 65, 190–94, 196, 198, 217, 240n27, 265n41; of wheat, 27, 107–8, 187–88, 196–97, 217, 249n114; restrictions on, 3, 20, 30, 50, 66–67, 181–82, 185, 192–93, 231n37, 264n3 fires, 34–35, 38–39, 46–47, 116, 168, 135n4 flax, 14, 65–66, 83, 97, 118, 176, 182 food markets, 33–36, 46, 48–49 France: canals in, 17; grain trade in, 2, 39 40; influence on Russia, 32, 40, 190, 226;

compared to Russia, 133, 183, 224–25, 253n59 Free Economic Society, 70, 101, 187–88 free trade, 40, 55, 57, 115, 185, 193, 221 Frederick II of Prussia (king), 224–25 Gerhard, Johann Konrad (hydroengineer), 171, 177, 210 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Ivan Longinovich (official), 216 Golitsyn, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (statesman), 37, 45–46, 54 gostinyi dvor, 34, 36, 46–48 granaries, 2, 44–45, 50, 59, 223 Granary, St. Petersburg State: and crisis of 1786-1787, 50–52, 191; as safety net, 4, 32, 41, 48–49, 51, 53, 56–57, 213, 221, 223; creation of, 44; operations of, 45–46, 52, 56–57, 209, 223; purchases by, 45, 52, 66, 136, 167–68, 173, 221 Great Britain. See Britain; England Great Northern War, 10, 20, 27, 29 gristmills: belonging to the Tolchenovs, 124, 152, 162, 260nn54–55; in Moscow region, 162–65; in Orel province, 162– 65; in Penza province, 152; in vicinity of Riga, 62; in vicinity of Rybinsk, 162; in Simbirsk province, 153; in vicinity of St. Petersburg, 27, 37, 67, 124, 153; in upper Volga region, 162, 168; in vicinity of Vyshnii Volochek, 170, 173 guilds, 8, 114, 124–28, 127, 144, 167 Gzhatsk (town and trading wharf): creation of, 165, 261n66; grain sale in, 116, 121, 166, 198; importance of, 76–78, 117, 120–21, 167, 212, 218 Hamburg, 18, 149 Hauter, Adrian, 17–18 hemp: as cargo, 16, 71, 78, 118–20, 173; as cash crop, 65, 69, 83, 105, 166; commerce in, 113–20, 144, 167–68; export of, 11, 15, 65–66, 71, 143, 182, 196, 202, 231n37 highways, 16, 148, 165 hinterland: of different ports, 67, 198; of St. Petersburg, 14, 60–61, 63, 65, 69 hired labor. See wage labor horses: and agriculture, 105, 99; and overland transport, 16, 27, 148, 155; and water transport, 158, 165, 169–70, 174, 211–12

Iakovlev, Savva (merchant), 48, 116 Iamshchiks (couriers, coachmen), 29, 85, 148 Iaroslavl Province, 69–70, 74, 87, 90, 94–96, 116 Il’men, Lake, 19, 104, 174, 176, 206, 209 imports, 30, 94, 129, 215, 225 inflation: causes of, 42, 57, 135, 201, 266n59; effects of, 98, 133, 192, 195, 198, 201–2 Ingria (region), 10–11, 26–27 iron, 11, 16, 118, 158–59, 170, 182, 209 Istomina, Enessa Grigorievna (historian), 7, 16, 157 Ivanovskii Canal. See Oka-Don Canal Kahan, Arcadius (historian), 7, 94 Kaluga Province: grain trade in, 116, 120, 134, 163–64, 261n57; agriculture in, 70–72, 74, 109, 152, 154, 166 Kama River, 76, 125, 154, 212 Karelia (region), 10, 26, 138 Kharkov Province, 72, 77, 89, 166 Khlebnikov, Ivan (grain merchant), 248, 257 Kingston-Mann, Ester (historian), 5, 241n67, 248n97, 253n59 Kolomna (town), 71, 120, 164 Konovnitsyn, Petr Petrovich (official), 49, 53–54 Korostina (estate near Novgorod), 104–5, 248n98 Kostroma Province, 69–72, 74, 88, 109, 154, 200 Kozlova, Natal’ia Vladimirovna (historian), 123, 250 Kronstadt (fortress, naval base, port, town), 15, 20, 61, 66 Kursk Province, 73–74, 89, 97, 109, 116, 130, 166 Ladoga Canal: construction of, 19; extension of, 206, 210; importance of, 29, 68, 148, 169, 177, 211; reconstruction of, 177, 205 Ladoga, Lake, 9, 15, 19, 27, 63, 200, 206 Leckey, Colum (historian), 101, 243n7 Lenin Vladimir Il’ich, 3, 77 liberal economic theories, 32, 55 Livland (Lifland), 15, 30, 65–66 Livonia, 11, 15, 59, 79, 104, 184–87, 191. See also Baltic Provinces; Estland; Livland Louis XVI (king of France), 2, 39 luxuries, 23, 94 Lyskovo (village), 132, 151, 156

index

293

magistracy, 34, 47, 122, 126–27, 139–40, 162, 248n93, 251n14 manure, 61–62, 64, 69, 105–7, 248n101 makler (broker), 148, 150, 222, 259n22 Mariinskii System (of waterways), 18, 210–13, 220, 223 Maria Fedorovna (empress), 208, 210 markets. See food markets Mavrin, S. I. (official), 46, 49, 51 Mediterranean Sea, 13–14, 17, 65, 207, 217, 225 Menshikov, Aleksandr (governor), 21, 74 merchants: government consultation with, 4, 54, 56, 129, 144, 176; distrust and suspicion of, 6, 33–34, 52–55; organization of, 121, 126–27; privileges of, 112, 114–15, 127–29, 244n20; state service of, 28, 126–27; stereotypes of, 33, 81, 114, 122–23, 140 merchant guilds. See guilds military. See army; admiralty mills. See gristmills Milov, Leonid Vasil’evich (historian), 7, 178 Mironov, Boris Nikolaevich (historian): and all-Russian market, 77, 196–98; and fairs, 244n19; and percentage of population engaged in agriculture, 85; on relationship of exports and prices, 181, 194–95, 202, 229n8, on Russia as a normal, European country, 222 Mologa River, 17, 160–61, 206, 212 monetization, 4, 28, 81, 245n44. See also obrok monopolies, 40–41, 48, 55, 126, 129, 184–85, 221 Morskoi market, 34, 36, 46 Moskva River, 71, 77, 130, 163–65, 218 Moscow (city): banks in, 130–32, 135, 142; consumption of wheat in, 108, 198; deliveries of grain to, 27, 71, 77–78, 113, 116, 120, 163, 218, 199; in comparison to St. Petersburg, 16, 23, 27, 30; merchants of, 120, 124–25, 128; nobles’ townhouses in, 4, 93, 100, 116; state granary in, 45, 223; transfer of capital from, 14, 21–23 Moscow Province: agriculture in, 69–70, 103, 109; gristmills in, 162–65; merchants of, 119–20; transport of cereals through, 167. See also Dmitrov Msta River, 19, 174–77, 179, 205, 209, 234n95

294

index

Muchnoi Pereulok (street in St. Petersburg), 35–37, 49 Müller, Gerhard Friedrich (member of St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences), 120, 125 Műnnich, Bernhard Christoph (statesman), 19, 177 Murav’ev, N. E. (statesman), 20, 174–75, 231n34 Narva (city): as a seaport, 11, 14, 65, 79, 198, 230n4; grain exports from, 65, 186–87, 239n23, 264n17 Neva River: as transport terminal, 35, 148, 169, 177, 179; importance of, 9–11, 15, 17, 19, 61, 64, 68, 180; problems arising from, 10 Netherlands: and canals, 17–18; and loans to Russia, 202; Russian grain exports to, 31, 191; compared to Russia, 133, 145, 224, 253nn59–60 Nevskii Prospekt (street in St. Petersburg), 34–36, 48 Nienshants (Nyenskans) (Swedish settlement), 10–11, 20 Nizhnii Novgorod Province, 69, 71–72, 74, 132, 151, 154–58 Nizhnii Novgorod (town), 117, 120–21, 143, 149, 164, 256n125, 259n33, 261n6 nobles: and agriculture, 40, 85, 96, 98, 101–2, 187, 247n83; and credit, 102, 134–35, 255n105; and the grain trade, 93, 103–4, 113, 115, 116–17; stereotypes of, 83, 100. See also Annenkov; estates; Polianskii; Shcherbatov; Sheremetev Northern Dvina River, 12, 68, 79, 159, 198, 206 Novgorod Province, 21, 63–65, 74, 84, 97, 109, 126 Nystadt, Treaty of, 14, 65 oats: for animals, 27; as cargo, 118, 158, 173, 249n110; cultivation of, 37, 61, 105–7, 109; for humans, 24 obrok: conversion from barshchina to, 83, 90, 96, 98–100, 189, 195, 246n64, 246n68; opposition to, 96, 189; preference for, 97–98; rates of, 86, 93, 96, 98–100, 245n44, 246n62 Oddy, J. Jepson (writer), 17, 216 Odessa (city and port): acquisition of, 216; banks in, 132, 135, 142; compared to

New Orleans, 224; development of, 205, 212, 216, 286n31 odnodvortsy (social category), 85, 89, 99, 243n14 Oka-Don Canal, 13–14, 213 Oka Basin: agriculture in, 71–73, 76, 108, 110, 163; importance of, 71; towns in, 120, 163, 164; Russian settlement in, 74. See also Kaluga; Kolomna; Orel Oka River: and canals, 13, 79, 213; boats used on, 154–55, 158, 163, 161n58; transportation along, 71, 76–77, 120, 130, 152, 164, 166 Old Belivers, 119, 127–28, 137, 144, 167 Olonets Province, 61, 63, 67, 74, 84, 239n16 Onega, Lake, 210–12 Ordin-Nashchokin, Afanasii Lavrent’evich (statesman), 11, 133 Orel Province: agriculture in, 71, 73, 77, 108, 163, 166; grain prices in, 82, 149, 166 Orel (town): as collection point for grain, 76–78, 116, 163; grain shipments from, 116, 120, 159, 163–64, 166–68, 249n118, 252n49; merchants of 120, 143, 163, 252n49, 261n57 Orlov, Vladimir Grigor’evich (estate owner), 109, 248, 251 Ottoman Empire: and control of the straits, 14, 215, 225; compared to Russia, 269; peaceful relations with, 208, 268; Russian trade with, 142; Russian wars against, 11–14, 133–35, 188, 202, 206–7, 211, 216; territories acquired from, 206 overland transport: compared to water transport, 16–17, 67–68, 148, 177; improvements to 16–17, 148; use of, 14, 17–18, 29, 37, 61, 159, 165–66 Paris, 2, 30, 40, 52, 59, 220, 228n1, 257n47 Paul (emperor/tsar): and Black Sea Region, 207–8, 216, 268n31; and canals, 25, 56, 169, 205, 208, 212–18; and grain exports, 192–93; and granaries, 44, 223; and retail trade, 55; financial reforms of, 128, 135, 140 Pavlenko, Nikolai Ivanovich (historian), 167, 247n83 payment in advance, 117, 146 peasants: and agriculture, 56, 52–53, 69, 81, 83–85, 90, 92, 103–10; categories of, 89; and commerce, 86, 90, 103, 114–15, 159, 251n14; and the grain trade, 110,

112–15, 117; stereotypes of, 71–72, 83, 188, 243n6. See also serfs Penza Province: agriculture in, 106–9, 157, 249n11; and grain surplus, 77, 116; barshchina in, 97–98, 246n68; distilleries in, 152–53; grain prices in, 91, 98, 157, 245n42; water transport in, 151, 154 Perry, John (English engineer), 13, 16–17, 205–6, 215 Peter I (emperor/tsar): and Baltic provinces, 14–15; canals, 13, 17–20, 148, 169, 213; creation of St. Petersburg, 9–10, 15, 20–23, 198, 229n1; and grain exports, 182; and marketing regulations, 29–30, 33, 35, 38; and merchants, 33, 55, 121, 128, 139, 142, 253n51; and nobles, 93; and Ottoman Empire, 12–14; strategic vision of, and provisioning of St. Petersburg, 6, 9–12, 17, 73, 229n5, 229n8, 231n30 Peter III (emperor/tsar), 39, 102, 128, 183–85 physiocrats, 39, 41, 102, 183, 185 pilots (on waterways), 150, 155, 168, 175–76, 211, 263n102 Pipes, Richard (historian), 222, 268n1 plows, 86, 105, 107 podzol, 61, 63, 65, 69 Poland: compared to Russia, 123, 182–83, 187; grain exports from, 3, 30, 182–83; Russian border with, 15, 20, 78, 184, 240n49; territory acquired from, 108, 133, 135, 202, 223–24 Polanyi, Karl (sociologist), 6, 85 Polianskii, I. A. (pomeshchik), 98, 108, 116, 249n120 police: and grain prices, 29, 33, 38–39; and supervision of markets, 33, 38, 41, 43, 46, 258n16; and St. Petersburg granary, 45, 57; required service as, 91, 126 poll tax: as burden on peasants, 82, 87, 91– 92; as social stigma, 127, 233nn60–61, 243n14, 245n20; collection of, 87, 93; introduction of, 28, 89, 129; rate of, 87, 93 Popov, Afanasii (steward), 131–32 Popov (grain merchant), 161–62, 261n55 population increase: as cause of price increases, 198–99, 202, 214; effects of, 179; in Europe, 215; in Russia, 74, 108– 9, 199; limits on, 64; of St. Petersburg, 39, 146, 168, 181, 213, 225 populationism, 41, 241n62, 269n9 posad, 115, 121, 126, 139, 159 index

295

Pososhkov, Ivan Tikhonovich (writer), 114, 122 Potemkin, Grigorii Aleksandrovich (stateman), 5–6, 208 price controls, 2, 30 price inflation. See inflation pristan. See trading wharf Provisions Chancellery: and military rations, 56, 221; and St. Petersburg granary, 45, 51, 209; as purchaser of cereals, 28, 44, 117, 148, 167, 223; purchasing practices of, 45, 117–18, 131, 136, 138, 221; reorganization of, 45 Pskov Province, 65, 97, 65, 97, 133, 176, 198 public markets. See food markets; gostinyi dvor Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (writer), 61–63, 67–68, 208 Ransel, David (historian), 5–6, 123, 250n1 rasshiva (type of boat), 154–55, 158, 211 Razumovskii, Kiril Grigor’evich (statesman), 93–94 recruits: as percentage of eligible males, 87, 244n24; selection and induction of, 87–88, 93; purchase of substitute, 88, 91, 127, 129. See also conscription Regulation on Merchant Shipping, 150, 155, 160 Reval (Tallinn): as regional depot, 65, 79; as provider of grain to St. Petersburg, 67, 80; grain exports from, 65–67, 182, 185, 197, 239n27; harbor of, 14–15, 230n21; merchants of, 123 Riazan Province, 71–72, 74, 77, 109, 152, 163 roads, 16, 148, 150–51, 208, 245n44. See also highways; overland transport; winter roads Rubinshtein, N. L. (historian), viii, 7, 97, 100 Rumiantsev, Nikolai Petrovich, (statesman), 88 Rumiantsev, Petr Aleksandrovich (statesman), 88 Rybinsk (Rybno, Rybnaia Sloboda) (town): as transport center on Volga, 113, 121, 149, 151, 158–59; banks in, 132; commerce in, 136, 159; legal status of, 159; river traffic from, 160, 162, 168, 172, 211–12; river traffic to, 151–52, 155, 157–58, 164, 166 Rzhev (town), 119, 144, 166–68, 172, 252n38

296

index

Sadovaia Street, 34–37, 48–49 schools, 39, 125, 127–28, 208, 253n57 Semenova, Lidia Nikolaevna (historian), 6, 24 Semevskii, Vasilii Ivanovich (historian), 96, 99, 246n57, 246n64, 246n68 Senate, Russian: and export of grain from St. Petersburg, 181–85, 188; and peasants purchasing grain in St. Petersburg, 61, 239n8; and retail trade in St. Petersburg, 48, 237n50; and waterways, 170, 174, 206; investigation of grain prices by, 41–43, 55–56, 82 Sennaia (Haymarket) Square, 34–35, 49 Serdiukov, Mikhail, 18–20, 148, 169–71, 134n65. See also Vyshnii Volochek: Serdiukov Concession at serfs: and commercial undertakings, 90, 99, 100, 103, 115; and wage labor, 129, 170, 248n86; as collateral for loans, 134; as pilots on waterways, 168, 175; merchants’ ownership of, 127–29; nobles ownership of, 95, 98, 102, 115, 245n47, 246n57. See also obrok: conversion from barshchina to; peasants; Penza Province: barshchina in; Smolensk Province: prevalence of barshchina in Seven Years War, 39, 66, 102, 106 Shapiro, Aleksandr L’vovich (historian), 6, 178, 195 Shcherbatov, Mikhail Mikhailovich (statesman, estate owner, writer): and estate management, 69–70, 87–88, 90, 94–96, 104; and grain trade, 96, 103, 117; and opposition to Catherine’s policies in the south, 208; as moralist, 94–95 Sheksna River, 159–60, 206, 209, 211, 165n4 Sheremetev (wealthy noble family), 91–94, 98, 116, 247n70, 248n93 Shlissel’burg (fortress, town), 9, 19, 26–27, 29, 53, 67, 177, 196, 209 Sias River, 17, 206, 210–12, 267n4 Shuvalov, Ivan Ivanovich (statesman), 49–50, 137 Shuvalov, Petr Ivanovich (statesman), 130, 134, 183, 205 Sievers, Jakob Johann (official): and delays at Vyshnii Volochek, 174, 209; and improvement to Vyshnii Volochek System, 170–71, 177, 205; and creation of Department of Water Communications, 179, 208; and opposition to Catherine’s policies in the south,

208; and proposal for waterway from Ukraine, 79; and reforms at Korostina, 104; and works at Vyshnii Volochek, 20; appointed director of Water Communications, 169, 262n82; as head of Department of Water Communications, 208–10; on merchants, 124, 144, 264n78; on schools for townsmen, 128; relationship with Paul, 208, 211; relationship with Maria Fedorovna, 208, 212; retirement of, 211 Simbirsk Province: and marketing of grain, 116, 121; and grain shipment to St. Petersburg, 76, 128; as farthest extent of St. Petersburg grain market, 77, 153; as source of burlaks, 157; cost of water transport from, 155; gristmills in, 153; peasants of, 89, 100 skupshchiks, 113–15, 131 Smith, Adam, 55, 85 Smolensk Province: access to water transport in, 66, 79; agriculture in, 65, 91, 106, 248n101; famine in, 210n29, 210n 41; grain prices in, 91, 245n42; merchants of, 119, 143; prevalence of barshchina in, 97 Sobolev (family of grain merchants), 118, 121, 251n28, 252n43, 257n149 speculators, 15, 22, 32, 38, 42, 52, 161 St. Petersburg: advantages of, 10, 15; as capital, 21–23, 181; compared to other ports, 13, 14–15, 23, 218, creation of, 10, 14; disadvantages of, 10, 16, 59, 181; grain deliveries to, 16, 26–27, 57, 63, 67, 179, 196, 213; grain exports from, 181–82, 185, 190, 192–96, 202, 214–15, 217; maritime trade of, 20, 182, 218; name of, 22; population of, 10, 23, 31, 56, 199, 213–14; quantities of grain needed by, 25, 50, 56; retail trade in, 34–39, 46, 48–49 St. Petersburg Granary. See Granary, St. Petersburg State St. Petersburg Province, 45, 61–63, 65, 74, 84, 97, 238n4 St. Petersburg Foundling Home, 134, 210 State Mint, 133–34 steppe: and nomads, 71, 223; and grain trade, 76–78, 80, 86, 149, 152, 204; agriculture in, 73, 105–6, 109; forested, 5–6, 71–74, 76, 85, 97, 109, 223; grassland, 73–74, 89; Pontic, 2, 216, 218; settle-

ment of, 5, 72–74, 76, 81, 83, 89, 223; surplus grain in, 69, 74. See also names of individual steppe provinces Stevens, Carol (historian), 4, 233n50, 233n56 stewards: as agents of grain merchants, 35, 124, 131–32, 139, 145, 155, 254n65; as managers of nobles’ estates, 87, 90–91, 94, 101–7, 117, 131, 157 struga (type of boat), 154–55, 158, 163, 166, 261n58 Stockholm, 2, 59 Storch, Heinrich Friedrich (writer), 68, 196, 232n46, 234n63 Sunderland, Willard (historian), 5, 73, 241n61 Sura River, 76, 121, 151, 154, 158 Sweden: and Great Northern War, 11, 14–15, 17, 21, 29, 229; and grain from Estland and Livland, 65; crop failure in, 191; Russian grain exports to, 230n10; wars of Catherine II and Alexander I with, 133, 135, 191, 202 Taganrog (city, port), 13–15, 77, 132, 135, 142, 215, 230n17 Tambov Province, 76–78, 89, 108, 120, 149, 151–52 taxes: as reason for peasants to sell grain, 31; on merchants, 114, 116, 139; collected in cash rather than kind, 4, 28, 83, 117 Teplov, Grigorii Nikolaevich (statesman), 46, 60, 122, 136 tiaglo, 92, 248n100, 259n45 Tikhvin System (of waterways), 212, 267 timber, 11–12, 23, 65, 160–61, 167, 209, 263n97 Tolchenov, Ivan Alekseevich (grain merchant): and his creditors, 137, 140; and water transport, 16, 155, 158, 166, 174, 178–79; and use of veksels, 131–32, 137; David Ransel’s book about, 5–6, 250n1; diary/memoir of, 124; grain purchases by, 125, 136, 145, 151, 159, 166; grain sales by, 136, 145, 159; life and career of, 124–25, 127, 140; ownership of mills by, 152, 161; profits and losses of, 17, 136, 145, 151, 155 tolls, 14–15, 19, 170–73, 209 Torzhok (town), 16, 104–5, 145 towpaths, 150, 157, 161, 169, 213 trading company. See corporation trading wharf, 16, 145, 150–51, 155, 165–66

index

297

Trudy (publication), 101–2, 247n81, 248n92 Tsna River: in Tambov Province, 76, 151– 52; in Tver Province, 17, 174 Tula Province, 71–75, 93, 97, 106–7, 120, 163 Turkey. See Ottoman Empire Tver (town), 118, 121, 168 Tver Province: agriculture in, 69–70, 103, 106, 109; gristmills in, 162; peasants of, 85, 90, 99; pilots in, 168. See also Rzhev; Torzhok; Tver Tvertsa River: as hindrance to boat traffic, 19, 169–70, 209, 261n55, 262n83; improvements to, 170–71, 174, 179, 209 Ukraine, 167, 184–86, 198, 218, 221, 223, 230–31 United States of America, 147, 204–5, 214–16, 224 Ural Mountains, 12, 15, 73, 76, 89, 152, 170, 221, 223 Valdai Hills, 63–64, 68 veksel, 131–32, 135, 137–39, 146, 222 Viatka Province, 12, 68, 76, 154, 187, 190, 198 Viazemskii, Aleksandr Alekseevich (Procurator-General of Senate), 148, 264n15, 266n57 Vladimir Province, 69–74 Volkov, Dmitrii Vasilevich (statesman), 182–86, 203, 218 Volokolamsk District of Moscow Province, 70, 241n51 Volga Basin, 13, 67–68, 73, 76, 148, 202 Volga River: and central Russian grain market, 79; as central artery of Russian transport, 13, 15, 17, 43, 68, 74–77, 148; distances along, 152–53; grain shipments on, 149, 151, 158, 164; navigation on, 155–58, 161; tributaries of, 154, 160 Volga-Don Canal, 13, 213 Vologda Province, 12, 159, 244n36 Voronezh Province, 89, 97, 108, 148–49, 167 Vorontsov, Aleksandr Romanovich (statesman, president of Commerce College), 49–51, 61, 161, 208, 265n36 Vorontsov, Mikhail Illarionovich, 183–84, 264n5

298

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Vyborg Province, 26, 28, 56, 61, 63, 239n11. See also Finland Vyshnii Volochek (town), 132, 173–74 Vyshnii Volochek Canal: Hauter’s canal, 18; importance of, 20, 148, 158, 171; improvements to, 177, 179, 205, 208; problems with, 20, 170, 171, 205, 209, 212; reopening of, 29; traffic through, 172–73; visit of Catherine II to, 171; workers at, 173–77 Vyshnyi Volochek, Serdiukov Concession at, 148, 169–71, 231, 31 Vyshnii Volochek System (of waterways), 19–20, 179, 211–12, 218, 231n34 Vytegra River, 17, 206, 209–11, 267n18 wage labor: and grain trade, 149; and obrok, 86, 90, 96; as alternative to agriculture, 63, 69, 92, 200; compulsory labor converted to, 28, 245n44; greater productivity of, 28, 104; in Shcherbatov’s enterprises, 90, 96; merchants’ dependence on, 129; Russians’ unfamiliarity with, 28 weights and measures, 35, 46, 146, 222, 235n7, 258n16 “West, the,” Russia and, 222–23 Western Dvina River, 14, 66, 68, 78–79, 206, 212, 218 wheat: commerce in, 118, 125, 151–53, 158– 59, 163–65, 249n11; consumption of, 24, 26, 37–38, 56, 196; export of, 27, 107–8, 152, 185–90, 192, 196, 215–17; increased cultivation of, 50, 61–62, 64, 73, 77, 106–8, 114; varieties of, 107 winter roads, 16, 151, 163, 166, 262n69, 263n99. See also roads; highways; overland transport Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling (historian), 112, 233n50 Wortman, Richard (historian), 22, 233n43 Ziablovskii, Evodokim (writer), 73–74, 78, 163–64, 241n65, 248n101, 261n57 Zubtsov (town), 100, 112, 119, 151, 165–68, 172 Zuev, Vasilii (adjunct member of St. Petersburg Academy of Science), 71