Thinking Russia's History Environmentally 2023004605, 9781805390275, 9781805390282

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THINKING RUSSIA’S HISTORY ENVIRONMENTALLY

The Environment in History: International Perspectives Series Editors: Stefania Barca, University of Santiago de Compostela; Kieko Matteson, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa; Christof Mauch, LMU Munich; Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich

Recent titles: VOLUME 25

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Colonial Seeds in African Soil: A Critical History of Forest Conservation in Sierra Leone

Edited by Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon

Paul Munro

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Planting Seeds of Knowledge: Agriculture and Education in Rural Societies in the Twentieth Century

Hazardous Chemicals: Agents of Risk and Change, 1800–2000

Edited by Heinrich Hartmann and Julia Tischler

Edited by Ernst Homburg and Elisabeth Vaupel VOLUME 16

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Planning for the Planet: Environmental Expertise and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960–1980

VOLUME 22

Simone Schleper

VOLUME 23

Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure, and the Making of German Southwest Africa

The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow Edited by Julia Herzberg, Andreas Renner, and Ingrid Schierle

VOLUME 15

Changes in the Air: Hurricanes in New Orleans from 1718 to the Present Eleonora Rohland

VOLUME 21

VOLUME 14

Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment

Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments

Edited by Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière

Edited by Julia Herzberg, Christian Kehrt, and Franziska Torma

VOLUME 20

VOLUME 13

The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France

A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America

Karena Kalmbach

Edited by John Soluri, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua

VOLUME 19

Conservation’s Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100–1800 Edited by Abigail P. Dowling and Richard Keyser For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/environment-in-history.

Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally

/ Edited by

Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2023004605

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-027-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-028-2 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390275

/ Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

x

Notes on the Text

xi

List of Abbreviations

xii

Introduction Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon

1

PART I. INDUSTRIALIZATION AND ITS ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTS Chapter 1. Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry of the White Sea Area in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina Chapter 2. Early Russian Industrialization: An Environmental Perspective Catherine Evtuhov Chapter 3. Seeing Oil: Isaak Levitan and the Industrial Volga Jane Costlow Chapter 4. Kazan’ Citizens against Air Pollution: The Case of the Ushkov & Co. Chemical Factory (1893–1917) Andrei Vinogradov Chapter 5. “Environing” the North: Fishing and Hunting in the Industrial Development of Khanty-Mansi Okrug, 1960–75 Evgenii Gololobov

25

48

74

98

123

vi Contents

PART II. HUMANS AND ANIMALS Chapter 6. Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge Anna Olenenko

151

Chapter 7. Public Health across Species: Domestic Animals and Sanitary Reforms in Imperial Russia Anna Mazanik

174

PART III. ENVIRONMENT AND POLITICS IN THE LATE SOVIET SPACE Chapter 8. How Wetlands Entered the Transnational Spaces of Late Soviet Environmentalism Katja Bruisch Chapter 9. “You Ought to Love Nature!” People’s Control Committees—Environmental Whistleblowers and Western Siberian Oil in the 1970s Valentina Roxo

201

224

PART IV. GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENT PAST AND PRESENT Chapter 10. Empire, Settlement, and Environment: The Russian Empire and Donald Meinig’s “Macrogeography of Western Imperialism” Denis J. B. Shaw

253

Chapter 11. Tracks across the Tundra: Making a Living from Nature in the Borderland of the Russian Northwest Urban Wråkberg and Peter Haugseth

277

Afterword. Russian and Soviet Environmental History: Unexceptionalism and Exceptionalism J. R. McNeill

301

Glossary

312

Index

314

/ Illustrations

Maps 1.1. The Far North. Arkhangel’sk and monasteries. Map by Artem Gusak.

27

2.1. Iron production in the Urals region (Perm’–Ekaterinburg– Nizhnii Tagil). Both the sheer density of factories, illustrating the expansion of the 1740s–50s, and the strategic location on rivers, most notably the Chusovaia, are remarkable. Adaptation of part of Roger Portal’s map, “L’Oural industriel en 1762” (1950). Map by Bill Nelson, http://www.esva.net/~billnelsonmaps/.

49

5.1. Tiumen’ Region (oblast’) and Khanty-Mansi and Iamalo-Nenets National/Autonomous Okrugs. Map by Bill Nelson, http://www .esva.net/~billnelsonmaps/.

124

10.1. The USSR before 1991: natural vegetation. Map by Bill Nelson, http://www.esva.net/~billnelsonmaps/.

259

10.2. A macrogeography of Russian imperialism according to Meinig’s scheme (within the boundaries of the USSR). Map by Bill Nelson, http://www.esva.net/~billnelsonmaps/.

261

Figures 2.1. A 1743 sketch of the water power system, with dam and reservoir, in the Urals: the Siniachikhin factory. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

53

2.2. Grace Mountain (Gora Blagodat’) in 1910, after a century and a half of exploitation. Photo by S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

61

viii Illustrations

3.1. Isaak Levitan, Evening. Golden Plyos. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

79

3.2. Maxim Dmitriev, Levitan en Plein-air, 1889.

80

3.3. Isaak Levitan, After the Rain. Plyos, 1889. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

81

3.4. Isaak Levitan, On the River. Steamship on the Volga, late 1880s. Courtesy of arthive.com.

87

3.5. Isaak Levitan, Fresh Wind. Volga, 1895. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

88

3.6. Ivan Aivazovsky, The Volga River near the Zhiguli Range, 1887. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

89

4.1. Railway bridge over the Kazanka River and the factory of Ushkov & Co. Postcard (1900s). Private collection, owner deceased.

99

4.2. Map of Kazan’, with Bol’shoe Igumnovo on the left. Baedeker guide, 1914.

105

4.3. Patients with certain diseases as a percentage of the total number of patients. Compiled from archival data. © Andrei Vinogradov.

109

5.1. Schematic representation of the administrative divisions of the RSFSR. © Catherine Evtuhov.

125

5.2. A rare archival map indicating the most polluted areas of Surgut District, from the report: The Development and Distribution of the Hunting Economy in the Surgut Cooperative Game Collective. VNIIOZ. 1980.

129

6.1a and 6.1b. Camels in Russian agriculture, Kaluga Province, late nineteenth century. Kniaz’ Gorchakov, “Verbliud v Kaluzhskoi gubernii,” Sel’skii khoziain, no. 3 (1893): 45.

150

8.1. “You can’t sow rye in a swamp, the swamp is dead land. Drain the swamp properly and the sound of grain will fill the fields.” Soviet poster championing wetland drainage, 1966.

202

8.2 and 8.3. Astrakhan’ Nature Reserve, Great White Egret, 1968 (l.). Kandalaksha Nature Reserve, Atlantic puffin, 1976 (r.). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

207

9.1. Pokoriteliam Samotlora (To the Samotlor conquerors) is a 1978-built monument in the form of a giant male oil driller near Nizhnevartovsk. © Valentina Roxo.

225

Illustrations ix

9.2 and 9.3. Two of the eighteen photographs of the Torskoe lumber mill and the Malaia Sos’va River taken by KNK groups in Sovetskii District of the Khanty-Mansi National Okrug in 1973. Courtesy of GATO, f. 1810, op. 3, d. 356. 232 11.1. Tourists and a Norwegian border guard at the three-nation cairn between Norway, Russia, and Finland in northernmost Europe. In the background is the clearing along the Norwegian-Russian border. 2011. © Urban Wråkberg.

279

11.2. Borderland travelers observing the environmental degradation around Nikel’. Beyond the lake in the background is Norwegian territory. 2006. © Urban Wråkberg

287

11.3. Deteriorating storage containers for spent nuclear submarine fuel at Andreev Bay on the Kola Peninsula. Cleanup work is seen in front, and in the background are new buildings for the preparations for transit of this waste to a safer final deposit. 2015. Reproduced with the permission of Birgitte Wisur Olsen.

289

Tables 2.1. British Iron Imports (in tons, 5-year averages).

51

7.1. Selected Livestock in the Russian Empire, the United States, and Germany in 1900.

180

7.2. Cattle Death Rates from Cattle Plague in European Russia (without Finland, Poland, and the Caucasus).

182

/ Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) for a grant that allowed us to conceive and develop this book. Many thanks to the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for supporting the editing and publication. At earlier stages of this collective endeavor, we received generous funding from the Leverhulme Trust, and from the Environment Initiative at Georgetown University. We would like to thank Ron Meyer for his translations and for being there to solve any problem; and Kirsten Painter and Jennifer Goetz for their expert and patient editing. Special thanks to Christof Mauch for shepherding the manuscript through its many phases, and for always being kind and supportive.

/ Notes on the Text

Note on Dates All dates prior to 1 January 1918 are in the Julian calendar (Old Style, O.S.) then in use in the Russian state, and all dates thereafter are in the Gregorian calendar (New Style, N.S.). The Julian calendar was thirteen days behind the Gregorian in the twentieth century. Before 1 January 1700 (O.S.), Russians marked the start of the year on 1 September and counted the years from the supposed date of the creation of the earth in the manner of the Byzantine Empire, but in this book all dates prior to 1700 are in ce/ad.

A Note on Units of Measure The default units of measure are metric (S.I.), but individual authors have used those most appropriate for their topics, such as Russian imperial measures that were in use until 1925, for example, pood, sazhen, desiatina, etc. In such cases, equivalents in metric are given.

/ Abbreviations

Archives d. f. l. ob. op.

delo (file) fond (collection) list (folio) obratnaia storona (reverse) opis’ (inventory)

ARAN GAIu GARF GART GASPITO

GATO OPI GIM

RGADA RGAE RGGU RGIA MAGS

Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Arkhiv Rossiiskoi аkademii nauk) State Archive of Iugra (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Iugry) State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii) State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan) State Archive of Social and Political History of Tiumen’ Region (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii Tiumenskoi oblasti) State Archive of Tiumen’ Region (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tiumenskoi oblasti) Manuscript Department, State Historical Museum (Otdel pis’mennykh istochnikov, Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei) Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov) Russian State Archive of the Economy (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki) Russian State University for the Humanities (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet) Russian State Historical Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv) Surgut City Archive (Munitsipal’nyi arkhiv goroda Surguta)

Abbreviations xiii

Other AN SSSR

Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Akademiia nauk SSSR) BSE The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia) CBC Cross-Border Cooperation programs (EU) ESBE Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona). 82 vols. St. Petersburg, 1890–1907 EU European Union GNP Gross National Product IaNNO Iamalo-Nenets National Okrug (Iamalo-Nenetskii natsional’nyi okrug); since 1978, Iamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (Iamalo-Nenetskii avtonomnyi okrug) (IaNAO) IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature KhMNO Khanty-Mansi National Okrug (Khanty-Mansiiskii natsional’nyi okrug); since 1978: Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (Khanty-Mansiiskii avtonomnyi okrug) (KhMAO) KNK Committees of People’s Control (Komitety narodnogo kontrolia) KPGK Committee for Party-State Control (Komitet partiino-gosudarstvennogo kontrolia) LGU Leningrad State University (Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet) MVD Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del) NGDU Oil and Gas Extraction Administration (Neftegazodobyvaiushchee upravlenie) NIU—RANKhiGS Nizhnii Novgorod Institute of Management—Russian Academy of the National Economy and State Service (Nizhegorodskii Institut upravleniia—Rossiiskaia akademiia narodnogo khoziaistva i gosudarstvennoi sluzhby) NK People’s Control (Narodnyi kontrol’) PSZ Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). 3 series: 1st series (PSZ 1), 45 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830); 2nd series (PSZ 2), 55 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1825–81); 3rd series (PSZ 3), 33 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1881–1916)

xiv Abbreviations

RAN REE RF RSFSR

RUDN SibNIIRKh

SME SOPS

SPbGU SPbII RAN

USSR VGPU VNIIOZ

VOOP ZSNGK

Russian Academy of Sciences (Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk) rare earth elements Russian Federation (since 1991) Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Rossiiskaia Sovetskaia Federativnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika) (1917–91) Russian University of the Friendship of Peoples (Rossiiskii universitet druzhby narodov) Siberian Scientific Research Institute for Fisheries (Sibirskii nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut rybnogo khoziaistva) small and medium-sized enterprises Council for the Study of Productive Forces under the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Sovet po izucheniiu proizvoditel’nykh sil pri Akademii nauk SSSR). St. Petersburg State University (Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet) St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Sankt-Peterburgskii institut istorii Rossiiskoi akademii nauk) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) Voronezh State Pedagogical Institute (Voronezhskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut) All-Union Research Institute of Game Management and Fur Farming (Vsesoiuznyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut okhotnich’ego khoziaistva i zverovodstva) All-Russian Society for Nature Protection (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo okhrany prirody) Western Siberian Oil and Gas Complex (ZapadnoSibirskii neftegazovyi kompleks)

/ Introduction Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

F

rom the vantage point of his Californian exile, looking out over the San Francisco Bay, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz experienced mostly discomfort from his “forced confrontation with nature.” The inability to escape into a private cocoon, protecting him from the “violated but always victorious expanse,” made him feel “stripped and destitute,” diminished and near-nauseous, having achieved nothing.1 Strangeness, indifference, eternal stone, stone-like eternity, and compared to it, I am a split second of tissue, nerve, pumping heart, and, worst of all, I am subject to the same incomprehensible law ruling what is here before me, which I see only as self-contained and opposed to all meaning.2

As a coastal California native, I remember well the shock I experienced in reading Milosz’s essay in the early 1980s. For me, equally subjectively, I can imagine no more calming experience than standing on the bluff, contemplating the vastness and majesty of the Pacific Ocean: if the bustle of human affairs seems therefore diminished, this can only be a positive moment, and puts any troubles into their proper perspective. The point of this reflection being: if indeed “I am here” (the opening words of Milosz’s book of essays), and this “here” involves nature, the “here” can be anywhere. Without making absurd claims that the Pacific Ocean, the Sahara Desert, the Siberian taiga are “the same,” it remains the case that the human encounter with nature is universal. When I am hiking in the Rocky Mountains, I experience the aspen groves, the wildflowers, the pine trees, the fast-flowing creeks and majestic crags quite as I did in the Altai Mountains—on the map the little pocket where Russia meets Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and China. This sort of international wandering is of course a privilege of, say, a university professor with access to air travel. But the observation remains valid: everywhere there are humans, there is by definition “nature,” and it is only in interaction with their immediate surroundings that humans feed themselves, establish their habi-

2 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

tations, and shape their own environment. So my perspective is unabashedly more optimistic than Milosz’s.

The Universal and the Particular in Environmental History Russia’s history, whether in European or global context, has suffered more than many from exceptionalism, prejudice, mystery, and misunderstanding. While the specialized field of Russian history is extremely sophisticated and has been highly developed for centuries, the ability to communicate (in part due to linguistic issues) across disciplinary boundaries remains weak. It is our premise that environmental history—which has burgeoned for the geographical space of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over the past two decades— is uniquely positioned for this task of integration. Because forests, rivers, soils, and geological formations are universally comprehensible, a writing of history that focuses on humans in their interaction with these and many other natural factors has the advantage of general accessibility. We hope that the history of this space can, through the pursuit of environmental history, be liberated from tropes of “us and them,” “Russia versus the West,” a special penchant for autocracy, paradigms of backwardness, and so forth. The chapters in this book take as their point of departure questions and situations that are readily recognizable to historians of absolutely any geographical location—the uses of natural resources in the process of transforming nature into environment with all degradation and pollution related to it, the manner in which industrial development was inscribed in local environments and affected by them, interactions between humans and nonhuman species, and efforts to protect the environment from overexploitation and pollution. In studying this common human endeavor, we hope to present some aspects of society, governance, and economic development in ways that make sense to readers outside the specialized Russian history field and integrate this (until relatively recently) “blank spot” on the map into the larger landscape of environmental history. There is no question that the territory of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union has been the scene of major environmental disasters and widespread environmental degradation that have been caused by the inhabitants and their governments. Nor is there any doubt that human and environmental health has been sacrificed to other priorities. What can be questioned is the extent to which these states were extreme outliers from the experience of other parts of the planet. Environmental historians have debated, and will continue to debate, the impact of different political and economic systems on the environment. Were communist regimes especially harmful in comparison with capitalist regimes? Recently, Andy Bruno described the Soviet government’s dualistic approach toward nature, where conquest and assimilation went hand

Introduction 3

in hand, and proposed that damage wrought by the communist regime was comparable to that brought about in the capitalist world.3 But answering these questions fully will require further detailed comparative studies that draw on research by historians of all parts of the world.4 Another angle from which to consider whether there is anything exceptional to Russian and Soviet environmental history is to consider the environments of this part of the world. There is a long tradition, dating back to at least the eighteenth century, of making a direct, causal connection between the relatively harsh natural environment of much of the center of the Russian state around Moscow and to the north, as well as Siberia to the east, and the authoritarian political systems and denials of individual freedoms that have characterized much of its history.5 In comparison with the lands to the west in Europe and far to the south and east in Asia, much of these lands have long, cold winters; short, hot summers; slightly lower rainfall; and infertile soils. Vast distances have been compounded by problems of transport, especially when autumn rains and spring thaws turn roads into seas of mud. The main rivers flow away from, rather than between, centers of population, and many mineral resources are located in remote regions. To extract a living from this environment, it is argued, the rulers, first tsarist, then communist, concentrated power in their hands and imposed systems of forced labor, such as serfdom, collective and state farms, and labor camps, on sections of the population. To acquire and hold on to lands with environments more favorable for human activities in the fertile steppes to the south and southeast and along the Baltic coast to the northwest, the regimes mobilized what resources they had and imposed further burdens on their populations in order to defeat militarily powerful neighboring states, such as the Mongol, Ottoman, and Swedish Empires in tsarist times and Germany in the twentieth century. The tsarist and Soviet regimes also had, it is claimed, an especially harsh attitude to the natural environment that they exploited for short-term needs rather than longer-term sustainability. Such environmental-determinist arguments cannot be dismissed: in many but not all territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union the climate and conditions for agriculture are indeed harsher than in many other parts of world, and the regimes have ruthlessly exploited their populations. But to take such arguments too far denies human agency and capability to devise strategies to sustain themselves and their states, and to develop rich cultures. It has been argued elsewhere that inhabitants of these lands have made their own histories and constructed their own identities in processes of interaction with the land and environment they have lived in.6 The cultures that have developed in the Russian and Soviet states have included innovative ways of understanding the “natural” world, humans’ part in it, and interconnections between the component parts of the environment.

4 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

Environmental Thinking in Russia and about Russia In turning our attention to human-natural interactions and environmental history, we inscribe our research in a long tradition of fascination or even obsession with the natural environment. The expanses of Russia and Siberia have historically been sparsely populated, arguably prompting an inevitable encounter with natural forces. As in many cultures, animals, trees, forest sprites, mineral fairies, and talking rivers are omnipresent in Russian literature, from the Igor Tale through Aleksei Ivanov’s contemporary Urals adventures. In the seventeenth century, cartographers produced a variety of local and regional maps and charted the state’s expanding domains;7 scientific description and detailed studies of nature over this vast territory burgeoned during the eighteenth century, when the imperial state invited European exlorers and naturalists to help it to learn its own geography and natural riches. The vast and diverse lands of Russia and Siberia needed to be mapped and described, their riches inventoried and classified. Peter the Great’s curiosity whether or not the lands under his possession merged into the American continent prompted a program of exploration in the Pacific known as the Kamchatka Expeditions. Siberian and other northern lands provoked special interest among European scientists who put them on maps and described exotic animals, including documenting the very first known extinction.8 Under Catherine the Great, the expeditions organized by the Imperial Academy of Sciences were also mostly by foreign naturalists like Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811) and Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1748–1804), and these continued and deepened the inventarization of the territory that later on attracted such internationally known explorers as Roderick Murchison and Alexander von Humboldt. Murchison gave the name “Permian” (after the Urals province of Perm’) to the geological period in the stratigraphic system between the Carboniferous and Triassic periods. At this moment, naturalists from the Baltic provinces of the empire deepened the study of nature from the maritime and northern peripheries to the open ocean—an endeavor that gave a strong impetus to the development of natural sciences in Russia. Adam Johann von Krusenstern (1779–1846), Friedrich Benjamin Graf von Lütke (known in Russian as Fedor Litke) (1797–1882), Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), and Alexander von Middendorff (1815– 1894), among others, laid the foundation for the understanding of nature of the empire as a part of the globe. At the same time, they played to imperial geopolitical and economic interests by describing new lands and resources and mapping them for their future exploitation by the state. It is important to remember this transnational origin of the study of nature in the Russian Empire when discussing the exceptionalism and universalism of its environmental history.

Introduction 5

If anything, the intellectual and scientific focus on the environment only increased during the apex of the imperial period, in the nineteenth century. Suffice it to note here two specific nature-focused intellectual orientations that can have much to contribute to the present-day writing of environmental history. The first is philosophical: the influential philosophers Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), and Sergei Bulgakov (1871– 1944), in particular, evince a strong environmental strain in certain of their writings. Their concerns included a fear of erosion and encroaching sands from the East, efforts to create artificial rain, and a general theory of economic life as contingent upon the relation between humanity and nature.9 Second, and of more immediate relevance to the present volume, are the environmental sciences of the nineteenth century, by which we mean soil science, agronomy, climatology, and chemistry. What are the ways in which these scientific endeavors qualify as “environmental”? Let us cite just three of the most important examples. Vasilii Dokuchaev (1846–1903) is generally known as the founder of the discipline of soil science, along with Eugene Hilgard (1833–1916), a German-born American scientist working in California. Thanks to Dokuchaev, the vocabulary of international soil science relies on Russian terms such as the chernozems (the fertile black earth), podzols (soils under coniferous forests), and solonchaks (saline soils).10 Dokuchaev made the crucial breakthrough of studying the soil as an organic system, in which not only the visible topsoil but the many layers of subsoils must be taken into account in their interaction in evaluating the viability of particular territories for agriculture and understanding their susceptibility to erosion. To Dokuchaev also belongs the now ubiquitous classification of natural soil belts circling the globe, permitting, for example, a direct comparison and juxtaposition of the Eurasian steppes and the North American Great Plains.11 A second figure, extremely influential in his day but oddly underappreciated in our climateobsessed times, is the meteorologist Alexander Voeikov (1842–1916). Voeikov’s foundational Climates of the Earth (Klimaty zemnogo shara, 1884) and Winds of the Globe, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute and published in English, established climatology as a discipline. A pathbreaking study investigated the effects of the snow layer on soils, climate, and weather.12 Voeikov was also a pioneer of “wellness,” studying and participating in the creation of health resorts (Kurort) in the Caucasus and heading the St. Petersburg Society of Vegetarians. A far more familiar name is that of Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1904). It is important to note that the periodic table itself emerged, like Dokuchaev’s soil science, from Mendeleev’s immersion in the manifold issues raised by the agricultural questions that followed upon the Great Reforms of the 1860s, and his subsequent work with the Russian Technical Society (Russkoe tekhnicheskoe obshchestvo, RTO).13 The deep roots of environmental thinking, into

6 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

the nineteenth century, created the milieu for by now better-known figures like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a student of Fedorov, and Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1935), investigator of the noosphere.14

The “McNeill Gap” and How It Is Being Fixed (or Not) This present volume in English shows how far “Russian environmental history” has come over the past couple of decades. In 2008, a collection of translations to Russian of classical works on various topics in environmental history was published by scholars at the European University in St. Petersburg and the Max Planck Institute of History in Germany. The volume, which included an introduction on “environmental history” (ekologicheskaia istoriia) by the editors, was intended to promote what was then a relatively new field of history in Russia.15 The translated essays included a survey of the field of environmental history globally by John McNeill that had been published in English in 2003. McNeill noted the underdeveloped state of research on Russia: Historians of Russia (both Russians and foreigners) have yet to go far exploring environmental history approaches, which in Russian history offer tremendous possibilities. . . . Exploiting [the] . . . sources will be painstaking work, to be sure, but the rewards of bringing an environmental approach to Russian history should be sufficiently alluring. The sweep of Russian frontier expansion, the compressed drama of Stalinist industrialization, the grandiose replumbing of Soviet Central Asia among other themes cry out (at least I can hear them) for the attention of environmental historians.16

In recent years, environmental historians—from outside Russia but also in growing numbers from Russia—have researched, analyzed, and debated the topics listed by McNeill and many more. A full survey of the growing field of “Russian environmental history” is beyond the scope of this introduction, but a good sense can be gained from Julia Lajus’s comprehensive review published in 2018, alongside a shorter review of a smaller field by Andy Bruno a decade earlier.17 More recently, reviewing books on such different subjects as a history of frozen earth (permafrost), an environmental history of the Carpathian Mountains in neighboring Ukraine, and a history of Russian national parks,18 Christopher Ely begins by echoing McNeill’s anxiety about the slow development of “Russian environmental history,” but then undermines it by asserting that “post-Soviet environmental history has achieved a reach and level of sophistication comparable to that of other regions.”19 Stressing “place” as the dominant organizing concept of a recent book of essays titled Place and Nature, which takes different but complementary methodological approaches,

Introduction 7

he uses the metaphor of a platypus, arguing that, nevertheless, “like the Australian mammal [the book] still manages to function effectively.”20 There has been a growing Russian-language literature on environmental history, represented in English in international journals such as Global Environment, European History Review, and Water History,21 in addition to journals in Russian and Soviet studies.22 Journals published in Russia have begun to include papers on environmental history, particularly as it enters into dialogue with other fields of history: economic history, history of medicine, urban history.23 Environmental historians of the Russian and Soviet lands are broadening the geographical scope of the field by paying more attention to non-Russian territories that were once governed from St. Petersburg and Moscow, such as Ukraine and Central Asia. Further, environmental historians of this part of the world are taking transnational and comparative perspectives that challenge notions of its exceptionalism. They are presenting more nuanced interpretations by comparing the development, application, and impact of technologies at a global level, along with Indigenous knowledge in colonial contexts, and analyzing intercontinental transfers and exchanges of people, biota, and knowledge.24 Our book offers a contribution to this burgeoning field by presenting detailed research on what may be considered the “core” territories of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, including Siberia. Among the locations in our purview are not only the Russian North and Volga region but the Urals and Western Siberia that are less well-known to international audiences than their global significance merits. For example, the Khanty-Mansi National/Autonomous Okrug—the regional focus of Evgenii Gololobov’s and, partly, Valentina Roxo’s chapters in this book—has been a major center of the booming Soviet and Russian oil industry since the 1970s, yet its name remains unfamiliar even to many historians, let alone readers of the media.25 Despite these developments in Russian and Soviet environmental history, readers who seek to learn about them from works on global and world environmental history written in English by specialists on other parts of the world would remain largely in ignorance. Many such works of synthesis have paid relatively little attention to the Russian and Soviet worlds, which is surprising since the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian states were, and are, the world’s largest by area, if not population. As McNeill indicated, moreover, they offer rich scope in research topics of global significance. When considering Europe and Asia, global and world environmental histories have paid far more attention to Western Europe and the east and south of Asia rather than the center—or “heartland” to use Halford Mackinder’s term—of the entire Eurasian continent.26 This is not to deny the importance of the Eurasian peripheries, of course, but to point out that an understanding of global or world environmental history is incomplete without due attention to continental interiors.

8 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

There are various explanations for these emphases, or perhaps distortions, as well as for the relative neglect of Russian/Soviet environmental histories in Anglophone global or world histories. Most of the authors do not have the language skills to read primary sources or scholarly studies in the languages of the region. They have tended to rely on often older works in English and other Western European languages. They have been influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by negative stereotypes and prejudices about these lands and their people, that long predate the communist regime and stretch back into early modern Europe. These can be readily tested by asking a random selection of people in the Western world for their instinctive reaction to the phrase “Russian environmental history.”27 When Anglophone works on global and world environmental history do consider the cases from the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, they have tended to present a one-sided or distorted picture that uses them as examples largely of wholesale destruction and pollution of the environment. The environmental history of this part of the world is presented in such works mainly as a list of anthropogenic disasters, such as: the desiccation of the Aral Sea as water from the rivers that feed it was diverted for irrigation; the Chernobyl’ nuclear power station explosion caused by design flaws and human error; threats to the pristine waters of Lake Baikal from cellulose plants built on its shores. It could have been worse. A global environmental disaster was averted by a decision by the Soviet leadership in the late 1980s to cancel plans to divert rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean to arid regions in the south of the Soviet Union. These are just the headline cases. Rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s caused massive pollution of the environments the workers and wider population lived in. Free-flowing rivers such as the Dnieper (Dnipro), Don, and Volga were converted to chains of stagnant lakes by dams to provide hydroelectric power and water for irrigation. Blame for this environmental degradation is attributed to wasteful and ill-considered exploitation of natural resources by authoritarian states, tsarist and Communist, that prioritized economic development and state needs over the health of their environments and populations. These states compounded their sins by thwarting nascent environmental movements. The chapters in our book do not seek to deny this negative history but offer more nuanced interpretations that present the environmental history of this part of the world in similar terms to environmental histories of other parts of the world.

“Environment as History”: Humans in Nature Like most environmental historians, the authors of the present volume share a concern not for the history of the environment as such but specifically, and in

Introduction 9

each particular instance, for the ways in which human behavior is imbricated in nature. To put it more simply, it is the ever-present interactions between “humans” and “nature” that interest us. This is not an empty statement, and it is indicative of one among many emerging new strands in Russian environmental history. Two recent monographs approach such interactions from the angle of animals, water, and regions that were peripheral to the centers of political power in the Russian and Soviet states. Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast, which examines both the Siberian and Alaskan sides of the Bering Straits, takes up the perspective of the walruses and the whales and becomes, as Sophie Pinkham puts it, “history from the vantage point of the sea; political treaties and trade agreements, monarchs and presidents flash by on the periphery, as if seen from far away.”28 In a different example, Maya Peterson’s recent history of the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia argues that the groundwork for its desiccation in the Soviet period was laid by the irrigation networks of the nineteenth century that diverted water from the rivers that fed it. Her book thus proposes continuities as well as ruptures in policies and attitudes toward the environment between the imperial and the Soviet regimes.29 In both Beringia and Central Asia, however, plans to manipulate environments devised in the imperial period were implemented so much more strongly and with so far greater consequences after 1917 as to make them an entirely different project. Both of these books offer revealing perspectives from politically peripheral regions of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, where the environments posed serious challenges to the designs of the central governments but were vulnerable to the consequences when such designs were realized. These new approaches are welcome as “Russian environmental history” explores a variety of methodologies. Along this spectrum, our book comes down firmly on the side of human history. Each of the chapters in this book, which offer viewpoints from a wide range of regions and different time periods, takes up a particular situation that has long been acknowledged as a significant historical question and explores the ways in which focus on the environment can illuminate new aspects. Environmental historians are interested to understand how economic development was inscribed in the environment, namely how it transformed “nature” into “environment” through technology in the process of “environing.”30 This methodology, which permits us to distinguish “nature” from “the environment,” has been applied to the longue durée history of the Solovki Islands in the Russian North.31 Readers of this volume may find that this methodology presents a framework to understand the developments analyzed. Thus, careful differentiation between “nature” that is perceived ahistorically in spiritual and scientific practices and the “environment” that is an actor and a result of historical transformation by means of available technologies helps to build more nuanced multifaceted narratives of human relations with the planet and with

10 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

other forms of life. For Russian environmental history, the need for “deeper analysis of attempts to inventorize the considerable riches of its land, water and marine resources, and parallel initiatives directed towards gaining greater understanding of the inner workings of the natural world and associated processes”32 has already been declared several times. It has been accompanied by a hope of understanding the “sophisticated system of natural resource management embedded in the country’s regional and local economies.” Several of the chapters in this book will help to fulfill this task, but others serve to broaden the scope of research into less developed aspects than natural resources or pollution. Rather than seeking something specific about the environmental history of the Russian and Soviet lands—either in the alleged malign influence of its harsh environment on the people and political regimes that have made their homes there or in the supposed equally malign influence on the environment of these people and their states—the overall tone of the chapters in this book taken as a body of scholarship suggest a multifaceted interrelationship between “nature” and “culture.” Together with many environmental historians of other parts of the globe, those working on the Russian/Soviet space have been moving away from a sharp distinction between the more-than-human and human worlds. Rather, they focus on entanglements between human societies and the environments of which they are a part and coevolution rather than humans being obstructed by or conquering and degrading the “natural world.”33

How Focusing on Environment Changes Historical Chronologies An environmental perspective provides interesting new boundaries and chronologies for the practice of history. For example, the concept of the Anthropocene as a distinct period in geological time highlights the incipient exploitation of fossil fuels, beginning in the 1780s, as a decisive moment of change, in some ways coinciding with what global historians like to describe as the emergence of the modern world.34 The chapters in our volume explore the potential of these new chronological landmarks for the writing of history of the spaces of the former Russian Empire and part of the Soviet Union (mainly the territory of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic), but even more for inscribing this history in the larger landscape of human-natural interactions. Thus, several of the chapters are concerned with mapping industrialization in these territories onto the better-known (in the English-language literature) scenarios of massive industrial production that followed the concerted exploitation of coal resources in the late eighteenth century and movements of protest against industrial pollution by the end of the nineteenth. Some historians date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the 1950s. Some further chapters can be

Introduction 11

read in this context, focusing on the displacement of local fishing and hunting industries by the unprecedented massive exploitation of oil and gas resources in the 1960s and 1970s, or efforts by local activists to limit the degradation brought about by development of wetlands and large-scale drilling. The Soviet drive to use—and also to protect—natural resources corresponds in time to a parallel intensification in other parts of the world, and can productively be juxtaposed in order to complete our picture of the special, intensive, aggressive assault on natural resources that characterizes the post–World War II era. In short, environmental history gives us the tools to move beyond exceptionalisms and Sonderwegs, posing questions in a universal language that permits us to situate events and movements in a global context. So far, the literature on Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian environmental history has largely focused on the late imperial and early Soviet periods. Our book expands this chronological scope, devoting attention to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as the late Soviet period and beyond.

Environment and Social History Our wish to integrate the environment into the historical narrative has implications for social history as well. How does focus on human-natural relations change our understanding of social interactions? Several of the pieces in the volume (Vinogradov, Mazanik, Bruisch, Roxo) allow us to shift our focus from the familiar state-versus-society model to the specific strategies and negotiations among local groups and forces. We needn’t wander around with our lighted torch in broad daylight, seeking evidence of “civil society,” as a previous generation of American (and German) social historians frequently did. Instead, looking at images of, and protests against, the pollution of the Volga in the late nineteenth century shows us in a manner completely devoid of ambiguity how local citizens formed associations, negotiated with factory owners, strategized and compromised, and ultimately shaped outcomes. What comes to the fore, then, is not an a priori opposition between state and society but the multiple interstices in which individuals and groups operate, and the conflicts and interactions of local powers at many different levels.35 An important recent volume on Eurasian environmental history asserted, and we agree, that historians discover innovative professional tools and different types of sources when they include environment in their narratives.36 Moreover, these new tools are instrumental not only for environmental history itself but for the deep, multilayered understanding of history in general. The central question of historical enterprise is a question of power; environmental history is not an exception. Thus, the authors of this book make a significant contribution to ongoing discussions on imperial geographies37 and the “nature

12 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

of Soviet power.”38 As Douglas Weiner put it, “Appreciation of the saturation of history and knowledge with questions about power give us the most powerful tool to reconstitute the ‘environment’ as a central and prepossessing category of analysis.”39 If we agree that behind any configuration of the environment is a social agenda—and we would like to note that the need for environmental history to be engaged more fully with social and political theory has already been declared40—then we should emphasize that through the studies of how environment was constructed and perceived, of what kind of relations between human and nonhuman actors evolved in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, we would much better understand the power relations, the economic successes and pitfalls and their costs, and the social and cultural transformations of society. It might even be said that this approach actually embodies the urge for the “greening” of social and labor history by incorporating environmental issues and nonhuman actors into the historical narrative. The authors turn their attention to state authorities and experts, but also to less obvious and visible historical actors: monks, traders, workers of the chemical industry, Indigenous people, peoples’ controllers who—some readers may be surprised to learn—were on the side of rational environmental policy in the 1970s, and many others. In addition, this type of history also highlights the unrealized scenarios, the possible futures that never became. What if camel breeding had continued to be a significant part of Russian husbandry, if Indigenous fishing and hunting activities had not become a victim of oil and gas production, or if this oil and gas economy had not flourished . . .

The Project and the Chapters The volume we wish to present is just one piece of a multilayered long-term collective project involving the authors represented here but also many other participants. Our endeavor has been deliberately international, involving scholars from the Russian Federation and Ukraine; other parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom; and the United States. Our collaboration began at international conferences devoted to environmental history41 and Russian, Eurasian, and East European area studies42 in Europe and North American over a decade and a half ago. We moved from presenting panels at conferences to organizing our own meetings, for example at Georgetown University in 2009 and, in particular, at the European University and the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. Some of our meetings have been parts of larger projects, including an international network supported by the Leverhulme Trust in 2013–16 that funded conferences, workshops, and field trips in St. Petersburg,

Introduction 13

Solovki, Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, Perm’, Ekaterinburg and other locations in the Urals, and Kyiv and Chernobyl’ in Ukraine. In the course of our work, we have broadened our circle of “Russian environmental historians” to include scholars who are or have been based at Elabuga in Tatarstan and Tiumen’ and Surgut in Western Siberia. The broad geographical backgrounds of our authors and the wider group, both within and without the territories of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, is essential to our understanding of their environmental history. Our collaboration has led to a number of joint publications.43 This present volume complements another edited collection, Place and Nature,44 that focuses on the locality and the need for an integral approach to environment in a circumscribed space. This second book mirrors the first by reflecting more strongly the universalizing aspects of our endeavor, and provides some examples of ways in which the story of the Eurasian space may be “made familiar” to students of other geographical regions. The chapters in this book are representative of the broad range of current work on the environmental history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. They explore ways in which humans in this part of the world have conceived, managed, and sought to change their role in the wider environment. They also reflect the growing variety of subjects investigated by environmental historians. There are chapters on important topics of long-standing interest, such as pollution and environmental movements. The use of natural resources features prominently. And attention is given to subjects that have attracted more notice in recent years, such as animals and wetlands. The environmental humanities are represented in a chapter on the impact of human activity on the environment through the eyes of a Russian artist. Readers can also compare the approach of a historical geographer with those of environmental historians. The scope of the chapters ranges from the vast territory of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union in its entirety to case studies of particular regions. The regions investigated echo the diversity of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule or domination, including the White Sea in the north, the Volga River and basin, the Ural Mountains, and Siberia. From the perspective of time, the chapters consider periods from the early modern era to the present day. How did management expertise contribute to the exploitation of natural resources in the Russian Far North in the early modern period? What was Russia’s role in early industrialization on the eve of the emergence of the fossil fuel economy? How was environmental degradation reflected in nineteenth-century art? What role did pollution play, and what were responses, in late imperial Kazan’? What was the interaction between intensive oil and gas exploitation and Indigenous industries in the extraction centers of Western Siberia? How did camels become a factor in the agriculture of European Russia? What was the place of animals in the creation of a public health system in imperial Russia? What measures did the Soviets take to preserve wetlands,

14 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

and how did environmental protest accompany the oil industry in the 1970s? How does taking environmental factors into account contribute to our framing of empire? Finally, what can we learn about the Russian/Norwegian border through exploration of environmental issues and tourism?

Conclusion One of the purposes of the present volume is to showcase a selection of recent studies by specialists on the region who have the requisite linguistic skills, access to sources, and deep familiarity with its environment, history, and culture. It should be noted that the selection is not distorted to present only “negative” or “positive” stories. The chapters deliberately include detailed analyses of exploitation of natural resources and pollution, as well as cases of people showing agency in articulating concerns about environmental degradation that are among a range of topics of interest to environmental historians of other parts of the globe. The better integration of the Russian and Soviet cases into world and global environmental history would allow scholars to test the recent assertion by Pey-Yi Chu: “A growing body of scholarship is finding Soviet relationships with the environment to be distinctive but not aberrant, grimly consistent with global trends rather than singularly destructive.”45 Finally, we note that our book brings together voices from a multiplicity of different traditions, thereby literally embodying the international principle that characterizes our method. Our authors hail from St. Petersburg and Genoa; Washington, DC and New York City; Maine; Tiumen’; Surgut; Zaporizhzhia; Moscow and London; Göttingen and Dublin; Ekaterinburg and Munich; Birmingham, UK; and Kirkenes at the northern tip of Scandinavia. While this sort of international collaboration and intensive travel have (we hope temporarily) faded into the past, we hope that our book may serve as a testament to the benefits of such cooperative adventures. We have sought to preserve individual voices while at the same time joining in a common task.

Catherine Evtuhov is professor of history at Columbia University in the City of New York. Julia Lajus is visiting associate professor in the History Department, the Harriman Institute, and the Climate School at Columbia University. She was formerly associate professor and senior researcher at the Department of History and head of the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg.

Introduction 15

David Moon is honorary professor in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

Notes 1. The opening paragraph of the introduction is written by Catherine Evtuhov; otherwise the introduction is co-authored. 2. Czeslaw Milosz, “Facing Too Large an Expanse,” in Visions from San Francisco Bay (New York, 1982), 10. 3. Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge, 2016). 4. For examples of comparative works drawing on specialist expertise on the region under investigation, see Paul Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, DC, 2002); J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge, 2010); Astrid Kirchoff and J. R. McNeill, Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in the Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990 (Pittsburgh, 2019). 5. See for instance, the quite original narrative on the relation of climate to power in “Russian America” by Ryan Tucker Jones, “‘A Cruel Climate Without any Art’: European Natural History and the Northern Nature of the Other Pacific, 1740–1840,” in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Vancouver, 2013), 17–38. 6. David Moon, “Land and Environment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History, ed. Simon Dixon (Oxford, 2015 [online]), DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199236701.013.001. For modern examples of environmental determinist interpretations of Russian history, see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974); L. V. Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow, 1998); A. P. Parshev, Pochemu Rossiia ne Amerika: Kniga dlia tekh, kto ostaetsia zdes’ (Moscow, 2000). 7. Valerie A. Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Denis J. B. Shaw, “Mapmaking, Science and State Building in Russia before Peter the Great,” Journal of Historical Geography 31, no. 3 (2005): 409–29. 8. Ryan Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (Oxford, 2014). See also Catherine Evtuhov, “A ‘Complete’ Atlas of the Russian Empire,” in Picturing Russian Empire, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (Oxford, forthcoming 2023). 9. See C. Evtuhov, “Philosophy and Environment,” unpublished conference paper. 10. See IUSS Working Group WRB, World Reference Base for Soil Resources 2014, Update 2015, World Soil Resources Reports 106, FAO, Rome 2015, https://www.fao.org/3/ i3794en/I3794en.pdf 11. For Dokuchaev and international soil science, see Jan Arend, Rußlands Bodenkunde in der Welt. Eine ost-westliche Transfergeschichte, 1880–1945 (Göttingen, 2017). For

16 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

more on the Great Plains and steppes, see David Moon, The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s (New York, 2020). A. I. Voeikov, Snezhnyi pokrov, ego vliianie na pochvu, klimat i pogodu i sposoby issledovaniia (St. Petersburg, 1889). Michael Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Princeton, 2019). See also Catherine Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions: Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro-Environmental Issues,” in Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History, ed. Benno Warkentin (Amsterdam, 2006). For more on these “environmental” scientists and others, see Jonathan Oldfield and Denis J. B. Shaw, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment (London, 2016). Daniil Aleksandrov, Franz-Iozef Briuggemaier [Franz-Josef Brüggemeier] and Iuliia Laius [Julia Lajus], eds., Chelovek i priroda: ekologicheskaia istoriia (St. Petersburg, 2008). J. R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 30. Julia Lajus, “Russian Environmental History: A Historiographical Review,” in The Great Convergence: Environmental Histories of BRICS, ed. S. Ravi Rajan and Lise Sedrez (Delhi, 2018), 245–73; Andy Bruno, “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 635–50. Pey-Yi Chu, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (Toronto, 2020); Anthony J. Amato, The Carpathians, the Hutsuls, and Ukraine: An Environmental History (Lanham, MD, 2021); Alan D. Roe, Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2020). Christopher Ely, “Review Essay,” Slavic Review 81, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 187–94. Ely is the author of This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2003), 187. Ely, “Review Essay,” 189. The book in question is David Moon, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova, eds., Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (Winwick, 2021). Anastasia Fedotova and Elena Korchmina, “Cattle Pasturing as a Traditional Form of Forest Use and Conflicts between Peasants and Forestry Administration in the Long Nineteenth Century (the Case of Białowieza Primeval Forest),” in “Reconfiguring Nature: Resource Security and the Limits of Expert Knowledge,” ed. Christian Kert and John Martin, special issue, Global Environment 13, no. 2 (2020): 525–54; Marina Loskutova, “Quantifying Scarcity: Deforestation in the Upper Volga Region and Early Debates over Climate Change in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in “Resource Challenges and Constructions of Scarcity in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” ed. Ole Sparenberg and Matthias Heymann, special issue, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire 27, no. 3 (2020): 253–72. See also Nicolas Maughan, Alexei Kraikovski and Julia Lajus, “Introduction” to “Living Side by Side: The Water Environment, Technological Control and Urban Culture in Russian and Western History,” Water History 10, nos. 2–3 (2018): 133–40, and several papers in this issue.

Introduction 17

22. See Elena Kochetkova, “Ekologicheskaia kontroversa: Sovetskie inzhenery i biologicheskii metod ochistki promyshlennykh vod, 1950–60-e gg.,” in “The Green End to the Red Empire,” special issue, Ab Imperio 1 (2019): 153–80; and Andy Bruno, ed., “Studies of the Siberian Anthropocene,” special issue, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 48, no. 3 (2021); 49, no. 1 (2022). 23. “Sovetskoe znanie ob okruzhaiuschei srede,” special issue, Ural’skii istoricheskii vestnik 2, no. 75 (2022): 59–114; Anna Agafonova, “Sanitarnye popechitel’stva v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii,” in “Epidemii i golod v istorii Rossii,” special issue, Ural’skii istoricheskii vestnik 1, no. 70 (2021): 30–38; as well as several special issues of Vestnik Surgutskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta on the history of water (2021, no. 6 [75]), environmental aspects of agrarian history, urban history and history of industry (2018, no. 6 [57]), (2019, no. 1 [58]); and the environmental history of Russian regions (2017, no. 6 [51]). 24. See Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2012); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York, 2019); Josephson, Industrialized Nature; Moon, American Steppes; Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963 (New Haven, CT, 2014). 25. For works illustrating this broadening geographical range, see, for example, Nicholas Breyfogle, ed., Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh, 2018); David Moon, The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford, 2013); Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca, NY, 2018); Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (New York, 2019); Jennifer Keating, On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia (Oxford, 2022); Amato, Carpathians; Doubravka Olšáková, ed., In the Name of the Great Work. Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and Its Impact in Eastern Europe (New York, 2016). 26. H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (April 1904): 421–37. See also David Christian, “Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 173–211. 27. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see David Moon, “The Curious Case of the Marginalization or Distortion of Russian and Soviet Environmental History in Global Environmental Histories,” International Review of Environmental History 3, no. 2 (2017): 31–50. For a recent example of work on global environmental history by an Anglophone scholar that gives more attention to other parts of the world and uses examples from the Russian and Soviet states, based on mostly older works in English, mainly as negative examples, see Daniel R. Headrick, A Global Environmental History: Humans versus Nature (New York, 2020), 296–300, 446–48. 28. Sophie Pinkham, “Blood on the Ice,” New York Review of Books, 7 November 2019. 29. Peterson, Pipe Dreams. 30. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, eds., Nature’s End: History and the Environment (Basingstoke, 2009); Sverker Sörlin and Nina Wormbs, “Environing Technologies: A Theory of Making Environment,” History and Technology 34, no. 2 (2018): 101–25. 31. Alexei Kraikovski and Julia Lajus, “‘The Space of Blue and Gold’: The Nature and Environment of Solovki in History and Heritage,” in Moon et al., Place and Nature, 37–68.

18 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

32. Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus, and Denis J. B. Shaw, “Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (January 2015): 1–15. 33. Chu, Life of Permafrost, 20–21. 34. J. R. McNeill, “Introductory Remarks: The Anthropocene and the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 117–28, esp. p. 121; Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2003); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London, 2016). 35. This sort of approach to society was pioneered by Reginald Zelnik, Law & Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872 (Berkeley, 1995); and independently in Russia by Alsu Biktasheva, Kazanskie gubernatory v dialogakh vlastei: pervaia polovina XIX veka (Kazan’, 2008). 36. Nicholas Breyfogle, “Towards an Environmental History of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Eurasian Environments, 17. 37. Alfred Rieber, “Imperial Space,” in The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge, 2014); Mark Bassin, “Geographies of Imperial Identity,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Dominic Lieven (Cambridge, 2006). 38. Bruno, Nature of Soviet Power. 39. Douglas R. Weiner, “A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History,” Environmental History 10, no. 3 (July 2005): 404–20; 409. 40. Sörlin and Warde, Nature’s End. 41. The European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). 42. The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) and the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). 43. For example: Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus, and Denis J. B. Shaw, eds., “Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment”; Evtukhova et al., “‘Prirodnye resursy, landshafty i klimat’”; Devid Mun, “Rossiiskaia i sovetskaia ekologicheskaia istoriia v sovremennoi zapadnoi nauke,” in Rossiiskaia provintsiia kak sotsiokul’turnoe pole formirovaniia grazdanskoi i natsional’noi identichnosti: sbornik nauchnykh statei; Materialy VIII Mezhdunarodnykh Stakheevskikh chtenii, ed. I. V. Maslova et al. (Elabuga, 2017): 14–21. http://environmentalhistory.ru/moon. 44. Moon et al., Place and Nature. 45. Chu, Life of Permafrost, 19.

Bibliography Agafonova, Anna. “Sanitarnye popechitel’stva v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii.” In “Epidemii i golod v istorii Rossii,” special issue, Ural’skii istoricheskii vestnik 1, no. 70 (2021): 30–38. Aleksandrov, Daniil, Franz-Iozef Briuggemaier [Franz-Josef Brüggemeier], and Iuliia Laius [Julia Lajus], eds. Chelovek i priroda: ekologicheskaia istoriia. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v St. Petersburge, Aleteia, 2008. Amato, Anthony J. The Carpathians, the Hutsuls, and Ukraine: An Environmental History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Introduction 19

Arend, Jan. Rußlands Bodenkunde in der Welt. Eine ost-westliche Transfergeschichte, 1880– 1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Bassin, Mark. “Geographies of Imperial Identity.” In The Cambridge History of Russia, edited by Dominic Lieven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bayly, Christopher. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. Biktasheva, Alsu. Kazanskie gubernatory v dialogakh vlastei: pervaia polovina XIX veka. Kazan’: Ekspress-format, 2008. Breyfogle, Nicholas, ed. Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bruno, Andy. The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 635–50. Bruno, Andy, ed. “Studies of the Siberian Anthropocene,” special issue, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 48, no. 3 (2021); 49, no. 1 (2022). Cameron, Sarah. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Christian, David. “Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History.” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 173–211. Chu, Pey-Yi. The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Ely, Christopher. “Review Essay.” Slavic Review 81, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 187–94. Evtuhov, Catherine. “A ‘Complete’ Atlas of the Russian Empire.” In Picturing Russian Empire, edited by Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023. ———. “Philosophy and Environment.” Unpublished conference paper. See Evtukhova et al., “‘Prirodnye resursy, landshafty i klimat.’ ” ———. “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions: Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro-Environmental Issues.” In Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History, edited by Benno Warkentin. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. Evtukhova, Ketrin [Catherine Evtuhov], Elena Kochetkova, Iuliia Laius [Julia Lajus], Devid Mun [David Moon]. “Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia ‘Prirodnye resursy, landshafty i klimat v istorii Rossii i sopredelnykh stran,’ posviashchennaia 200-letiiu akademika A.F. Middendorfa.” Istoriko-biologicheskie issledovaniia 8, no. 2 (2016): 160–68. Fedotova, Anastasia, and Elena Korchmina. “Cattle Pasturing as a Traditional Form of Forest Use and Conflicts between Peasants and Forestry Administration in the Long Nineteenth Century (the Case of Białowieza Primeval Forest).” In “Reconfiguring Nature: Resource Security and the Limits of Expert Knowledge,” edited by Christian Kert and John Martin, special issue, Global Environment 13, no. 2 (2020): 525–54. Gordin, Michael. A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

20 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

Headrick, Daniel R. A Global Environmental History: Humans versus Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. IUSS Working Group WRB. World Reference Base for Soil Resources 2014, Update 2015. World Soil Resources Reports 106, FAO, Rome 2015. https://www.fao.org/3/i3794en/ I3794en.pdf. Jones, Ryan Tucker. “‘A Cruel Climate without Any Art’: European Natural History and the Northern Nature of the Other Pacific, 1740–1840.” In Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, 17–38. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013. ———. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741– 1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Josephson, Paul. Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002. Keating, Jennifer. On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Kirchoff, Astrid, and J. R. McNeill. Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in the Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Kivelson, Valerie A. Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in SeventeenthCentury Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Kochetkova, Elena. “Ekologicheskaia kontroversa: Sovetskie inzhenery i biologicheskii metod ochistki promyshlennykh vod, 1950–60-e gg.” In “The Green End to the Red Empire,” special issue, Ab Imperio 1 (2019): 153–80. Kraikovski, Alexei, and Julia Lajus. “‘The Space of Blue and Gold’: The Nature and Environment of Solovki in History and Heritage.” In Moon et al., Place and Nature, 37–68. Lajus, Julia. “Russian Environmental History: A Historiographical Review.” In The Great Convergence: Environmental Histories of BRICS, edited by S. Ravi Rajan and Lise Sedrez, 245–73. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018. Loskutova, Marina. “Quantifying Scarcity: Deforestation in the Upper Volga Region and Early Debates over Climate Change in Nineteenth-Century Russia.” In “Resource Challenges and Constructions of Scarcity in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” edited by Ole Sparenberg and Matthias Heymann, special issue, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire 27, no. 3 (2020): 253–72. Mackinder, H. J. “The Geographical Pivot of History.” Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (April 1904): 421–37. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso Books, 2016. Maughan, Nicolas, Alexei Kraikovski, and Julia Lajus. “Introduction” to “Living Side by Side: The Water Environment, Technological Control and Urban Culture in Russian and Western History.” Water History 10, nos. 2–3 (2018): 133–40. McNeill, J. R. “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History.” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 5–33. ———. “Introductory Remarks: The Anthropocene and the Eighteenth Century.” EighteenthCentury Studies 49, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 117–28. McNeill, J. R., and Corinna R. Unger, eds. Environmental Histories of the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Introduction 21

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Facing Too Large an Expanse.” In Visions from San Francisco Bay. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. Milov, L. V. Velikorusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998. Moon, David. The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s–1930s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ———. “The Curious Case of the Marginalization or Distortion of Russian and Soviet Environmental History in Global Environmental Histories.” International Review of Environmental History 3, no. 2 (2017): 31–50. ———. “Land and Environment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History, edited by Simon Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Moon, David, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova, eds. Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2021. Mun, Devid [David Moon]. “Rossiiskaia i sovetskaia ekologicheskaia istoriia v sovremennoi zapadnoi nauke.” In Rossiiskaia provintsiia kak sotsiokul’turnoe pole formirovaniia grazhdanskoi i natsional’noi identichnosti: sbornik nauchnykh statei; Materialy VIII Mezhdunarodnykh Stakheevskikh chtenii, edited by I. V. Maslova et al., 14–21. Elabuga: Elabuzhskii institute, 2017. http://environmentalhistory.ru/moon. Oldfield, Jonathan, Julia Lajus, and Denis J. B. Shaw. “Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia.” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (January 2015): 1–15. Oldfield, Jonathan, and Denis J. B. Shaw. The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Olšáková, Doubravka, ed. In the Name of the Great Work: Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and Its Impact in Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Parshev, A. P. Pochemu Rossiia ne Amerika: kniga dlia tekh, kto ostaetsia zdes’. Moscow: Forum, 2000. Peterson, Maya K. Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pinkham, Sophie. “Blood on the Ice.” New York Review of Books, 7 November 2019. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Old Regime. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. Rieber, Alfred. “Imperial Space.” In The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Roe, Alan D. Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Shaw, Denis J. B. “Mapmaking, Science and State Building in Russia before Peter the Great.” Journal of Historical Geography 31, no. 3 (2005): 409–29. Smith, Jenny Leigh. Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Sörlin, Sverker, and Paul Warde, eds. Nature’s End: History and the Environment. Basingstoke: Springer, 2009.

22 Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, David Moon

Sörlin, Sverker, and Nina Wormbs. “Environing Technologies: A Theory of Making Environment.” History and Technology 34, no. 2 (2018): 101–25. “Sovetskoe znanie ob okruzhaiuschei srede.” Special issue, Ural’skii istoricheskii vestnik 2, no. 75 (2022): 59–114. Voeikov, A. I. Snezhnyi pokrov, ego vliianie na pochvu, klimat i pogodu i sposoby issledovaniia. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo “Lan’,” 1889. Weiner, Douglas R. “A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History.” Environmental History 10, no. 3 (July 2005): 404–20. Zelnik, Reginald. Law & Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

/ PART I Industrialization and Its Environmental Contexts

/

CHAPTER 1

Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry of the White Sea Area in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

Introduction On 25 September 1576 (OS), Maksim, son of Efrem Mudko, a peasant from the small village of Poduzhemie, not far from the town of Kem’ on the western (Karelian) coast of the White Sea, sold his own quarter share of a saltproducing enterprise to the Solovetskii Monastery. Fedor, an elder at the monastery, paid ten silver rubles and compiled a detailed record of the deal, which included numerous obligations for the seller, formal confirmation from four witnesses, and the indication that the document was written by Bogdanets Nikitin, the deacon of Kem’.1 Several things are worth noting in connection to this document. First, the nature of the region itself played a significant role in the story. This region is traditionally known as the Russian North, the vast area to the north of European Russia that includes the lands around the White Sea and the basins of inflowing rivers such as the Northern Dvina and Onega.2 This territory is characterized by a severe climate, abundant water sources, and natural resources, especially fish, marine mammals, forests, and minerals. The last group includes salt found in both underground brine and marine water. When the Slavs came to the Russian North in the Middle Ages, they immediately sought to exploit this resource. Traditionally, the charter granted by Prince Sviatoslav Ol’govich to the Orthodox cathedral of St. Sophia of Novgorod in 1137 is viewed as the earliest written source that directly mentions the region’s salt-boiling facilities. In that era, Novgorod was the major metropolis of the Russian North.3 According to the charter, the cathedral had, among other privileges and taxes, the right to obtain “on the sea one puz from each salga or tsren,” which means a sack of salt estimated at sixteen or thirty-two kilograms from each salt-boiling

26 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

pot or pan.4 Therefore, since early times, the salt in the seawater and underground brine was among the most important natural resources of the area. Thus, the salt-boiling industry became one of the most important branches of the local economy, and one can easily find a vast literature dedicated to the subject. The history of the salt industry provides a deep insight into the complex, multifaceted interaction between humans and nature in this region. In this chapter, we will use sources related to the early modern era, when the Russian North was an important economic region of the Russian state. Arkhangel’sk, founded on the east coast of the White Sea in 1584, was the major port that connected Muscovy with Europe and became the dominant urban center of the area. The Northern Dvina and Sukhona Rivers formed the trade route that connected Central Russia with the White Sea (see Map 1.1). The salt was boiled out in numerous areas near the major sources of salt water. The coastal zone of the White Sea included several important centers of salt production, such as Una and Nenoksa, while salt production near the Sukhona and Northern Dvina Rivers was concentrated in the towns of Sol’ Vychegodskaia and Tot’ma.5 The total production of the salt industry of the Russian North in the seventeenth century is difficult to estimate, yet we can make general observations regarding commercial strategies. We can be certain that the salt produced in the White Sea area was first concentrated in the settlement of Kholmogory, a short distance upstream from Arkhangel’sk, and then transported further upstream along the Northern Dvina River to the city of Vologda, which served as a gateway between Central Russia and the North. From there, northern salt could be delivered further to the southwest or southeast. By contrast, entrepreneurs in the salt-producing centers of the Sukhona-Dvina region sold their salt locally and did not normally send much of it to Vologda. In sum, the document cited above demonstrates that the Solovetskii Monastery was particularly eager to control salt production, given that salt was one of the major natural resources in the vast Russian North, an area characterized by both a severe climate and problematic agriculture. The story thus reveals a particular strategy based on the economic importance of the environment; the role of salt and other elements of northern nature as active nonhuman participants of the story should not be underestimated. Indeed, aside from salt itself, many other natural features of the area played a significant role in its story, such as the abundance of timber for fuel or the proximity of watercourses as industrial resources available to local inhabitants. Second, the Nikitin document demonstrates the significant role played by monks in the history of the region. During the Middle Ages and the early modern era, the Russian North was colonized by peasant communities, and Orthodox monasteries played a special role in this regard, serving as administrative, economic, and cultural centers.6 Viewed from this perspective, the

Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry 27

Map 1.1. The Far North. Arkhangel’sk and monasteries. Map by Artem Gusak.

story of this small share in the salt-boiling pan was one episode in the larger process that Giles Fletcher, an observant Englishman, summarized in his wellknown account of his visit to Russia in 1588: the monks possessed “verie great” grounds and were “the greatest merchants in the whole country.”7 This is even more true for the Russian North. Indeed, early modern Russian monasteries actively and successfully purchased various productive sites, and the elder Fedor, along with Maksim Mudko, represented hundreds and thousands of other actors in this grandiose drama. Monasteries eventually became the major power in salt production and commerce in the Russian North, so much so that private producers could not successfully compete with them. Even the powerful Stroganov family gradually lost their position and had to move to the Urals, where they managed to build their famous commercial empire and became active in the colonization of Siberia.8

28 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

We see that the elder Fedor dealt with the peasant Maksim Mudko in a rather formal way. The agreement was recorded according to standard procedures, and this may have been one of the few episodes in Mudko’s life that was documented in bureaucratic paperwork. This small episode, therefore, demonstrates penetration of modern practices of control at the lower levels of society. Indeed, the sixteenth century was the time when the centralized state was interested in building a uniform system of control that could eventually become a basis for the reliable translation of administrative power from Moscow to the peripheries of its growing Eurasian empire.9 The monk, therefore, appears to embody modern managerial and organizational methods. Through these routine economic operations, he brought the local peasants from their eternal material life, to use Fernand Braudel’s term, into the new world of modernity. This episode embodies the complicated transformation of traditional production into industry. The notion of industrial development as a cyclical process, moving from emergence through consolidation to decline, along with the configuration of organizational structures and managerial practices inherent for each stage, is an essential component of the historic turn in organizational studies.10 In this chapter we will apply this concept to the history of the early modern Russian salt industry in order to discuss the links between the development of organizations and management and the transformation of natural resources, such as salt, timber, and iron, into natural capital. Scholarship on the Russian salt industry largely reflects the methodological split within the historiography of Russian social and economic development. Indeed, the historiography of salt history consists of three major research directions. First, a great deal of scholarship describes the commodification of resources. Second, some research has been done on the history of economic decision-making as social and cultural practice. Last but not least, researchers have studied major transformations in the entire economic system, in terms of dynamic interrelations between entrepreneurial social groups, including the state authorities. Each approach relies on its own methodological instruments, and it’s not easy to find the common ground for all this scholarly research. Quite noticeably, however, the concept of concentration is the central issue for Russian, and especially Soviet, authors who analyzed early modern salt extraction and commerce in Russia. Indeed, historians who have studied the emergence of large-scale capitalistic production in seventeenth-century Muscovy,11 the development of salt commerce as part of the growing Russian national market,12 the economic activities of the most influential salt producers and traders such as the Stroganov merchant family,13 and the monasteries of the Russian North14 have included observations of socioeconomic processes that we could call concentration. The big actors gradually increased their con-

Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry 29

trol over both production grounds and markets. In Soviet times, scholars described this process from the perspective of “class struggle,” focusing on the forced bankruptcy of small producers and traders (predominantly peasants and unprivileged merchants).15 However, we would argue that considering this process from a purely economic perspective inevitably leads to an oversimplified vision of a multifaceted problem. Some questions in regard to concentration arise even when it is viewed as the simple process of big actors increasing their economic power at the expense of minor producers. For instance, we do not know why those small producers gave up their shares of salt production and trade to big actors like monasteries. More or less by default we believe that they wanted to remain salt makers or salt traders, but was that the case in reality? The complex and growing economy of the Russian North offered many possible occupations, from marine harvesting to seasonal work in the city of Arkhangel’sk. Therefore, the fact of selling one’s share in a salt-producing enterprise by itself did not necessarily mean bankruptcy and vice versa: the purchaser of this share was not necessarily an oppressor and bloodsucker. We would argue for a more complex view of the process of concentration that transformed production into industry. Indeed, the purchase of a production site as such was not enough to create the new reality. As mentioned previously, the salt production enterprise served as a nexus between several natural phenomena. Therefore, the new owner faced the challenge of efficiently managing heterogeneous environmental factors into an inseparable entity. This result could only be achieved on the base of new knowledge, and therefore the concentration of property was accompanied by new managerial practices used to increase expertise. In this chapter we will consider this element of early modern industrial management, as exemplified by monastic salt production of the Russian North.

Organizational Skills and the Management of Expertise Eric Ash, who has analyzed the vast literature dedicated to studies in expertise and experience (SEE), notes that the very concept of early modern expertise is open to discussion. However, he argues, despite the complexity and confusion regarding expertise and experts in the early modern context, it can be described through the following five characteristics: 1. To be “expert” was to possess and control a body of specialized practical or productive knowledge, not readily available to everyone . . . 2. Expertise was usually based at least in part upon experience, acquired both in the learning and in the subsequent wielding of the knowledge in question . . .

30 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

3. Expertise involved the abstraction or distillation of theory from practice . . . 4. Experts should be distinguishable from common practitioners or artisans within a given field . . . 5. Experts did not exist without a sociopolitical context; expertise required some form of public acknowledgment, affirmation, and legitimation to make it real.16 However, this concept is predominantly applied to the history of early modern extractive industries (which includes salt, of course) in regard to specific technical skills. For instance, Ursula Klein and Emma Spary highlight the distance between “practical expertise and learned natural inquiries” that was filled by numerous links in the early modern period.17 Apparently they view expertise as a technical know-how developed “around the manufacture of materials” and linked to “chemical techniques such as distilling, smelting, or dissolving.”18 Vera Shirokova takes the same perspective in her analysis of Russian salt extraction techniques from brine boiling to rock-salt mining.19 We would argue, however, that the problem requires a much more complex perspective. We completely agree with Michael Mahoney, who notes that we will not be able to discuss expertise from a social perspective without paying special attention to the “problem of organizing eхpertise.”20 In fact, this concept refers to two aspects of activities related to the emergence of industry. Studying the history of Languedoc canal building in the South of France under the general supervision of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Mahoney observes the interrelations between Colbert, representing the higher authorities, and Pierre-Paul Riquet, a technical expert who was directly responsible for the construction of the canal. Mahoney concludes that “Colbert’s difficulty in finding expertise and in organizing it to accomplish his goals stands in some contrast to the apparent ease with which Riquet got the canal underway and maintained its relatively steady progress.”21 This observation is essential for our chapter. Indeed, it highlights both the importance of organizational skill as a specific form of early modern expertise and the importance of the “organization of expertise,” that is, the efficient efforts of the general manager to get the best experts in the necessary places and make them do their best for the success of the enterprise. Therefore, the organization and management of early modern industry, we argue, includes not only the physical concentration of production, on the one hand (traditionally described as “primitive accumulation”), but also, and perhaps foremost, the concentration and management of skillful staff, expertise of dealing with knowledgeable people, what we may label as the management of expertise of all sorts—from purely technical knowledge to managerial capacity.

Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry 31

This perspective is not completely new for early modern Russian economic history. Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, in his research dedicated to Dutch merchants on the Russian market in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, proposed a distinction between commercial knowledge and commercial information. He described commercial knowledge as a specific expertise of successful business that replaced commercial information (a very general understanding of the trade process) in the seventeenth-century United Provinces and became a major difference between the Dutch modern economy based on commercial knowledge and the premodern trade conducted by the Russians based on commercial information.22 However, the Russian approach to economic management and organization in the early modern era has not yet been thoroughly studied, and the same is true for the management of skilled personnel, which requires the development of an efficient system of interaction between the owners of industrial facilities and the technical and/or managerial experts able to provide satisfactory economic results in terms of production and financial benefits. Using historical sources on the early modern Russian salt industry, we will trace the concentration and management of all sorts of expertise that eventually transformed a simple combination of practical skills into solid and well-developed industrial know-how and led to the development of modern commerce and industrial entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire.

The Salt Industry of the Spaso-Prilutskii Monastery in the Seventeenth Century: General Overview and Sources This section is based predominantly on materials from the Spaso-Prilutskii Monastery (the Monastery of Our Savior on Priluka). It was founded in the fourteenth century on the bank of the Vologda River, near the town of Vologda, and became one of the key players in the so-called monastic colonization of the Russian North, which took place in the late fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The tsar and the local landowners granted vast land possessions to the monks. The monastery enjoyed significant taxation privileges and managed to build an economic empire based on agriculture, salt production, and interregional trade. The monastery quite intentionally concentrated salt-producing sites by obtaining grants from the authorities and purchasing shares from local peasants. By the end of the sixteenth century, the monks had appropriated enterprises in three centers of the region. Namely, the monastery operated saltworks or shares of saltworks in the areas of Tot’ma, Sol’ Vychegodskaia, and Una. Apart from their own enterprises, the monks also resold salt from grounds owned

32 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

by local peasants, and were thus influential in the salt commerce of the entire area. In total, the monastery delivered significant consignments of salt to Vologda annually, and was one of the most important players in this market. For instance, in 1634 the monks offered a total of about three hundred tons of salt, and were thus the second biggest seller after Solovetskii Monastery, undoubtedly the richest monastery of the Russian North and the dominant power in salt commerce.23 As a result, the Spaso-Prilutskii Monastery received the lion’s share of budget revenues from the salt trade,24 and we may conclude that the monks were quite successful in their commodification of this natural resource. By the seventeenth century, the monastery possessed an impressive cloister with a powerful fortress and the magnificent stone-built Cathedral of the Savior. The monastery was thus very influential on the early modern salt market of the Russian North. Documents of monastic salt-producing enterprises and commercial units responsible for selling salt to merchants and consumers provide a detailed account of the organization and management of expertise, which allows us to analyze this aspect of early modern Russian organizational history. Looking at the monastery’s system of management, as reflected in the monastic documents, we see that the monks controlled the complete cycle of salt production. In other words, they organized and managed the provision of resources, transportation, and sales. Therefore, all stages of the industrial salt cycle were united under the specific skill we would label as “managerial expertise.” Indeed, the monks were apparently quite efficient in their collective efforts to make the salt industry as profitable as possible and to maximize opportunities provided by both the local environment and invited experts. In the following paragraphs we will consider in more detail the monks’ organizational and managerial skills at all stages of industry and commerce so as to establish the link between the successful management of all kinds of knowledge and commercial success. Viewed from this perspective, each stage of salt production and commerce represented critical points of organizational and/ or technical expertise concentration, requiring the monks to perform specific management activities. Therefore, we will expand our narrative according to the logic of the industrial cycle—from production to commerce—in order to demonstrate the role of both management and managerial skills in the monastery’s economic success. Even though the process of salt production was similar in all salt-producing areas, the natural conditions were quite different, leading to diverse technological cycles. In Sol’ Vychegodskaia, the cycle of works depended on the time that waters regularly and predictably rose and fell in the Vychegda River and its tributaries, influencing also groundwater. During spring flooding, the salt brine became very weak, so the salt-boiling sites (known as varnitsa) were

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stopped from mid- to late April until early to mid-July. The annual cycle was divided into periods called “cooking weeks,” each consisting of ten to fourteen days. As a result, one varnitsa (salt-boiling enterprise) worked twenty to twenty-one “cooking weeks” a year. In the 1640s, the monastery had two varnitsy, so they worked forty to forty-two weeks a year. The weeks were usually counted starting from the new lighting of a fire in a stove after the flooding period. Sometimes the annual cycle was interrupted by certain circumstances, for example, when the supreme monastic authorities unexpectedly replaced the elder who directed the service in winter, not in autumn as was normal. Overall the office work cycle was subordinated to production: thus, until the second half of the century, the credit and debit books of the given trade began either in winter, upon the arrival of the new treasurer in charge of trade, or with the beginning of a broth. In other words, the very chronology of monastic paperwork depended more on natural cycles than on the formal calendar established by church or state authorities. In the settlement of Una, located on the “mountain” above the river, brine strength apparently did not depend much on the spring rise of water, so the cycle of boiling salt was not interrupted, and office work was subject to the calendar year and began on September 1. To provide the varnitsa with fuel, which constituted the largest part of all expenses for salt production, as noted by Prokof ’eva,25 monasteries usually purchased forest land near the varnitsa. There were also such possessions in Una. But, in Sol’ Vychegodskaia, the monastery, apparently, did not acquire and consolidate the forest land, so the monks had to buy firewood for the varnitsa on the market. Nevertheless, our calculations demonstrate that the average cost of firewood harvested in the forest was higher than the average cost of firewood purchased at the market on the Vychegda. For instance, in Sol’ Vychegodskaia, buying and chopping one square sazhen of firewood cost 0.15–0.17 rubles, and in Una (purchase and section)—0.16–0.19 rubles. If we compare the productivity of these two salt enterprises, then one Vychegodsk varnitsa could produce 5,000–5,500 poods of salt for an incomplete year while in the Una, working all year round—7,000–8,000 poods.26 Una was an exclusively industrial complex; all the salt boiled there was supplied to the Vologda market. The Sol’ Vychegodskaia service combined a production complex with a trading yard, since more than half of the salt boiled there was sold on the local market; only one, apparently small, part was sent to Vologda.

Extraction: Fuel and the Expertise of Timber Production Scholars have historically studied this stage of salt production in terms of the development of technical skills. The process started with the extraction of raw materials. On all the salt production sites controlled by the monastery, salt

34 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

was boiled out of underground brine, which meant the need for salt wells. Drilling technology, which had emerged between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, probably in Tot’ma, gradually spread throughout all of the Russian North by the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century, this drilling technology was described in a handwritten instruction known to us in its seventeenth-century copy. The families of drillers kept these secrets and passed them from father to son. Semen Sablia, the author of this instruction, embodied this early modern technical expert: he accumulated and recorded the experience of several generations of practitioners.27 The next step was the construction and maintenance of the salt-boiling enterprise. The building was a simple log cabin; however, the oven and the iron pan for boiling brine, known in Russian as tsren, required qualified blacksmiths to provide flat sheets of cast iron and assemble them with thousands of rivets. Obtaining iron had always been very important for the salt-boiling industry. It was delivered to the Russian North from several locations inside Russia. Additionally, the region received a certain share of imported Swedish iron transported through Novgorod.28 However, the tsyrenshchiki (the tsren makers), the experts who assembled the pans, were local, since this work was completed directly on site.29 Moreover, the monks established strong links with such experts. For instance, in the 1640s, the master of salt frying-pan repair was mentioned in the documents of the monastery for a decade: he received a large salary of about ten to twelve rubles per year and apparently managed to accumulate some capital. In the 1690s, his grandson, a merchant, lent money to the monastery elders.30 The process of production consisted of slowly boiling the brine while collecting the salt crystals, which were dried, packed, and then stored until the time came to transport the commodity to the market. Almost all scholarship on the Russian salt-boiling industry describes the drilling and boiling processes as well as the necessary technical skills. Brine boiling itself constituted the most significant part of the industry, and thus the salt boilers’ expertise has been more extensively studied than any other technical processes involved in early modern salt production, both in Russia and internationally.31 However, we would argue for a more detailed examination of the managerial practices required to make physical precipitation an integral part of a profitable industry. Indeed, good skill in management and detailed knowledge of decision-making mechanisms was necessary to organize properly the supply of all the natural elements used in salt boiling. The monastic documents demonstrate that the skills of the salt-cooking professionals could only be efficient with the support from other qualified specialists, such as experts in preparing and delivering firewood for fuel, and moreover, it was important to make all these people work in strict coordination. Time and space, quantity

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and quality all mattered. In this section, we will discuss the management of fuel in more detail. This element of salt extraction has been insufficiently examined by scholars. The authors of existing works predominantly limit themselves to a brief mention of the high demand for firewood, which resulted in significant deforestation in the vicinity of the salt-boiling enterprises.32 However, we believe the problem of fuel to be far more complex, which we will demonstrate with documents from the monastic enterprises in Una, Tot’ma, and Sol’ Vychegodskaia.33 Traditional salt production was very demanding from the perspective of energy consumption: it took up to 0.03–0.04 cubic meters of wood for cooking 1 pood, which was about 0.006 hectares of the forest. Each salt enterprise cooked about 5,000 poods of salt per year, which meant felling about 28–30 hectares of forest. A specific type of timber was used for firewood. It was called miandach in the Vychegda region: a pine tree grown in a wetland, the diameter of which did not exceed 0.15 cubic meters, with loose wood. There is almost no information on the characteristics of firewood in the Una region, but it is known that harvesting was done at high elevations where the wood was denser, and calculations show a higher calorific value of this fuel (with all reservations, also associated with the difference in the saturation of brine). What is important for us is that first the firewood had to be turned into a resource to be delivered to the salt-producing site. The three salt enterprises of the monastery approached this in different ways. In addition, by the end of the seventeenth century, they were undergoing changes that reflected shifting economic conditions. As mentioned earlier, in Tot’ma and Una the monastery had its own forest land (typical for the monastic salt complex), so their task was to hire workers and horses for harvesting and then to melt the wood using dams near the salt complex. However, the Sol’ Vychegodskaia monastery did not have its own forest. Here the supply of firewood was in the hands of the local population—townspeople or peasants—whose villages were located along the Vychegda River and its tributary, the Viled’ River. We cannot confidently state who was directly involved in cutting wood. They were probably the same wage earners as in Una. The role of suppliers was to organize the whole chain: cutting down the trees, tying the wood onto rafts, rafting down the river, and finding a buyer for the firewood. After the purchase, the rafts were brought ashore, cut into logs, and piled near the salt-boiling enterprise. If the price of the raft fluctuated around 0.8–1.2 rubles, then its cutting cost as much as 0.2 rubles. This leads to an important question: how far from the river could the logging sites be located so as to justify the costs of this production? In his excellent study of the Solovetskii Monastery economy, Aleksandr Savich describes a curious situation when the monks decided to abandon production at some of their salt-producing complexes, arguing that the forest was too far away.34 So, not every forest was a potential resource: it was important to choose one

36 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

that would not require too much effort.35 The manager himself needed specific skills to evaluate the situation and then bring diverse experts together in order to achieve a result. The manager’s strategy had to include attention both to the waterways, which allowed for communication, and to the forest areas in order to prevent unexpected financial loss or logistical problems.

Transportation and Shipping Expertise In contrast to the monastery’s agricultural lands, which were predominantly concentrated around the town of Vologda, the salt-producing complexes of the Spaso-Prilutskii Monastery were scattered throughout the Russian North. The settlement of Una, situated to the northwest of Arkhangel’sk in the coastal zone of the White Sea, was the most northern part of the monastic salt-producing empire. The grounds in Tot’ma and Sol’ Vychegodskaia were situated much closer to the monastery itself, along the Sukhona and Northern Dvina Rivers. This discontinuity created problems that could only resolved by using water systems, both rivers and coastline, which constituted one of the main resources of this region. The Spaso-Prilutskii Monastery perfectly exemplifies such a transportation network: the Sukhona-Dvina riverine transportation system connected the monastery near Vologda with its possessions. The town of Tot’ma could be reached directly by moving downstream from the monastery along the Vologda River and then the Sukhona River. The town of Sol’ Vychegodskaia required a further trip downstream the Sukhona to the Northern Dvina and then a short way upstream on the Vychegda River (a tributary of the Northern Dvina). Kholmogory, where large batches of salt came from all over the White Sea area, could be reached by moving downstream on the Northern Dvina. The trip to Una included the entire river to the very mouth and a segment of sea along the coast of the White Sea. The headwaters of the Sukhona River, moreover, opened the way to the important regional salt market in the village of Kubenskoe Zaozerie. Similar systems can be traced to other northern monasteries, for example, from the Solovetskie Islands to Kem’, Kola, the Murman coast, Onega, the north of the mouth of Northern Dvina River, and further to Vologda. Therefore, management and control over this system provided a backbone for the entire industry, which included a regular transportation cycle of visits to the North and return voyages to Vologda, both for the resale of cheap salt purchased in Kholmogory and for the sale of their own salt production. The monks used every opportunity to make this commercial transportation even more profitable. For instance, they invested a lot of effort into eliminating tax from salt deliveries. The first charter issued by Grand Duke Vasilii III in the 1530s granted the monastery the right of duty-free transportation of 7,000 poods (about 112 metric tons) of salt from Kholmogory to Vologda. At the end

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of the sixteenth century, the amount of salt increased to 14,000 poods (about 230 metric tons), and in the next century the monastery regularly received confirmation of this benefit. After that, the salt was packed in big sacks containing 400 to 500 kilograms and delivered to various markets. Most of the salt was transported by water, with the sacks loaded onto vessels. Water transportation required the expertise of people we would generally call “navigators”: the monastic documents mention steersmen (kormshchiki), pilots (nosniki), and other professionals needed to move the vessels upstream or downstream along the powerful and unpredictable rivers of the Russian North and the coastal waters of the White Sea.36 However, this movement along the waterways required more concentration of expertise than just the navigators. Indeed, shipbuilding itself was an economic sphere that involved a variety of highly qualified professionals from carpenters to blacksmiths.37 The monastery had strong links with these specialists: the names of steersmen and pilots are repeated in the books of ship traffic for different years, which means that the monks built a relatively stable network of preferred experts. For example, Ivan Kulebiakin, a pilot of the lower Sukhona, accompanied the monastery’s ships during the years 1607–14, while a steersman named Mark from Vologda led the monastery’s ships to Kholmogory and back, and then died during the ship’s journey in 1618.38 In some cases, such cooperation meant that a layman taking a vow at the monastery continued to work in his field of specialty. For instance, Vologda ship owner Lazar from the Alachugin family (1630–40s) became a monastic ship foreman, known as Lavrentii Alachugin in the 1650s (when we analyze monastic and secular documents, we find such instances of the family name after the monk’s name).39 To cite another example, we found in the salt enterprise books the name Bogdashka Solov’ev, a monastery servant during the first quarter of the seventeenth century: he accompanied the elder Arsenii, who was the head of several salt services (in Tot’ma, Sol’ Vychegodskaia, Una, and again Tot’ma). In the books of the 1640s, we found the elder Manasiia Soloviev, who was an assistant and the head elder for the Una and Sol’ Vychegodskaia salt services. Since “Bogdashka” and “Bogdan” are not Christian names, and both refer to the circumstance of his birth (Bogom dannyi means “He who has been given by God”), we can assume that these records refer to the same person. So his expertise was utilized again after he took his monastic vows.40

Trade and Commercial Expertise Once the vessels arrived at the market city, this marked a new “commercial” stage. The salt was unloaded and stored until the buyer came to collect it. This

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stage seems to have no connection to technical expertise. However, record keeping combined with the use of weighing scales was not very common for seventeenth-century Russia, and the monks were considered to be the best experts in this arena.41 Moreover, the monks developed new techniques for commercial operations that have been ignored by scholars but are decisively important for the emergence of the early modern Russian economy based on the extraction and commodification of natural resources. Indeed, in the end, the key to the entire story is that the monks in reality did not need salt—they wanted silver. In other words, they were only interested in the underground brine of the Russian North because of the silver it would bring them; it is thus crucial to understand their way of dealing with money. The history of financial management in early modern Russia has already been extensively studied. The existing scholarship can be roughly divided into several groups. First of all, we find works dedicated to coins as the physical embodiment of money. Alla Mel’nikova, the leader of this approach, analyzed the development of the Russian financial system based on governmental control of precious metals from abroad and coin production.42 A second approach emphasizes the question of credit. These scholars consider this economic activity as a necessary stage before the appearance of modern banking and the specific financial document known in Muscovy as a kabala—a debenture reflecting simple credit relations. In this regard, international scholarship focuses on the question of credit in Russia in connection with European commercial expansion to the Russian market. For instance, Jarmo Kotilaine, in his study of seventeenth-century Russian mercantilism, mentions that foreigners dominated Russian trade because “import goods were almost invariably sold to Russians at least in part on credit, against future deliveries of Muscovite wares. The most typical kind was so-called kabala credit, which tended to tie poorer and middling Russian merchants into quasi-permanent supply networks.”43 Erika Monahan emphasizes that Western credit institutions allowed European merchants to dominate, because they were more efficient “than the ad hoc practices Russian merchants knew.”44 Russian scholarship on this topic is more abundant and diverse. Numerous Russian studies discuss the legal framework of kabala and include a detailed analysis of the form.45 Another trend, which is relatively new and very promising, focuses directly on the historical practices of financial operations. Monastic sources are of special importance for this research. We completely support the approach outlined by Zoia Dmitrieva and her coauthors, which views the monasteries as key actors of credit development in early modern Russia.46 Below we will consider in detail the credit operations the monks used in the salt market so as to reconstruct the financial practices related to the exploitation of this resource. The monks often used credit while selling salt. The pe-

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riod 1646–48, when the government imposed high taxes on the salt trade and thus caused prices to increase, became a good time for credit operations. The monks of Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery offered two options to potential buyers. The merchant could directly petition the local service, sign a kabala, and get the commodity. For instance, Ivan, son of Severian Kargopolets from Volok Slavenskii, did this on 15 December 1647 to obtain a sack (rogozha) of salt (about five hundred kilograms) from the Vologda service. Two days later a group of peasants from the vicinity of Karachev (Sapun and the sons of Timofei Priezzhii [Sapun i Priezzhego Timofeevy deti]) used another option. They petitioned the monastery directly, signed a kabala there, and received an order signed by the monastic authorities. After presenting this document to the Vologda service, they obtained their sack of salt.47 Ivan, son of Dei Vesinskii from Rostov District, undertook an even more complicated operation. He got a consignment of salt for 4 rubles and 24 altyns, signed a kabala, and “transferred this debt to Bulat, son of Arefa Nefediev also from Rostov. These 4 rubles are recorded in the Bulat kabala with his own debt, and those 24 altyns were also to be collected from Bulat according to the same kabala.”48 The management of the Spaso-Prilutskii monastery provides another example of the use of the kabala. For instance, in 1661, Samoila, son of Dementii Timofeev, received 1.5 rubles from the monastic elders and signed a kabala. According to this document, he undertook the obligation to cut and deliver 10 sazhens49 of pine firewood to the varnitsa.50 The account books mention many occasions of that kind. The monks also used kabala operations while dealing with the state authorities. In fact, while in Moscow, the monastery staff often had to use the services of familiar merchants in order to pay duties. Then they had to sign a kabala for those amounts. In 1647–48 the monastic servant Zhdan Obrosimov and other monastery clerks used this mechanism several times. Quite significantly, according to signed documents, the monastic servants promised to “pay that money on Vologda at the Prilutskii monastery, which Ivan will send with a loan note.”51 In other words, the creditor could get his money back not from Zhdan (who obviously had no access to money at all) but directly from the monastery in Vologda. Moreover, he could either come himself or send an attorney. To sum up, we see a diverse system of payments and money transfers, which requires further discussion. At first glance, the issue of payments does not seem to be complicated. The market appears to be the simplest place of exchange, when the buyer took the commodity and gave the agreed amount of silver coins to the seller. All other operations involving the commodity and the financial documents are normally considered as a sort of credit. However, the monastic documents demonstrate that the reality could be much more complicated.

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First of all, the transportation of physical money could be an uneasy and rather expensive operation. For instance, in September 1614 the monks paid 30 altyn (90 kopecks) for the transportation of 30 silver rubles from Sol’ Vychegodskaia to Moscow in order to pay special taxes.52 In January 1615, they paid 0.36 rubles for the transportation of 11.1 rubles in taxes, and this additional payment was recorded in the tax book.53 Therefore, the cost of transporting 1 silver ruble between Sol’ Vychegodskaia and Moscow in the early seventeenth century was 1 altyn (3 kopecks). In other words, this involves a 3 percent operational cost. Meanwhile, the complex and diverse economy of the monasteries had significant financial turnover. While paying and receiving thousands of rubles exclusively in cash, the monks could spend hundreds of rubles for the transportation of silver. Second, significant experience in credit operations eventually provided the basis for expertise in financial management. While dealing with contractors through credits, the monasteries inevitably constructed an entire system of financial services. It was far more complicated than one would expect based on available sources, without taking into consideration financial practices that can be derived from the records of market operations. From this perspective, kabala itself appears to be the term for a diverse group of financial documents. Ivan Kargopolets used such a document as a simple debenture. For Ivan Vesinskii, a kabala worked as a bill of exchange. For Samoila Timofeev, it was a contract to supply firewood to the varnitsa. Finally, Zhdan Obrosimov used a kabala as a payment check, with the monastery acting as a bank. In our view, this financial expertise, when the monasteries used kabala documents not only to give simple credits but also to organize what we could now call cashless payments and transfers, was the most important achievement of these seventeenth-century monks, whose financial savvy has been significantly understudied. From our perspective, however, the most important aspect of these financial operations is the central role played by managerial expertise in the transformation of natural materials into silver. This meant that the monks viewed the salt-boiling enterprises as facilities for obtaining silver rather than for salt as such. Therefore, the monks successfully used their managerial expertise to obtain silver from salt-containing grounds, which significantly transformed domestic production into a market-oriented industry.

Conclusion By focusing on expertise concentration, we can better understand the understudied aspects of the commodification (or, perhaps, resourcification) of nature in the early modern era. Indeed, the role of expertise in the transformation of

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rich underground brine deposits into an important natural local resource has predominantly been considered from a technical perspective in the literature dedicated to the history of the salt production in the Russian North.54 These researchers focus on skills related to the drilling of wells or to the construction and operation of salt-boiling enterprises. Yet, this sort of expertise in reality had surprisingly little influence on the commodification of natural objects. While it shaped the ability of local inhabitants to derive salt from underground saltwater, it tells us nothing about the scale, intensiveness, and demand of this operation. These aspects can only be understood by studying the organization and management skills in all relevant spheres, including transportation and marketing. In our view, management expertise regulates the growth of those communities trying to commodify this resource. The extension of the market increased the number of direct consumers. Due to the development of riverine transportation, northern salt became a regular part of life for people in Central Russia. Moreover, development of management skills supported the complex links between the branches of the northern economy, providing, for instance, the increasing demand for salt from the growing fisheries of the White and Barents Sea areas. Further, the concentration of managerial expertise through commercialization made salt an essential component of the economic life of numerous groups, thus providing an array of services to the monks as industry organizers. This expertise consisted of many organizational innovations, and attracting qualified personnel was an important part of it. Indeed, management provided jobs to experts in construction and repair of salt-making equipment, boatmen, trade agents, financial operators, taxation officials, and many others. In sum, we can conclude that the concentration of expertise that made the monks quite efficient in the resourcification of the nature of the Russian North allowed them to act as key economic agents in the area. On the other hand, the process of concentration, we argue, increased rather than decreased the number of economic actors involved in commodification. Small salt producers were not necessarily excluded from this process when their enterprises came to the hands of the monasteries, but the system of links between them and the natural resource was transformed.

Alexei Kraikovski is a research fellow at the Department of Economics, University of Genoa, Italy; and formerly associate professor in the Department of History and senior research fellow at the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg.

42 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

Margarita Dadykina is associate professor in the Department of History and senior research fellow at the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg.

Notes 1. Irina Liberzon, ed., Akty Solovetskogo monastyria, 1572–1584 (Leningrad, 1990), 88. 2. Galina Demchuk, Zemel’nyi stroi v Dvinskom uezde v XVII veke (Ekaterinburg, 2002). 3. Henrik Birnbaum, Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State (Bloomington, IN, 1981). 4. Serafim Iushkov, ed., Pamiatniki russkogo prava (Moscow, 1953), 2:117–19. 5. Aleksei Kraikovskii, “The Main Centers of the Salt Trade in Northern Russia (Pomorye) in the 17th c.,” in Investitionen im Salinenwesen und Salzbergbau: Globale Rahmenbedingungen, regionale Auswirkungen, verbliebene Monumente; internationale Tagung am Lehrstuhl für Bauaufnahme und Baudenkmalpflege, ed. Rudolf Palme (Weimar, 2002), 276–79. 6. Sergei Nikonov, “Osvoenie poberezh’ia Barentseva moria monastyriami pomor’ia vo vtoroi polovine XVI–XVII v.,” Rossiiskaia istoriia 2 (2016): 35–42; Julia Lajus, “Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier,” in Cultivating the Colony: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, ed. Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund (Athens, OH, 2011), 164–90; Ernst Benz, The Eastern Orthodox Church, Its Thought and Life (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009); Matvei Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii s drevneishikh vremen i do XX veka (Moscow, 1996); Alexei Kraikovski, Margarita Dadykina, Zoya Dmitrieva, and Julia Lajus, “Between Piety and Productivity: Monastic Fisheries of the White and Barents Sea in the 16th– 18th Centuries,” Journal of the North Atlantic 41 (2020): 1–21. 7. Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth. Or Maner of Gouernement of the Russe Emperour (London, 1591), 88. 8. W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (Ithaca, NY, 2007), 36–43. 9. Mikhail Krom, “Gosudarstvo rannego Novogo vremeni: obshcheevropeiskaia model’ i regional’nye razlichiia,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 4 (2016): 13. 10. David Kirsh, Mahka Moeen, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, “Historicism and Industry Emergence: Industry Knowledge from Pre-emergence to Stylized Fact,” in Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, ed. Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani (Oxford, 2014): 221. 11. Elena Zaozerskaia, U istokov krupnogo proizvodstva v russkoi promyshlennosti XVI– XVII vekov: K voprosu o genezise kapitalizma v Rossii (Moscow, 1970); Nikolai Ustiugov, Solevarennaia promyshlennost’ Soli Kamskoi v XVII veke (k voprosu o genezise kapitalisticheskikh otnoshenii v russkoi promyshlennosti) (Moscow, 1957). 12. Ekaterina Frantsuzova, “Torgovlia sol’iu v Vologde v XVI veke,” in Torgovlia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo v Rossii v XVI–XVIII vv.: sbornik materialov nauchnoi konferentsii, ed. Aleksei Razdorskii, Andrei Iurasov, and Andrei Pavlov (St. Petersburg, 2001), 20–24.

Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry 43

13. Andrei Vvedenskii, Dom Stroganovykh v XVI–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1962). 14. Vladimir Ivanov, Monastyri i monastyrskie krest’iane Pomor’ia v XVI–XVII vekakh: Mekhanizm stanovleniia krepostnogo prava (St. Petersburg, 2007). 15. Aleksandr Borisov, Khoziaistvo Solovetskogo monastyria i bor’ba krest’ian s severnymi monastyriami v XVI–XVII vekakh (Petrozavodsk, 1966). 16. Eric H. Ash, “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State,” Osiris 25, no. 1 (2010): 5–9. 17. Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, “Introduction: Why Materials?” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary (Chicago, 2010), 2. 18. Klein and Spary, “Introduction,” 6. 19. Vera Shirokova, “Solianye promysly Rossii,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 3 (2005): 47–56. 20. Michael S. Mahoney, “Organizing Expertise: Engineering and Public Works under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 1662–83,” Osiris 25 no. 1 (2010): 153. 21. Mahoney, “Organizing Expertise,” 169. 22. Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, “Gollandskaia sistema torgovli i russkii rynok v 1560–1760 gg.,” in Torgovliia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo v Rossii v XVI–XIX vv., ed. Aleksei Razdorskii et al., (Kursk, 2009), 38–42. 23. Liudmila Prokof ’eva, Votchinnoe khoziaistvo v XVII veke: po materialam Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria (Moscow, 1959); Aleksandr Savich, Solovetskaia votchina XV– XVII v.: opyt izucheniia khoziaistva i sotsial’nykh otnoshenii na krainem russkom severe v drevnei Rusi (Perm’, 1927); Aleksei Kraikovskii, “O sopostavimosti dannykh tamozhennykh i monastyrskikh prikhodnykh knig XVII v. na primere tamozhennoi knigi Vologdy i prikhodnoi knigi Vologodskoi sluzhby Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria 1634/35,” in Torgovlia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo, ed. Razdorskii, Iurasov, and Pavlov (St. Petersburg, 2001), 24–29; Kraikovski, “Main Centers of the Salt Trade”; Margarita Dadykina, “Knigi razdachi starcheskogo plat’ia Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria,” in Vspomogatel’nye istoricheskie distsipliny i istochnikovedenie: sovremennye issledovaniia i perspektivy razvitiia, ed. Iu. Shustova (Moscow, 2015), 178–80; Margarita Dadykina, “Managing Space: The Structure and Organisation of the Communication System in the Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery (16th–17th Centuries),” Quaestio Rossica no. 3 (2016): 123–40; Margarita Dadykina, “Knigi 1640-x gg. Sol’vychegodskogo solianogo promysla Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria: kodikologicheskoe issledovanie,” Istoriia 8, no. 5 (2017): 59. 24. Prokof ’eva, Votchinnoe khoziaistvo, table VI. 25. Prokof ’eva, Votchinnoe khoziaistvo, 61. 26. A pood is 16.38 kilograms. 27. Petr Kolesnikov, “Pervoe inzhenernoe nastavlenie po glubinnomu bureniiu skvazhin,” in Problemy istorii i istochnikovedeniia istorii Evropeiskogo Severa, ed. Aleksandr Kamkin, Arkadii Komissarenko, Fedor Konovalov, and Vasilii Sudakov (Vologda, 1992), 189–202. 28. Kseniia Serbina, Krest’ianskaia zhelezodelatel’naia promyshlennost’ Severo-Zapadnoi Rossii XVI-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Leningrad, 1971), 179–80. 29. Vvedenskii, Dom Stroganovykh, 169. 30. Dadykina, “Knigi 1640-x gg.”

44 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

31. Zaozerskaia, U istokov krupnogo proizvodstva, 197; Ustiugov, Solevarennaia promyshlennost’. 32. Prokof ’eva, Votchinnoe khoziaistvo. 33. Calculations are based on archival sources: SPbII RAN, f. 271, op. 2, d. 164, 166, 172– 73, 176, 193, 205, 214; OPI GIM, f. 61, op. 1, d. 20–21; RGADA, f. 196, op. 1, d. 46, 96. 34. Savich, Solovetskaia votchina. 35. The same criteria obtained for the manufacture of iron using timber resources in the eighteenth century. See chapter 2. 36. Dadykina, “Managing Space,” 132–33. 37. Alexei Kraikovski, “‘The Sea on One Side, Trouble on the Other’: Russian Marine Resource Use before Peter the Great,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (2015): 46–50. 38. Dadykina, “Managing Space,” 133. 39. Dadykina, “Knigi razdachi starcheskogo plat’ia,” 385; Dadykina, “Knigi 1640-x gg.” 40. See SPbII RAN, f. 271, op. 2, d. 60–61, 64–65; RGADA, f. 196, op. 1, d. 8. 41. Ivanov, Monastyri i monastyrskie krest’iane. 42. Alla Mel’nikova, Russkie monety ot Ivana Groznogo do Petra Pervogo (istoriia russkoi denezhnoi sistemy s 1533 po 1682 god) (Moscow, 1982). 43. Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe, eds., Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia (New York, 2004), 167. 44. Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca, NY, 2016), 348. 45. A. S. Lappo-Danilevskii, “Sluzhilye kabaly pozdneishego tipa,” in Sbornik statei, posviashchennykh Vasiliiu Osipovichu Kliuchevskomu ego uchenikami, druz’iami i pochitateliami ko dniu tridtsatiletiia ego professorskoi deiatel’nosti v Moskovskom Universitete (Moscow, 1909); M. A. D’iakonov, “K voprosu o krest’ianskoi poriadnoi zapisi i sluzhiloi kabale,” in Sbornik statei, posviashchennykh Vasiliiu Osipovichu Kliuchevskomu; V. G. Geiman, “Neskol’ko novykh dokumentov, kasaiushchikhsia istorii sel’skogo naseleniia Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVI stoletiia,” in Sbornik Rossiiskoi publichnoi biblioteki. Tom 2. Materialy i issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1924), 1:267–94; V. M. Paneiakh, “K voprosu o tak nazyvaemykh derevenskikh sluzhilykh kabalakh SpasoPrilutskogo monastyria,” Problemy istochnikovedeniia 5 (1956): 210–30; S. M. Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekogo istochnika: akty X–XVI vv (Moscow, 1996). 46. Zoia Dmitrieva, Margarita Dadykina, and Aleksandr Bugrov, “Kreditnye otnosheniia v Moskovskom tsarstve XVI–XVII vv.: monastyri i kreditnye operatsii; Predprinimatel’skaia kul’tura,” in Kredit i banki v Rossii do nachala XX veka: Sankt-Peterburg i Moskva, ed. Boris Anan’ich (St. Petersburg, 2005), 18–37. See also Vladimir Ivanov, Bukhgalterskii uchet v Rossii XVI–XVII vekov: istoriko-istochnikovedcheskoe issledovanie monastyrskikh prikhodo-raskhodnykh knig (St. Petersburg, 2005). 47. RGADA, f. 1441, op. 1, d. 1441, l. 56 ob.-57, 59. 48. RGADA, f. 1441, op. 1, d. 1441, l. 55–55 ob. 49. 1 cubic sazhen = 2.13 × 2.13 × 2.13 meters, which is about 9.7 cubic meters. 50. Margarita Dadykina, Kabaly Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria vtoroi poloviny XVI–XVII v.: issledovanie, teksty (Moscow, 2011), 223. 51. Dadykina, Kabaly, 180–86. 52. SPbII RAN, f. 271, op. 2, d. 65, l. 5 ob.

Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry 45

53. SPbII RAN, f. 271, op. 2, d. 65, l. 12, see also l. 15. 54. Savich, Solovetskaia votchina; Prokof ’eva, Votchinnoe khoziaistvo; Shirokova, “Solianye promysly Rossii”; Ustiugov, Solevarennaia promyshlennost’.

Bibliography Ash, Eric H. “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State.” Osiris 25, no. 1 (2010): 1–24. Benz, Ernst. The Eastern Orthodox Church, Its Thought and Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2009. Birnbaum, Henrik. Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 1981. Borisov, Aleksandr. Khoziaistvo Solovetskogo monastyria i bor’ba krest’ian s severnymi monastyriami v XVI–XVII vekakh. Petrozavodsk: Karel’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1966. Dadykina, Margarita. Kabaly Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria vtoroi poloviny XVI–XVII v.: Issledovanie, teksty. Moscow: Al’ians-Arkheo, 2011. ———. “Knigi 1640-x gg. Sol’vychegodskogo solianogo promysla Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria: kodikologicheskoe issledovanie.” Istoriia 8, no. 5 (2017): 59. ———. “Knigi razdachi starcheskogo plat’ia Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria.” In Vspomogatel’nye istoricheskie distsipliny i istochnikovedenie: sovremennye issledovaniia i perspektivy razvitiia, edited by Iu. Shustova, 178–80. Moscow: RGGU, 2015. ———. “Managing Space: The Structure and Organisation of the Communication System in the Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery (16th–17th Centuries).” Quaestio Rossica 25, no. 3 (2016): 123–40. Demchuk, Galina. Zemel’nyi stroi v Dvinskom uezde v XVII veke. Ekaterinburg: Ural’skoe оtdeleniie RAN, 2002. D’iakonov, M. A. “K voprosu o krest’ianskoi poriadnoi zapisi i sluzhiloi kabale.” In Sbornik statei, posviashchennykh Vasiliiu Osipovichu Kliuchevskomu ego uchenikami, druz’iami i pochitateliami ko dniu tridtsatiletiia ego professorskoi deiatel’nosti v Moskovskom Universitete, edited by Ia. L. Barskov et al., 317–31. Moscow: Tovarishchestvo “Pechatnia S. P. Iakovleva,” 1909. Dmitrieva, Zoia, Margarita Dadykina, and Aleksandr Bugrov. “Kreditnye otnosheniia v Moskovskom tsarstve XVI–XVII vv.: monastyri i kreditnye operatsii; predprinimatel’skaia kul’tura.” In Kredit i banki v Rossii do nachala XX veka: Sankt-Peterburg i Moskva, edited by Boris Anan’ich, 18–37. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SPbGU, 2005. Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe Common Wealth. Or Maner of Gouernement of the Russe Emperour. London: Charde, 1591. Frantsuzova, Ekaterina. “Torgovlia sol’iu v Vologde v XVI veke.” In Torgovlia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo v Rossii v XVI–XVIII vv.: sbornik materialov nauchnoi konferentsii (Sankt-Peterburg, 17–20 sent. 2001 g.), edited by Aleksei Razdorskii, Andrei Iurasov, and Andrei Pavlov, 20–24. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SPbGU, 2001. Geiman, V. G. “Neskol’ko novykh dokumentov, kasaiushchikhsia istorii sel’skogo naseleniia Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVI stoletiia.” In sbornik Rossiiskoi publichnoi biblioteki. Tom 2. Materialy i issledovaniia, 1:267–94. St. Petersburg: Brockhaus-Efron, 1924. Iushkov, Serafim. Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 2, rev. ed. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1953.

46 Alexei Kraikovski and Margarita Dadykina

Ivanov, Vladimir. Bukhgalterskii uchet v Rossii XVI–XVII vekov: istoriko-istochnikovedcheskoe issledovanie monastyrskikh prikhodo-raskhodnykh knig. St. Petersburg: Dmitri Bulanin, 2005. ———. Monastyri i monastyrskie krest’iane Pomor’ia v XVI–XVII vekakh: mekhanizm stanovleniia krepostnogo prava. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Olega Abyshko, 2007. Kashtanov, S. M. Iz istorii russkogo srednevekogo istochnika: akty X–XVI vv. Moscow: Nauka, 1996. Kirsh, David, Mahka Moeen, and R. Daniel Wadhwani. “Historicism and Industry Emergence: Industry Knowledge from Pre-emergence to Stylized Fact.” In Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, edited by Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani, 217–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Klein, Ursula, and E. C. Spary. “Introduction: Why Materials?” In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, edited by Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, 1–24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Kolesnikov, Petr. “Pervoe inzhenernoe nastavlenie po glubinnomu bureniiu skvazhin.” In Problemy istorii i istochnikovedeniia istorii Evropeiskogo Severa, edited by Aleksandr Kamkin, Arkadii Komissarenko, Fedor Konovalov, and Vasilii Sudakov, 189–202. Vologda: Vologodskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut, 1992. Kotilaine, Jarmo, and Marshall Poe, eds. Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia. New York: Routledge, 2004. Kraikovski, Alexei. “The Main Centers of the Salt Trade in Northern Russia (Pomorye) in the 17th c.” In Investitionen im Salinenwesen und Salzbergbau: Globale Rahmenbedingungen, regionale Auswirkungen, verbliebene Monumente; internationale Tagung am Lehrstuhl für Bauaufnahme und Baudenkmalpflege, ed. Rudolf Palme, 276–79. Weimar: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2002. ———. “‘The Sea on One Side, Trouble on the Other’: Russian Marine Resource Use before Peter the Great.” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (2015): 39–65. Kraikovskii, Aleksei. “O sopostavimosti dannykh tamozhennykh i monastyrskikh prikhodnykh knig XVII v. na primere tamozhennoi knigi Vologdy i prikhodnoi knigi Vologodskoi sluzhby Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria 1634/35.” In Torgovlia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo v Rossii v XVI–XVIII vv.: sbornik materialov nauchnoi konferentsii (Sankt-Peterburg, 17–20 sent. 2001 g.), edited by Aleksei Razdorskii, Andrei Iurasov, and Andrei Pavlov, 24–29. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SPbGU, 2001. Kraikovski, Alexei, Margarita Dadykina, Zoya Dmitrieva, and Julia Lajus. “Between Piety and Productivity: Monastic Fisheries of the White and Barents Sea in the 16th–18th Centuries.” Journal of the North Atlantic 41 (2020): 1–21. Kraikovski, Alexei, Margarita Dadykina, and Ekaterina Kalemeneva. “Water Management in Russian Monasteries, 16th–18th cc.” In Gestione dell’acqua in Europa (XII–XVIII secc.): Water Management in Europe (12th–18th centuries), edited by Giampiero Nigro, 319–36. Florence: University of Florence, 2018. Krom, Mikhail. “Gosudarstvo rannego Novogo vremeni: Obshcheevropeiskaia model’ i regional’nye razlichiia.” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 4 (2016): 3–15. Lajus, Julia. “Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier.” In Cultivating the Colony: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund, 164–90. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.

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Lappo-Danilevskii, A. S. “Sluzhilye kabaly pozdneishego tipa.” In Barskov et al., Sbornik statei, posviashchennykh Vasiliiu Osipovichu Kliuchevskomu, 719–64. Liberzon, Irina, ed. Akty Solovetskogo monastyria, 1572–1584. Leningrad: Nauka, 1990. Lincoln, W. Bruce. The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Liubavskii, Matvei. Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii s drevneishikh vremen i do XX veka. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1996. Mahoney, Michael S. “Organizing Expertise: Engineering and Public Works under JeanBaptiste Colbert, 1662–83.” Osiris 25, no. 1 (2010): 149–70. Mel’nikova, Alla. Russkie monety ot Ivana Groznogo do Petra Pervogo: istoriia russkoi denezhnoi sistemy s 1533 po 1682 god. Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1982. Monahan, Erika. The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Nikonov, Sergei. “Osvoenie poberezh’ia Barentseva moria monastyriami pomor’ia vo vtoroi polovine XVI–XVII v.” Rossiiskaia istoriia 2 (2016): 35–42. Paneiakh, V. M. “K voprosu o tak nazyvaemykh derevenskikh sluzhilykh kabalakh SpasoPrilutskogo monastyria.” Problemy istochnikovedeniia 5 (1956): 210–30. Prokof ’eva, Liudmila. Votchinnoe khoziaistvo v XVII veke: po materialam Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria. Moscow: Nauka, 1959. Savich, Aleksandr. Solovetskaia votchina XV–XVII v.: opyt izucheniia khoziaistva i sotsial’nykh otnoshenii na krainem russkom severe v drevnei Rusi. Perm’: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1927. Serbina, Kseniia. Krest’ianskaia zhelezodelatel’naia promyshlennost’ Severo-Zapadnoi Rossii XVI-pervoi poloviny XIX v. Leningrad: Nauka, 1971. Shirokova, Vera. “Solianye promysly Rossii.” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 3 (2005): 47–56. Ustiugov, Nikolai. Solevarennaia promyshlennost’ Soli Kamskoi v XVII veke (k voprosu o genezise kapitalisticheskikh otnoshenii v russkoi promyshlennosti). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1957. Veluwenkamp, Jan Willem. “Gollandskaia sistema torgovli i russkii rynok v 1560–1760 gg.” In Torgovlia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo v Rossii v XVI–XIX vv.: sbornik materialov Vtoroi mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii (Kursk, 2009 g.), edited by Aleksei Razdorskii, with N. D. Borshchik, A. V. Tret’iakov, D. N. Shilov, A. V. Iurasov, 38–42. Kursk: Izdatel’stvo Kurskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2009. Vvedenskii, Andrei. Dom Stroganovykh v XVI–XVII vv. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo sotsial’noekonomicheskoi literatury, 1962. Zaozerskaia, Elena. U istokov krupnogo proizvodstva v russkoi promyshlennosti XVI–XVII vekov: k voprosu o genezise kapitalizma v Rossii. Moscow: Nauka, 1970.

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CHAPTER 2

Early Russian Industrialization An Environmental Perspective Catherine Evtuhov

A

n environmental perspective provides interesting new boundaries and chronologies for the practice of history.1 For example, the debate over the Anthropocene as a distinct period in geological time highlights the incipient exploitation of fossil fuels, beginning in the 1780s, as a decisive moment of change, in some ways coinciding with what global historians like to describe as the emergence of the modern world.2 In the meantime, the intensive production and export of metals and particularly iron on Russian territory, making Russia Europe’s biggest iron exporter in the middle of the eighteenth century, has received relatively little attention as part of the mounting worldwide pace of industry at that same time. The Russian-language literature, which peaked in the 1940s and 1950s at the height of Stalin’s industrialization, though abundant and rich in detail, remains mostly parochial and indifferent to the international context.3 In this chapter I turn my attention to what I call early Russian industrialization. By this term I mean not the occasional mine or foundry in seventeenthcentury Tula or up north in Olonets, nor even the construction of many forges and mines in Peter the Great’s push for military production. In those days, industrial enterprises that were not state owned belonged to the blacksmithturned-capitalist Nikita Demidov, if not to the baronial Stroganov family. I am thinking rather of the consolidation and expansion of industry, and particularly iron (secondarily copper) production, beginning in the 1730s and taking off in the 1740s and 1750s. The major trends of industrial expansion in the reigns of Empresses Anna (1730–40) and especially Elizabeth (1741–61) are: first, the shift in the primary locus of industrial production from central Russia to the Urals and southern Urals; second, the diversification of entrepreneurship and privatization of industry; and finally, production primarily for export rather than military purposes. In terms of sheer numbers: Elizabeth’s reign saw the construction of fifty-four new factories in the Urals, making a

   



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