Perrie M. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689
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michael khodarkovsky
variety of goods, cash and loans compelled the native elites to increase the tax
burden on their own population in order to obtain various items of prestige
and luxury. This in turn led to the problem of ‘the labour drain’, that is, the
fleeing of the native commoners to Russia to escape their plight at home. The
commoners in theindigenous societies had foundthemselvesoverburdenedby
the increasing demands of both their own elites and the Russian government.
What followed was the interminable civil wars between the elites vying for
powerandclosertiesto Moscowonthe onehand,andpopular uprisingsagainst
theRussiangovernment and those native elites whocollaborated with Moscow
on the other. The ultimate result was continuous and irreversible political and
economic debilitation of the native societies, their increased dependence on
Russia and their eventual incorporation into the imperial structures.
For many non-Russian peoples, the seventeenth century marked the begin-
ning of their integration into the Russian Empire. At the time, the Russian
government was still struggling to close a large gap between the rate of
Moscow’s expansion and its ability to control and govern the new territo-
ries and peoples. The under-governed nature of Russia’s new territories and
frontiers meant that the government preferred to rely on indirect control and
mostly a set of non-coercive policies and incentives. It was in the eighteenth
century, after the Petrine revolution, that the new Westernised generations of
Russian bureaucrats and officers brought with them to the Russian frontiers
the conviction of Russian and Christian superiority and their determination to
achieve both the submission of the natives in no uncertain terms and a change
in their way of life. In relative terms, the events of the seventeenth century
were less traumatic and destructive for the native societies than the following
century would prove to be.
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richard hellie
Commerce and the merchantry
The Russian economy in the period 1613–89 was quite sophisticated. The
leaders of the hypertrophic Muscovite state were basically monetarists
`
ala
Milton Friedman who understood well that the quantity and quality of the
money in circulation determined the price level. The currency was based on
silver, primarily reminted thalers imported from other countries in Europe
because Muscovy in that period mined no precious metals, which did not
exist on its territory. By manipulating the quantity and quality of silver in
the currency, the government could make the price level rise, fall or remain
constant.
Throughout these decades of the ‘short Russian seventeenth century’, the
price level of commodities varied wildly for brief periods, but always returned
sooner or later to the median for the period.
1
Events such as famines and wars
alsohad an impact onthe price level, buttheywere not nearlyas dramaticas the
monetary impacts. Thus prices tended to rise for the Smolensk war (1632–4)
and the Thirteen Years War (1654–67), but the major inflationary swing in
prices in 1662–3 was caused not by the war, but by the government’s devaluing
the currency. This commenced at the end of the 1650s, when the government
decided to try to pay for the war by replacing the silver currency with copper
coinage.
2
Probably because faith in the government was strong, the ‘bogus
currency’ was accepted at ‘face value’ for four years. A crisis occurred only
when the government began to refuse to accept the copper coinage for tax
payments and when word began to circulate that government leaders were
minting copper coins for their own profit. Then bedlam broke loose, prices
1 This is evident for the most common commodity, rye, but holds for nearly everything
else as well. See Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia 1600–1725
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 14 (see Fig. 2.1) et passim.
2 Richard Hellie, ‘Russia, 1200–1815’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in
Europe, c.1200–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 494 et passim.
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skyrocketed and the populace of Moscowrebelledin the famousCopper Upris-
ing. Almost immediately the government increased the silver content of the
currency by 2 per cent, all protest subsided and prices fell back to the median.
Aside from war years, prices generally were stable for long periods of time.
Of course crop failures caused temporary, localised price spikes. The general
rule of the data on this period is that whenever an agricultural commodity
price veers far from the median (i.e. looks ‘wrong’), the source will typically
say that the high price was the result of a crop failure.
All commerce in Russia was based on cash or barter. Russia had no banks
until the middle of the eighteenth century,
3
and the merchants were not
Rothschild-types who could proffer loans to the government or to each other.
The Russian merchantry had a reputation for dishonesty, and the level of trust
wascertainlyvery low.Monasterieshadreserves,whichsometimes the govern-
ment would ‘borrow’: there is no evidence that such ‘loans’ were ever repaid.
The nexus between the mercantile monasteries, integrated vertical conglom-
erates which engaged in production and trade and the merchant class is not
fully understood.
Thegovernment understoodthatits capacitytocontrol prices generally was
extraordinarily limited. One might expect that a government with pretensions
akin to those of the Muscovite ‘Agapetus state’
4
would have been in and out
of the market all the time, but this was not the case. In its purchases, the
government both in Moscow and at the local level generally was a ‘price
taker’, that is, it paid market prices if it wanted to buy something. Only very
rarely did the government impose price controls on ordinary traded goods,
such as sturgeon in 1623 on the lower Volga.
5
The major exception was the
price of slaves: the government set the price of limited service contract slaves
at 2 roubles apiece during the Time of Troubles and raised it to 3 roublesapiece
in the mid-1620s.
6
Earlier the price for slaves had been set by the market;
7
the
intervention by the government changed the composition of slaves. Forcing
a buyer to pay the same price for a young child as for a prime-age worker
motivated buyers to bypass the over-priced slaves who thus could not get the
3 Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout. An Economic History of Eighteenth-
Century Russia, ed. Richard Hellie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
pp. 311–18.
4 See ‘Agapetos’, in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. P. Kazhdan, 3 vols. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. i,p.34.
5 Hellie, Economy,pp.80–1.
6 Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia 1450–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
p. 63.
7 There was one exception: as noted in Chapter 16 above, the Sudebnik of 1550 had placed
a price cap of 15 roubles on military slaves.
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The economy, trade and serfdom
welfare which the institution of slavery provided. Whether the government
had anticipated this consequence of its action is unknown. The government
was able to intervene in the pricing of slaves because all purchases of slaves
had to be registered with the government. Without registration of the slave
in the Slavery Chancellery (see Chapter 12 above), the buyer had no legal
claim to his chattel, who then would have been able to flee with impunity.
The government was not similarly involved with any other sale transactions
in Muscovy. One might imagine that the government, which by the time
of this chapter had complete control over the economic factors of land and
labour, would have been similarly involved with registration of the sale of
immovable property, but the fact is that sales of agricultural land were almost
non-existent.
8
As shown in Chapter 16 above, government control over most
of the agricultural land fund plus the right of clan redemption combined to
stifle free sales transactions in land.
Thevast quantity of price data permit thecalculation of costs for almost any-
thing when quantitative data are available. Thus the cost of the great Smolensk
fortress, built between 1596 and 1600, perhaps the largest construction project
in the sixteenth-century world, can be calculated at about 1.5 million rou-
bles.
9
One can further calculate that the government saved vast quantities of
money by abandoning that stationary form of defence in favour of the system
of the fortified lines south of the Oka in the seventeenth century, and that,
moreover, around mid-century, the army cost about one-eighth of Muscovy’s
GDP.
10
Muscovite legislation did much of what it could to facilitate commerce.
Interest on loans in common law was limited to 20 per cent in the six-
teenth century.
11
In 1649, however, it was forbidden.
12
Although Russia was
in the Roman law tradition in many respects because much of its law came
from Byzantium, Russia for some reason never developed the Roman law of
8 So far, no one has produced any Muscovite land transaction between non-relatives with
both the units of lands and the prices paid – presumably the definition of a market. This
is most evident in the work of Valerie Kivelson: see her Autocracy in the Provinces: The
Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1996). This makes comparison between the prices of farm land in
Muscovy and elsewhere impossible. See also Hellie, Economy,pp.392, 631.
9 Richard Hellie, ‘The Costs of Muscovite Military Defense and Expansion’, in Eric Lohr
and Marshall Poe (eds.), The Military and Society in Russia 1450–1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2002),
p. 49.
10 Ibid., p. 66.
11 E. I. Kolycheva, Agrarnyi stroi Rossii XVI veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 117.
12 Richard Hellie (trans. and ed.), The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 (Irvine, Calif.:
Charles Schlacks, 1988), ch. 20,art.39. (Cited henceforth as Hellie, Ulozhenie.)
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richard hellie
contract.
13
Other areas of law of interest to merchants, such as the storage of
goods, however, were well developed and it would be fair to say that the legal
climate for trade was generally favourable. Throughout most of this period
access to courts was inexpensive, trials were expeditious and judges seem to
have been relatively (if not totally) honest. Muscovite law helped to lower
commercial transaction costs.
Muscovy had a well-developed group of merchants of all types, ranging
from petty merchants who traded in local market stalls to long-distance mer-
chants such as the Stroganovs who traded in salt, furs, precious objects and
imported goods. The long-distance merchants used slaves to expandtheir fam-
ily firms as was done in other countries, especially in Africa. The merchants
were greatly facilitated by a number of institutional factors which considerably
ante-dated this period. Most crucial was the practice stressed during Ivan IV’s
minority that Russia had ‘one faith, one unit of currency and one measure’.
This was strengthened in 1653 by a proclamation of standard units as well as
a rationalisation of internal customs fees. Although internal customs collec-
tions were not abolished until 1753, they seem to have been relatively few and
seem not to have inhibited commerce significantly. Given these factors, it is
not surprising that Russia had something approximating a single market in
the seventeenth century: costs of any similar item were similar throughout
Russia, with differences being accounted for by the cost of transportation.
Merchants had sufficient information to learn of differences in the costs of
similar items throughout the country, and took advantage of arbitrage oppor-
tunities wherever they might arise by shipping goods from low-cost areas to
higher-cost areas whenever it would have been profitable. By 1689 merchants,
who created dynasties often lasting three generations, could trade unhindered
throughout much of the Eurasian land mass, from the White Sea in the north
to the Caspian Sea in the south, from Smolensk in the west to the Pacific
Ocean in the east. This trade provided opportunities for significant accumu-
lation of capital – which was spent on large houses, the Church, luxury goods
and household slaves, who produced little or nothing and consumed much.
The elite merchants were organised by the government into three groups:
the gosti, the gostinaia sotnia and the sukonnaia sotnia.
14
The assignments were
based on capital. Rather than being an honour, such assignments were some-
thing to be avoided and even dreaded, for the government regarded them as
13 Richard Hellie, ‘Russian Law from Oleg to Peter the Great’, in Daniel H. Kaiser (trans.
and ed.), The Laws of Rus’ – Tenth to Fifteenth Century (Salt Lake City, Ut.: Charles Schlacks,
1992), pp. xi–xl.
14 Hellie, Ulozhenie, preamble, ch. 13,art.1; ch. 19,art.34.
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The economy, trade and serfdom
members of the service class who could be pressed into government service
as needed. This service took them away from their businesses and had the
potential to bankrupt them. The first, the gosti, were based in Moscow and
were the leading merchants of the realm. There were only a handful of them
and they were assigned to run the major customs houses, such as at Archangel,
in Astrakhan’, and elsewhere. The second group, the gostinaia sotnia (some-
times translated as ‘the merchants’ hundred’)werealso Moscow-basedand ran
lesser customs houses. If collections did not match anticipation, they could
be charged the difference. The third group, the sukonnaia sotnia (‘the cloth
hundred’) were the elite of the provincial merchants and were assigned lesser
government tasks. All of these merchants from time to time were assigned to
trade the tsar’s goods, particularly sables.
Chapter 19 of the Law Code (Sobornoe Ulozhenie)of1649 made the mer-
chantry into a privileged estate or caste. Except for monasteries and the tsar
himself, town merchants faced little competition. Peasants, landowners and
landholders, clergymen and most military servitors were forbidden to engage
in trade, manufacturing and the ownership of urban property. Townsmen,
those juridically on the urban tax rolls, had an exclusive monopoly on trade,
manufacturing and the ownership of urban property. A small exception was
made for members of the upper and middle service-class capital and provincial
cavalry: they could own one house in town and keep one slave there. Such
properties could not be used as bases for enterprises which would compete
with the townsmen.
15
Armed musketeers were allowed to engage in petty
trade and urban employment to supplement their inadequate wages. Church
establishments had to surrender their urban properties and keep outside a
wide greenbelt around towns, where the townsmen could keep gardens and
pasture livestock. In exchange for these monopolies, the townsmen, who were
largely either craftsmen or merchants, had to provide the government with
the cash it needed. This arrangement, the product of disturbances in many
Russian towns in June 1648, produced a settlement that kept the townsmen
fromrioting for over a centurywhileproviding the government with itsneeded
revenues.
16
Although the Russian merchants did comparatively well domestically, they
could not compete in the international sphere. The larger merchants expressed
this in an elaborate petition to the government in 1649 in which they requested
the expulsion of Western merchants from the interior of Russia and their
15 Ibid., ch. 19.
16 Richard Hellie, ‘The Stratification of Muscovite Society: The Townsmen’, RH 5 (1978):
119–75.
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confinement to the ports and frontier cities. The petition rehearsed foreign
trade in Muscovy for the previous century and its dominance by the English
and Dutch. They noted that the English gave local Russian merchants loans,
which the Russians themselves could not do, and employed them as their
factors. The foreigners kept the Russians confined to their White Sea ports.
17
The fact is that the English were just better merchants. This was proved in
the Mediterranean in the last quarter of the sixteenth century when in two
decades the English seized all long-distance trade from all competitors.
18
It
was also proved in the period 1740–1810, when the French dominated Russian
culture but werea poor third in the trade sector. The Frenchcomplained about
English loans to Russian factors, just as the elite Russians had complained a
century earlier. In all of these cases, the Mediterranean, the pre-1649 era and
the post-1740 era, the key to English success was communications.
19
This was
high on the list of the things the Russians said that they just were unable to
compete with.
Without any assistance from the government, by 1613 the Russians were
able to borrow the names and styles of much of their clothing from the
Turkic peoples who had been their southern neighbours for the previous
millennium.
20
But when it came to major technology transfer after 1613 from
the West, nothing happened without governmental intervention. Moscow
hirednotonlymedicaldoctors,linguists,translators,astronomers andpainters,
but also architects, silk weavers, ship builders, food specialists, paper makers,
vintners, iron makers and ore prospectors from the West. Metal specialists
were requested from abroad in 1621, and the Dutch in the 1620s and 1630s
enjoyed monopolyhegemonyin the iron industry. In 1623 Dutch entrepreneurs
established a rope works, complementing that set up by the English at the end
of the sixteenth century. The Dutch got a pitch monopoly in the 1620s and a
potash monopoly in the 1630s. Dutch and Holstein shipwrights built a fleet on
the Caspian in the 1630s. In 1634, the Dutch got a monopoly on the manufacture
of velvet. In the same year, the first glass factory was established. Westerners
also organised a temporary postal system and taught the Russians how to dig
deeper wells. The first paper mill was built in 1655, and foreigners established
17 Richard Hellie (ed. and trans.), Muscovite Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967, 1970), pp. 63–91.
18 Maria Fusaro, ‘Commercial Networks of Cooperation in the Venetian Mediterranean:
The English and the Greeks, a Case Study’, unpublished paper, October 2001.
19 Richard Hellie, ‘Le Commerce russe dans la deuxi
`
eme moiti
´
e du XVIIIe si
`
ecle (1740–
1810)’, in L’Influence franc¸aise en Russie au XVIII si
`
ecle, ed. Jean-Pierre Poussou et al. (Paris:
Presses de l’Universit
´
e de Paris-Sorbonne, 2004), pp. 73–82.
20 Hellie, Economy, ch. 18.
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a rag paper factory six years later. In 1667 foreigners set up woollen mills and
a decade later an Italian set up a silk factory. In the late 1660s, at the invitation
of the government, foreign prospectors discovered copper ores in the north,
north of the Volga, and began to mine and process them for the state. These
people were in addition to the mercenaries who modernised the Russian army
for the Smolensk war (1632–4) by introducing the new formation regiments.
About half of the Russian army at Smolensk consisted of these mercenaries
and their men. They proved to be a tremendous drain on the treasury, so the
majority were sent home after the war. Recruitment was initiated again in 1647
in preparation for the Thirteen Years War (1654–67), but this time was largely
limited to officers.
21
In 1654 the government, primarily at the urging of the
Orthodox Church, closed one of the last openings in the caste society created
by the Ulozhenie of 1649 (see below) when it forced the foreigners, almost all
of whom were very highly compensated, to live in the Northern European
Settlement (nemetskaia sloboda: the Foreign – literally German – Quarter). This
later served as the incubator for Peter the Great’s Western orientation.
In the mid-seventeenth century mercantilism (a slight variation on the
French Colbertism) came to Russia. The first mercantilist was Fedor Rtishchev,
but its major spokesman was A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin. A native of Pskov,
Ordin-Nashchokin wrote the Pskov merchant charter of 1665 and the New
Trade Regulations of 1667. He advocated Western-style efficiency and gaining
an outlet in the Baltic to the West. Inter alia, he was a mild protectionist who
advocated keeping as much specie as possible in Russia, which may have been
partially responsible for the general decline in the price level between 1663 and
1689.
22
The process of enserfment, 1613–49
TheMuscoviteeconomydidnotprovide wellformostRussians.Asmentioned,
there are no useful minerals between the Volga and the Oka and all had to
be imported. The thin podzol topsoil is acidic and provides very low yields, in
this period three seeds harvested for each one sown. The growing season was
too short and the precipitation typically considerably more than would have
been ideal. Lesser yields led to famine and starvation, which occurred roughly
once in every seven years in Russia.
Most people lived in smoky huts, log cabins with a large brick or stone
and mortar stove which vented their lethal smoke into the room rather than
21 Hellie, Enserfment, chs. 10 and 11.
22 See most of the figures in Hellie, Economy.
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outsidevia a chimney, to save heat.One maysurmise that most people had very
little energy, both because they weregassed six months of the year by their own
air-polluting stoves and because of inadequate nutrition. Most people lived at
a subsistence level with a life expectancy of less than thirty years. Per capita
incomewasprobablylessthan$600 (
£350).Themedianwagefortheentirepop-
ulation was 4 kopecks per day, and for the ‘working class’ it was 3 kopecks per
day. A smoky hut’s median price was 3.25 roubles, or about 100 days’ pay.
23
Fre-
quent fires meant that housing was replaced often. As discussed in Chapter 12
above, there was little inside most of the huts: the three-chambered stove
(which could be large enough for two people to sleep on the top), benches
around two-plus walls of the room to sit and sleep on, occasionally a table,
perhaps a trunk for extra clothing and little more.
The vast majority of the population in the years 1613–89 were serfs, perhaps
85 per cent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 per cent were slaves. Then the clergy,
townsmen and military forces comprised around another 2 per cent each.
These were of the roughly five million inhabitants in 1613, perhaps nine or ten
million in 1689.
24
For reasons that are still not clear, the Time of Troubles had little impact
on the process of enserfing the peasantry. Shuiskii’s 1607 decree seems to have
gone into limbo, and the legal situation reverted to the decrees of 1592: the
peasants were bound to the land with the repeal of the right to move on St
George’s Day until further notice and the five-year statute of limitations on
the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive serfs. What may be called ‘the
Soviet’ explanation for this was that the government was so terrified by first
the Khlopko uprising (1601–3) and then the Bolotnikov uprising (1606–7) that
it lacked the spirit to repress the peasants any further. I would be inclined
towards another interpretation: the 1592 provisions satisfied those who were
running the government, so they were not about to make any changes unless
forced to do so.
25
Other elements, however, were restive with the status quo. In the social
stratification sweepstakes, the townsmen held a special place. Their problem
was the Russian system of collective taxation. The census takers came around
23 Hellie, Economy, ch. 20;pp.388, 404–5.
24 Ia.E.Vodarskii reckonsthe1678 populationattenmillion,ofwhom92 per cent werepeas-
ants (V. A. Aleksandrov et al., Krest’ianstvo perioda pozdnego feodalizma (seredina XVIIv. –
1861 g.) (Istoriia krest’ianstva Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 g., vol. iii) (Moscow:
Nauka, 1993), p.18). This seems to minimise excessively the slave population, which was
not counted in the censuses because slaves paid no taxes. See my Slavery volume for my
calculations of the numbers of slaves.
25 Hellie, Enserfment, chs. 6 and 7.
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The economy, trade and serfdom
and would find x number of people living in an urban area. Assuming that
x number of people lived in the area, the tax collectors assessed the area y
roubles until the next census. Problems arose when some townsmen moved
away or fled. The tax collectors still insisted that the area pay y roubles, even
though there were fewer taxpayers than there had been when the census was
taken. As a result, the remaining townsmen began to ask the government to
forbid any further people from moving away and that those who had moved
away be returned to share in the tax burden. An early example of this was
in 1590/1, when the people of Toropets (on the western frontier) asked that
their fellow townsmen be forbidden to move. The government complied by
extending the forbidden years concept from the peasantry to the townsmen
of Toropets.
26
TheTimeofTroubleswasbrutal to the Russiantowns. Townsmen weresent
scurrying in all directions, much as IvanIV’s savage reign had sent the peasants
scattering. By 1613 many towns were completely depopulated.
27
‘Recovery
economics’ is an important branch of economics, and it is probably correct
to infer that Russia had recovered from the Time of Troubles by 1629.The
year 1613 became the reference point for urban residence. After then, when
townsmen asked that their peers who had departed be returned, the reference
point alwayswas back to 1613. By the late 1630s, townsmen werebeing returned
who had fled a quarter-century earlier. This example played a major role in
the campaign to have peasants returned who had fled more than five years
previously. Also exemplary for the institution of serfdom was the fact that the
government in the late 1630s became directly involved in the search for and
return of fugitive townsmen.
28
For fugitive serfs and slaves, on the other hand,
the government took no role until after the Ulozhenie of 1649.
Monasteries also suffered from the dislocations caused by the Time of
Troubles. This recalls the time in the 1450s, when monasteries initiated the
limitation of indebted peasants to the period around St George’s Day, the very
first steps on the road to serfdom. Shortly after 1613 elite monasteries were
the first to be heard from on the issue of fugitive serfs. They complained that
five years were inadequate for the recovery of their fugitive serfs, and the
government extended the time to ten and more years, depending on when the
peasants had fled.
29
26 Hellie, Muscovite Society,pp.33–47.
27 P. P. Smirnov, Posadskie liudi i ikh klassovaia bor’ba do serediny XVII veka, 2 vols. (Moscow
and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1947–8).
28 Ibid.; Hellie, ‘Stratification’.
29 Hellie, Muscovite Society,pp.144–56, A. E. Vorms et al. (eds.), Pamiatniki istorii krest’ian
XIV–XIX vv. (Moscow: N. N. Klochkov, 1910), pp. 50–2.
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