Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume IX

"Priorities." Pavel squinted and hunched over as though he expected a strong wind.

"I was given to understand that we had a rather high priority?" Boris tried to keep his voice calm. Perhaps too calm.

"I'm just passing on what I was told." Pavel waved the report, then began to read. "Because of the requirements of the grain shipments to Sweden, Yuri Petrovich Gorbochov is desperately needed to expedite the harvest in the Gdansk region."

"They picked one that has a higher priority than we do." Boris had to give that section chief credit. It was cleverly done anyway. There might even be some truth to it.

"Father, I'm not sure you do know the real reason. At least not all of them. I was talking to Petr Somovich. He said that a lot of people are starting to be afraid that this is a nowhere job. Not that much has come out of the dacha yet and we have all these books that mostly don't make sense, not even to people who do speak English. Who cares that Audubon painted birds? Russia has real issues to deal with."

"I know, son. " Boris had to concede that some of the objections to working with the dacha crew seemed to be valid. Among the other things that Boris had brought back was a down-time copy of the first book of the Encyclopedia International, 1963 edition, that had been in someone's garage. They had refused the outright sale of the books but had rented them to Vladimir for an outrageous sum. "But you never know what might combine with something else to solve a problem. We saw it again and again in Grantville. There would be an article on something that they needed but it would be missing some vital bit. Then the vital bit would show up in the biographic blurb about the guy who discovered it. Something like where he was when he found the first deposit of some rare earth."

"So you decided to send a copy of everything. I know. Father. I even agree." Pavel's face was serious, his dark eyes intent. "That doesn't change the fact that spending the next ten years of their lives translating minutia about people who will never even be born seems a pointless, career-ending job to most people."

Boris sighed. "I had hoped it would be more popular. It is a secure position, doing important work, if not the most exciting. A safe place in the bureaus."

"That's the problem, Father." Pavel shrugged. "It's not secure unless the Grantville section becomes secure."

Boris was left with an office and a budget and not nearly enough people who read and wrote English and Russian. The budget… for the moment he had plenty of money. Well, lands. The government of Muscovy ran on a formalized barter system because there was not nearly enough money to support the economy they had. That, however, was about to change.

Ivan Nikitich Odoevskii didn't look like a book worm. He was tall and as richly dressed as a prince and a member of the boyar cabinet ought to be. He rode, he was a skilled falconer, but he did love to read. He read anything. Account books. Treatises. Stories. Anything he could get his hands on. His fierce black beard was twitching and his blue eyes squinted as he thought. "It's complicated, Patriarch. Yes, the up-timers use paper money but their system is a tortured mix of the government and… well, anarchy."

"Anarchy?"

"They have something called Federal reserve banks…"

Patriarch Filaret was a man of no mean intellect, but his eyes were trying to glaze over within a paragraph. He tried to follow the salient points for a while, but finally gave up. "Enough. Can we use it, Ivan Nikitich? Can we use it?"

Ivan Nikitich sighed like the wind gusting from the north. "Yes. But it is dangerous. The books made that clear, even if I could only understand one word in three without talking to that idiot Bernie Janovich." Ivan Nikitich snorted. "And only one word in two after talking to him. The danger is more than the simple temptation to print ever more and more as it loses it's value. That's a danger, true enough. It is made worse by the fact that failing to print enough can hurt the nation even more. That is one thing the books on economics taught me. Half of Muscovy's troubles are caused by not enough cash."

"You needed a book from the future to tell you Muscovy is not a wealthy nation?" Fileret snorted in exasperation.

"No!" Ivan Nikitich almost shouted, then visibly got hold of himself. "Patriarch, what I needed the books from the future to tell me was that Muscovy is a wealthy nation. A wealthy nation with a cash flow problem. That Muscovy has everything it needs to have a booming economy, except the economy."

Filaret glared a bit. "Speak sense!"

Ivan Nikitich sighed. "We have grain. We have timber. We have pitch, not to mention furs of all sorts. We have rivers that in summer give us clear roads from China and India to the Baltic sea. In hard winter, the sleighs are more efficient than wagons are. What we lack is a means of tying all those things together. Much of our trade is just that. A peasant trades a bushel of grain to another peasant for bit of cloth. It happens that way because neither peasant has any money. Did you know that over ninety percent of the up-timers purchases were made with money? Everything from their homes to a piece of candy for their children. Everyone had money, even the very poor. That-along with their transportation system-made the manufacturing of goods in one place to be sold in another much easier."

Ivan Nikitich spoke with passion. He even stood and began pacing the room. "The raw materials are here. The trade routes are here, mostly. Even the skills are here. Every peasant in holy Rus spends half the year at some craft because you can't farm ice." Ivan Nikitich shook his head. "The only thing really missing is some practical means of letting the people in one place buy the products from another. Buy them, Patriarch, not trade for them. Because barter simply won't work for what we need. The things we must have are: Money, ways of transferring money from one place to another without bandits robbing the caravan, banks where bureau men and even peasants can save money or get loans. As I said-everything we need for an economic boom but an economy."

"What you're saying is we're rich in goods but not in money?"

Ivan Nikitich nodded. "What we need is cash and the books of the up-timers explain how to do that without silver or gold. The idea is to have just a little more money available than there is product for it to buy. That encourages the peasants to work harder to get the last bit. It's like hanging a carrot in front of a mule. Too close and he eats it. Too far and he gives up. Muscovy's carrot is hanging off the mule's ass."

"So, you think Vladimir is right." This was the test. The Odoevskii didn't get along all that well with the Yaroslavich family. If Ivan Nikitich could find a way to say Vladimir's report was wrong, he would.

"No, absolutely not," Ivan Nikitich said by reflex. Then he laughed. "Well, perhaps a little bit. The way the boy proposes to go about it is all wrong. We are not some barbarous western nation. It will need to be the Czar's Bank and all the little banks part of the Czar's Bank. The Yaroslavich boy's proposal will just make the Yaroslavich family richer than they already are."

Filaret gave the Boyar of the Exchequer a look.

"Very well. The Yaroslavich family and many others," Ivan Nikitich conceded. "But the czar should reap a greater benefit if the government owns all the banks, not just the Czar's Bank."

Filaret considered. "What bureau would control the Czar's Bank?" he gave Ivan Nikitich another hard look.

Ivan Nikitich gave him back look for look. "The bureau of the exchequer is the obvious choice," he acknowledged.

In some ways Filaret really preferred Vladimir's plan. As chaotic as it was, it had the advantage of not putting the power of a central bank in the hands of one of the great families. On the other hand, having the Romanov family in charge of the central bank would strengthen them considerably.