Philip Longworth - Russia

Yet within forty years Russia’s wasted muscles were bulging once again. By the 1670s roles had been reversed: proud Poland was much reduced; Russia had supplanted it as the strongest power in eastern Europe. How is the extraordinary turnaround to be explained? By what mysterious means was the pitiable Russia of 1613 transformed into a new Goliath? And how was it able to ward off a series of internal troubles that threatened to undermine its new stability: an open rift between tsar and patriarch; an irreparable split among Russian Christians; the appearance of yet more pretenders; and repeated rebellions, both urban and rural, some of massive scale? 2

Imperial growth hinged on military power, but this in turn depended on size of population and the generation of wealth, both of which are difficult to measure for an age for which there are no census data, official statistics or economic indicators. Informed estimates suggest that the population grew from as little as 8 million in 1600 to 11 million or more by 1678, 3but the increase was due to several factors other than natural increase: the acquisition of eastern Ukraine along with Smolensk in 1666 gave a big boost to population, and the conquest of Siberia added as many as half a million more. On the other hand the great plague of 1654 sharply reduced the population of Moscow, and war casualties — notably those sustained in the Polish war of 1654–67 — decimated the male population. These losses were offset to some extent by the government’s practice of transporting civilians, especially those with skills, to Moscow from the western territories it occupied, and by the importation of foreign professional soldiers and technological experts. Even so the rate of natural increase must have been high, and the most obvious reason for this was improvement in diet since the Time of Troubles. There were fewer interruptions to the production and transportation of food; fewer famines, less disruption; and in the last three decades of the century Russia shared in the upsurge of prosperity and optimism enjoyed by most of Europe.

The economic recovery was quicker than the demographic. The leading American economic historian of Russia, Richard Hellie of Chicago, concludes that normal economic activity’ had been restored by 1630. But Russia’s ability to break through the ramparts that separated her from the West depended on more than this — indeed, on something like an economic miracle. Hellie argues that the absence of guilds, which had inhibited economic development in western Europe, was one advantage. The government created another in 1649, when it removed previously existing restrictions on urban craftsmen and traders, and limited the economic privileges of the Church. Furthermore, the state maintained a stable currency, enforced standard weights and measures, reduced the number of internal toll charges, and kept communications relatively safe from bandits for most of the time. All this helped to promote the economy. On the other hand the final imposition of serfdom, according to Hellie, was bad for the country’s development, because it confined the peasant labour force to the Volga—Oka region around Moscow, where soils were relatively poor, hampering agricultural development in the more productive Black Earth zones of the south and east. 4

Yet the maintenance of a large labour force around Moscow was essential if the state, which protected the economy, was to function. A free labour market would not have guaranteed that. Nor would a free market necessarily have promoted faster economic development. The problem arose not so much from the state and the autocracy squeezing initiative out of society (as some historians argue) as from the conservatism of most Russian merchants, who showed much less initiative than their Western counterparts. They viewed their privileges merely as monopolies to be exploited. 5At the same time wealthy magnates, so far from investing productively, tended to stockpile wealth and acquire luxuries, otherwise engaging with the market as little as possible. They continued to produce the bulk of their needs in their own households on their own estates, as in bygone times. Rather than the Russian state restricting economic growth through its interference in economic life, it could be argued that the taxes it imposed stimulated production and that it filled some of the gaps which unenterprising Russians of means had neglected. 6

Siberia was to be a major factor in Russia’s recovery. Ivan IV’s backing for the Stroganov venture (see Chapter 5) continued to pay handsome dividends, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century the vast potential of Siberia had not yet been recognized. Its huge expanses remained almost entirely terra incognita, its population, chiefly native peoples, small. Although the disruption of the Time of Troubles had displaced many Russians and encouraged migration to the periphery of the Empire, most migrants preferred to move south rather than east; and although the laws required the return of runaway serfs to their landlords, those who benefited from their labour were reluctant to surrender them. So population movement into Siberia remained a trickle. Trappers and traders went there, but they lacked the resources, the capability and perhaps even the inclination to organize the exploitation of the territory in any thoroughgoing manner, and so the task fell to the state. 7

Concern to secure the biggest possible tax income led it to build forts at distant trading stations and to devise settlement programmes. In 1601 the Godunov regime had mounted an expedition to a winter trading station called Mangazeia on the Yenisei river deep in the icy tundra at the very edge of the Arctic Circle. The purpose was to build a log fort and administration centre, where traders would gather and taxes could be collected. Although the dismal area was a hunting ground of the feared Samoyeds, who were reputed to eat their own children, they could be forced to pay tribute to the benefit of the state. Mangazeia was to become an important base for the penetration of Siberia as far as the Pacific.

At the same time, since all virgin land was regarded as crown property, the state was anxious to make cultivable parts of Siberia productive. It therefore encouraged peasants not already in the tax net to settle around new log forts, providing them with food and seedcorn, and sometimes much more, to get them started. 8Such opportunities were to be announced in the market places of appropriate towns. ‘Whoever is willing to go to the Taborinsk area…’ ran one such proclamation, ‘will be given a plot of arable land and money from our Treasury for horses and farm buildings… and tax exemption for one year or more depending on the condition of the land they settle, and one ruble or two for transportation depending on the size of the family.’ 9

The river Yenisei, Russia’s eastern limit in 1601, also marked the eastern limit of cultivable land in Siberia, so the lure of free farms for would-be homesteaders did not work beyond that point. Nevertheless, within half a century Russians and the Russian state had reached the Pacific. Yakutsk, where there are frosts for nine months of the year, was founded in 1637; Lake Baikal was reached in 1647, the Bering Strait in 1648.

The quest had originally been for furs, then salt (the foundation of the Stroganovs’ fortune), iron, fish and walrus tusks. Siberia’s gold was as yet undiscovered, and its rich oilfields and natural gas and aluminium deposits — the bases of future wealth — were unknown and unneeded.

The pioneers were Cossacks, boatmen, trappers and traders. Their technology was simple, and they lacked navigational instruments. They sailed Arctic seas from estuary to estuary in boats they had built themselves; they traversed permafrost landscapes, and braved their ways across 4,000 miles of uncharted taiga to Chukhotka, Kamchatka and the frontiers of China. Many died in the process. Yet these Russian explorers found their way across the vast, inclement tracts of northern Asia amazingly quickly. Often they were oblivious of their achievement. One such was the Cossack Semeon Dezhnev, who found the straits separating Asia from America in 1648, eighty years before Vitus Bering.