In the 1920s, the Russian economist Alexander Chayanov described the peasant household as a ‘moral economy’. The peasant was accustomed to earning the amount he considered necessary; he worried about getting less but was not interested in making more. This attitude was not peculiar to the Russian peasant. On the contrary, Chayanov showed that Swiss and German farmers also lacked a profit incentive and were risk averse. For example, Chayanov saw that the peasant willingly kept a couple of cows, whose upkeep amounted to ‘practically nothing’. But keeping more cows needed more work than the peasants were prepared to do. For most of the year the peasants had no employment: working in the fields of central Russia occupied no more than a quarter of their time. Using their free time, the peasants mastered the production of goods, such as linen, for export. But, even as they got richer, they didn’t abandon their subsistence farming, which functioned like a self-regulating mechanism, along the lines of a thermostat. In order to trade, you need a surplus, but the reverse is also true: there is no surplus without trade. This is nature’s own way, and the main concern of the farmer is not what to do with a surplus but how to avoid a deficit. The peasant toiled not to earn money but to survive; not to maximise profit, but to make enough to live on. 13 Although specialisation was always the most efficient solution, peasant farms remained diverse: even if their main product, for example grain or wool, was successfully traded on the market, they continued to produce many other things – vegetables, meat, hay, which they consumed themselves. The production of these commodities didn’t appear in accounts and they weren’t taxed. The state and landowners attached no importance to subsistence farming, but it was fundamental to the survival of the peasantry. The seasonal nature of many important tasks meant investment in expensive machines was not practical. The cyclical life of nature was alien to the town, preoccupied with stability and expansion. Still, urban life required supplies of grain, firewood and much more, which could only be secured by the peasants.
Supplying the capitals
Trade hubs and sites of power, capital cities grew so rapidly that they far outpaced the limited ability of the surrounding lands to feed them. For most of them, trade in fibres, metals and finished goods was the push factor, and the shortage of grain and timber the pull factor, of development. From Venice to St Petersburg, full granaries symbolised the stability of power, just as they had done thousands of years before in the cities of Mesopotamia.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Paris consumed 3 million bushels of grain per year, Amsterdam, 1.5 million, Rome 1 million. Transporting such quantities of grain by cart was impossible – all growing cities were situated near the sea or navigable rivers. The shortage of grain was a constant problem for Mediterranean cities. As early as the sixteenth century, Dutch ships had transported grain to them from the Baltic lands, sailing around Europe. Amsterdam was supplied from the Polish lands around Danzig, while Stockholm depended on the fields of Livonia and Estonia. The provisioning of London was helped when the East Anglian fens were drained and large farms were established on the reclaimed fenland. Paris was kept supplied via the Seine and the canals built by Colbert. Completed in 1734, this network deprived provincial France of supplies, and local riots accompanied the growth of the capital. 14
The delivery of grain to the new capital, St Petersburg, was to become a perennial problem for the Russian Empire. Having occupied the delta of the Neva in 1703, Peter I appreciated its similarities to the situation of Amsterdam, where he had spent the best time of his youth. The Baltic route to Europe was three times shorter than the White Sea route around Scandinavia. Impatient to join the Northern trade, the newly proclaimed empire turned this freshly captured Swedish colony into its capital city and resettled many thousands of people there. It had to supply them with grain and other essentials of life.
The fertile lands lay far away. The low (200 metres) but wide (500 kilometres) central Russian upland separates the basins of the Baltic and the White Sea from the basins of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Its hills formed the heart of the Muscovy state – they became the curse of the Petersburg Empire. In the south, the empire had black soils which produced excellent crops. The construction of a short linking canal, just 2.8 kilometres long, would create an uninterrupted waterway almost 1,000 kilometres long, connecting the trading capital with its resource base, the Baltic Sea with the Caspian, the markets of Europe with the treasures of Asia. Having rejected tenders from foreign adventurers, Peter gave a concession to build the Vishny Volochok canal to Mikhail Serdyukov (1678–1754). A Mongolian captive from the heart of Siberia who, like many successful Russian entrepreneurs, was suspected of the heresy of Old Belief, Serdyukov had taught himself about canals from studying French books. His Vishny Volochok canal was a success. * It served to bring grain to the capital for almost 200 years, right up until the arrival of the railways. But cargo could not go in the opposite direction, against the current, with the result that the prices of imported textiles in the Russian provinces were several times higher than in St Petersburg.
Once he got his canal, Peter imposed prohibitive duties on the export of hemp and pelts from Arkhangelsk. 15 St Petersburg’s population grew rapidly and in 1790 overtook that of Moscow. The mass influx of soldiers and peasants needed to keep building the city only exacerbated the shortage of bread. But the farms around the capital didn’t turn to growing rye. The Finnish peasants sold meat, milk, hay and firewood in the city and themselves bought bread. All the rye for the commoners, wheat for the rich, oats for horses and hemp for ships’ ropes were brought from the south. Transportation costs dictated consumer prices. During the time of Peter the Great, rye flour cost four times as much in St Petersburg as it did in Moscow. St Petersburg rapidly turned into a city of scandalous inequality, as described in the classics of Russian literature. But right up until the twentieth century St Petersburg never experienced the kind of bread riots that took place in Paris or London.
Grain’s way to the new capital was long: 2,000 kilometres. Barge haulers or horses pulled grain barges up from Kazan and the southern steppes along the Volga River. With luck, the grain reached the capital within six months; if things went wrong, it could take a year. The cargo might rot on the journey or the vessel carrying it might sink. Flour was easier to transport than grain. Milled locally, it was packed in birch bark baskets, each holding from 120 to 160 kilograms of flour. In autumn or winter the baskets of flour were delivered from the mills to the grain quays by cart or on sledges. Barge haulers pulled the barges upstream; it took sixty men to pull a barge carrying 2,000 baskets. In the shallows at Rybinsk the baskets had to be loaded into small boats. Like the baskets, these barques were sold for firewood in St Petersburg. One of the busiest trade routes in the world, the short canal was the bottleneck in the whole system. A barque stuck on a weir could hold up traffic for a week. New, bypassing waterways weren’t built until the nineteenth century. 16 In the meantime, the area of arable land doubled in the newly colonised lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia. The empire’s problem was that in the south there was no one to sell grain to, and in the north there was nowhere to buy it. Unable to reach the grain in Ukraine, the government sent the mountain to Mohammed, billeting a quarter of the Russian army there.