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where one grain of seed multiplies itself at least five times; it is this minimum surplus which determines (assuming no food imports) whether a significant proportion of the population can be released from the necessity of raising food to pursue other occupations. 'In a country with rather low yield ratios highly developed industry, commerce and transport are impossible'.2 And so, one may add, is highly developed political life.
Like the rest of Europe, Russia averaged in the Middle Ages ratios of 113, but unlike the west, it did not experience any improvement in yield ratios during the centuries that followed. In the nineteenth century, Russian yields remained substantially the same as they had been in the fifteenth, declining in bad years to i:2, going up in good ones to 114 and even 115, but averaging over the centuries 1.-3 (slightly below this figure in the north and slightly above it in the south). Such a ratio generally sufficed to support life. The picture of the Russian peasant as a creature for ever groaning under oppression and grubbing to eke out a miserable living is simply untenable. A Russian agrarian historian has recently challenged the prevailing view in these words:
We confront a paradox. A scholar investigates the condition of peasants in the period of early feudalism. Their condition is already so bad it cannot deteriorate further. They are perishing completely. But then, later on, they turn out to be worse off yet; in the fifteenth century still worse, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, all the time worse, worse and worse. And so it goes until the Great October Socialist Revolution. It has already been pointed out, very correctly... that the living standard of peasants is elastic and capable of shrinking. Still, it cannot shrink ad infinitum. How did they survive?3 The answer, of course, is that the traditional view of the living conditions and living standards of Russian peasants must be wrong. Recent computations of the incomes of Novgorod peasants in the fifteenth century, and of the Belorussian-Lithuanian peasants in the sixteenth (both inhabitants of northern regions with the inferior, podzol, soil) do indeed indicate that these groups had managed to feed themselves quite adequately.4 The trouble with Russian agriculture was not that it could not feed its cultivators but that it never could produce a significant surplus. The productivity lag of Russia behind western Europe widened with each century. By the end of the nineteenth century, when good German farms regularly obtained in excess of one ton of cereals from an acre of land, Russian farms could barely manage to reach six hundred pounds. In Russia of the late nineteenth century, an acre of land under wheat yielded only a seventh of the English crop, and less than a half of the French, Prussian or Austrian.6 Russian agricultural productivity, whether calculated in grain yields or yields per acre, was by then the lowest in Europe.
The low productivity of the Russian soil, however, cannot be blamed entirely on the climate. Scandinavia, despite its northern location, attained already by the eighteenth century yield ratios of 1:6, while the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire, where the land was in the hands of German barons, in the first half of the nineteenth century had yields from 1.-4-3 to 1:5-1, that is, of a kind which made it possible to begin accumulating a surplus.*
The other cause of low agricultural productivity in Russia, besides the natural factors already enumerated, was the absence of markets. Here, as is the case with most historical phenomena, cause and effect confronted each other in reciprocal fashion: the cause produced the effect but then the effect became a force of its own which in turn influenced and transformed its original cause. Unfavourable natural conditions made for low yields; low yields resulted in poverty; poverty meant that there were no buyers for agricultural produce; the lack of buyers discouraged yield improvements. The net effect was the absence of incentives. A vicious circle of this kind could be broken only by the intervention of some external force, in this case the opening of commercial contacts with other countries or major scientific or technical innovations.
Clearly, an agricultural surplus must be disposed of not to other farmers but to people who themselves do not grow food, and this means, in effect, the inhabitants of cities. Where an urban market is absent, little can be done with the excess grain except to distil it into spirits. As noted above, the improvement in the yield ratios of medieval Europe was originally associated with the growth of cities; the emergence of sizeable trading and artisan groups both encouraged improvements in farming and was made possible by them. Now in Russia cities have never played a significant role in the nation's economy; and paradoxically, over the centuries, their role tended to decline rather than grow. As late as the eighteenth century, Russia's urban inhabitants comprised only 3 per cent of the total population, and even this figure is deceptive because the majority of Russian city dwellers traditionally have consisted of landlords and peasants who grew their own food. Nor could Russia dispose of its grain abroad because there were for it no foreign markets until the middle of the nineteenth century at which time countries with advanced industrial economies decided it was cheaper for them to import food than to grow it. Russia is too remote from the great routes of international trade to have developed a significant urban civilization on the basis of foreign commerce. Three times in its history she was pulled into the mainstream of international trade; each time the result was the sprouting of cities; but each time, too, the urban flowering proved short-lived. The first occasion occurred between the ninth and eleventh centuries, when, following Muslim expansion and the closing of
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