the eastern Mediterranean to Christian trade, Russia offered a convenient shortcut from northern Europe to the Near East. A great proportion of the major cities of old Russia were founded at that time. This commerce came to an end around 1200 when Turkic nomads cut the route to Byzantium. The second period of Russia's involvement in international trade took place between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Novgorod was a leading member of the Hanseatic League. This connection was forcefully severed by Moscow at the end of the fifteenth century; less than a hundred years later Moscow razed Novgorod. The third period began in 1553 when English merchants discovered a maritime route to Russia by way of the North Sea. Once again, the international trade which ensued led to a lively growth of cities, this time along the roads and rivers connecting Moscow with the North Sea. But this commerce came to a halt in the latter part of the seventeenth century, partly because the Russian government, under pressure from its own merchants, withdrew the privileges which it had granted foreign traders, partly because the demand for Russia's goods in the west had diminished. Russia's cities, few in number and, except for Moscow, small in population, came to serve primarily military and administrative purposes, and as such would not provide a significant market for food.
There were thus no economic incentives present to try to overcome nature's handicaps. The Russian landlord and peasant looked upon the soil primarily as a means of subsistence, not of enrichment. Indeed, no major fortunes in Russia were ever made from agriculture. Little money was invested in it, because the yields were meagre and the market exceedingly narrow. Well into the nineteenth century, the basic instrument of the Russian farmer was a primitive plough called sokha, which scratched the soil instead of turning it over (its maximum depth of penetration was 10 centimetres) but which had the advantage of requiring little pulling power and being ten times as fast as the plough. The basic crop was rye. It was chosen because of its hardiness and adaptability to the northern climate and poor soil. It also happens to be the cereal crop with the lowest yields. The prevalent pattern of cultivation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was the three-field system which required that one third of the land always lie fallow to regain its fertility. The system was so uneconomical that in countries with advanced agriculture like England it had been abandoned in the late Middle Ages. The whole stress in Russia was on getting the most out of the land with the least possible investment of time, effort and money. Every Russian sought to extricate himself from the land: the peasant desired nothing better than to abandon the fields and become a pedlar, artisan or usurer; the rural merchant, to join the nobility; the noble to move into the city or make a career in the state service. The proverbial root- lessness of Russians, their 'nomadic' proclivities so often noted by western travellers accustomed to people seeking roots, whether in the soil or in social status, have their main source in the marginal quality of Russian farming, i.e. in the inability of the land, the chief source of national wealth, to furnish much beyond sustenance.
Just how unprofitable farming was in Russia, especially in the forest zone, may be gathered from the calculations of August Haxthausen, a Prussian agrarian expert who visited the country in the 1840s. Haxthausen compared the income produced by two hypothetical farms of equal size, 1,000 hectares of arable and meadow each, one located on the Rhine, near Mainz, the other on the upper Volga, in the vicinity of Iaroslavl. A German farm of this size, in his estimation, would require the regular attention of 8 male and 6 female peasants, 1,500 man-days of seasonal hired labour and 4 teams of horses. The total operating expenses would come to 3,500 thalers. With an estimated gross income of 8,500 thalers, it would return annually a net profit of 5,000 thalers. In Iaroslavl, only because the short farming season demands a heavier concentration of labour, it would take ^male and 10 female peasants, 2,100 man-days of hired labour, and 7 teams of horses to accomplish the same work. The resulting expenses would reduce the profit by nearly a half, down to 2600 thalers. These calculations rest on the premise that the soil in the two cases is of equal quality, which, of course, would not be so. If one then adds to the disadvantages on the Russian side of the ledger the severe winters which prevent the peasant from engaging in any field work at least six months out of twelve; the high costs of transport due to great distances, poor roads and low population density; the lesser productivity of the Russian peasant as compared with the German; and, last but not least, the low prices fetched by agricultural produce-it becomes apparent that farming in northern Russia was not a paying proposition and made sense only when no alternative sources of income were available. Haxthausen concluded with the advice that anyone given the present of an estate in northern Russia on condition that he run it like a central European farm would do well to decline the gift because he would be adding year after year money to its operations. According to him, estate farming in Russia could be made profitable only on two conditions: if performed with serf labour (to free the landlord from the cost of supporting peasants and animals) or combined with manufacture (to employ idle labour during the winter months).7 A Russian land expert in 1866 independently confirmed Haxthausen's opinion, stating that in Russia capital invested in government bonds brought better returns than that invested in agriculture; state service, too, was more renumerative than farming.8 We can now understand why another German observer of the early nineteenth
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century could conclude that there was no country in Europe where 'agriculture was practised so negligently'.9 The history of Russian agriculture is the tale of a land being mercilessly exploited without being given much if anything to nourish it and thus being driven into exhaustion. V.O.Kliuchevskii had this phenomenon in mind when he spoke of the old Russian peasants' unique talent for 'ravaging the land'.10
It is because the soil offered so little and dependence on it was so precarious, that Russians of all classes have learned from the earliest to supplement agricultural income with all kinds of'industries' or promysly. In its virgin state, the Russian forest zone teemed with what appeared an inexhaustible supply of wildlife: deer and elk, bears, and an immense variety of fur-bearing rodents. These were hunted and trapped by peasants working for princes, landlords, monasteries as well as for themselves. Honey was plentiful; it was aot even necessary to build hives, because the bees deposited honey in ihe trunks of dead trees. The waters abounded in fish, including sturgeon which made its way upstream from the Caspian. This abundance of wildlife allowed early Russian settlers to raise their standards of life above the bare subsistence level. How important such forest commodities were in the Russian budget may be seen from the fact that in the seventeenth century income derived from the sale of furs (mostly to foreign merchants) constituted the single largest item in the revenues of the imperial treasury. As the forests were cleared to make way for agricultural land and pastures, and overhunting and overtrapping depleted the supply of wildlife, especially the more valuable varieties of fur-bearing animals, Russians increasingly shifted their attention from the exploitation of natural resources to manufacture. In the middle of the eighteenth century there emerged in Russia a peculiar form of cottage industry (kustarnaia promyshlennost'), employing both free and serf labour, and working for the local market. This industry supplied Russia with a high proportion of its farming and household needs, simple cloth, silver, ikons, musical instruments and so forth. Much of the relative prosperity of both landlord and peasants between the middle of the eighteenth and middle of the nineteenth centuries derived from such manufacture. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of factory industry undercut the market for the unsophisticated products of cottage industry, and deprived peasants, especially in the northern provinces, of vital supplementary income.