For they shared a secret.
Though Russka was quiet that morning, there were many indications that nowadays it was a busier place than before. True, the walls frowning from the high river bank were still as stout as in the time of Ivan the Terrible; the tall, forbidding watchtower with its steep tent roof still rose into the sky; but within the walls there were two wide streets of wooden houses on each side of the market, intersected by three more. Behind the church, there was now a broad avenue with rows of trees down the centre and on one side three neat stone merchants’ houses, with classical features. At the end of this avenue was a small park, and past that the old fortification wall had been lowered and a small esplanade laid out with a pleasant view over the river and the surrounding countryside. Outside the walls, on the side away from the river, the scattered huts and smallholdings had grouped themselves into several lanes which petered out into fields about a quarter of a mile away. The total population was about two thousand. In short, though certainly not the city designated by Catherine, Russka had still managed to assume the character of a small town.
Dear Savva: how close they had grown in the last four years. She was rather lonely sometimes. Alexander had become sick and this had made him rather uncommunicative. Sergei was employed in the Foreign Ministry nowadays, which kept him busy in St Petersburg and Moscow. Olga had recently married a handsome young guards officer with an estate near Smolensk, so she was absent. And Alexis, now married, had been posted down to the Black Sea, at the great port of Odessa. The previous month he had had a son, whom he had named Mikhail. But it might be years before Tatiana saw her first grandchild. So there’s only Ilya and me, really, she thought sadly. And though Ilya was at home, his large, placid head was usually in a book; one couldn’t talk to him about anything practical.
But Savva and his father were practicaclass="underline" that was what she liked about them. They ran two little factories in Russka now, each employing a dozen people. One wove woollen cloth, the other linen. And the two men were so well organized that they still had time to spare. Indeed, the previous year she had persuaded her husband to let Savva’s father go down to supervise the Riazan estate – with the result that its revenues immediately rose sharply. She often went into Russka to watch the Suvorins’ activities and talk to Savva about his business.
And it was these talks that had first led to a great realization, and her present secret plan.
For – though one would never have guessed it in the country houses of the gentry – Russia was slowly changing; and the change was taking place in the very region in which she lived.
There had always been several sources of wealth in Russia. The salt beds and the furs in the huge northern wilderness, which had once made the merchants of ancient Novgorod rich; the wonderful black earth, the chernozem, of the warm Ukraine; and since the time of Ivan the Terrible there had gradually been added the minerals of the Ural Mountains, far to the east, and some very modest trade from the huge, barely colonized wastes of Siberia that lay beyond.
Yet it was here, in the old Russian heartland around Moscow, where the weather was terrible and the land was poor, that the greatest strides were now being made. For here was the home of Russian manufacturing. Leather goods, metalwork, icon painting, cloth, linen, the printing of silks imported from the east, and most recently, cotton manufacture: these were light industries that could be set up in town or village. Then there were the old ironworks at Tula and the huge armaments factories of Moscow. The greatest market for iron, as well as many other commodities, lay only a few days to the east, where the Volga and the Oka met at the ancient frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod. In Catherine’s reign, an enterprising merchant family had even set up a glass factory in a village not twenty miles away from Russka. And above all, the provincial capital city of Vladimir, with a new industrial town called Ivanovo to the north of it, was becoming a huge new centre of the textile business.
By the standards of western Europe this new industrial and commercial activity was unimpressive. Under five per cent of Russians lived in towns, against twenty per cent in France and over thirty in England. But it was a beginning.
And to Tatiana, the more she understood it, the more exciting it became. Often Savva would remark to her: ‘Ah, Tatiana Ivanovna, what I could do if only I had more money to invest!’ She saw what huge opportunities there were and, having nothing else to occupy her active nature, brooded about them constantly.
‘If our serfs can set up little factories,’ she would challenge her husband, ‘we could set up big ones.’
It was a perfectly reasonable statement. Though most of the gentry despised such merchant activities, there were others who did not. Indeed, some of the greatest magnates were also owners of large industrial enterprises which were worked by their serfs. Bobrov could have set up a plant like the nearby glass-making factory without loss of face.
But he was not interested. ‘Who would run it after I am gone?’ he demanded. ‘Alexis? He’s a soldier. Ilya? He’d be incapable.’ He shook his head. ‘Far better to build up the estates for them than get into risky projects none of us understand. Besides,’ he would remind her, ‘it’s far simpler to let the serfs do it alclass="underline" we get our reward by taking their profits in obrok payments.’ And when she was still unsatisfied, he remarked wearily: ‘You’re just a German.’
Tatiana had long supposed that she knew Savva; yet it was only a year before that she had fully realized the secret passion that drove him. It came to light one day when she was quizzing him gently about his personal life. The two Suvorins, as well as being entrepreneurs, were highly unusual in another way too: they were both single. Savva’s father was a widower. But Savva himself, though thirty-three now, was still unmarried. It was unheard of. The priest at Russka had spoken to him about it many times; Bobrov had threatened to force him to marry. But he had been strangely evasive. And only then had he at last confessed to Tatiana: ‘I’ll never marry until I’m free. I’d sooner go into the monastery.’
‘Who will you marry?’ she had asked.
‘A merchant’s daughter,’ he replied. ‘But no merchant will let his daughter marry a serf, since then she becomes a serf too.’
So that was it. He wanted to buy his freedom. Several times already he had approached Bobrov on the subject, but the landlord had waved him away. ‘Every landlord has a price though,’ he told Tatiana. ‘And then…’ Then she suspected he would do great things.
And so Tatiana had formed her plan. It was very simple, if somewhat unusual. And it rested on the perfect understanding which she now reached with Savva.
At first Alexander Bobrov was puzzled by his wife’s desire that he should sell Savva and his father their freedom. ‘What’s it to you?’ he would enquire. But weeks and months went by, and she continued to badger him: ‘Let them go, Alexander Prokofievich. You say you want to put money by. Take your profit now then, and sell them their freedom.’
‘I sometimes think you prefer those serfs to your own family,’ he would remark drily.
But still she had persisted until, just a week ago, and in order to get some peace, he had at last promised wearily: ‘Very well. But if they want their freedom, they can pay me fifteen thousand roubles for it and nothing less.’ After bleeding them white for so many years, he calculated, there was no possibility of their raising such a sum.
At which Tatiana only smiled.