Two life stories of Moscow merchants take us inside the economic lives of merchants in Muscovy. Samuel Baron chronicled Vasilii Shorin, whose career ranged across European Russia and reached heights ofsuccess and depths offailure. Shorin was the son of a gost' and became one himself around 1634; he did not specialize in one area of trade, but ranged wherever opportunities arose, benefiting from his government contacts and gost' position, particularly in the 1650s and 1660s. He purchased a lucrative tsarist monopoly in fishing in the lower Volga, and managed a fleet of boats to ship the fish up the Volga to Nizhnii Novgorod and Moscow. To provide preservative for the fish he got into the salt business with the help of a government loan to start up a salt works and by buying a monopoly of salt production in the Middle Volga. Shorin owned his own landing dock on the Kama River for salt shipments and kept a large compound in Nizhnii Novgorod for fish and salt shipments. He was active in the fur trade, selling sables on credit from the tsar's treasury and buying and selling lesser furs not claimed as tsar's monopoly. Shorin also organized large shipping expeditions to Russian settlements in Siberia, bringing clothing, leather, hardware and tools, guns, wax and candles, beads and trinkets, to be sold in exchange for furs. Shorin also shipped Russian goods to Arkhangelsk to sell to European merchants not allowed to travel freely in the interior. In turn he purchased and shipped back to Moscow and Nizhnii Novgorod European goods: gold and silver thread, satins, velvets, needles, bells, paper, and silver coins. He kept a hand in eastern trade with warehouses and retail activities in Astrakhan. Finally, he was involved in grain shipping from his various landhold- ings. Shorin's trade was generally wholesale, but he also had over eleven retail shops in Moscow and elsewhere, selling fish, salt, grain, hemp, luxury items from Europe and Persia.
Vasilii Shorin performed the most important tasks assigned to gosti; twice he served as customs collector in Arkhangelsk, a lucrative position for its holders. He similarly reaped benefits from serving as assessor of the "fifth" tax; he acted as the tsar's agent in negotiations with Swedish and Persian traders; he was reprimanded for his harsh treatment and tough application of customs duties on foreign traders in Arkhangelsk.
Despite this seeming success, Shorin ended his life crippled by debt. The infrastructural challenges of carrying on business in Muscovy and of being a gost' combined with the risk involved in major business deals caught up with him. He repeatedly sustained great losses without insurance. In 1648 a rise in the price ofsalt brought popular outrage down on him and on boyars associated with the salt reform; rioters in Moscow pillaged his house, but he avoided death because he was on duty in Arkhangelsk. Undaunted, in 1650 he sent a trade caravan to Persia and India, but met complete disaster, the goods spoiled or stolen by highwaymen and corrupt officials all along the way. Shorin estimated he lost 17,000 rubles on that expedition.
Second, he lost big on both sides of Russia's dearth of credit. He loaned money that he could never collect, to the tune of 5,000 rubles or more in total, and borrowed without the ability to repay. By 1655 he owed over 28,000 rubles to three state departments for services as a gost' or for loans he had taken; his political connections got most of the loans forgiven, but he was still in dire straits. In 1660 he launched another failed caravan to Persia; in 1662 he was again saved from a
Moscow riot (this time in protest of a new tax that he as gost' was in charge of levying), but his home was plundered. In the 1660s more of his debtors defaulted and he to his own lenders. To cap it all off, around 1670 his properties on the Volga were destroyed in the Stepan Razin uprising. So dire was his situation that at the end of the 1670s some of his properties in Moscow were confiscated to pay off debts to the state. His children had no capital to succeed him in business.
Gavriil Nikitin's career as a merchant in Siberia had similar highs and lows, but was perhaps even more impressive than Shorin's given his modest social origins. Nikitin was born in a family of state peasants near Vologda; he began in the trading business by working as an agent for the Moscow gost', Ostafii Filat'ev, in Siberia. As Filat'ev's agent in the 1670s Nikitin purchased caravans of exotic eastern products (textiles and silks, gems and spices) and sold Russian goods and European imports, successfully leading a caravan to Beijing and returning with what Erika Monahan calls "a small fortune in exotic Eastern wares." By the 1680s Nikitin was headquartered in Moscow and was advancing through the guilds of merchants with his own agents in Siberia. He managed trading shops in Siberian towns from western (Irbit, Tobolsk) to far eastern Siberia (Eniseisk, Mangazeia, Nerchinsk). Monahan describes his trade network as made up of "hired, indentured, contract or slave labor" and kinsmen, including a Mongol slave that he adopted as his son Aleshka Nikitin. Just before Nikitin died, his net worth was a healthy 30,000 rubles. Politics, not economics, did him in; he was arrested in late August 1698, having been denounced as speaking against Peter I precisely during the musketeer rebellion; Nikitin died in prison by mid-September. He was caught up in a politically charged moment that had nothing to do with his business acumen.
Trade was not easy in seventeenth-century Russia, but fortunes could be made. All early modern trade on the scale that these men ventured was precarious, but they also dealt with particularly Russian challenges. Clearly the state was a hard taskmaster, setting quotas and calling in loans with ferocity. There was neither available credit and insurance nor business trust to stabilize this system, and the potential for catastrophe—uprisings, highwaymen—always loomed. But for every bankruptcy like Shorin's, there is a successful merchant like Nikitin. Even in difficult Siberian conditions, over vast distances of dangerous caravan routes, Russian merchants managed to turn a profit. As Paul Bushkovitch and J. M. Hittle remind us, other gosti did annual business of up to 100,000 rubles on their own, trading on the advantages that their gost' status gave them. They learned where the best commercial opportunities were, they bought up the best fisheries and salt works, they won contracts to ship the tsar's goods, and they prospered from state loans in cash and goods. Gosti, for example, routinely took furs from the state treasury, sold them for a profit and split the difference with the state. That few created long-lasting dynasties was typical for all but the most affluent of west European merchants in these centuries; merchant families in central and eastern Europe, Bushkovitch showed, paralleled the Muscovite pattern of lasting only a few generations. Given these structural challenges, Muscovy's merchants could not match their west European counterparts, but they kept the economy moving.
Muscovy's towns and townsmen from taxpayers to gosti represent in microcosm the diversity of an empire of "difference." Towns were patchwork quilts of divided jurisdictions; townsmen had no esprit de corps as "citizens" since they were virtually as enserfed as peasants. They were urban taxpayers, constrained in amassing capital and innovating. Muscovy's petty and larger merchants faced the same constraints on growth. But the expanding empire continually opened up opportunity for transit trade, and state protectionist policies carved out a sphere of opportunity for the bold. Shorin's and Nikitin's careers exemplify the dynamism of the empire's trade.