mining them only in the eighteenth century. The shortage of money was sufficient cause to have prevented the emergence in Russia of a moneyed class comparable to the western bourgeoisie of the classical age of capitalism. But this point conceded, the problem is by no means settled. For Russia at all times was a country whose inhabitants had a remarkable penchant for trade and manufacture; where indeed the natural poverty of the soil compelled them to become businessmen. One must not be misled by statistics indicating that under the old regime nearly the entire population of Russia consisted of either dvoriane or peasants. The social categories of old Russia were legal in nature, and designed to distinguish those who paid taxes from those who rendered full-time service, and both from the clergy which did neither; they were not meant to define economic occupations. In fact, Russia always had a much larger proportion of its inhabitants engaged in trade and manufacture than the official census figures indicate. It is probably true to say that when its state was in the process of formation (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), proportionately more of Russia's inhabitants pursued non-agricultural activities part-time or full-time than was the case in any other European country. Western travellers to Muscovy were invariably struck by the business enterprise of its citizenry. Johann de Rodes, a Swedish commercial agent, noted in 1653 that in Russia 'everyone, from the highest to the lowest, practises [trade]... No doubt, in this respect this nation's zeal almost excels that of all the others...n Twenty years later a German visitor, Johann Kilburger, made similar observations: no one was better suited to trade than Russians, because of their passion for it, their favourable geographic location, and their very modest personal wants. He believed that some day Russians could become a great commercial nation.8 Foreigners were especially impressed that in contrast to the west, where trade was regarded as an occupation below the dignity of the nobility, in Russia no one disdained it: 'All the boyars without exception, even the ambassadors of the Great Prince to foreign sovereigns everywhere occupy themselves with commerce,' wrote another seventeenth-century traveller, 'they sell, buy, and barter without hypocrisy and concealment.'3
This intense trade activity was not quite equalled by Russia's industrial development. But even that was never quite as negligible as is generally supposed. In the eighteenth century, Ural foundries, working mainly for the English market, smelted the largest quantity of iron in Europe. The cotton spinning industry, the first in Russia to be mechanized, produced in the 1850s more yarn than that of Germany. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Russia had a bustling cottage industry, whose enterprising leaders differed little from self-made entrepreneurs of the Americas. The surge in all branches of heavy
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industry which got under way in 1890 attained a pace which Russia has not been able to match since. Thanks to it, on the eve of the First World War Russia's industrial production attained fifth place in the world.
Non: of which is intended to imply that Russia under the old regime was at iny time a predominantly commercial or manufacturing country. Without question, until the middle of the twentieth century, agriculture constituted the foundation of Russia's national economy and the main source of her wealth. The per capita income from non-agrarian occupations remained low even after the aggregate industrial figures had grown impresdvely. But on the face of it, it would certainly seem that a country which in 1913 ranked, in value of industrial output, only behind the United States, Germany, Great Britain and France did possess an adequate economic basis for some kind of a middle class - not a flourishing one, perhaps, but one which should have been able to make its weight felt. Commercial and industrial fortunes were in fact made in Russia from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth. The intriguing question is why these fortunes tended to dissipate rather than grow, why rich merchants and manufacturers failed to found bourgeois dynasties, and, above all, why Russian money did not acquire political ambitions. The solution to these questions is best sought in the political environment in which Russian business had to operate. As noted before, the small and unreliable returns from agriculture had compelled Russians from die time of their earliest settlement in the forest to supplement income obtained from the land with other revenues. Galled pro mysly they were of a most diverse character: fishing, hunting, trapping, apiculture, salt distilling, leather tanning and weaving. The minglhg of agricultural and non-agricultural occupations which economic conditions forced upon the population accounted, among other things, for a weak division of labour and the absence of highly skilled (that is, full-time) traders and artisans. For a long time it also inhibited the ris: of a commercial and industrial culture; for where trade and manufacture were regarded as natural sources of supplementary income for all, neither could become a separate vocation. Foreign accounts of Muscovy do not mention merchants as a distinct estate, lumping them with the mass of'little men' or muzhiki. Already in the appanage period, princes, boyars, monasteries and peasants were quick to seize every opportunity to earn additional income from such promysly as came their way. In the testaments of the Great Princes, promysly are treated as an intrinsic part of the princely patrimony, and carefully apportioned among the heirs along with towns, villages and personal valuables.
As the might and the ambitions of the Muscovite dynasty grew, it began to concentrate in its hands the major branches of trade and nearly
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all manufacturing. This process paralleled the crown's centralization of political power and its appropriation of landed wealth. Proceeding from the premiss underlying patrimonialism, namely that the tsar owned his realm, the rulers of Moscow sought to appropriate all the promysly along with all the authority and all the land. The manner in which political power and landed property became the exclusive domain of the tsars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is reasonably well known. The same cannot be said of the acquisition of control over trade and manufacture, a subject largely unnoticed and uninvestigated by historians. Here a process of expropriation not unlike that carried out earlier in respect of landed property seems to have taken place in the sixteenth and even more so in the seventeenth century. By a succession of decrees bearing on specific promysly, the crown imposed royal monopolies, eliminating thereby the threat to itself of private competition. In the end, just as he had earlier become the country's largest landowner and de jure title-holder of all the landed estates, the tsar became also the exclusive proprietor of industries and mines, and both dejure and de facto monopolist in regard to all but the most trivial commercial activities. In his business affairs, he was assisted by cadres of specialists drawn from the ranks of the service class, topmost merchants, and foreigners. The trading and artisan class, in the proper sense of the term, that is, the membership of the posad communities, was in large measure excluded from these activities.
This fact is absolutely essential for the understanding of the fate of the middle class in Russia. Like everything else, trade and industry in Muscovy had to be carried out within the context of the patrimonial state, whose rulers regarded monopoly on productive wealth a natural complement to autocracy. In his letter to Queen Elizabeth, cited above (p. 77), Ivan iv taunted her that English merchants - presumably in contrast to his own - 'seek their own merchant profit', as proof that she was not a genuine sovereign. Given this view of the function of the trading class, the Muscovite state could hardly have been expected to show concern for its well-being. The richest among them it harnessed in its service; the remainder it treated as a breed of peasants whom it taxed to the limit; and rich and poor alike it expected to fend for themselves.