Bread upon the Waters. The St Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811

摘要

Specialists and generalists alike should be delighted with the appearance of the fine flowing monograph under review, which explains the connections between state policies and how St Petersburg fed itself in its initial century of existence. Professor Jones argues that Peter the Great's founding of this city, envisioned as Russia's chief seaport as well as capital, while its location lay far from adequately productive soil, constituted not only the major break with the Muscovite past which dominates our understanding of Russian history, but also a provisioning challenge which the state met head-on and thereby acquitted itself quite well. For sure some state projects, once started, such as the Don-Volga and Don-Oka canals, had to be abandoned due to more pressing needs. Yet others, such as the Vyshnii Volochek system, which Peter I had on his mind even before he captured Swedish Nyenskans at the mouth of the Neva in 1703, proved absolutely essential for feeding St Petersburg. State authorities understood well the need for such provisioning, as they set specific transit points such as hitherto insignificant Gzhatsk; repaired, improved, and extended the networks of canals and portages, established markets and granaries; calculated the population's need for grain in relation to predicted supplies; limited or forbade exports in times of shortages; and even forbade owners of skilled and valued serf-pilots to send them off as military recruits to meet their communities' quotas. Among the most interesting of the policies of this state, in which about half of the population were serfs, military conscription was for twenty-five years and represented civil death relative to the recruit's village, and the authorities did not shrink from massive labor conscription whenever deemed desirable, was the reliance on free enterprise and markets for this provisioning and transport. Here, the state's role was one of facilitating and regulating, but not treating the actual production, wholesaling, conveying, or retailing as state enterprises. Rather, from Bread upon the Waters a picture emerges of a society, which, despite serfdom, was replete with homines rationales, calculating when, where and in what domain to work and how to maximize profits. This could take the form of St Petersburg's military authorities' purchasing bulk grain futures at favorable prices; a landed magnate's extending credit to thousands of serfs and skirting restrictive laws so that some of them could engage in the grain commerce in St Petersburg; or the reckoning of a more modest trader from around Moscow that a normally slower land route to bypass a temporary canal bottleneck would ultimately yield higher profits.