Bread upon the waters: the St. Petersburg grain trade and the Russian economy, 1703-1811

Abstract

Bread upon the waters: the St Petersburg grain trade and the Russian economy, 1703-1811, by Robert E. Jones, Pittsburgh PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013, xii + 298 pp., US$45.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-822-94428-7Robert E. Jones analyzes the workings of eighteenth-century Russia's economy, government, and society through a deep examination of the cereal trade with special emphasis on the flour trade to feed St Petersburg. Starting with Peter the Great's founding of St Petersburg in 1703, the study chronicles his efforts and those of later rulers to provide the capital's inhabitants with food at prices they could afford. Accepting responsibility for provisioning St Petersburg, the government actively subsidized the process by creating a public granary, and the tsarist state took the lead in engineering the waterways that made the transport of rye flour to the capital possible. However, a key insight of the work is that the state allowed a large role to private enterprise by generally leaving the grain trade to private forces in the market and not restricting the cereals trade to a privileged group or category of its subjects. Thus, Jones demonstrates that, in contrast to Muscovite and Soviet Russia, imperial Russia tolerated and encouraged private enterprise. Peasant traders participated in the earliest deliveries of grain and flour to St Petersburg, and by the 1720s they accounted for 20 percent of those commodities arriving in the capital. Nobles, peasants, and non-merchants played a significant role in the grain trade as the money economy grew. For example, the peasant Savva Iakolev, a grain dealer from Ostashkov, made a fortune shipping food to the court of Elizabeth Petrovna and by the 1770s he was the wealthiest and most influential Russian merchant in St Petersburg and the director of the St Petersburg customs house. Among nobles, Prince M. M. Shcherbatov entered the long-distance grain trade and had his stewards buy grain from Iaroslavl and Nizhnii Novgorod and bring it to his mill for grinding. From among the recognized merchants, the largest contingent to supply grain to St Petersburg came from Tver.Chapters move chronologically and cover the sale of bread and flour, the sources of St Petersburg's grain supply, the growing of rye, wheat, and other grains in different regions of European Russia, the sale and processing of grain, the transport of grain from distant villages to St Petersburg, and the export of Russian grain through the Black Sea, especially Odessa. Jones shows how the supposedly closed economy of the self-sufficient estate vanished in the eighteenth century thanks to the development of St Petersburg, the levying of taxes in cash rather than in kind, and the settlement of the southern steppe that expanded the commercial grain market. …