Russia under the Old regime

10

century could conclude that there was no country in Europe where 'agriculture was practised so negligently'.9 The history of Russian agriculture is the tale of a land being mercilessly exploited without being given much if anything to nourish it and thus being driven into exhaustion. V.O.Kliuchevskii had this phenomenon in mind when he spoke of the old Russian peasants' unique talent for 'ravaging the land'.10

It is because the soil offered so little and dependence on it was so precarious, that Russians of all classes have learned from the earliest to supplement agricultural income with all kinds of'industries' or promysly. In its virgin state, the Russian forest zone teemed with what appeared an inexhaustible supply of wildlife: deer and elk, bears, and an immense variety of fur-bearing rodents. These were hunted and trapped by peasants working for princes, landlords, monasteries as well as for themselves. Honey was plentiful; it was aot even necessary to build hives, because the bees deposited honey in ihe trunks of dead trees. The waters abounded in fish, including sturgeon which made its way upstream from the Caspian. This abundance of wildlife allowed early Russian settlers to raise their standards of life above the bare subsistence level. How important such forest commodities were in the Russian budget may be seen from the fact that in the seventeenth century income derived from the sale of furs (mostly to foreign merchants) constituted the single largest item in the revenues of the imperial treasury. As the forests were cleared to make way for agricultural land and pastures, and overhunting and overtrapping depleted the supply of wildlife, especially the more valuable varieties of fur-bearing animals, Russians increasingly shifted their attention from the exploitation of natural resources to manufacture. In the middle of the eighteenth century there emerged in Russia a peculiar form of cottage industry (kustarnaia promyshlennost'), employing both free and serf labour, and working for the local market. This industry supplied Russia with a high proportion of its farming and household needs, simple cloth, silver, ikons, musical instruments and so forth. Much of the relative prosperity of both landlord and peasants between the middle of the eighteenth and middle of the nineteenth centuries derived from such manufacture. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of factory industry undercut the market for the unsophisticated products of cottage industry, and deprived peasants, especially in the northern provinces, of vital supplementary income.

Promysly, however, vital as they were, could not of themselves support the national economy: the latter, in the end, depended on farming. The rapid exhaustion of the soil under conditions of Russian agriculture compelled the peasant to be continually on the move in search of virgin land or land which had regained its fertility from a long rest. Even had the population of the country remained constant, Russia would have