Russia under the Old regime

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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