Russia under the Old regime

193

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.

In his commercial capacity, the tsar handled a large variety of commodities. These he obtained from three sources: 1. surplus produced by his private domains; 2. tribute from administration and subjects; 3. purchases made for resale. As a rule, any commodity in which the crown acquired a major interest was declared a royal monopoly and withdrawn from public commerce.

The most important of the regalia in the category of surplus from royal domains were cereals, trade in which was a crown monopoly until 1762.