Russia under the Old regime

THE MISSING BOURGEOISIE

never belonged to itself; it was always the property of someone else - at first often of private owners, and later of the state - and its entire population was dependent on him on whose land it stood.

A century ago, a historian of the Muscovite city made a remark which subsequent researches have in no way invalidated: 'Essentially, the history of the [Russian] city is nothing else but the history of regimentation, of transformations of the commercial and industrial population of cities carried out by sovereign authority. The course of these transformations was determined by the sovereign authority's view of state interests.'10 These interests centred on internal and external security and the flow of taxes. Lacking independent status, the Muscovite city could not have had a history different from that of the rest of society. Attempts by modern Russian historians to magnify its historic role are wide off the mark. It is not enough to demonstrate (as they are able to do) that Muscovy had more urban-type concentrations than the official counts of cities indicate, and many busy market-places scattered throughout the country. Historically speaking, the significance of the city lies not in numbers of inhabitants or in the intensity of economic activity - both of which were absurdly low in Muscovy in any event - but in the acquisition by its residents of judiciary, fiscal, and administrative autonomy. And of this there was no trace. Muscovite merchants had to adapt themselves to the difficult conditions under which they lived; accordingly, their business activities tended to be small in volume, oriented towards quick profit, and conducted largely on a barter basis.

The central region of Russia - the Volga-Oka mesopotamia where the state of Muscovy was born - seems to have become first involved in longdistance trade at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the country was under Mongol rule. The Golden Horde insisted on its tribute being paid in silver. Since Russians did not then mine precious metals, they had to look for them abroad. Around 1300 merchants from Russia established at Sarai, the capital of the Horde, a commercial colony from where they traded under Mongol protection with the Crimea and northern Iran. Thus, unlike Novgorod and Pskov, whose commercial ties were with Germany, Moscow's trade tended to be Asiatic in orientation. The most striking testimony of the debt which Russian commerce owes to the Mongols and their Turko-Tatar allies is the large number of words in the Russian vocabulary having to do with finance, merchandise, storage and transport derived from the languages of these nationalities. The Mongol origin of the Russian words for money, customs and treasury has already been noted (p. 75). The Russian word for merchandise - tovar - comes from the Turko-Tatar term for cattle or