Russia under the Old regime

212

precarious. As a serf, he lacked elementary civil rights. His master could at any time appropriate his wealth and send him back to the fields. He had neither access to interest-free loans nor an assured buyer as did the dvorianin-industrialist or the merchant working for the state. It is only thanks to a strong inner drive that so many serfs triumphed over then-handicaps. The story of N.N.Shipov may be unusual, for few could have encountered and overcome as many adversities as this remarkable peasant, but it is typical of the spirit of this breed of self-made men. Shipov was the son of a very successful serf merchant who at the beginning of the nineteenth century made a fortune dealing in cattle and furs. After he died, his assistants stole much of the property and connived with officials to imprison his heir. In 1832 Shipov fils fled from his landlord and for the next five years wandered from place to place doing business under assumed names. Someone betrayed him to the authorities, and after spending four years in prison, he was returned to his legitimate master. He then obtained a passport valid for six months, on which he travelled to Bessarabia where he purchased a glue factory. On the passport's expiration, the authorities refused to renew it, and Shipov had to give up his business and once again return home. At that time he learned of a law that a serf who escaped from the captivity of the north Caucasian mountaineers, against whom the government was waging war, was to be granted freedom. Driven to desperation, Shipov made his way to the Caucasus, attached himself to the army, let himself be captured and then, having made good his escape, received his freedom and with it at last the right to carry on business free of private and official chicanery.17

It was thanks to men of Shipov's iron determination that rural industries made rapid progress. The deterioration in the legal status of tlhe peasantry under Catherine should not obscure the fact that at the saime time their economic conditions improved. Russian peasants were proib-ably never as prosperous as during her reign when the liberalization of economic policies gave them virtually unlimited access to trading amd manufacture.

Until 1839, when an enterprising German, Ludwig Knoop, settled iin Russia, Russia's rural textile industry relied on manual labour; it wass a form of cottage industry and suitably primitive in its technology. Knootp, who represented in Russia a major English textile firm, knew how to g;et around English prohibitions on the export of spinning machines. He won the confidence of some rich peasant manufacturers (most of thetm recently emancipated serfs) whom he persuaded to invest in machinery. His clients were so successful that he was soon swamped with orderrs. Knoop arranged credit for his peasant-clients, engaged the managers and foremen, laid out the plants, procured the raw material, amd as an active shareholder often supervised actual operations. In all, he founded 122 spinning mills and died in 1894, the richest industrialist in Russia.

It is significant that these undertakings which laid the foundations of Russia's first mechanized industry were controlled not by merchants but by peasants. Prohibited from acquiring serfs, merchants had to confine themselves to supplying the raw materials to peasant-entrepreneurs and selling the finished product of their factories. The industrial processes themselves were not in their hands. Mechanical spinning of cotton yarn, the industry which in England had launched an economic and social revolution, in Russia accommodated itself perfectly well to serfdom and indeed matured within its womb. The result of technological innovation was a peculiar blend of modern technology imported from the west and servile labour inherited from Muscovy, a mixture which contradicted the nineteenth-century belief that industrialism and bondage were incompatible. Viewed against the background of these economic facts, the attempts of eighteenth-century monarchs to build up in Russia western-type cities inhabited by a western-type bourgeoisie appear to have been singularly misguided.

It would be tedious to recount in detail the urban legislation of that age, not only because the provisions were most elaborate, but because they bore little relationship to reality and rarely produced any results. Suffice it to say that all the rulers, notably Catherine 11, tried to overcome the traditional formlessness of Russian cities by consolidating all their actual inhabitants into a cohesive and legally recognized class enjoying self-government. The City Charter of 1785, issued by Catherine concurrently with her Dvorianstvo Charter, was a particularly ambitious step in this direction, because it granted the Russian urban population for the first time in history the right to form corporations and elect its own officials. But none of this meant much. The urban inhabitants continued as before to owe primary allegiance to their respective social estates; a dvorianin who happened to live in the city and to hold property there, though technically an urban inhabitant under Catherine's definition, in fact felt nothing in common with his fellow-burghers, and the same could be said of the urban peasants and clergy. In effect, the city population remained split and the merchants and artisans continued to live in isolation from the rest of society. The seemingly generous powers of self-rule granted the cities in the Charter of 1785 were immediately nullified by other provisions assuring the bureaucracy a tight reign on urban corporations. Despite their promises, eighteenth-century governments treated