Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930

11. From the Zloty to the Ruble: The Kingdom of Poland in theMonetary Politics of the Russian Empire

11 From the Zloty to the Ruble: The Kingdom of Poland in the Monetary Politics of the Russian Empire Ekaterina Pravilova The study of the rise, development, and fall of empires is an inexhaustible project. Even as researchers continue to adopt new approaches and raise new questions about the organization and functioning of imperial states, the number of unresolved issues and unexplored topics barely seems to diminish because the subject is so complex. Indeed, just as old “blank spots” in the history of empires are ¤lled in, new ones emerge, while other important problems remain persistently under-examined. One enduring “blank spot” of imperial history concerns the vital question of money, or, more generally, the question of the working of imperial ¤nancial systems. What, after all, could be more important to understanding how empires work than determining the costs for an empire of acquiring or losing a given piece of territory, the general economic consequences of imperial growth and decline, the in®uence of ¤nancial factors on the nature of imperial administration, culture, and social life, and the underlying principles that informed the drafting of imperial budgets? Despite their obvious importance, however, questions of this sort have not usually been taken up by historians. In the case of tsarist Russia, the organization of state ¤nances re®ected some of the complexities that characterized the broader administration of the state. The management of the Russian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested both on a toleration of diversity and on the pursuit of standardization. Consequently, in Russia perhaps more than elsewhere, the life of the state was de¤ned by an interweaving of the par- ticular and the universal. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in the realms of economy and ¤nance. On the one hand, the Russian government routinely adopted measures that were tailored to address the special economic needs and circumstances of its disparate regions; on the other, it also routinely sought to bring these particular policies into alignment with general principles governing the empire’s business and economic life. This already implicitly contradictory situation was made all the more complicated by the fact that the empire’s regions varied strikingly in terms of their general level of economic development. Many of the imperial borderlands were markedly less developed than the Russian center in terms of industry or manufacturing. Consequently, their “maintenance” proved to be quite costly for the imperial treasury. At the same, the empire also included the much richer territories of Poland and Finland, whose economies were oriented toward Western Europe and many of whose ¤nancial institutions and practices were based on European models. These differences in development as well as the equally diverse ¤nancial cultures of the empire’s regions led Russian administrators to adopt an extremely broad range of budgetary, taxation, custom, and credit policies. At the same time, there was no question that these same administrators ultimately aspired to integrate the ¤nancial systems of the borderlands into a common imperial framework. Naturally the existence of a unitary ¤nancial space of this sort presupposed the existence of a single currency—the Russian ruble—that would circulate throughout the whole of the state’s territory. The road to a single currency was complicated, however, and the process of incorporating newly acquired territories into the empire’s ¤nancial system often dragged on for decades. War, the incompatibility of Russian and non-Russian accounting practices, and the preference of local peoples for the currencies already in circulation in their regions prior to the advent of Russian power all helped to make the complete elimination of non-Russian currencies in the borderlands extremely dif¤cult. Of course, the most obvious and important hurdle standing in the way of monetary standardization was the incompatibility of Russian monies with the currencies of foreign states circulating in the empire’s newly acquired territories. The Russian government encountered this problem repeatedly as it expanded to the west. Polish-Lithuanian and Western European coins that circulated in areas such as Little Russia, the Baltic provinces , Belorussia, and Poland were much easier to use for accounting purposes and tended to be better minted than Russian kopecks, which were full-weight (that is, undebased) but small and dif¤cult to use.1 The inhabi296 Ekaterina Pravilova tants of the Ukrainian lands incorporated into the Russian state in 1654 were unfamiliar with Russian coinage and preferred to use the monies they knew best rather...