Bread upon the Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811

Chapter 6. Transportation

147 Chapter 6 R Transportation Throughout the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial government worked to improve transportation from provincial Russia to St. Petersburg . Then, in the early nineteenth century, it expanded and intensified its undertakings by creating new routes and adding other ports to its list of destinations. The historical literature on transportation and waterways in eighteenth-century Russia has described those developments in considerable breadth and detail, but it has largely failed to connect them to the growth of St. Petersburg, the expansion of agriculture, the organization of the grain trade, and other subjects covered in this book.1 Improvements to the transportation infrastructure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries paralleled improvements to Russia’s commercial infrastructure. Together they enabled St. Petersburg to acquire the food, firewood, and building materials it needed to sustain its growing population; at the same time, they enabled Russia to increase its exports and augment its national income. Although bringing goods to market was left to private individuals, the government did direct its efforts toward making that task easier. Whereas British and U.S. entrepreneurs and investors constructed toll bridges, turnpikes, and canals with their own funds, private enterprise played no 148 traNsPortatioN part in creating or improving Russia’s roads, highways, and waterways. With the exception of the Serdiukov concession at Vyshnii Volochek, which the government finally bought up in 1774, transport facilities were the exclusive purview of the imperial government. For overland transport, it created and maintained thirteen highways, or “tracts,” that connected important cities and towns within the empire, and it ran the coaching stations, with their complements of coachmen (iamshchiki) and horses. Those highways carried state couriers and private travelers , messages, parcels, and light goods, and for limited distances they could also carry grain, flour, and other heavy goods if water transport was not available. For long distances, however, the availability of navigable waterways determined the movement of heavy commodities, such as grain and flour. Nature provided Russia with low elevations and relatively abundant precipitation , creating a plenitude of streams, rivers, and lakes. Russia’s network of natural waterways and portages had allowed merchants to transport their goods for at least a millennium before Peter I resolved to improve it. With two short canals at Vyshnii Volochek Peter succeeded in opening a continuous waterway from the Volga to the Gulf of Finland, but that was only the beginning of the government’s efforts to facilitate the movement of goods from the Volga Basin to St. Petersburg. The Ladoga Canal, from the Volkhov to the Neva, enhanced the safety and the value of the waterway Peter had created, and his successors made further improvements that increased the volume of traffic and decreased the difficulties and delays on the waterway to St. Petersburg. Commerce along the waterways increased from decade to decade, towns along the rivers grew in size and prosperity, and hundreds of thousands of Russians found employment as skilled and unskilled workers in the many trades and occupations that commerce required. For all its determination to improve what nature had created, the Russian government had to accept the limits that nature imposed, and nature could be harsh and difficult. Great distances and a severe climate with long frigid winters and summer droughts made water transport in Russia quantitatively and qualitatively different from water transport in western and central Europe. Nature set the terms; Russians could hope only to modify them. Moving grain and Flour On July 24, 1775, Prince A. A. Viazemskii, the procurator-general of the Senate, forwarded a directive from the empress to the governors of Voronezh and Kazan ordering each of them to purchase 25,000 chetverts of rye from the recent harvest and arrange for it to be milled and the flour delivered to the Provisions Chancellery in St. Petersburg by the spring of 1776. In separate responses, each governor explained the practical problems he faced in carrying out that order and the modifications he had been forced to make. Because it was too soon after the harvest for new grain to be threshed and traNsPortatioN 149 milled, the governors found it necessary to purchase flour from merchants who could provide the desired quantity the following spring at the wharf in Nizhnii Novgorod. At 2.40 rubles a chetvert, however, the price would be higher than the governors had anticipated. In the meantime, the governors would make arrangements to transport the flour from...