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

Chapter 3. Sources of Supply

59 Chapter 3 R Sources of Supply Because cities do not produce food, they need to acquire it from places that produce more than enough to satisfy local demand. Paris, for example , ate cereals from Champagne and other surplus-producing provinces within France. Amsterdam brought Polish and Livonian grain from Danzig and Riga. Stockholm relied on grain from Estland and Lifland. To sustain itself and to grow, St. Petersburg likewise needed an accessible source of surplus grain, but its supply problems were more difficult than those of other large cities. European Russia as a whole produced a surplus of grain in most years and was undoubtedly capable of producing far more, but it encompassed a large territory comprising different regions with widely differing agricultural productivity. Situated in the far northwestern corner of European Russia, St. Petersburg lay far from Russia’s most fertile provinces, while those to which it had the easiest access almost never produced a surplus of grain. Although cereals could be brought to St. Petersburg from regions of surplus production, this was difficult and expensive—though possibly less difficult and certainly less expensive than importing them by sea. Even so, St. Petersburg endured high prices and repeated threats of scarcity, while a number of provinces that were capable of producing 60 soUrces of sUPPly enormous surpluses curtailed their production because they had no access to St. Petersburg or any other market. The crucial difference between the surplus-producing regions that supplied St. Petersburg with cereals and those that could not was water transport. When long distances were involved, grain and flour moved by water, and by linking specific regions of surplus production with available consumers, the waterways of European Russia created, organized, and defined Russia’s separate markets for surplus grain, the largest and most important of which supplied St. Petersburg and much of northern and central Russia. the proBleM In June 1772 Senator Grigorii Teplov wrote a response to the Senate’s inquiry into the causes of the recent rise in the price of cereals. In a brief memorandum, Teplov explained that the fundamental problem was one of supply, calling it “the consequence of creating this capital city in such a region of the empire, which, either from the characteristics of the soil or of the climate, is itself unproductive and in which nothing that is nourishing grows satisfactorily, but everything is, of necessity, brought from far away with great difficulty.”1 Teplov was not only one of Catherine’s closest associates but also a well-educated and experienced government official with a deep interest in economic matters. His many assignments included an appointment, in 1763, to the Commission on Commerce, for which he acted as secretary and executive director until his death, in 1779. Given its source and its context, Teplov’s memorandum directed the Senate’s attention to the structural problems underlying the city’s provisioning, but its remarks about the region surrounding St. Petersburg were hardly original. Ever since the city’s founding, Russians and foreigners alike had commented on the surrounding area’s inability to provide food and other necessities for a populous city.2 In June 1786 the Commission on Grain made that same point in its third report to the empress. After identifying the proximate causes of the most recent rise in prices, it added, “The commission cannot refrain from saying that this capital, lying almost on the edge of the empire and unable to rely on grain brought from the districts that surround it, is deprived of the advantages by which all populous cities attract to themselves the nearby rural inhabitants with their domestic produce , but must supply itself instead with cereals brought here by water annually at great expense.”3 The information that the government gathered during the crisis of 1786–1787 and in succeeding years demonstrated the accuracy of that statement and provided a wealth of detail on the places from which St. Petersburg could and could not obtain its supply of cereals. the hinterland The vast sheet of ice that covered northern Europe during the last ice age defined and shaped the natural hinterland of St. Petersburg. It removed much of soUrces of sUPPly 61 the soil from the areas north and northeast of the city and deposited it well to the south and east, where it created the series of low hills that separate the watershed of the Neva from those of the...