Tseny i ikh dvizhenie v russkom gosudarstve XVI veka, and: The Economy and Material Culture of Russia 1600–1725 (review)

When, almost half a century ago, Arkadii G. Man'kov published his history of prices in 16th-century Russia, Joseph Stalin was still alive, and debates about the formation of the "all-Russian market" still headlined Soviet historical journals. Richard Hellie's massive new book arrives in a different era: the Soviet Union – not to mention Joseph Stalin – is no more, and Lenin's dictum about the all-Russian market seems to be troubling no one. And yet these two books, for all the differences in their origins, deserve to be considered together. Read one after the other, they establish price dynamics for the entire early modern period of Russian history, and therefore provide vivid insight into the changes observable in the Muscovite economy, and the ways in which political, military, climatic, and social vectors affected economic performance. These two books also permit historians, in conjunction with price histories for the later periods of Russian history, to connect the early modern experience to the economic history of Imperial Russia.¹

Man'kov observed at mid-century that, despite a few works written before the 1917 revolution, the history of prices in Muscovite Russia was practically unstudied, and for good reason (3). The sources were dispersed and, for the earliest period, rare, which meant that the student of prices would have to excavate data from a wide range of evidence composed and preserved for other reasons. In addition, the sources employed various units to measure the goods received or alienated for cash, itself sometimes expressed in different systems.

Man'kov attempted to resolve these problems by concentrating upon one large body of sources whose similarity promised comparability: the income and expenditure books of Russia's 16th-century monasteries. Of the more than 200 books that Man'kov studied, only a handful (20) had been published, which made his labor almost exclusively archive-driven.² The 17 monasteries from which Man'kov collected data included some of the largest in Muscovy, and, since they proved to be active agents in the market, their records provided a great deal of data on prices.³ But they also presented the historian with distinctive problems: most of the price data came from the period after 1550, which made generalizations about the entire 16th century difficult to sustain.⁴ In addition, monasteries from the center and north were better represented than those headquartered in the south and east, delivering therefore an uneven picture of the "Russian" economy. Still another complication results from the use of monastic records. Inasmuch as some of these monasteries were authentic economic gorillas, they wielded unusual influence on the market, leading the researcher to wonder how representative their price data might be of normal market operations. Certainly monastic economies did not operate within the same constraints or under the same impulses as did small, private economies, so that the meaning of their price records is certainly open to debate.

Despite these limitations, even half a century later, Man'kov's work remains an enormous achievement. More than half the book (104–237) is taken up with tables that report prices for about 100 separate goods by type, place of transaction, and year; every entry features an exact location (the great bulk of which are archival). Within the first 100 pages of text that make up the heart of the book, separate chapters examine and consider the price history of grains and bread, livestock and dairy products, handicrafts, salt, metalworking, and leather goods. In producing this unprecedented body of information, Man'kov created about 7000 price records, many of which he reported in graphs indexed against prices for the end of the 16th century (9, 13).⁵

Even though evidence from before 1550 was relatively scant...