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  • Bread upon the Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703–1811 by Robert E. Jones
  • David L. Ransel (bio)
Robert E. Jones . Bread upon the Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703–1811. 312 pp. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press , 2013 . ISBN 9780822944287 .

Nothing is more critical to the survival of a national capital than the supply of foodstuffs to its garrison and people. When Peter the Great constructed a new capital, St. Petersburg, at the mouth of the Neva River in the far northwest of his country, he had to find a means to feed its soldiers and civilian inhabitants. The climate and poor soils of the city’s hinterland supported only subsistence farming and could not produce adequate supplies of cereals for what was soon to become one of Europe’s largest cities. Flour for the rye bread that constituted the staple of the Russian diet had to be found elsewhere, far to the south and east of the city. One of the central problems of Russian government from the early eighteenth century until the construction of railroads in the second half of the next was finding and transporting cereals to Petersburg. Yet historians have given surprisingly little attention to the question, even if some elements of the story have been treated. For example, many writers have looked into the development of agriculture in early modern Russia, and historians during the Soviet era debated the timing of the emergence of a national market in grain. Enessa Istomina and Khaia Sorina wrote detailed studies of the construction and management of waterborne transportation, and I recently did a study of a merchant family that worked in the grain trade to Petersburg. But this new study by Robert E. Jones is the first to offer a unified picture of the provisioning of the new capital.

Jones’s career prepared him well for this study. His first book on the emancipation of the Russian nobility from obligatory state service looked into, among other things, the new life of the nobility in the provinces and their need to provide a living for themselves by drawing on the resources of their landed estates, which were one source of the cereals that traveled to Petersburg. His second monograph followed the career of Jakob Sievers, a reforming state bureaucrat of the Catherinian era, who managed the waterways to Petersburg and was governor of much of the territory through which they ran. Since the completion of the Sievers book thirty years ago, Jones has been collecting a wealth of printed and archival material on the far-flung grain trade to the new capital on the Gulf of Finland, a trade that encompassed virtually the entirety of central and northern Russia down to the middle Volga River and its tributaries and up the Oka River to the city of Orel and its hinterland. The principal fulcrum of the system was Vyshnii Volochek, where a canal and locks united the Tvertsa River, a tributary of the upper Volga, with the Msta River, which [End Page 329] tumbled downhill through dangerous rapids to Lake Il’men. The waterway continued down the more placid Volkhov River, past Novgorod, and then followed the southern edge of Lake Ladoga before entering the Neva River and making a final short leg to Petersburg. This was the corridor that carried the bulk of the flour that fed the burgeoning new capital, and Jones describes its shape and importance well. He also tells us of the several other routes that added to the larger system but that were less heavily traveled because they required portages from one river to another. Some of these secondary routes acquired canal links in the early nineteenth century and added significant sources of provision for Petersburg.

A compelling concern of the ruler and officials in Petersburg was the price of rye flour, as black bread was the main constituent in the diet of ordinary citizens. Free trade was replacing mercantilism in the minds of policy makers throughout Europe in this era, and officials in the field of commerce convinced Empress Catherine to free up economic activity. She did so first in...

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