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1 introduCtion R Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Ecclesiastes 11:1 The primary subject of this book is the provisioning of eighteenthcentury St. Petersburg, a new and rapidly growing city created by fiat in an infertile region on the periphery of the Russian Empire. The book begins with Peter the Great’s founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 and his first efforts to provide its inhabitants with food at prices they could afford. It follows succeeding governments’ efforts to achieve that same goal, and it ends in the early nineteenth century, when Peter I’s successors finally produced a longlasting but by no means permanent solution to the problem. Within that period of slightly more than a century, food shortages—in the 1720s and again in the mid-1780s—forced the imperial government to take extraordinary measures to ward off starvation and possible rebellion, but even in more orderly times, supplying Russia’s capital with cereals constituted what Russia’s minister of internal affairs described to Emperor Alexander I in 1808 as “a special subject of concern and worry for the government.” Concern with the supply and distribution of cereals was certainly not unique to St. Petersburg or the Russian Empire. Before the twentieth century, governments accorded grain the importance that governments in the present age give to oil and gas. Providing grain or at least making sure that it was available and 2 iNtrodUctioN affordable was also seen as a basic component of sovereignty. Rulers who could provide their subjects with the daily bread for which they prayed were acting as God’s agents on earth; those who could not, such as Tsar Boris Godunov, could face doubt about their right to rule or, in China, be accused of having lost the “mandate of Heaven.” Governments often went to great lengths to meet their subjects’ needs and expectations. States that could not produce enough grain for themselves had to find accessible sources and create dependable lines of supply, and most endeavored to regulate the availability and price of cereals in their capitals and major cities. As one might expect, the longest and most continuous record of grain procurement and provisioning belongs to imperial China, which began moving grain from the delta of the Yangtze River to the grain-deficient north as early as the sixth century B.C.E. By the sixth century C.E., it had completed the Grand Canal, a 1,776-kilometer waterway to bring grain from the Yangtze Delta to Beijing. Ancient Athens depended on a steady supply of grain from the steppe north of the Black Sea and from Egypt, and during the Peloponnesian War (432– 404 B.C.E.) Athens invaded Sicily to cut off the flow of grain from that island to the city’s enemies. Imperial Rome depended on a steady supply of grain from Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa to feed and placate its capital city’s population. The Byzantine Empire and its Ottoman successor in Constantinople directed and controlled the provisioning of that city with supply zones, price controls, and, when necessary, requisitioning. The much smaller cities of medieval Europe organized their own grain markets to stabilize availability and affordability, and the city-states of medieval and renaissance Italy bought grain with public money at harvest time and maintained public granaries that sold and distributed grain when supplies ran short. The best example from eighteenth-century Europe—if only because it has been the most thoroughly researched—is prerevolutionary France, whose government developed an elaborate system for provisioning Paris and other cities. The government of Sweden bought grain in Estland and Lifland to ensure the provisioning of Stockholm, and when it lost those two provinces to Russia in 1721, it preserved the right to continue buying grain there. While most European countries limited their efforts to supplying their capital cites, the government of seventeenth-century China created a network of granaries to stabilize the grain market throughout the empire.1 France presents the outstanding example of what could happen to a sovereign who failed to satisfy his or her subjects’ demands for bread. In the autumn of 1789, in response to rapidly rising prices and fear of famine, the women of Paris marched out to Versailles, demanding bread; once there, they forced King Louis XVI to return with them to Paris as a virtual prisoner. Nothing of that sort occurred in St. Petersburg during the crisis of the mid-1780s...

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