n INTRODUCTION. 



development of Russian trade and industry. Opening- with the great reforms of Peter 

 the Great, the eighteenth centur^v alread^y brings Eussia into the circle of nations 

 with a trading and industrial organisation. But these efforts were opposed by the 

 wars with the Swedes, ending witli tlie occupation of the Baltic provinces, the wars 

 in the south for pushing back the Turks who had already succeeded in seizing the 

 northern shores of the Black Sea and the territories of tlie related Slaves, and the 

 ceaseless extension to the east where unorganised Asiatic hordes long prevented the 

 establishment of peace and order to which the Eussian people ever strove, and which 

 it attained so lately. The beginning of the nineteenth century bears the same char- 

 acter in consequence of the invasion by Napoleon, the Turkish wars and the forcible 

 introduction of an orderly rule in the Caucasus and the Central Asiatic territories, 

 where it was impossible to permit tlie constant raids upon the country and rapes of 

 the inhabitants by petty Asiatic rulers. At this time trade relations with the west 

 began to develop principally in agricultural raw materials, the production of which 

 visibly increased in proportion as order was established, and to such an extent that 

 the surplus of grain, hemp, flax, timber and wool, chiefly from the Chernoziom zone 

 of Eussia, began to be sent in abundance to the markets of Western Europe, and 

 furnished grounds for regarding Eussia as an exclusively agricultural country, a view 

 justified by the whole structure of Eussia's past existence. 



Although the Government, and a few enlightened people, made great efforts to 

 establish in Eussia various forms of mining and manufacturing industry, and although 

 the rapid development, at the time, of certain works and manufactories, for example, 

 the metallurgical works in the Urals, the factories around Moscow, the beet industry 

 near Kiev, the petroleum industry in Baku, demonstrated the combination of conditions 

 existing for the purpose in Eussia, nevertheless the industrial development of the 

 Empire moved very slowly and yielded not only to the other aspects of the growth 

 of Eussia's forces, for example, the development of science, the advances of litera- 

 ture, music and painting, the increase of the means of warlike defense, but also to 

 the growing demand for articles of foreign production. As an illustration of the 

 latter, may be taken the import of wine which in 1850 amounted to seventy- 

 six million roubles across the west European frontier, while in 1875 it reached 

 five hundred and twelve million roubles, or an increase in twenty-five years of nearl}' 

 700 per cent. 



The chief cause of the feebleness of the development of the home manufacturing 

 industry consisted for a long time in the whole organisation of former Eussian life, 

 which was concentrated in the peasantry, which directed all its energies to agricul- 

 tural production and employed for the attainment of tliis object only the means w^hich 

 lay at hand, such as the replacement of lands exhausted by cultivation by fresh lots, 

 home-made implements and the felling of forests. The rural gentry, or large land- 

 holders, having serf labourers bound to them, employed them also mainly in the cul- 

 tivation of the land and, like the peasants, strove to satisfy their wants as far as 

 possible from their domestic resources, only having recourse to the productions of 

 manufacturing industry as a luxury. Thus houses were built chiefly of wood from 

 their own estates by their own carpenters, who had attained extraordinary skill in 

 their trade. Clothing also was in the main woven from home-grown flax and wool, or made 

 from home furs and skins. In the matter of food the people confined themselves so strictly to 



