Russia's merchant fleet on the Caspian was barely adequate. The ships
were too few and too small to sustain more than a light volume of
traffic. Most were designed so that they could only travel with the
wind. Many had flat bottoms, which aided passage through shallow
coastal waters at the cost of decreased maneuverability. The crews
were usually men of few nautical skills. For all the shortcomings of
the Russian merchant marine, it played a central role in the trans-
Caspian trade. The alternative was the Iranian merchant craft, the
karaji (called kirzhim by the Russians). It was a small, flat-bottomed
vessel sheltered only by bundles of branches along its sides. A sack of
stones did duty as the anchor. The karaji was used more for fishing
and local coastal travel than for the main commercial routes. The few
Russians who did journey to Anzali found its hot, humid climate and
its swamp-bred diseases to be at least as great a menace as the political
instability.
Russia exported to Iran iron and steel, a variety of textiles, dyes,
and perfumes, as well as goods from western Europe, including Brit-
ish and Dutch textiles and sugar from the British West Indies. The
most important of Iran's exports was Gilani silk. Its other exports
included cotton, rice, fruits, spices, and opium. In light of the many
difficulties, it is not surprising that the volume of Russo-Iranian trade
was quite small. Attempts to stimulate it by establishing chartered
companies modeled after the East India companies or by abolishing
them were of no avail.
All of this would make it seem as though the only people who
could believe in the practicability of Russia's ambition to rival the
British East India Company were those who knew very little about
Asia. Yet the French agent G. A. Oliver, who traveled across the Le-
vant and reached Iran about the time of Catherine's 1796 expedition,
viewed Russia's commercial opportunities in the same light as the
tsaritsa. He, too, was convinced that, if Russia could secure its tur-
bulent southeastern marches, then it would in all probability succeed
in replacing Britain as the purveyor of Indian luxuries to Europe.^24
Although the drive to emulate the great empires of western Europe
provided the theoretical underpinning of Russian expansionism,
that consideration was not the sole determinant of Russia's policy
toward the lands to the southeast. Paralleling but only occasionally
coinciding with the theory was an ad hoc approach in which Russia
rarely took the initiative but instead reacted to the changing political
alignments in a disunited Iran. Most of Russia's actions in these epi-
sodes did not produce the desired results, but they had a long-term
significance anyway. These occasional engagements influenced offi-
36 Russian Expansion under Catherine the Great