Some Russian towns in these centuries had even less of a“municipal”presence,
with very fewposadskieand everyone in town engaged in trade. International transit
trade in Siberia was in the hands of Central Asian“Bukharan”merchants, and
major merchants from Moscow, Novgorod, and Iaroslavl’regularly bought and
sold goods in Siberian towns. Siberian towns were rustic outposts: Erika Monahan
finds the following panoply of traders listed in Siberian customs books: soldiers,
musketeers, coachmen, Cossacks, vagrants, Kalmyks, peasants, priests, with not a
single townsman (posadskii) among them. Garrison Cossacks were particularly
heavily engaged in trade, even acting as the tsar’s representatives in China trade
in the 1680s; they dominated the populations of many Siberian towns. Thus, in
these centuries Russia had very little social capital from which an indigenous
“middle class”might have developed.
Those who did constitute a potential middle class were merchants and artisans
who managed to build up capital for intra-city trade. But they, too, faced challenges
in managing their wealth for their own benefit. As national and international trade
developed, the state coercively recruited merchants into its service for high-level
trade. The wealthiest among them were calledgostiand are cited in the 1550
Lawcode; by the 1590s two groups of lesser merchants are also cited, the“merchant
hundred”and the“cloth weaver’s hundred.”These three groups of merchants
served as the tsar’s factors, called upon to leave their successful businesses to serve
once everyfive or so years. The ranks of these groups were replenished from
successful townsmen, which promotions, of course, deprived the taxpaying com-
mune of some of its most able-to-pay members.
The highest of these merchant groups, thegosti, served as ambassadors on foreign
trade missions, collectors of customs in the port cities or alcohol taxes around the
realm, buyers of goods on which the tsar claimedfirst right of refusal, and sellers of
goods claimed as a state monopoly. In return for such service, they received
significant privileges: freedom from direct taxes, exemption from many tariffs
and customs, until 1666 the right to own land and serfs, and adjudication by
the Chancery of the State Treasury rather than by the Moscow Administrative
Chancery to which the normal townsman was subject. They also could personally
benefit from the access and trade opportunities the work exposed them to. The
number of such privileged merchants was limited—fifteen to thirty in Moscow in
the seventeenth century. Those based in Moscow outnumbered those of other
towns, and dominated in wealth and volume of trade, but there weregostiin several
other active trading centers, such as Ustiug Velikii, Iaroslavl’, Smolensk, Nizhnii
Novgorod, Novgorod, and Pskov. The merchants of the lesser hundreds did similar
but less responsible jobs (collecting taxes and customs) and enjoyed similar exemp-
tion from direct taxes and from the administration of the Moscow Administrative
Chancery. In the seventeenth century some foreigners becamegosti, including the
Dutch entrepreneurs Marcus Vogelaer and Andrei Vinius. In 1649 the government
expanded all these ranks to more than 25gostiand 274 in the two hundreds in
Moscow; by the end of the centurygostihad reached about 40 in number.
Two life stories of Moscow merchants take us inside the economic lives of
merchants in Muscovy. Samuel Baron chronicled Vasilii Shorin, whose career
240 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801