from Baltic and Volga arteries. Shifting gradually from grain to manufacturing,
Moscow’s hinterland became a manufacturing hub for leather goods, textiles, and
other products generally for the domestic market, produced by quitrent-paying
peasants whose villages turned to the market for grain.
From the beginning of the century the thriving Livonian trade centers, acquired in
1710, provided a huge boost to Russia’s export trade; they shipped goods produced in
Latvian and Estonian borderlands as well as inland in the Grand Duchy. Livland’s
port of Riga was the empire’s most important port until eclipsed at mid-century by
St. Petersburg; nevertheless it and other Baltic ports (Narva and Reval/Tallinn)
remained important. Livland and Estland constituted a somewhat discrete economic
zone, inasmuch as these ports retained their traditional tariff structure, customs
duties, weights and measures, coinage, and other trade practices until 1773.
A traditional producer and exporter of grain, under Russian control Livonia con-
tinued to sell to grain-poor Sweden according to Swedish-Russian treaties (1721).
Grain surpluses in Estland were turned into alcohol for lack of good transit capacity
and exported to Europe and Russia. As a trade region in the Russian empire, Livonia
provided outlet for hemp,flax, leather, and the growing manufacturing energies of
the Western Dvina basin (Pskov and Smolensk provinces).
St. Petersburg’s rise as the empire’s most significant export port was momentous.
With the cessation of hostilities in the eastern end of the Baltic Sea around 1710,
it grew fast. Peter the Great forcibly populated the city with merchants and
noblemen from Moscow, Iaroslavl’, and other central towns; he diverted trade
Figure 15.1Catherine II’s urban redesigns prescribed opening up a municipal square with
religious and secular buildings including, as here in Kostroma, an arcaded“merchants’
quarters”for shops. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
322 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801