from Arkhangelsk by awarding the new capital favorable tariffs and simply man-
dating redirection of goods, even before proper means of transport to the new
capital existed. As canals were built to supply it, St. Petersburg became the empire’s
primary international port, receiving transit goods from the Volga route and
domestic products (leather, hemp,flax, rye to feed the population) from the
upper and Middle Volga and its own hinterland of Novgorod, Olonets, and
Pskov provinces.
Arkhangelsk, founded in 1584 in response to the development of English and
later Dutch trade through the White Sea,flourished as the destination of export
goods from the Volga route through Moscow and Vologda. Its drawbacks as an
international port were considerable, however, iced in more than half the year and
so distant that passage to it from Europe took three times as long as the trip through
the Baltic to St. Petersburg. In the eighteenth century Arkhangelsk declined as
St. Petersburg rose, but it continued to export forest products (naval supplies, furs,
pitch, tar) from its Northern Dvina hinterland and even some surplus grain from
the Middle Volga. It was still the third busiest port in the empire in this century.
Astrakhan was Russia’s fourth most important trade center, the empire’smost
international city, and a magnet for goods produced along the Volga and Black Sea
through the century, but its dominance in the south waned as the empire expanded.
As in the preceding century, it featured neighborhoods of Bukharan, Indian, Persian,
and Armenian merchants who, unlike European merchants, were allowed to engage
in retail trade (after 1745 they were forced to pay local taxes on it). Astrakhan played
an important role in the importation of Iranian products (often through Indian
merchants) and in the shipping of locally produced silk, leatherwork, and silver, crafts
dominated by Armenians. Astrakhan servedas the catch basin for grain produced in
the lower Volga (Kazan, Simbirsk, Penza, Saratov, Tambov, and southern Riazan’
provinces), areas too distant from Moscow and St. Petersburg to profitably ship north.
For eastern trade, Astrakhan gradually yielded to Ural trade centers. In the
seventeenth century overland caravan routes from China and Central Asia had
shifted northward, bypassing a turbulent steppe. Instead of routes across the steppe
north of the Caspian, or via northern Iran and across the Caspian Sea to Astrakhan,
trade originating in China and Central Asia moved through Tobolsk and Verkho-
tur’e in western Siberia. Bukharans brought silks and cottons, Kirghiz sold horses,
camel hair and skins, wool and sheep, other steppe nomads sold horses by the
thousands. Over the century, the state developed customs ports that offered more
direct connection to central Russia than Astrakhan; these included Ekaterinburg,
Orenburg, and Semipalatinsk. Ekaterinburg was founded in 1713 in the Perm lands
as a mining and ironworks center, laid out in a regular square urban plan. Designated
in the 1760s the main customs center (replacing Verkhotur’e), Ekaterinburg became
Russia’s“window on Asia,”particularly after the Siberian highway was constructed
through it (1763). In the 1730s Orenburg was founded in the southern Urals
Bashkir lands and Semipalatinsk far to its east on the Irtysh Line, and the state
redirected trade from Astrakhan to Orenburg. By the 1740s Astrakhan’s Indian
population had resettled in Orenburg and the city had become a center of Central
Asian caravan trade in silks, cottons, horses, wool, and sheep.
Fiscal Policy and Trade 323