tradition of grain reserves was represented in the eighteenth century by a large
network of urban and rural granaries. In Byzantine times Constantinople had been
systematically provisioned through agreements with Genoese merchants; under
Ottoman rule the state developed a network of grain reserves and sources of supply
for the capital so that the population rarely suffered famine in the eighteenth
century. In Italy from the latefifteenth century major towns established grain
reserves and by the eighteenth century France and Prussia had developed national
systems to provision major cities.
Founding his new capital in a far-flung location poorly served by existing trade
routes, Peter I immediately faced the problem of provisioning St. Petersburg with
grain. In 1703 he ordered grain requisitions in kind delivered to collecting centers
for St. Petersburg; by the 1720s this burden was monetized. In 1724 Peter I ordered
granaries established for St. Petersburg, but George Munro calls the system that
developed“haphazard.”Canal-building efforts, as we have seen, greatly improved
St. Petersburg’s steady supply of grain.
Through the middle of the eighteenth century, as noble estates were becoming
less autarkic, the Volga grain trade proved sufficient for local populations and the
capitals. Landlords were expected to maintain reserves to provide for their serfs in
time of dearth, although the subsequent repetition of a 1734 decree to that effect
suggests that landlords might have fallen short in this regard. But by the 1760s,
demographic and urban growth and mercantilist ideology combined to encourage
a more systematic approach. In the 1760s the Empress decreed that all towns and
state-owned and crown-owned villages should maintain granaries, to be stocked
annually by peasants and townsmen themselves. The Charter to the Townsmen
of 1785 repeated the requirement that towns maintain grain reserves; reminders
to landlords of their obligations also recurred. By the 1780s Moscow was
developing reserves, while St. Petersburg was better equipped. In 1766 a masonry
structure had replaced the town’s wooden grain reserve; by the 1780s the city and
province had a network of granaries. When bad harvests hit in 1785, St Peters-
burg had sufficient reserves to avoid food riots of the sort that bedeviled Russia’s
European counterparts.
Beyond the capitals, the population was less well provided for. Peasants and
townsmen considered the obligation to build and stock granaries an additional tax
burden, while landlords expected the state to pay for construction and mainten-
ance of granaries. The result was inertia. Paul I’s government more effectively
enforced the call for granaries on noble, state peasant, and court lands, resulting in
a system that served the army and populace well in the Napoleonic wars a decade
later. Provisioning was of particular concern in Siberia. There, as in the seven-
teenth century, governors were attentive to maintaining grain reserves, given the
severity of the climate; they recruited and subsidized peasant agriculture to
provide stocks. Iakutsk had state grain warehouses from the 1740s, and the
state imposed on the Iakuts (nomadic horsemen) the service obligation of trans-
porting state goods eastward. Across the empire, however, the difficulty of oversight
and the unpredictability of agrarian supplies made such mandates impossible to
fulfill consistently.
Surveillance and Control 345