percent of the grain harvest was exported, Riga being the primary port until Black
Sea ports got going at the end of the century. Grain constituted a much less
important part of the peasant diet in this century than for counterparts in Europe,
where since the sixteenth century the peasant diet had increasingly been relying
on grain. Russian peasants, by contrast, in the eighteenth century derived only
3.1 percent of their calories from grain, benefiting from vegetables, fruits, honey,
fish, beef, mutton, and dairy. The British traveler William Coxe remarked that
Russian peasants got“plenty of wholesome food.”Even when the economic
turndown in the late 1780s reduced variety in the peasant diet, it was still composed
of meat as much as grain.
The improved network of river and canal communications facilitated the avail-
ability of goods. Virtually all peasants kept gardens and those in the forested north
harvestedfish, honey, and berries that fed them and found their way to market. The
plains of the south from Novorossiia to Bashkiria nurtured huge herds of cattle and
sheep (in the east among Nogai and Kalmyk nomads, horses as well); more than a
million head were driven annually north through regional depots along the Volga,
Don, and routes through modern day Ukraine and Belarus’, making meat products
readily available all along the way. In Ukrainian lands and the Baltics, for example,
traveling herds feasted on the by-products of vodka production that consumed
much of the local cereal crop. By the end of the century the highlights of the
holiday seasons in St. Petersburg, before Christmas and Shrovetide, were markets
for frozen meat and game held on the ice of the Neva and around town. Blanchard
notes that the interdependence of husbandry and cereal farming typical of the
wooded steppe and steppe lands maintained high soil fertility as well as providing a
much more calorie-rich diet.
Boris Mironov has claimed that the peasant’s standard of living must have fallen
since the average height of army recruits (primarily East Slavic peasants) declined by
3.2 centimeters over the eighteenth century. He attributes this to a decline in the
peasant diet by diversion of grain to the export market, vodka distilling, and the
ever expanding army, which in turn raised prices. But most disagree with Mironov,
citing the dietary diversity outlined above. Furthermore, Steven Hoch argues that
recruits are not representative of the whole (villages were unlikely to select for
recruitment the most hale and hearty) and Paul Bushkovitch, noting that Russia’s
population expanded demographically faster than any other European or Eurasian
realm in this century, dismissed the decline Mironov cites as“modest”in compari-
son to this fertility-driven demographic growth.
RESISTANCE
In his stimulating study of Eurasian borderlands, Arthur Rieber links resistance
with accommodation. He explores how some groups and individuals“accommo-
dated”to imperial power: elites joined nobilities, educated strata joined the bur-
eaucracy or served the state in similar skilled capacity. Some passively cooperated,
others assimilated culturally and religiously. If the imperial center skillfully
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 369