THE CULTURE OF MERCHANTS
As noted, Moscow’s merchants faced a lot of competition—from state peasants and
serfs, noble investors, and foreign entrepreneurs. They never developed the wealth
and status of some of their European counterparts in trade andfinance. Many
have lampooned Russia’s merchant class as backward, illiterate, and unethical.
Foreign travelers like the sixteenth-century British envoy Giles Fletcher and
the seventeenth-century German scientist Adam Olearius perpetuated a trope of
Russians as deceptive in trade, and eighteenth-century noblemen looked down on
merchants as insufficiently cultured. Modern scholars lament Russia’s lack of a
proper middle class—entrepreneurial, thrifty, and successful. But Elise Wirtsch-
after has argued persuasively that early modern Russia had not so much a“missing”
bourgeoisie as“an indeterminate, ambiguously delineated one.”Everyone could
trade, from noblemen to peasants toraznochintsy; typical of this crossing of social
boundaries is the fact that Catherine II tried both to legally define a bourgeois
corporate estate in 1785 and at the same time to open up access to trade to more
social groups.
But the cliché of Russia’s merchantry being a moribund, backward class should
be laid to rest. The weakness of the merchant class was not the personal fault of the
members of the group, but the absence of necessary infrastructure—contract,
Figure 18.1Urban reforms in the Volga city of Iaroslavl’created open space to appreciate
the beauty of the seventeenth-century Church of Elijah; its interior featured frescos painted
in a slightly more realistic (than iconographic) style, showing influences of European printed
books and art. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
392 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801