Moscow riot (this time in protest of a new tax that he asgost’was in charge of
levying), but his home was plundered. In the 1660s more of his debtors defaulted
and he to his own lenders. To cap it all off, around 1670 his properties on the Volga
were destroyed in the Stepan Razin uprising. So dire was his situation that at the
end of the 1670s some of his properties in Moscow were confiscated to pay off
debts to the state. His children had no capital to succeed him in business.
Gavriil Nikitin’s career as a merchant in Siberia had similar highs and lows, but
was perhaps even more impressive than Shorin’s given his modest social origins.
Nikitin was born in a family of state peasants near Vologda; he began in the trading
business by working as an agent for the Moscowgost’, Ostafii Filat’ev, in Siberia. As
Filat’ev’s agent in the 1670s Nikitin purchased caravans of exotic eastern products
(textiles and silks, gems and spices) and sold Russian goods and European imports,
successfully leading a caravan to Beijing and returning with what Erika Monahan
calls“a small fortune in exotic Eastern wares.”By the 1680s Nikitin was head-
quartered in Moscow and was advancing through the guilds of merchants with his
own agents in Siberia. He managed trading shops in Siberian towns from western
(Irbit, Tobolsk) to far eastern Siberia (Eniseisk, Mangazeia, Nerchinsk). Monahan
describes his trade network as made up of“hired, indentured, contract or slave
labor”and kinsmen, including a Mongol slave that he adopted as his son Aleshka
Nikitin. Just before Nikitin died, his net worth was a healthy 30,000 rubles.
Politics, not economics, did him in; he was arrested in late August 1698, having
been denounced as speaking against Peter I precisely during the musketeer rebel-
lion; Nikitin died in prison by mid-September. He was caught up in a politically
charged moment that had nothing to do with his business acumen.
Trade was not easy in seventeenth-century Russia, but fortunes could be made.
All early modern trade on the scale that these men ventured was precarious, but
they also dealt with particularly Russian challenges. Clearly the state was a hard
taskmaster, setting quotas and calling in loans with ferocity. There was neither
available credit and insurance nor business trust to stabilize this system, and the
potential for catastrophe—uprisings, highwaymen—always loomed. But for
every bankruptcy like Shorin’s, there is a successful merchant like Nikitin. Even
in difficult Siberian conditions, over vast distances of dangerous caravan routes,
Russian merchants managed to turn a profit. As Paul Bushkovitch and
J. M. Hittle remind us, othergostidid annual business of up to 100,000 rubles
on their own, trading on the advantages that theirgost’status gave them. They
learned where the best commercial opportunities were, they bought up the best
fisheries and salt works, they won contracts to ship the tsar’sgoods,andthey
prospered from state loans in cash and goods.Gosti, for example, routinely took
furs from the state treasury, sold them for a profit and split the difference with
the state. That few created long-lasting dynasties was typical for all but the
most affluent of west European merchants in these centuries; merchant families
in central and eastern Europe, Bushkovitch showed, paralleled the Muscovite
pattern of lasting only a few generations. Given these structural challenges,
Muscovy’s merchants could not match their west European counterparts, but
they kept the economy moving.
242 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801