deficits soared as expenditures (on wars, on conspicuous consumption at court, on
salaries to noble officialdom) continued unchecked. Income from direct taxes was
fairly inelastic. Before 1801 Russia was the beneficiary of European industry
dependent on so much foreign import. As European industry and farming
improved in the next century, however, Russia failed to keep up, squandering the
exuberance of the eighteenth-century economy.
*****
On the eighteenth-century economy: Arcadius Kahan and Richard Hellie,The Plow, the
Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985); Isabel de Madariaga,Russia in the Age of Catherine the
Great(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Robert E. Jones,Bread upon the Waters:
The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703– 1811 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Ian Blanchard,Russia’s Age of Silver: Precious-
Metal Production and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century(London: Routledge,
1989); Simon Dixon,The Modernisation of Russia, 1676– 1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Boris Ananich,“The Russian Economy and Banking System,”in
D. C. B. Lieven,The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 2:Imperial Russia: 1689– 1917
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 394–425. On the iron industry, see
Hugh D. Hudson,The Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the
Eighteenth Century(Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1986).
On economic pressures on the nobility, see Arcadius Kahan,“The Costs of‘Westernization’
in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century,”Slavic Review
25 (1966): 40–66.
Onfiscal institutions and policy towards the borderlands in Catherine II’s time, see John
P. LeDonne,Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism,
1762 – 1796 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Oniasakin Siberia, see
George Lantzeff,Siberia in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Colonial Administration
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943).
An English translation of Catherine II’sInstructionof 1767 is Vol. 2 of Paul Dukes,Russia
under Catherine the Great, 2 vols. (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners,
1977); on agriculture is article 314.334 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801