of population, cities, and state ambitions, the state intervened to improve on
Russia’s bounty of rivers with canal construction.
Peter I, as interested in fostering export trade as in his military exploits, imme-
diately embarked on canal building. He initially focused, as in military campaigns,
to the south, aiming to connect the Volga and Don during his Azov campaign in
the 1690s.The English engineer John Perry used his memoirs to vent his frustration
with unreliable Russian labor and corrupt officialdom on this project, which was
abandoned with the loss of Azov in 1713. Peter’s projects for canals to link the Don
and Oka and Oka and Volga also foundered, but waterways to the new capital had
greater success. With the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 work began on the
Vyshnyi Volochek canal system to link the city with the Volga through rivers and
lakes (Il’men, Ladoga). It wasfinished by 1722, followed by a canal bypassing
turbulent Lake Ladoga in 1731.These canals were essential in provisioning the new
capital with grain as well as export goods; by 1725 export trade out of St. Petersburg
surpassed Archangelsk in value, and by the end of the century it surpassed other
Russian ports in volume of goods.
Empress Elizabeth’s mercantilist minister P. I. Shuvalov proposed new canals,
but they were sidelined by expenses of the Seven Years War. Catherine II’s
government significantly improved the Vyshnyi Volochek system, where shallows
on some rivers, rapids on the Msta River, and turbulence on the lakes made for
tedious or treacherous sailing. When the young merchant Ivan Tolchenov escorted
shipments of grain through this route in the 1770s, he regularly lost barges or was
forced to leave some stranded over the winter because of low water levels. The new
Directorate of Water Communications (1773) and Corps of Hydrologic Engin-
eering (1782) built aqueducts and reservoirs to augment the Vyshnyi Volochek
system’s water level, rebuilt locks in stone, renovated the Ladoga Canal and
modified hazardous rapids. Travel became safer and faster and traffic through the
system doubled over Catherine II’s reign.
Paul I launched a major canal-building era that extended into the 1820s, giving
Russia“one of the most extensive and successful networks of inland waterways in the
world,”according to Robert Jones. It included improvements to the Vyshnyi
Volochek system (1797–1802), a new Mariinskii system (1799–1810) through
Lake Beloozero, and bypass canals skirting Lakes Ladoga and Onega. The Mariinskii
system was shorter than the Vyshnyi Volochek by almost 300 km; a later system
through Tikhvin (1802–11) was another 200 km shorter. Paul and his successors
also pursued several less successful canal projects linking the Volga to the White Sea
and the Dnieper to the Baltic.
Harbor building alsoflourished by Catherine II’s time. Peter I famously failed in
his harbor and port at Azov, but his construction of the harbor at St. Petersburg and
its deeper partner at Kronstadt was a great success. Harbor building developed in
earnest with Black Sea acquisitions at the end of the century. Victory in 1774
brought new ports—Taganrog, Kerch, Nikolaev, and Kherson—but they were not
deep-water. With the Treaty of Jassy in 1792, Russia acquired Black Sea littoral
from the Dniester to Dnieper that allowed for a major deep-water port, Odessa
(1794). Serving the Black Sea steppe hinterland, its rise was phenomenal: by the
342 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801