MILITARY PROVISIONING
Russia’s military provisioning improved in the eighteenth century but systematic
practices for feeding the army in peacetime, on garrison service, or on campaign
were difficult to implement due to the vast scale of the empire, low crop yields, and
incomplete road networks. Peter I’s creation of a standing army paid in salary (cash
and in-kind) and billeted in communities increased the state’s engagement in
provisioning. When billeted in communities (which could be for six to eight
months a year), troops were supported by peasants and townsmen, in principle
using provisions from the army but often drawing on their own as well. This
economic and personal burden fell heaviest in the Baltic arena where most troops
were stationed in this century, although more regiments were shifted to the
Black Sea in the 1780s. Using funds from the new poll tax, the army purchased
grain, meat, and vegetables for distribution. By the 1730s such purchasing was put
under a central War Commissariat and later under its provisioning chancery,
whose agents bargained with landlords and merchants for long-term supply
contracts. The Provisions Chancery maintained granaries for military garrisons in
the capitals.
The system was strained when the army was on the move: Russia struggled to
meet the European standard of placing supply granaries withinfive days’march in
territories where action was anticipated. Its network of grain reserves for campaign
and garrison forces was skeletal; in 1731 there were 14 major provision depots, in
1766, 135. The chronic food and forage shortages suffered by the Russian army in
Poland and Prussia in the Seven Years War proved the system to be inadequate and
an empire-wide solution was not found. In particular cases, however, some progress
was made. In the protracted Black Sea campaigns Governor-General Grigorii
Potemkin created an impressive network of forward grain storage points on the
Dnieper and Bug. Depots were spaced at a six- to eight-day march distance on the
main roads as well as mobile warehouses with a month’s supply offlour and groats,
a system judged at the time better than its Ottoman counterpart.
The army also bought food and forage on the move, often raising local grain
prices for the entire populace, while benefiting wealthy landholders with grain to
spare. Armies also requisitioned when all else failed. Such impact on local commu-
nities was primarily felt in Siberian garrison towns and on the western and southern
borders. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century, to cite John Keep,
Russia relied on“a set of makeshift devices that did not readily complement each
other,”and shortages plagued the army on campaign well into the nineteenth
century.
GRAIN RESERVES, GRAIN SUPPLIES
Maintaining civilian stores of grain and grain supply for urban centers had been a
concern in more populous and urbanized parts of the world for centuries; reserves
both stabilized prices and provided food in times of dearth. China’s centuries-old
344 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801