property and bankruptcy law, insurance, banks and credit, communication sys-
tems. But they did enjoy legal protections through commercial courts for promis-
sory notes (veksely), contracts, and to a lesser extent bankruptcy, allowing large-scale
trade. And they could attain success. Contemporary tales and proverbs depict
merchants as honorable and hardworking, crafty perhaps but not corrupt. One of
the most popular themes in popular tales of the eighteenth century concerned
merchants; one characteristic one, echoing themes common in world literature,
tells the tale of the virtuous wife of merchant Karp Sutulov who deflects the
advances of nefarious suitors while her husband is away on business, all the while
craftily amassing wealth. Russian proverbs extolled the skill that success in trade
required:“With brains you can trade, and without them, you’ll despair.”Russian
merchants lived a culture different from the nobility; their education was on the
job, practical and not classical and their dress was modest. In portraits merchants
favored what David Ransel calls“plain”style, almost two dimensional with somber
black suits, beard, and simple haircut (in contrast to the powdered wigs, silk
clothes, and Imperial orders of noble portraits in academic style). Merchants were
intelligent and accomplished, entrepreneurial and energetic, and they were abso-
lutely essential to creating and maintaining the intricate and booming trade
networks of imperial Russia’s eighteenth century.
Since European merchants were legally prohibited from engaging in retail trade in
Russia and were allowed to set up wholesale shops in only a few major centers, they
needed to work with Russian merchant partners. Those who prospered often took
pride in their home towns, patronized cultural institutions, and served in public life.
As Elise Wirtschafter argues, merchants actively worked with the state to advocate for
their interests and participate in reform. Businessmen in provincial capitals in the late
eighteenth century together with local noblemen supported educational, cultural,
and social organizations such as theaters, salons, and balls. The Moscow Merchant
Club was a bustling center of social and political exchange. Robert E. Jones has
argued that they were comparable to central European merchantries (Poland, Prussia,
the Habsburg lands), their family dynasties lasting about the same time and their
struggles about the same. David Ransel presents as a model the merchant, Ivan
Alekseevich Tolchenov, whose life in some ways sharply contrasted with that of the
Muscovite merchants Vasilii Shorin and Gavril Nikitin, surveyed in Chapter 11.
Tolchenov was born in 1754 into a family of prosperous grain merchants in the
provincial town of Dmitrov, 80 km north of Moscow. His father Aleksei had
earned the rank of“first-guild”merchant, and with it the esteem of his community
and eventual election to responsible posts—delegate to the Legislative Commission
of 1767 and mayor of Dmitrov. Ivan followed in his father’s footsteps. He began
traveling with his father on business trips at around age 11 and took up his active
apprenticeship in the grain trade at age 14 in 1768. Under the watchful eye of his
father’s agents he traveled in the winter through the Middle Volga to purchase
grain; in the summer he escorted barges loaded with grain through canals to
St. Petersburg. He oversaw sales at market; he transported grain to his father’s
mills and brought theflour to market; in times of famine his father dispatched him
to search their usual supply areas for the cheapest grain. It was a rough and
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 393