challenging life; he noted in his diary that he spent more than half the time away
from home in the early years of his career, in conditions that were certainly
uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous (many was the time he jumped into a
shallow stream to haul his barges out of silt banks). He prospered in the grain trade
into the 1780s and achieved social distinction—first guild status, elected to the
magistracy council, and eventually mayor of Dmitrov like his father.
Like the Muscovite Shorin, however, Tolchenov also suffered business setbacks,
now as much because of a new eighteenth-century burden—cultivation of an expen-
sive lifestyle that he could not sustain—as from bad luck or poor business acumen. As
a businessman he was resourceful and canny, but he suffered his share of misfortunes.
He invested in a successful playing card factory, only tofind the entire industry
declared a state monopoly that was sold to a rival entrepreneur. He bid several times
unsuccessfully on franchises to sell alcohol. He unwisely let an incompetent
business manager in St. Petersburg run through his assets. He overspent on
accoutrements of afine life (gambling debts, fancy home, the best education for
his eldest son). With mounting debts and bankruptcy inevitable in the 1790s,
Tolchenov unethically used his business savvy to protect his assets: he transferred
ownership of his home to his in-laws, declaring his wife and minor children legally a
separate household from his own and having his married son declared a member of
his wife’s household and thus immune from Ivan’screditors.Hissons’fates mimic
that of the father: the eldest, raised during Tolchenov’s most successful years, well
educated and trained in business, prospered as a merchant; two others never made it
in the merchant world, one becoming a horticulturalist to noble families and the
other an actor. Tolchenov’s demise worked just the way that Catherine intended:
he fell in status as his capital declined. He ended his career in the ranks of simple,
taxpaying townsmen, working as a factory manager in Moscow.
The tremendous variety of the empire’s urban experience and Ivan Tolchenov’s
personal experience testify to the eighteenth century’s dynamic economy and rapid
social change. Many people benefited directly or indirectly from Catherinian
reforms, Tolchenov among them. He, for example, achieved a respected social
status by dint of his accumulation of capital. He and his father’s business dealings
for decades facilitated a growing and complex trade network across central Russia.
He took advantage of solid business instruments for purchase and exchange,
suffered high rates but found creditors, and played a significant role in the essential
grain trade. He participated in the most autonomous version of city government
that Russia had yet developed, well on the road to municipal autonomy. Others—
peasants, townsmen, and nobles—also prospered like him, but many, like he, fell
victim to a trading system poorly supported by credit, insurance, communications,
and other buffers against the vulnerability of an agrarian economy. Individual
entrepreneursflourished in this century, if not a social class. Furthermore, the
ground was laid in urban institutions, concepts of urban autonomy, economic
policy, and economic opportunity for the more cohesive merchantry and middle
class that emerged in the next century.
*****394 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801