The enormous territory was as yet undeveloped or only inadequately developed and almost everywhere very thinly populated. In the north vast tracts of tundra and forest supported only hunters, fur trappers and a little primitive and precarious agriculture. The potential of Siberia was unexploited. Even in central Russia, with the territory around Moscow the population was scanty and the level of economic development low by west European standards.
Agriculture remained an extremely backward sector of the Russia economy. Farming techniques remained primitive, inefficient three-field system by which one third of the land lay fallow each year. There was also absent from Russia any sign of a class which might have developed into a significant middle class or bourgeoisie. There was certainly a lot of interest in trade and manufacturing and Russian merchants astonished foreigners with their sharp practice and dishonesty. But few could become rich through trade. If a profitable trade was developed by Russian entrepreneurs the tsars eager for more revenue would declare it a royal monopoly. There was plenty of activity in manufacturing. When peter was born in 1672 20 small private and state owned iron foundries existed in Russia. It Russia was to address its economic and technological backwardness a truly enormous amount of work remained to be done.
Russia faced many economic problems and to some extent this was a matter of geography. Great distances and an extreme continental climate with severe winters, burning summers and a shorter growing season for crops than in western Europe were in themselves barriers to economic progress. For each grain of wheat or rye sown only three or four were harvested; this was far lower than the standard yield in the more advanced areas of Western Europe. Such a scanty yield meant that the overwhelming majority of the population had to work the ground if any kind of organised society were to survive. These natural obstacles were however, reinforced by manmade ones.
Throughout the 17th century there were no permanent Russian diplomatic missions stationed in the capitals of western and central Europe. Instead such missions were sent only intermittently often when some crisis or turn of events made them necessary and it was quite normal for the same mission to visit a series of courts in turn, staying briefly in each. Apart from their intermittent and impermanent character, diplomatic missions from Moscow suffered from other difficulties. The almost total ignorance of the Russian language in the courts and capitals of Europe sometimes created problems. Thus in 1673 after Prussian protests, the Russian government had to agree to provide in future, Latin or German translations of any documents which its envoys might bring to berlin. The not uncommon Russian practice of paying diplomats in kind, by providing them with furs and other goods to sell abroad, sometimes inspired condescending amusement or even outright contempt in the capitals of Western Europe.
The economic as well as the diplomatic relations between Russia and the European states were growing in scale and importance in the later seventeenth century. From early on in the century the importance of the English merchants who since the 1550s and the beginnings of trade with Western Europe via the White Sea, had been the most active element in commercial relations between Russia and the outside world, declined rapidly. But this was more than compensated for by the growth of trade with other parts of Western Europe, notably with the Dutch republic, now commercially the most advanced and successful state in the world. Russia’s raw materials, pitch tallow, leather, grain, furs-formed the basis of a rapidly growing Dutch trade carried on both directly through archangel and indirectly through such Swedish Baltic ports as Narva and Riga. All over Europe merchants and governments continued to be attracted by the century old hope that through Russia it might be possible to develop a lucrative trade in luxury goods with Persia and perhaps even with china. Russia’s merchants had travelled and traded abroad at least in Sweden, Livonia and Denmark, since the 16th century.
Russia was unable to achieve all it wanted to do so in foreign policy. The traditions of Russian external relations were, however, until the last decades of the century, much more anti-polish and anti-Swedish than anti-Turkish. Ottoman dominance of the black sea littoral was not resented as a bridling of Russia’s economic development and a seizure of territory formerly Russian in the way that Swedish possession of Ingria and Livonia was. By 1686 Russia was a partner in a great anti-Turkish alliance and in 1687 and 1689 it made unsuccessful efforts to invade and conquer the Crimea so long a thorn in its flesh. The last quarter of the century in other words made it increasingly clear that Russian expansionist energies would in future be directed in the main either west wards against Sweden in a renewed effort to force an entry to the Baltic, or southwards against the Turks.
The assessment of Russia as isolated weak and backward is partly true because Russia wasn’t as developed as Europe at that time, as compared to Russia; Europe was stronger and more developed. But Russia was improving its ideas and trade, as well as its army.
by
fl28eur96 (student)
