other matters, and the uncomprehending, unwilling nation, there were the foreigners. None of Peter's work in developing the national economy would have been possible without the foreign experts and craftsmen who poured into Russia between the time of Peter's return from the West in 1698 and his death in 1725. The Tsar engaged more than a thousand foreigners during his first visit to Amsterdam and London, and thereafter Russian envoys and agents at foreign courts were urgently commissioned to search out and persuade local artisans and technicians to enter Russian service.
Foreign craftsmen, foreign ideas and foreign machines and materials were at work in every sphere of industrial, commercial and agricultural activity. Vines, brought from France, were planted near Astrachan to produce wine which a Dutch traveler pronounced as 'red and pleasant enough.' Twenty shepherds, arriving from Silesia, were sent to Kazan to shear the sheep and
teach the Russians there how to make wool so that it would no longer be necessary to buy English wool to clothe the army. Peter saw better horses in Prussia and Silesia and ordered the Senate to establish stud farms and import stallions and mares. He observed Western peasants reaping grain with a long-handled scythe rather than the short-handled sickle which Russian peasants had always bent to use, and decreed that his people must adopt the scythe. Near Petersburg was a factory which turned Russian flax into a linen as fine in every respect as linen from Holland. The flax was spun in a workhouse where an old Dutch woman was teaching eighty Russian women how to use the spinning wheels, which were little known in Russia. Not far off was a paper mill run by a German specialist. Throughout the land, foreigners were teaching Russians how to build and operate glass factories, brick kilns, powder mills, saltpeter works, ironworks and paper mills. Once in Russia, foreign workers enjoyed numerous special privileges, including free houses and exemption from taxes for ten years. Surrounded by suspicious and xenophobic Russians, they lived under the Tsar's personal protection, and Peter sternly warned his people not to harm or take advantage of them. Even when a foreigner failed, Peter usually treated him with kindness and sent him home with a sum of money.
Behind this policy was not a frivoulous love of everything foreign. Instead, Peter had a single, firm purpose: to use foreign technicians to help build a modem Russia. Foreigners were invited and privileges granted to them on a single condition which was part of every contract: 'that they instruct our Russian people properly and conceal nothing.' Occasionally, foreign experts did attempt to conceal trade secrets. In one such case, English tobacco curers, departing from Russia, used violent means to prevent their special technology from falling into Russian hands. Astonishingly, Charles Whitworth, the English ambassador, not only countenanced this violence, but committed it himself:
The great secret which the Muscovites desire to know is the liquor for preparing and coloring the tobacco. . . . The Russian laborers were dismissed and the same evening I went to the workhouse together with Mr. Parsons, my secretary, and four of my servants. We spent the best part of the night in destroying the several instruments and materials, some of which were so strong that they obliged us to make a great noise in pulling them to pieces. There were cloven barrels about a quarter full of the tobacco liquor which I caused to be let out. ... I likewise broke the great spinning wheel, and above three score reels for rolling; I then destroyed three engines already set up for cutting tobacco and took away the plates and cranes for two more; several engines for pressing the tobacco into form have been pulled to pieces, their screws split, the wooden moles broken, the copper carried away, and about 20 fine sieves cut to pieces. . . . The next day my servants returned and burned all that remained of wood.
Had Peter discovered the ambassador's role in this violent, nocturnal episode, Whitworth's stay in Russia would certainly have been cut short.
On another occasion, however, a Russian outwitted a secretive foreigner. Peter had established a ribbon factory near Petersburg, staffing it with young Russian apprentices; the master was a foreigner. At the end of a year, Peter found that one young man, the most skilled of the young Russians, could make any kind of ribbon once the materials were set upon the loom, but that neither he nor his companions could begin unaided because the master always placed the work upon the loom himself and forbade anyone to watch during this operation. Peter instructed the Russian apprentice to discover this secret and promised a reward if he succeeded. Accordingly, the apprentice bored a small hole in the ceiling of the workshop and lay quietly on his stomach, observing the master as he set the looms. Having learned the technique, he informed the Tsar, who had set up a loom in his presence in the palace. When the apprentice succeeded, Peter kissed him, gave him money and made him the new master.
Having constructed a new capital on the Neva, Peter was determined that it should be more than an administrative hive for his bureaucrats and a parade ground for his Guards regiments; he meant St. Petersburg to be a great port and commercial center. To endow it with importance and build it into a major commercial center, he took steps to divert trade to the Neva from other ports, in particular from the lengthy, circuitous Archangel route. This arbitrary commercial upheaval was achieved only by overriding the pleas and cries of many—Russians and foreigners alike—who had invested heavily in that route. Nevertheless, Peter gradually increased the pressure. The struggle continued until 1722, when he finally forbade the shipping of any goods from Archangel other than those actually produced in that province or along the banks of the Dvina. That year, St. Petersburg finally prevailed over Archangel and became the leading port on Russian soil, although its trade was still not as large as Riga's. By the end of Peter's reign, the volume of Russia's foreign trade exceeded the wildest of Peter's early dreams. Overall seaborne commerce had quadrupled in value. In 1724, 240 Western merchant ships arrived in St. Petersburg, while 303 visited Riga. In 1725, 914 foreign ships called at Russian Baltic ports.
But Peter failed in another objective: the creation of a Russian merchant marine. He had hoped that Russian goods could be carried to the West in Russian merchant ships, but this effort ran into an old prejudice, long inflicted by Western maritime nations. In the time of Novgorod, when Russian merchants had desired to export their produce in their own ships, the merchants of the Hanseatic League had joined against them to insist that they would buy Russian goods only in Novgorod and then be responsible for shipping them themselves. At a later time, an enterprising merchant of Yaroslavl took a cargo of furs to sell in Amsterdam, but, by concerted arrangement among Dutch buyers, he was unable to sell a single fur and had to carry them back to Archangel. There, they were bought immediately at a good price by the Dutch merchant who owned the vessel which had carried the furs back to Russia.
Early in his reign, Peter resolved to change this pattern and instructed Apraxin, as Governor of Archangel, to build two small Russian ships which would sail to the West carrying Russian cargoes under the Russian flag. Knowing that their arrival would provoke opposition, he pondered where to send them. Dutch and English merchants would be vigorously opposed, while in France, the Tsar felt, the Russian flag might not be respected. At last the ships
Despite this failure, Peter bore no grudge against foreign captains or seamen. On the contrary, he was delighted when foreign merchant ships arrived in Russian ports, welcoming them grandly and treating the captains as brother mariners. As soon as a foreign ship appeared in the harbor of Kronstadt or St. Petersburg, Peter arrived on board to walk its decks, examine its structure and rigging and look for new developments in its construction. His visits were so common, especially among the Duth captains who came annually to St. Petersburg, that they looked forward to sitting down with the Tsar in their cabins with brandy, wine, cheese and biscuits to answer his questions about their voyages. In return, Peter invited them ashore to attend his court and all its celebrations; it was seldom that they returned sober to their ships. As one observer noted: 'It is easy to conceive how much this reception was to the taste of people in that line of life and with how much pleasure they steered their course for St. Petersburg.'
Nothing was allowed to spoil this relationship. In 1719, when new customs regulations were drawn up for the port of St. Petersburg, the first draft presented to Peter for approval declared that ships that carried contraband or concealed dutiable goods should be confiscated. Peter struck out this article, explaining that it was much too early in the life of the port for such drastic action; he had no desire to frighten ship captains and merchants away.
The Emperor allowed visiting captains to speak to him on terms of familiarity which shocked his Russian favorites. When one Dutch captain said he still preferred Archangel to St. Petersburg and the Tsar asked why, the captain cheekily replied that there were no pancakes in St. Petersburg. 'Come to court tomorrow,' Peter replied, 'and you will have your fill of pancakes.'
