BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham, ed. (1976). The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brovkin, Vladimir. (1987). The Mensheviks After October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Galili, Ziva. (1989). Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Haimson, Leopold. ed. (1974). Mensheviks: From the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(c. 1672-1729), soldier and statesman; favorite of Peter I.
Menshikov rose from humble origins to become the most powerful man in Russia after the tsar. Anecdotes suggest that his father was a pastry cook, although in fact he served as a noncommissioned officer in the Semenovsky guards. Alexander served in Peter’s own Preobrazhensky guards, and by the time of the Azov campaigns (1695-1696) he and Peter were inseparable. Men-shikov accompanied Peter on the Grand Embassy (1697-1698) and served with him in the Great Northern War (1700-1721), rising through the ranks to become general field marshal and vice admiral. His military exploits included the battles of Kalisz (1706) and Poltava (1709), the sacking of Baturin (1708), and campaigns in north Germany in the 1710s. At home he was governor-general of St. Petersburg and president of the College of War.
The upstart Menshikov had to create his own networks, making many enemies among the traditional elite. He acquired a genealogy which traced his ancestry back to the princes of Kievan Rus and a dazzling portfolio of Russian and foreign titles and orders, including Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Prince of Russia and Izhora, and Knight of the Orders of St. Andrew and St. Alexander Nevsky. Menshikov had no formal education and was only semi-literate, but this did not prevent him from becoming a role model in Peter’s cultural reforms. His St. Petersburg palace had a large library and its own resident orchestra and singers, and he also built a grand palace at Oranienbaum on the Gulf of Finland. In 1706 he married Daria Arsenieva (1682-1727), who was also thoroughly Westernized.
Menshikov was versatile and energetic, loyal but capable of acting on his own initiative. He was a devout Orthodox Christian who often visited shrines and monasteries. He was also ambitious and corrupt, amassing a vast personal fortune in lands, serfs, factories, and possessions. On several occasions, only his close ties with Peter saved him from being convicted of embezzlement. In 1725 he promoted Peter’s wife Catherine as Peter’s successor, heading her government in the newly created Supreme Privy Council and betrothing his own daughter to Tsarevich Peter, her nominated heir. After Peter’s accession in 1727, Menshikov’s rivals in the Council, among them members of the aristocratic Dolgoruky clan, alienated the emperor from Menshikov. In September 1727 they had Menshikov arrested and banished to Berezov in Siberia, where he died in wretched circumstances in November 1729. See also: CATHERINE I; GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PETER I; PETER II; PREOBRAZHENSKY GUARDS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Mercantilism is the doctrine that economic activity, especially foreign trade, should be directed to unifying and strengthening state power. Though some mercantilist writers emphasized the accumulation of gold and silver by artificial trade surpluses, this “bullionist” version was not dominant in Russia.
The greatest of the Russian enlightened despots, Peter the Great, was eager to borrow the best of Western practice in order to modernize his vast country and to expand its power north and south. Toward this end, the tsar emulated successful Swedish reforms by establishing a regular bureaucracy and unifying measures. Peter brought in Western artisans to help design his new capital at St. Petersburg. He granted monopolies for fiscal purposes on salt, vodka, and metals, while developing workshops for luxury products. Skeptical of private entrepreneurs, he set up state-owned shipyards, arsenals, foundries, mines, and factories. Serfs were assigned to some of these. Like the state-sponsored enterprises of Prussia, however, most of these failed within a few decades.
Tsar Peter instituted many new taxes, raising revenues some five times, not counting the servile labor impressed to build the northern capital, canals, and roads. Like Henry VIII of England, he confiscated church lands and treasure for secular purposes. He also tried to unify internal tolls, something accomplished only in 1753.
Foreign trade was a small, and rather late, concern of Peter’s. That function remained mostly in
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the hands of foreigners. To protect the industries in his domains, he forbade the import of woolen textiles and needles. In addition, he forbade the export of gold and insisted that increased import duties be paid in specie (coin). See also: ECONOMY, TSARIST; FOREIGN TRADE; PETER I
Gerschenkron, Alexander. (1970). Europe in the Russian Mirror. London: Cambridge University Press. Spechler, Martin C. (2001). “Nationalism and Economic History.” In Encyclopedia of Nationalism, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Motyl. New York: Academic Press, pp. 219-235. Spechler, Martin C. (1990). Perspectives in Economic Thought. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kievan Russia supplied raw materials of the forest-furs, honey, wax, and slaves-to the Byzantine Empire. This trade had a primarily military character, as the grand prince and his retinue extorted forest products from Russian and Finnish tribes and transported them through hostile territory via the Dnieper River and the Black Sea. In the self-governing republic of Novgorod, wealthy merchants shared power with the landowning elite. Novgorod exported impressive amounts of furs, fish, and other raw materials with the aid of the German Hansa, which maintained a permanent settlement in Novgorod-the Peterhof-as it did on Wisby Island and in London and Bergen.
Grand Prince Ivan III of Muscovy extinguished Novgorod’s autonomy and expelled the Germans. Under the Muscovite autocracy, prominent merchants acted as the tsar’s agents in exploiting his monopoly rights over commerce in high-value goods such as vodka and salt. The merchant estate (soslovie) emerged as a separate social stratum in the Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, with the exclusive right to engage in handicrafts and commerce in cities.
Peter I’s campaign to build an industrial complex to supply his army and navy opened up new opportunities for Russian merchants, but his government maintained the merchants’ traditional obligations to provide fiscal and administrative services to the state without remuneration. From the early eighteenth century to the end of the imperial period, the merchant estate included not only wholesale and retail traders but also persons whose membership in a merchant guild entitled them to perform other economic functions as well, such as mining, manufacturing, shipping, and banking.
Various liabilities imposed by the state, including a ban on serf ownership by merchants and the abolition of their previous monopoly over trade and industry, kept the merchant estate small and weak during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Elements of a genuine bourgeoisie did not emerge until the early twentieth century.
Ethnic diversity contributed to the lack of unity within the merchant estate. Each major city saw the emergence of a distinctive merchant culture, whether mostly European (German and English) in St. Petersburg; German in the Baltic seaports of Riga and Reval; Polish and Jewish in Warsaw and Kiev; Italian, Greek, and Jewish in Odessa; or Armenian in the Caucasus region, to name a few examples. Moreover, importers in port cities generally favored free trade, while manufacturers in the Central Industrial Region, around Moscow, demanded high import tariffs to protect their factories from European competition. These economic conflicts reinforced hostilities based on ethnic differences. The Moscow merchant elite remained xenophobic and antiliberal until the Revolution of 1905.
The many negative stereotypes of merchants in Russian literature reflected the contemptuous attitudes of
