Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/144

118 of Russia. Agriculture, and still more industry, had to seek models in Europe. To some extent reaction positively favoured this Europeanisation, in so far as "Enrichissez-vous, messieurs" is the doctrine of every reaction.

Commerce had had its importance even in Old Russia, in the Russia of Kiev and of Novgorod. In the realm of Muscovy, and above all in the capital, trading considerations were dominant in the organisation and spread of home industry and of manufacture. On into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries foreign trade consisted mainly in the export of natural products (honey, bees-wax, furs, and the like, but also linen and hempen textiles), the compensatory imports being European manufactures (arms, textiles, commodities of art and luxury, wines, etc.). In the year 1653, goods to the value of more than one million roubles were imported by way of Archangel, and it must be remembered that at that time the purchasing power of money was far greater than now. In the days of Muscovy the import of Europeans had already begun, and the inconsiderableness of the exports was in part dependent upon the fact that European merchants and handicraftsmen were settling in Moscow.

Peter energetically supported the development of manufacturing industry, which had been initiated by the mercantile classes, and this resulted in the growth of what are often termed "artiﬁcial" manufactures—meaning manufactures fostered by the state, and especially to supply the needs of the army.

In the reign of Peter the originators of manufacturing enterprise were mainly merchants, but a few of them were landowners. Labour was recruited from among the serfs, and here the noble landowners with private factories on their estates had an advantage, for their workmen belonged to them as serfs, whereas the owner of an ordinary factory had to procure labourers from a landowner. It is true that Peter made the adscription of serfs to the factories possible, but during the eighteenth century the number of the factories owned by nobles as hereditary property increased, more especially seeing that the state did so much to protect the nobles, in their manufacturing enterprises as well as in other ways.

The obrok relationship of many of the serfs was favourable to the growth of a class of factory workers. The peasant who paid obrok, a yearly sum due on account of the utilisation