What Was the Russian Merchant Class?
On 17 March 1775, in her Nakaz to the Legislative Commission, Catherine the Great set out the principles of the new urban self-government, including the three-tier guild (kupechestvo) structure that would govern Russian urban life for the next century. A first-guild merchant was to be a wholesale trader or banker, with a minimum capital of 10,000 rubles; a second-guild merchant a retail trader or manufacturer, with 1,000-5,000 rubles; a third-guild merchant a small shopkeeper or craftsman, with 500-1,000 rubles. The guilds gave the merchant class a formal legal status, the right to trade free of the townsmen, and an obligation to keep the urban records (see Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy, 1993).
The Muscovite inheritance
The Russian merchant class grew out of the Muscovite gosti — the great trading houses of Moscow, Novgorod, and the Volga — and the various trading companies that had been chartered by Ivan III and Ivan IV. The Stroganovs, the Solodovnikovs, the Filatievs, the Botkins, and a small number of other families had been the partners of the Muscovite state in its first great commercial adventures: the Stroganovs financed Yermak’s Siberian campaign; the Filatievs and the Solodovnikovs supplied the army; the Botkins and the Morozovs built the early Russian textile industry. The 1775 guild system was the attempt to give the descendants of the gosti a stable, legally codified base for the long-term development of Russian commerce (Rieber, 1993).
The growth of the class
The merchant class grew rapidly in the nineteenth century. The 1812 Moscow fire destroyed the Morozovs’ textile works; the family rebuilt them within two years and by 1820 was producing more than half of Moscow’s silk. The 1840s and 1850s brought the railway age and the first Russian banks: the St Petersburg Discount and Credit Bank (1863), the Mutual Credit Society (1866), the Volga-Kama Bank (1870), the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade (1871), and the Russo-Asiatic Bank (1877). The 1890s boom — the great Witte years, with the gold standard of 1897, the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the industrial spurt financed by French capital — produced the Putilov, the Nobel, the Morozov, the Mamontov, the Ryabushinskii, and the Tretyakov fortunes. By 1900 the kupechestvo numbered about 327,000 adult males, of whom 17,000 were in the first guild (Crisp, “Russian Financial Crisis,” 1976).
The merchant class and the state
The Russian merchant class had a complex relationship with the autocracy. The guilds gave the merchant class a place in the imperial table of ranks, an exemption from conscription, and a privileged commercial position; the state relied on the merchant class for tax farming (otkup) and for the supply of the army and the imperial court. The merchant class, in turn, was dependent on the state for charters, customs, and tariffs.
The 1860s and 1870s brought a new urban self-government, the gorodskoe polozhenie of 1870, which gave the merchant class a place on the new municipal duma and a 56 per cent share of the new urban votes. The merchant class was, by the 1870s, the dominant social group in Moscow; the Filatiev, the Morozov, the Tretyakov, the Soldatenkov, and the Gromov families were the principal patrons of the city’s hospital, schools, museum, and art collections (Becker, Russia’s Protectorates, 2008).
Philanthropy and culture
The merchant class was, in the late imperial period, the principal patron of Russian art and education. Pavel Tretyakov founded the State Tretyakov Gallery with his collection in 1892. The brothers Morozov collected modern French painting — the Morozov collection, much of it nationalised after 1917, is now split between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage. Savva Mamontov established the Moscow Private Russian Opera, where Chaliapin, Rachmaninoff, and Rimsky-Korsakov all worked, and his Abramtsevo colony was the principal centre of the Russian Art Nouveau. The Solodovnikov, the Shanyavsky, and the Gromov gifts to the city of Moscow funded schools, hostels, and clinics (Becker, 2008).
The revolution and the disappearance
The merchant class was hit twice by the First World War: by the inflation of 1915-1917 and by the disintegration of the grain supply. The October Revolution nationalised the banks in December 1917, the industrial firms in the summer of 1918, and the trade enterprises in November 1920. By 1921 most of the great merchant families had left Russia, those that had not (Kokosov, Shanyavsky) were displaced or shot. The class that Catherine had chartered in 1775 had, in effect, ceased to exist by 1922. The reconstruction of Russian capital in the 1990s, on a very different pattern, was a separate event (Becker, 2008).