Chapter 9 

 

The Rhubarb Trade & Russian Regulation in Siberia

 

 

 

            Thus far, this examination into trade life in early modern Siberia has taken categories of merchants as its heuristic focus.  In this chapter, the focus switches from people to a commodity.  The commodity is rhubarb.  This prized plant was traded vigorously in the seventeenth century, but not for its culinary features most appreciated in modernity.  Nowadays, people think of rhubarb as a food. Its tart stalks provide a pleasing compliment to sweet pies and jams.  However, such recipes, which require heavy doses of sugar to make the sour rhubarb palatable, only began to emerge in the eighteenth century and gained in popularity only when sugar, largely as a result of imperial advancement in other parts of the globe, became a widely available and less expensive commodity.[1]  In the seventeenth century then, it was not the rhubarb stalks that were coveted.  Nor were rhubarb leaves: they contain oxalic acid, which makes them poisonous, although they were reportedly used as table greens in Elizabethan England before the toxicity of the leaves was understood; and allegedly, a cook at Versailles experimented with using rhubarb leaves in a soup; needless to say, the recipe did not become popular, and we do not know if his mistake was attributed to ignorance or maleovalence.[2]  In the early modern world, it was not leaf nor stalk, but the rhubarb root that merchants carried from the highlands of the China to pharmacists in Western Europe and lands between.    

The Chinese had known since ancient times what increased contact between East and West through travelers like Marco Polo and Jesuits made known to Europe: that rhubarb root was precious for its purgative effect.[3]  It was used as a diuretic, to cure a loose stomach (diarrhea) and for catalyzing a catharsis that was followed by constipation.  Its mildness relative to other purgatives made it especially desirable.  It was also administered as a cure for jaundice and for various skin complaints, used to fight fever, and lauded for its astringent qualities. Sixteenth-century women in Italy considered “Indian” rhubarb a treatment for fever, different from the rhubarb they used for cooking.[4]  An elixir containing rhubarb powder was administered to England’s failing Henry VIII.[5]  Rhubarb commonly accompanied bloodletting treatments in seventeenth-century France.[6]  

            Thus, the precious root would be dug up in the rugged highland territory of western China and dried to prepare for transport. The Scotsman John Bell in 1720 reported that Mongols would string rhubarb root across their yurts or from the horns of their sheep for drying, but the Pole Michael Boym, a Jesuit missionary in China 1643–1659, described a shorter and less exotic drying process, in which roots were dug up in winter and dried on tables, then in the wind, but out of the sun, which was believed to sap their potency.[7]  Once the curing process was complete (recall from chapter seven how the Bukharan merchants described their transport practices to Russian officials[8]) the root would be transported via numerous routes—by sea, across Persia and Turkey to Aleppo, or on camelback across Eurasia to Arkhangel’sk and beyond—until it was sold and ended up as a powder in an apothecary in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Venice or elsewhere.

A number of important trends contributed to the rising popularity of rhubarb in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the late sixteenth century only a small fraction (estimated 14%) of drugs were imported to England from outside of Europe.  By the seventeenth century rhubarb consumption in England increased as the use of imported curatives became more generally common.  By 1669, 70% of pharmaceutical drugs in Britain were imported primarily from India and the East Indies.[9]  The publication of herbal and pharmaceutical guides, such as Jean de Renou’s Dispensatorium medicum (1615) and Johann Bobart’s Catalogus horti botanici Oxoniensis (1648) reflected and were manifestations of numerous developments in early modern European society:  development of medicinal knowledge and scientific study of the natural world; popularization of printing presses which stimulated the dissemination of knowledge; and the increasing contact Europeans had with Eastern products.[10]  Concretely, such publications helped to spread knowledge about rhubarb’s useful effects, and thereby increased demand for the distant root. 

Increasing European demand drove the importance and increased attention to the rhubarb trade.  Seventeenth-century Venetian merchants sought rhubarb in the markets of Aleppo.[11]  Russian rhubarb also shipped to Amsterdam, Europe’s busiest market.  That the Dutchman Nieuhoff and Swede De Rodes gave such attention to rhubarb indicates the root was valued in their countries as well. Visiting Russia in Anna Ioannovna’s reign in 1739, the Venetian merchant Francesco Algarotti wrote about the state’s active monopoly trade in rhubarb.[12]  Meanwhile, the Dutch East India and British East India Companies competed with the Russian state’s overland trade for rhubarb market share.  Many of the company men filled their return ship-carriage allotments from India with rhubarb; these private decisions reflect importantly the profitability of the rhubarb trade.[13]  Despite efforts at domestication and discreet “buy local” campaigns, English demand for imported rhubarb continued to increase.[14]   The second half of the eighteenth century was the heyday of rhubarb importation to Europe, with rhubarb imports to England peaking in 1768 at 67,764 pounds (funty).[15]

The imported root arrived to England in dried and shriveled pieces.  The root itself was covered with a dark brown bark, and could be as thick as a man’s thigh, according to the report of Chaggi Memet, a Persian merchant who brought rhubarb to markets in Venice.[16]  A Venetian merchant’s notebook from the fourteenth century contained the following guidelines for purchasing rhubarb: “rhubarb ought to be yellow in color, and big in appearance, and firm, without holes.  And when it is broken, inside it appears reddish-yellow in color and has markings like veins; inside it has a red-brown color.”[17]  The Dutchman Johann Nieuhoff who spent time in Russia observing the rhubarb trade gave a similar description.[18]

Rhubarb was often named based on presumed origin. The original Western names reflect its presumed place of origins by the ancient Greeks who first wrote about it.   Rha may refer to an ancient word for the Volga River.  Rha pontic meant, literally, beyond the Volga and pontic steppe (the steppelands stretching from western Ukraine to Kazakstan).  Rha barbarum referenced a land of barbarians beyond the Volga.[19]  In fact, from the time botanists in the emerging fields of the natural sciences became interested, there was much debate and uncertainty about where and how rhubarb actually grew; various candidate locations were posited as rhubarb sources in and around the territory of the Russian, central Asian and Chinese empires.  In the early sixteenth century a Portuguese doctor, Garcia ab Orta, thought that lesser sorts of rhubarb grew around Samarkand.[20]  Returning to Tobol’sk from his embassy to China in 1658, Fedor Baikov noted that Chinese kopytchatyi rhubarb root grew near the town of Sukhzheia.[21]  Ysbrant Ides noticed Bukharans farming on the way to China.  Johann Nieuhoff, the steward to the Dutch East India Company ambassadors, on a trip to China wrote that, contrary to the commonly held idea that rhubarb was harvested in the wild, in the East it was deliberately cultivated, although the Scottish physician and explorer Jonathan Bell disputed this point.[22]  Recalling that the expeditions of Baikov, Ides, and Spafariia all noted farming Bukharans beyond the Siberian settlements on the way to China, and since Bukharans probably dominated the rhubarb trade in China during the seventeenth century, one wonders if these farming Bukharans cultivated rhubarb, in addition to purchasing it from Mongols, who, as noted above, reportedly dried it by hanging it on their sheep’s horns and transported it from the Far East to Moscow and Persia (Iran).[23] Once it was determined that various sorts of rhubarb grew in different places, the challenge became to understand what made Chinese rhubarb particularly potent, a question that would remain unanswered into the nineteenth century.[24]

Leaving questions of the geographies of cultivation aside, appellations could also reflect trade routes the root followed.  Rhubarb root that came through the Ottoman Empire to the Aleppo market was called Turkish rhubarb.  If it made its way to a London or Amsterdam pharmacist with the company men of the Dutch and East India Companies—they filled their allowances with rhubarb increasingly in the seventeenth century—it was called Chinese or Indian rhubarb.  Alternatively, it might make its way through Russia, along routes from Central Asia, via the Caspian Sea or across Siberia, and was called Russian rhubarb in Europe.  Of the various sorts of rhubarb one could find at medieval markets—Turkish, Indian, Chinese, and Russian, most had probably grown in China.  This is not to say the labels were completely products of ignorance.  They reflected meaningful qualitative categories for European purchasers.  Russian rhubarb, in particular, was signified rhubarb of the highest quality rhubarb and garnered the highest prices.  Astute buyers knew that Russian rhubarb came from China (Rhubarbus palmatum), but valued this root above others because it had passed state-established quality standard inspections (brak) (discussed below) en route to Europe.[25]

Making sense of the various names applied to rhubarb requires significant untangling at several levels.[26]  A number of ontological, genealogical, and geographical aspects complicate the problem of identifying rhubarb. For much of the eighteenth century botanists puzzled over whether soil, climate, age of individual plants or genetic/ontological variation accounted for a failure to cultivate on European soil a rhubarb with the same look and potency of Chinese rhubarb.[27]  First, different varieties existed; rhubarb’s proclivity towards bastardization adds extra challenge to the establishment of an accurate historical genealogy.[28]  Second, rhubarb was transported to market in dried mode before ultimately being crushed by the patient or by the pharmacist, which made visual recognition difficult.  Third, early modern botanists lacked modern tools of preservation, representation, and reproduction such that even the matter of physical description was not trivial.  Botanists-horticulturalists-explorers sometimes had samples, but sometimes relied only on descriptions by others in order to fit their observations into categories. Such difficulties in identification, of course, were typical in the development of botanical taxonomy and medicinal knowledge of plants in the early modern period.

For the study of the broader, transnational arena of trade, making sense of inconsistent, overlapping, and contradictory labels is important.  Fortunately, however, for the purposes of this chapter, which focuses narrowly on rhubarb in Russia, the discussion is appropriately contained to two varieties of rhubarb:  kopytchatyi and cherenkogo. Russian customs records consistently refer to only these two varieties.  The names reflect appearance:  kopytchatyi, or ungulate, refers to the large, hoof-like and dark-colored root.  Cherenkogo means pedunculated, or ‘having a flowered stalk’; it allegedly was the lighter in color and rotted more quickly (but was sometimes passed off as the more valuable version).[29]  Even though kopytchatyi rhubarb was more prized, there was a market for cherenkovyi as well.  The Russian state regulated the trade of both varieties.  Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both varieties were imported into Russia and transported through Siberia, but the kopytchatyi sort always garnered the higher price.

            Our story focuses on the rhubarb trade in Russia, in particular, across Siberia.  In focusing on Siberian rhubarb trade, we nonetheless observe Russian imperial policy within a larger political-commercial context, for Russian rhubarb policy was informed primarily by its recognition of Russia’s potential position as a bridge between eastern medicine and European markets.  In other words, we see how global trends affected economic dynamics in remote Siberia and how Siberia and Russia were parts of a larger world dynamic.  By examining the Russian state’s regulation of rhubarb we see that in its commercial policy, Russia behaved much like other contemporary empires, i.e., its actions were largely informed by the mercantilist ideas of the day, the central goal of this broadly defined theory having been to achieve a favorable balance of trade.   In paying attention to how this policy played out on the ground, this story offers a case study in the limits of imperial reach. 

I should clarify that rhubarb was not solely transported across Russia, although it was this fact that motivated the Muscovite government to regulate its trade so heavily.  Far less is known about uses of rhubarb within Russia.  It may have originally been used to dye wool yellow.  Its medicinal applications became known in Russia during the seventeenth century, but the educated exile Yuri Krizhanich, writing during Alexei Mikhailovich’s reign, still listed rhubarb as a dye, not a medicine.[30] Paul of Aleppo on the other hand, writing under the same tsar, reported that Russians drank glasses of vodka with small chunks of rhubarb root in it for their good health.[31]  In Siberia, rhubarb’s applications were broader.  According to one nineteenth-century author, rhubarb was seen as a panacea for myriad ailments.  It was also used as incense and tanning agent.[32]

 

Beginning of Russian Regulation

The intersection of the growing study of botany and contemporary economic thinking created incentives for English gardeners to grow rhubarb domestically.  Despite sustained efforts, however, and much to the dismay of British mercantilists, the English and other Europeans were unsuccessful in reproducing potent “true rhubarb.”[33]  In the growing European demand for medicinal rhubarb and the failure to cultivate rhubarb in Europe,  the Russian state found opportunity.  After all, at a cost of ten or eighteen rubles per pud on the Siberian frontier in the century’s early decades and roughly fifty rubles per pud in Moscow by mid-century, and more abroad, the profit margin was significant.[34]  Richard Hellie’s encyclopedic price survey contends that rhubarb accounted for 12% of the market in luxury items like jewelry, spices, and medicine, accounting for 34,499 rubles of 268,665 rubles traded, and being the third most popular luxury item in terms of value traded among 53 products.[35] In Hellie’s ranking of 34 agricultural products, rhubarb occupied the eighth highest proportion of market share, ranking behind grains and hemp and above fruits.[36]  Recognizing this growing potential in rhubarb trade, the Russian government sought to capitalize on the commodity by regulating its trade.

The earliest information, taken from English and northern Russian shipping records, provides information about Russian rhubarb trade without always revealing if traffic flowed via Siberia or Astrakhan. In 1568 a ship sailed from Russia to England with 20 pounds of rhubarb.[37]  As was typical of luxury items, small quantities were shipped in the sixteenth century.  The first record of rhubarb being declared at a Siberian customs post was a consignment of eight pud of rhubarb in Tara declared in 1637/8.[38]  About 18-1/2 pud were declared in Tobol'sk in 1649/50.[39]  In 1652, 6,000 pounds of rhubarb worth 7,500 rubles, or 50 rubles/pud were shipped from Arkhangel’sk.[40]  Some very small amounts appear in customs books excerpts from central Russia in the 1660s.[41] While miniscule amounts of rhubarb do not disappear, Vilkov’s work illustrates substantial rhubarb flows across Siberia, conveying the tentative impression, as do the above examples, that shipment sizes increased.[42]

The Russian state recognized this increasing demand.  Under Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich the state began investing in the rhubarb trade.  In 1642 Tobol’sk kupchin' (merchant on state business) Bukharan Kozma Ameti sold four pud of rhubarb for 183.5 rubles (45.87 rubles/pud) in Velikii Ustiug. The consignment was bound for Europe via Arkhangel’sk.[43]  In 1652 a Tobol’sk Cossack in the party of Bukharan Seitkul Ablin, which was returning from China and escorting Dzhungar ambassadors (see chapter eight), brought rhubarb root back to Moscow with him.  It is significant that this Russian serviceman chose rhubarb, of all possibilities, to carry with him the entire breadth of the continent.[44]  It was not a bizarre selection; shippers of the Dutch East Indian Company were making similar choices with their cargo allottments on Dutch ships; they knew there was profit in rhubarb.  The Russian state also knew this, and recognized that, with its access to China, it was in an advantageous position to procure a product that grew—as far as people knew—only in the Far East and was increasingly in demand in the West.  On his state embassy to China (1654-1658), Fedor Baikov purchased 208.3 pud of rhubarb for the Russian state treasury.[45]  Vilkov calculated that 198 pud of rhubarb was declared at Tobol'sk customs in 1654/5 and 95.5 pud in 1655/6.[46]  Much of this rhubarb was bound for European apothecaries through people like the Englishman William Prideaux, who in 1655 shipped 100 pud of rhubarb from Arkhangel’sk to England for 4,000 rubles.[47] De Rodes estimated that during the 1650s approximately 154 pud of rhubarb shipped annually from Arkhangel’sk.[48]

Having tasted the lucrative profits of rhubarb trade through active participation in the rhubarb market, the Russian state introduced a regulatory policy on rhubarb to further capitalize on the potential profit rhubarb afforded.  Explicit regulation of rhubarb began in about the middle of the seventeenth century and policy fluctuated as the state experimented with how best to achieve the desired advantage. [49]  De Rodes, a Swedish ambassador in Moscow from 1650-1655, wrote that until 1652 the Tsar had paid Bukharans a high price for rhubarb, because he wanted to receive a lot of it.  But, according to De Rodes, once the Moscow government realized the value and scarcity of the root, they wanted to become sole suppliers to the world, and insisted that Bukharans sell their entire supply to the Tsar at state-imposed prices.  He wrote scathingly that the Russian government was “treating Bukharans disgustingly, practically seizing their goods by force at whatever price they wanted.”[50]  However uncharitably De Rodes cast his judgment of the situation, he was certainly correct in that the Russian state regulated rhubarb quite consciously so that the pay-off would come from its export potential.  However “disgusting” such behavior may have been, it was typical of the day.  The logic of amassing a commodity in order to profit from export to foreigners with hard currency conforms to the arguments of scholars such as Marc Bassin regarding furs:  mercantilist Russia found a valuable commodity to serve as substitute for specie that it lacked.[51]   

Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich began with restriction and soon escalated policy on rhubarb to prohibition. It is not precisely clear when rhubarb trade was first restricted in Russia.  The historian Ziiaev wrote that rhubarb became a forbidden (zapovednyi) commodity in 1649, but he cited no evidence for the assertion.[52]  As far as I know, the Russian state began to regulate rhubarb trade through Russia in 1652 with an order from February 12, 1652, which restricted rhubarb trade in Siberia.  It directed that anyone with rhubarb must sell it to the state treasury for the “direct Siberian price” and anyone smuggling it should have it confiscated from them without compensation.[53]  In that year, however, it continued to be traded at Tobol’sk customs without apparent restriction.[54]  Shortly thereafter, in 1653 or 1654, the center stepped up the rhetoric, informing Siberian governors that rhubarb trade was prohibited to all—including provincial administrators (prikaznye liudi)—on pain of death.[55]  Orders to Tobol’sk and Verkhotur’e governors, written on November 21 in Moscow and received on December 2, 1657, in Siberia, repeated the 1654 edict that the import, purchase, sale, barter, or transport of rhubarb would be punishable by death.[56] 

A look at Siberian trade shows the gap between proscription and practice.  Certainly, the introduction of trade restrictions added an additional burden to traders of rhubarb, who in the middle of the seventeenth century in Siberia were mostly Bukharans.  However, even with the new restrictions, Bukharans continued to bring rhubarb to Russia through legal channels.  Despite the harsh language of the decrees issued by 1654 and 1657, the traffic was not immediately eliminated and, to my knowledge, no one was ever executed for rhubarb smuggling.  Several incidents in which Bukharans arrived to Siberia with rhubarb unaware of the new policy reveal that the state had a more pragmatic than draconian response. 

As chapter seven discussed, Shaba Seitov and his colleagues first learned of the new regulations in January 1653 when they returned from the steppe with several sacks laden with rhubarb root to learn that there was only one buyer for their product:  the state.[57]  Surprised and disappointed, the returning traders were questioned under oath—they swore by their Muslim faith—in detail about how the Bukharans procured, treated and transported their rhubarb.[58]  Later that year in September 1653 a Bukharan traveling from central Asia declared 41-pud of kopytchatyi and cherenkogo rhubarb in Tomsk.[59]  As unpleasant as the new conditions of trade may have been, Shaba Seitov himself made another trip to China and returned with rhubarb.  This time, he and his party met with even more obstacles.  In January 1656 he found himself in Moscow trying to get paid for his rhubarb, which he had handed over to the government almost one year earlier.  He petitioned to the tsar in January 1656, complaining that they had been getting the bureaucratic red tape run-around for a long time already (volochilis mnogo vremia).[60]  Even this great frustration did not keep Bukharan Shaba Seitov from sending his son Eshka Shababin back to China to import more rhubarb into Russia.  In the fall of 1654 Eshka Shababin with a small caravan returned from China to Tiumen’ laden with Chinese rhubarb root.  It was taken from them in Tiumen’ without any payment—not because it was confiscated, but because there was no money in Tiumen’ with which to pay the Bukharans for it.[61]

Other parties met with similar obstacles.  While they certainly did not welcome the added inconvenience and limited options, they found that they were able to side-step criminal charges with claims of ignorance and could eventually get compensated for their products.  On May 16, 1654, another transit Bukharan, Babakshea Ermaliev, declared 30-pud kopytchatyi rhubarb root in Tomsk with a total value of 450 rubles (15 rubles/pud).[62]  That fall, on October 3, 1654, a party coming from central Asia and bound for Moscow declared 35-pud kopytchatyi and 16-pud cherenkogo rhubarb at Tobol’sk customs.[63]  One month later in January 1654 a party of transit Bukharans arrived to Tobol’sk with much rhubarb to sell and were dismayed to learn that according to new regulations, there was only one legal buyer.  That state-designated man was Fedor Baikov, but Fedor Baikov had left Tobol’sk for China and was unlikely to return for quite a long time.  The frustrated Bukharans did not appreciate the customs officials' precise execution of their orders.  They petitioned the tsar, imploring Moscow to direct a solution.  The Bukharans explained that they had come far and if they could not sell their rhubarb, their trade would be ruined and they would be unable to return to their own tsar with desired wares.[64]  They were savvy to paint a picture of deteriorated trade relations with the Bukharan khanate, for the Russian state was very interested in cultivating active trade relations with the eastern middlemen.  It is unclear how this incident was resolved, but it seems safe to assume that the offending (and offended) Bukharan merchants were not executed for their Siberian rhubarb imports.[65] 

Another incident further illustrates not only the confusion and consternation the new rhubarb regulations created, but also that the state’s response on the ground bore little resemblance to the draconian proscription that threatened the death penalty.  In November 1654 a party of Kalmyk ambassadors and Bukharans, who only specified one ware in their cargo, rhubarb root, was denied entrance to Tiumen’ and sent on to Tobol’sk.[66]  The Bukharans in the party insisted that they did not want to go to Tobol’sk because another larger caravan of Bukharans with rhubarb root was already headed there.[67]  This is not to downplay the inconvenience of facing additional cumbersome travel and a fixed, depressed price for one’s product.  But in the risky world of early modern trade, getting one’s product to destination safely was a far greater concern than profit margin.  Despite the harsh proscription, by claiming ignorance of the new ordinance one could avoid punitive consequences.  The 1657 orders to Siberia specified that the state should confiscate rhubarb of foreigners ignorant of the new statute, but return the rhubarb to them once they had finished their business in Russia.  They could leave with the rhubarb, but the only place in Russia they would be allowed to sell it was Astrakhan.[68] Though the measure specified foreigners, Russians could get away with claiming ignorance as well.  A Moscow merchant returning to Siberia with rhubarb around 1656 claimed that he had left Russia with a Bukharan trading caravan and had been living in Kalmyk lands for about one and a half years, so he knew nothing of the new rules.[69]  Some Bukharans probably managed to dispose of their rhubarb anyway, but apparently not all.  In July 1675 one Bukharans departed Tara with rhubarb that his brother had brought to Russia in 1657/8.  It had languished there for 18 years, without the merchant being allowed to sell it to any satisfaction.  He had his brother bring it back to Central Asia to seek a more friendly market elsewhere.[70]  Indeed, even as customs records show that Bukharans continued to bring rhubarb to Siberia, it is quite likely that other Bukharan caravan merchants shifted their trade routes as a result of the new Russian regulations.  Persia may have become a more attractive routing in the face of the Russian state monopsony.  For example, one observer noted that rhubarb root was brought to Mashhad in such great quantities that one might have thought it an Iranian commodity.[71]

Once customs officials in Siberia had purchased it for the tsar, rhubarb was sent on to Moscow.  We learn about one of these trips in early 1656 because the purveyors lost their travel documents. Senka Omelianov, along with Tatar head Senka Turkoi [sic] and five other servitors, were on their way from Tobol’sk to Moscow with a shipment of rhubarb for the state treasury.[72]  On February 26, 1656, they (in the second instance the Tatar head is called Savka Turskoi [sic]) petitioned the tsar to ask for travel expenses and per diem allowances (zhalovaniia, korm, vykhod); their petition says nothing of the six-week stay in Moscow.[73] We learn that they spent at least weeks in Moscow from a petition submitted by Senka Omelianov’s relative Mikitko, who had accompanied the party, perhaps to help out while benefiting from the security of a state-escorted expedition to move wares of his own to Moscow. As argued in chapter eight, such attachments to state caravans were typical.  Tobol’sk townsman Mikitko Omelianov petitioned the state for per diem expenses (he had only been issued a food allowance [korm] for two weeks out of a six week stay in Moscow).  He explains that he had come to the capital from Tobol’sk bringing rhubarb for the state treasury.[74]  However, it seems that Mikitko’s affiliation to the state on this mission is looser than Senka Omelianov’s and Turskoi’s.  First, he petitioned separately from the others.  Second, he uses different language:  Senka Omelianov and Savka Turskoi address the Tsar as “your humble servant,” using the formulaic language of those who are in service of the Tsar.  Mikitko, however, addresses the tsar posing as “your orphan,” the language of address by those not in the service of the tsar.

So far, I have helped to narrow the dating of the first rhubarb regulation by the Russian state.  First, I have demonstrated that the state was an active participant in the rhubarb trade in the 1640s.  By 1652 the state had declared a monopsony, in which the state was the sole legal buyer.  That merchants returning to Siberia from central Asia in the early 1650s claimed surprise at the new regulations suggests that if the 1652 order featured here was not the original order, it was probably not too chronologically distant from it.  The state issued a decree declaring death as punishment for rhubarb smuggling prior to 1654.  However, this inquiry into rhubarb trade and regulation in Siberia does more than revise the dates and provide more detail.  While most scholarship about rhubarb focuses on the regulatory and prohibitive aspects of state trade policy, this chapter also contributes an important new finding: in the years 1652–1654, the Moscow administration sought to capitalize on rhubarb’s profit potential not just through regulation of trade, but also through reconnaissance and extraction of rhubarb that grew wild in Siberia.

 

Rhubarb Reconnaissance in Siberia

The following episode from the Verkhotur’e archives reveals that the Muscovite administration pursued the idea of finding domestic rhubarb sources from at least 1652.  In 1663 the Croatian exile Yuri Krizhanich, writing in exile in Tobol’sk, quite consistently with the mercantilist thinking of the day suggested that the Russian government should find domestic sources of rhubarb.  His suggestion makes it seem that he was unaware that the Russian state had pursued precisely that objective over a decade earlier.  As mentioned above, ascertaining where rhubarb grew had long confounded the curious. The Russian state mounted its own efforts to discover if rhubarb grew within the boundaries of its empire. 

In the short Siberian summer of 1652 orders went out to marshals (prikashchiky) of various boroughs (slobody) ordering them to assemble gear or men (i.e., a peasant to help dig up [the rhubarb]) for a gosudareva delo.[75]  Gosudareva delo was a specific phrase denoting matters of particular importance to the tsar. That such language was used regarding rhubarb reconnaissance tells us that it was a high (and maybe secret) priority for the central government.  In fact, it is only a later document that reveals that the gosudareva delo referred to involved secret rhubarb reconnaissance.  Grigorii Barybin, the marshal of a Nitsynskii borough in Verkhotur’e region, who had been summoned for rhubarb reconnaissance, reported that the Irbit marshal had been uncooperative in providing resources.[76]  In response the Irbit marshal defended himself by explaining that he did not have the Cossacks, peasants, or arms, to spare.[77]  After all, he noted, the suggested reconnaissance would take them to the very edge of the steppe beyond the Iset River close to Kalmyk territory.[78]  Such a trek into potentially hostile territory without sufficient arms was ill advised.

A surviving excerpt of instructions to Pankratii Semenovich Perkhurov provides more detail about the instructions for those supervising rhubarb reconnaissance. Perkhurov was instructed to watch the Cossacks and peasants closely to make sure that they did not take any rhubarb for themselves; he was to be sure to record precisely how much rhubarb they dug up and dried.  He was not to let locals gain access to places where they found rhubarb, so that no one but the Tsar would have access to rhubarb root.  If he should find people of any ranks or foreigners nearby with rhubarb they had dug up, it was to be confiscated from them for the Tsar.[79]  It seems that Barybin and Perkhurov may have led separate search parties in the summer of 1652.

Perkhurov, by the next summer, would be gone.  In June 1653 Perkhurov was replaced by Verkhotur’e gentryman Prokopii Buzhenin, who became responsible for rhubarb procurement and processing (promysly) in Verkhotur’e.[80]  Perkhurov may have been discharged for incompetence.  In 1653 Pankratii Perkhurov had had grain reserves shipped nearer to the extraction sites.  This grain was intended to supply the tax-exempt (“white”; see discussion in chapter two) Cossacks who were sent along the Iset for rhubarb extraction.  According to Perkhurov, the elder Dolmat at the Iset monastery had refused to let Perkhurov store the grain there.  The Cossacks hid the grain elsewhere, but it was stolen.[81]  Perhaps not coincidentally, in the next year Iset monastery would be implicated in an underground rhubarb smuggling ring.[82]  In the meantime, however, Perkhurov was in the spotlight, and Moscow viewed his mishap with little sympathy.  A letter from Moscow dated August 12, 1653 blamed Perkhurov’s and his contingent’s own negligence for the theft.  Verkhotur’e officials were warned that no more grain was to be issued in order to compensate for the loss.[83] 

Reports came back that rhubarb of the cherenkovyi sort was virtually limitless in some places along the Iset River.  The more desirable kopytchatyi rhubarb, however, could only be found in dangerous Kalmyk territory.[84]  In any case, the provincial authorities followed their orders and began harvesting the local rhubarb root.  Despite the difficulties in assembling needed supplies and human resources in a region short on both, the effort produced results.  The search parties discovered rhubarb. By August of 1652 consignments of locally harvested dried root had already been sent to Moscow.[85]  In January 1653 additional quantities reached Moscow:  Verkhotur’e servitors Ivan Kartashev and Lichko Evseev delivered four pud of new cherenkogo rhubarb root dug along the Iset River.  Verkhotur’e gentryman Izmail Koptev and servitors Mikhail Pokhaluev and Ivan Prianishnikov delivered 63-3/4 pud cherenkogo rhubarb root.[86]  In March 1653 the Siberian Office in Moscow confirmed receipt of 11 pud 18 grivenok[87] cherenkogo rhubarb, delivered by Verkhotur’e gentryman Grigorii Barybin, Murkushka Viskunov, and colleagues.  In a separate correspondence, Governor L.M. Izmailov reported that a total of 79 pud 8 grivenok of cherenkogo rhubarb was found in Verkhotur’e region for 1652/1653.[88]  The close correspondence of this total and the afore-mentioned figures suggests that a complete record has survived for the year 1652/3.  Within these documents, another memo noted that customs head Elizar Tolstoukhov collected from d’iachia Vasilii and an Atarskii man about 22 pud cherenkogo rhubarb in 1651.[89]  Since this memo came from the customs head, it probably refers to rhubarb confiscated at Verkhotur’e customs rather than to rhubarb procured through state reconnaissance. 

Rhubarb extraction along the Iset River employed not only state servitors.  Fetka Ivanov syn Krisovo, a peasant from Nitsynskii borough, had been part of Barybin’s 1652 party charged with searching for rhubarb.  As per his orders, Fetka had found and dug up seven pud of rhubarb, which he brought back to Barybin.  Subsequently, he was sent back along the Iset in the service of Pankratii Perkhurov for more rhubarb extraction, where he dug up 50 pud of rhubarb.  However, Krisovo complained that, with all his time spent on rhubarb reconnaissance, it had become difficult to farm his land sufficiently to pay state grain taxes.  He asked the Tsar to relieve him of these burdens.[90]  The Tsar obliged.  The notation made June 7, 1652, on the back of Fetka’s petition, orders that Fetka Krisovo was to be relieved of his land burdens and employed fully in rhubarb extraction. His grain obligations were to be transferred to another local family.[91]

If these early searches were so successful, why have they remained hidden from view?  A communiqué from Moscow provides a clue to the silence.  On June 20, 1653, the Tsar instructed Verkhotur’e governor L.M. Izmailov and undersecretary Mikhail Polsnikov not to dig up cherenkogo rhubarb anymore.  The instruction explained that the 67 pub 20 grivenok they had recently sent to Moscow had not sold.  It was considered inferior (khudym) and no one wanted to buy it.  Therefore, the Verkhotur’e administration should not waste the energy of Verkhotur’e servitors or state funds in the extraction of rhubarb of the cherenkogo variety any longer. Prokopii Buzhenin’s instructions were also modified.  He had originally been ordered, along with two musketeers and 120 Cossacks, to dig up cherenkogo and kopytchatyi rhubarb root, dry it, and send it to Moscow along the winter route.  Now, Buzhenin was ordered not to send any cherenkogo rhubarb to Moscow, but to just sell it in Verkhotur’e, and keep the sales money to cover local expenses.  If no one bought the cherenkogo rhubarb in Verkhotur’e, however, Buzhenin was ordered not to waste further state resources digging it up.[92]  Along with this letter, the Siberian Office sent back the 67 pud 20 grivenok of rhubarb with the instruction to sell it to whomever they could in Verkhotur’e and use the revenue to cover local expenses.[93]  With these orders the state’s program of active domestic harvesting went into permanent suspension.

 

Extraction failed, but rhubarb regulation continued

For the rest of the seventeenth century, the Russian state occasionally revisited the goal of domestic extraction. In 1668 Alexei Mikhailovich ordered a survey to seek out rhubarb in territory stretching from Tobol’sk to Yakutsk.[94]  Another such survey was initiated in the Verkhotur’e region in 1675.[95]  In December 1696 Peter I ordered an expedition to search for dark rhubarb growing in the Nerchinsk area.[96] There were also rumors that the state tried to obtain seed from the Chinese and plant it in Siberia, near a village called Barnevka.[97]  One wonders if they discovered, as English gardeners later did, through much experimentation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that transplanting rhubarb stalk or root produced a more similar offspring, while planting seed yielded more bastardized versions of rhubarb.[98]  Little or nothing is known of the results of those searches, which, along with the fact that the Russian state continued to procure rhubarb from China, leads to the conclusion that they could not have been very successful.[99]

To return to the matter of distinct sorts of rhubarb, price information corroborates that the kopytchatyi variety was preferred to cherenkogo.  Yet, one wonders if Moscow exaggerated in saying that the cherenkogo had no buyers.  After all, Bukharan caravans regularly transported both types long distances to Siberia.  Over half a century after Moscow complained that the cherenkogo did not sell at market, it was still passing in significant quantities through Siberia.  In the first two months (January and February) of 1728 just over 50 pud of rhubarb was declared at Tiumen’ customs.  The vast majority, 42 pud, was cherenkogo.[100]  As stated above, we know considerably less about the domestic consumption of rhubarb within Russia, but it is doubtful they would have gone to the trouble of importing the variety if no market for it existed.  Perhaps kopytchatyi was distinctly potent for medicinal purposes, but cherenkovyi sufficed for other uses, such as dye.

Meanwhile, an undeterminable amount of rhubarb was smuggled through Russia.  Kilburger wrote that in 1673, more than thirteen years after it had been declared a forbidden good, Bukharans continued to smuggle rhubarb into Siberia and from there into Moscow, especially during winter.[101]  On August 2, 1659, two tribute-paying Tatars came to the Governor’s House in Tiumen’ and reported, with the help of interpreter Stepan Trubachev, that they had seen a large group of Tobol’sk Bukharans passing through with horses and rhubarb.  The Bukharans were from Tobol’sk, they had about ten porter-cooks with them, and were driving 700 horses to Kazan’.  They were traveling up the Iset River by a boat, in which they also carried, reported the Tatars, 62 pud of rhubarb root with them; but it was unclear if they carried the necessary travel documents with them.[102]  The report is sandwiched between reminders among Siberian administrators to remain vigilant and strict in ensuring that Bukharan merchants and yurt Tatars do not bypass customs posts without paying the Sovereign’s taxes.[103]  (If the group was indeed driving 700 horses, one wonders if it was vigilance that was in deficit.) 

Although Bukharans dominated rhubarb trade in Siberia, Russians also participated, and were found smuggling as well.  Between 1654–1656 rhubarb was confiscated in Tiumen’ from military men, Russian merchants, and passersby.[104]  The monastery on the Iset River and other churchmen were even embroiled in an investigation about the local rhubarb trade.[105]  Churches in seventeenth-century Tobol’sk were not so removed from the markets:  merchants would sometimes rely on local churches as warehouses for their goods.[106]

 

Late seventeenth century policy: tax farms

Moscow’s recognition of substantial smuggling motivated them to revise the rhubarb policy.  In 1680, the conclusion that fighting smuggling may be a losing battle may have motivated Tsar Fedor to lift the prohibition on trading and transporting rhubarb.  In October 1680 he sent instructions to the governor of Verkhotur’e to record names and quantities of Bukharans trafficking in rhubarb and not to allow rhubarb to be traded en route, but the rhubarb was not to be confiscated.  Merchants arriving to Siberia with rhubarb would be allowed to proceed to Moscow to sell their rhubarb.[107]  Siberian customs posts were to make careful inspections to ensure that their consignments remained unchanged en route to Moscow. Regardless of how Muscovite policy might have influenced shifts in trade flows, Bukharans did continue to bring rhubarb to Moscow through official channels.

During Sophia Alekseevna’s regency Moscow changed its rhubarb policy again, choosing to manage rhubarb regulation through out-sourcing. In 1686, perhaps in response to depleted state rhubarb supplies, rhubarb was given over to a tax farm.[108]  Meanwhile, the state negotiated for an exclusive European buyer.  Indicative that the monopoly had been slightly relaxed, decrees were issued that rhubarb for export could only be sold to the designated European buyer, a Dutch merchant named Adolph Alferevich Gutman. The objective behind this order was to ensure that “the price of rhubarb abroad not be diminished.”[109]  In 1691 the tax farm was awarded to a member  of the Merchant Hundred, Ivan Isaev.  He had probably become acquainted with eastern goods by working for his father’s silk shop in Moscow.[110]  Isaev was given five years to purchase 50 pud or however much he wanted of rhubarb and to seek out the valuable root “in Siberia or wherever it was found.”[111] However, he was relieved of his duty after four years; Burton conjectures that he was dismissed for abusing his role.  Isaev was replaced by a Hamburg merchant, Matvei Poppe, in May 1695.  Since he probably paid for the tax farm privileges in valuable coins, it may be that this advantage facilitated his replacing Isaev.[112]  Stricter regulatory oversights characterized the terms of Poppe’s tax farm, suggesting that the center’s methods for quashing embezzlement were evolving.  However, with the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689, trade relations between Russia and China increased, which only exacerbated the already tremendous challenge the state faced in regulating rhubarb traffic across Siberia.[113]  In any event, by the end of Peter’s reign, the state warehouse was stocked (and sometimes over-stocked) with rhubarb bound for Western Europe, epitomizing the abiding focus on export in state rhubarb policy.[114] 

 

1727–1731: An experiment with free trade

In Peter’s wake a short-lived liberalization was implemented from 1727-1731.  A combination of free trade rhetoric from the West, particularly from the Dutch, may have influenced the impetuous, reforming tsar.  He had been particularly enamored with the Dutch, a sea-faring mercantile culture that was at the helm of free trade promotion in the seventeenth century.  Problems with administering and monitoring the tax farm monopoly played some part in the decision as well.  As had been the case in 1680, the state was probably feeling the need to employ a new strategy.  As such, in 1727 the state declared that any citizen could buy and sell rhubarb at the marketplace and with payment of proper duties.  Traders in Siberia responded immediately.  Tiumen’ customs books from 1728 reveal a regular flow of rhubarb of both the kopytchatyi and cherenkogo varieties.[115]  The laissez-fairre arrangement did not last long, however:  the profits that rhubarb garnered were too enticing.  Russian imports to Europe hit new highs in an environment in which private initiative could respond to growing demand.[116]  No doubt such reports by Russian consuls in Europe back to St. Petersburg made tax revenues from rhubarb sales seem all the less satisfying and, soon enough, the state reinstated its monopoly.[117] It was no coincidence that the rhubarb monopoly was reinstated as prices in Europe were on the rise.  Reflective of Moscow’s sensitivity to trends in foreign markets, the state similarly reinstated the tar monopoly as tar prices began to rise.[118]

Policy fluctuated on other commodites as well, as Moscow tinkered to try to achieve the best result.[119]  For much of the eighteenth century, the Senate and Commercial College grappled with how best to manage the rhubarb trade in order to maximize its profits.[120]  Whether out-sourcing through a tax farm, allowing trade on which revenue could be collected, or maintaining its monopoly in which it tried to keep supplies low but most importantly, prices high, were all positions advocated at different moments by different parties.  Arguments for increased stability—the vagaries of market boom and bust—led to the reinstatement of the rhubarb monopoly.[121]  In reinstating the monopoly, Russia was casting its lot with high prices over a limited supply, as opposed to little revenue from a large volume.  Given the nature of the product, this was a reasonable analysis.  Yet, even as it struggled with limited success in controlling traffic within its own territory, it could not control world traffic and faced stiff competition in Europe’s destination markets.  In response, Russia went one step further to ensure that its bet on high prices was attainable. 

 

BRAK

From the time that the monopoly was reinstated under Tsarina Anna Ioannovna, efforts were afoot to ensure quality.  In 1735 decrees were issued for the establishment of a quality control institution.  One year later, on the Siberian frontier at Kiakhta, an inspection post for all rhubarb entering the Russian empire was established. This was an important development in eighteenth-century trade policy.  At this post, all rhubarb supplies would be inspected for quality.  Any rhubarb that was wet, mildewy, rotting or otherwise of inferior quality was separated from the inspected lot and publicly burned.  Indeed, if the edicts of the 1650s displayed a naiveté in wanting to control the market but doing little to counter alternative routing of re-exported rhubarb, the new policy to burn inferior rhubarb reflects the state’s more savvy approach to controlling supply.  This operation was known as the brak.  And while inspections on the frontier could result in major culling of stock that frustrated merchants who had hopes of getting paid for much larger quantities, quite soon the brak system paid off.  Russian rhubarb came to enjoy a superior reputation among all other sorts in European markets and garnered the highest prices. Although Foust argued that micro-management of the Russian state made them less successful against their competitors (Dutch and British East Indian companies), the brak contributed to the superior reputation that Russian rhubarb enjoyed in English markets.[122]  Russian rhubarb’s premier reputation obtained as long as the state inspection institution existed.  Indeed, after the brak was finally abolished in the second half of the nineteenth century, the overall quality of medicinal rhubarb declined; there were no assurances against adulteration of the drug with less potent or other ingredients.[123]

 

CONCLUSION

This chapter has demonstrated that Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich launched a program of rhubarb reconnaissance in Western Siberia in the 1650s. In the first place, this episode, which moves towards a more precise dating of this policy, reveals some of the ambiguity and struggles for scarce resources that characterized frontier administration.  This examination of rhubarb policy also presents a picture of a more involved commercial policy than has been appreciated. The state employed various methods—regulations, monopoly, tax farms (to domestic and international actors)—to maximize profit on this precious tuber. We see a policy that conformed to mercantilist thinking of the day:  it was aimed at achieving a favorable balance of trade. As this illustrates, to Muscovite policy makers, that involved not only cultivating domestic sources of marketable export products, but also as garnering profiting by adding value to commodities that crossed Eurasia and Russia en route for western markets. If comparing commercial policy, Russia looks more like its western European neighbors. On the other hand, from the perspective of attempts at domestic cultivation and the development of biological and pharmaceutical knowledge, English efforts displayed more private initiative and persistence. If comparing the fields of medicine and science, the gulf between Russia and western European nations widens.

Finally, the utility of commodity study extends further. From caviar to paper clips, the study of a particular commodity or object has proven an effective organizing principle through which historians discuss much more than economic history.[124]  William Cronon brilliantly revealed the inner workings of nineteenth-century Chicago while explaining important environmental changes and regulatory and technological developments by tracing the physical and historical paths of logs, pork and grain.[125] In that same spirit, the study of rhubarb can help deepen our understanding of the multiple layers of life that commodity touched in early modern Europe.  Behind the economic demand that informed state trade policy stood developments in knowledge of horticulture and medicine that provide insight into additional layers of cultural change in early modern Europe.  Inquiries like these can contribute to the growing and vibrant subfield of the history of botanical transfer.  Alfred Crosby’s inquiries into the plants, animals, and germs that Europeans brought with them opened up a new space for historical exploration.[126]  Scholars realized that in addition to deliberate and inadvertent exports, histories of the deliberate imports of useful and/or exotic flora and fauna can teach us much about political, cultural and socio-cultural dynamics.[127] In sum, studying the transnational movements and cultural uses and meanings of rhubarb locates Russia within a broader context of Early Modern European commerce.

 


[1] Clifford M. Foust, Rhubarb:  The Wondrous Drug (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1992), 214. For a study on the globalization of the sugar trade see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). Given that this is the story of Siberian rhubarb that proved inferior to seventeenth-century sensibilities, it is somewhat ironic that the sour stalks most valued and consumed today in pies and jams is presumed to be derivative of the wild rhubarb that grew near Verkhotur’e. A recipe for rhubarb tart sent from England to Philadelphia in 1739, specified to use “Siberian rhubarb”:  Foust, Rhubarb, 214.

[2] Foust, Rhubarb, 214.

[3] For the notion that the Chinese used rhubarb for incense, veterinary purposes, or fuel, but did not use rhubarb medicinally on humans, see Audrey Burton, The Bukharans:  A Dynastic, Diplomatic, and Commercial History, 1550-1702 (Surrey, England: Curzon, 1997), 459.

[4] Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo), The Worth of Women:  Wherein Is

Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 170.

[5] Foust, Rhubarb, 16, 19.

[6] Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 307.

[7] Foust, Rhubarb, 23, 25.

[8] Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, f. 214, op. 3, stb. 414, ll. 1–5, hereafter cited as RGADA. EDIT: LOII-SPB, f. 187, op. 1, d. 126, l. 1.

[9] Denis Leigh, “Medicine, the City and China,” Medical History 18 (1974), 54.

[10] Foust, Rhubarb, 21, 34.

[11] Suraiya Faroqhi, “The Venetian Presence in the Ottoman Empire (1600–1630),” Journal of European Economic History 15 (1986), 379; Foust, Rhubarb, 9–10.

[12] Iu.N. Il’ina, “Novye perevody.  Iz knigi Puteshchestvie v Rossiiu,” Zviezda 5 (2003), 84, 86.

[13] Leigh, “Medicine, the City and China,” 54-55.

[14] Foust, Rhubarb, 21.

[15] Ibid., 22; Clifford Foust, “Customs 3 and Russian Rhubarb:  A Note on Reliability,” Journal of European Economic History 15 (1986), 555.  1 pud = 36.11 lbs. = 16.4 kg = 40 Russian funty. Foust, Rhubarb, 47.

[16] Foust, Rhubarb, 7.

[17] John E. Dotson, Merchant Culture in Fourteenth-century Venice:  The Zibaldone da Canal (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), 130.

[18] Nieuhoff quoted in Burton, Bukharans, 383. 

[19] Foust, Rhubarb, 3-4.

[20] Ibid., 10.

[21] N.F. Demidova and V.S. Miasnikov, Pervye russkie diplomaty v Kitae (Rospis’ I. Petlina i stateinyi spisok F.I. Baikova) (Moscow:  Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1966), 125.

[22] Foust, Rhubarb, 24.

[23] Burton, Bukharans, 384, 428, 442.

[24] Foust, Rhubarb, 181.

[25] Foust, Rhubarb, 59-61.

[26] For example: Rha ponticum, Rha barbarum, Rhapontic verum (“True rhubarb”), R. palmatum, Ravend cind, kopytchatyi, cherenkogo are some names used.  Rheum rhaponticum is what Ides thought he saw growing wild near Nerchinsk (M.I. Kazanina, “Introduction,” in Izbrant Ides i Adam Brand, Zapiski o russkom posol’stve v Kitai [1692-1695] [Moscow, 1967], 150).  Kopytchatyi  = Daurskii according to Demidova and Miasnikov (N.F. Demidova and V.S. Miasnikov, Pervye russkie diplomaty v Kitae [Rospis’ I. Petlina i stateinyi spisok F.I. Baikova] [Moscow:  Nauka, 1966], 154).  However, Daurskii  = Rheum undulatum according to Kazanina (M.I. Kazanina, translator and editor, Zapiski o russkom posol'stve v Kitai [1692–1695] [Moscow:  Glavnaia redatktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1957], 307).  Foust says R. undulatum is Siberian and is not Chinese, R. palmatum (Foust, Rhubarb, 12). Burton associated cherenkogo with rhapontik (Burton, Bukharans, 384; Foust, Rhubarb, 24).  Whereas Kilburger considered rhapontik to be an imposter, which some tried to pass off as rhubarb; for him it was an altogether different plant as opposed to a different sort.  See B.G. Kurts, Sochinenie Kil’burgera o russkoi torgovlie v tsarstvovanie Alekseia Mikhailovicha (Kiev:  Tip. I.I. Chokolova, 1915), 106. 

[27] Foust, Rhubarb, chapters 7–8.  The difficulty that Western Europeans had in the eighteenth century suggests that they had not obtained the knowledge Russians gained in the seventeenth.  A closer look into communications of Europeans in the Russian Academy of Sciences with colleagues in England and continental Europe could illuminate the issue of intellectual exchange.

[28] Ibid., 243.

[29] Kurts, Sochinenie Kil’burgera, 106.

[30] Kh. Trusevich, Posol’skie i torgovye snosheniia Rossii s Kitaem (Moscow:  Tip. T. Malinskogo Moroseika, 1882), 109.  There may have only been two apothecaries in Moscow at mid-century.  Foust, 47.

[31] Kurts, Sochinenie Kil’burgera, 288.

[32] Burton, Bukharans, 384.  Trusevich, Posol’skie i torgovye snosheniia Rossii s Kitaem, 109.  Indeed, most of the information here focuses on European demand and the Russian state’s efforts to capitalize on that demand.  Rhubarb use in Russia should be further studied.

[33] Foust, Rhubarb, 57.

[34] Kh.Z. Ziiaev, Ekonomicheskie sviazi srednei Azii s Sibir’iu v XVI-XIX vv. (Tashkent: Izd. FAN, 1983), 69; O.N. Vilkov, Remeslo i torgovlia zapadnoi Sibiri v XVII v. (Novosibirsk, 1967), 213; Burton, Bukharans, 384; Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600-1725 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1990), 13, 178, 200, hereafter referred to as Hellie, Economy and Material Culture.  Hellie’s extrapolations are based on thirteen transactions involving rhubarb from 1610-1668:  maximum price: 50 rubles/pud; minimum: 2.4 rubles/pud; median: 38.4 rubles/pud.  Rhubarb in Siberia cost about 15 rubles per pud.  Hellie’s data are too sparse and his method too unsystematic to regard his price conclusions as definitive, but his work nonetheless provides a valuable point of departure, not least for the picture he presents about commodities in relation to one another.

[35] Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 178, 200.

[36] Ibid., 37.

[37]T.S. Willan, The Early History of the Russia Company, 1553-1603 (New York:  Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), 82.

[38] Vilkov, Remeslo i torgovlia, 213 (check) and/or Surgut article.

[39] Ibid., 177. 

[40] Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 191; Kurts, Sochinenie Kil’burgera, 288.

[41] RIB 23 (1904), 1631, 1633.

[42] Vilkov, Remeslo i torgovlia, 177, 213.

[43] A.Ts. Merzon and Iu.A. Tikhonov, Rynok Ustiuga Velikogo v period skladyvaniia vserossiiskogo rynka (XVII vek) (Moscow, 1960), 287.  The use of the term kupchin’ specifies a trader in service of Russian state. Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 191, calls Ameti a foreign agent.

[44] Demidova and Miasnikov, Pervye russkie diplomaty v Kitae, 87.

[45] Foust, Rhubarb, 47.

[46] Vilkov, Remeslo i torgovlia, 177.

[47] Arkhangel'skii, “Diplomaticheskie agenty Kromvelia,” Istoricheskie zapiski – (19-), 139.  Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 191. Hellie names the shipper as William Prido, citing article in Russian where name was transliterated into Cyrillic, but probably meant William Prideaux, who traveled to Russia as an agent of Cromwell on an unsuccessful mission to persuade Alexei Mikhailovich to restore the merchants of the Muscovy Company in Russia.  English merchants had been expelled from Russia in 1649.  See Geraldine Marie Phipps, “Britons in Seventeenth-century Russia:  A Study in the Origins of Modernization,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1972), 151–5.

[48] Foust, Rhubarb, 47.

[49] Burton, Bukharans, 442. 

[50] Ibid., 482.

[51] Mark Bassin, “Expansion and Colonialism on the Eastern Frontier:  Views of Siberia and the Far East in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Journal of Historical Geography 14, no. 1[Great Britain] (1988): 3-21

[52] Burton, Bukharans, 513. Burton was not aware of any extant edicts declaring a monopoly between the years 1649-1657.

[53] RGADA, f. 214, op. 3, stb. 414, ll. 1–5. Burton distinguished forbidden (zapovednyi) and restricted (ukaznyi) categories for wares.  The first denoted total prohibition from trading and even possessing; the second meant that merchants could bring rhubarb to market, but only sell it to the tsar’s agents, precisely known as a monopsony.  The Oxford English Dictionary Online (http://dictionary.oed.com/) provides the following definitions.  Monopsony, n.- A state of the market in which there is effectively a single buyer or consumer for a particular product, who is therefore in a position to influence its price; a consumer in this position. Monopoly, n.- The exclusive possession or control of the trade in a commodity, product, or service; the condition of having no competitor in one's trade or business.

[54] RGADA, f. 301, kn. 301, ll. 2, 24.

[55] Ibid., f. 214, stb. 462, l. 35.  NB-This document revises chronology of other historians who wrote that the monopoly was established in 1657.  There is some confusion in the scholarship.  See Historians say rhubarb was declared a monopoly in 1657. Foust recognized that the state had declared for itself the right of first refusal in the rhubarb market from 1652.  See Foust, Rhubarb, 47; George V. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century:  A Study of the Colonial Administration  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 147; N.N. Ogloblin, Obozrenie stolbtsov i knig Sibirskago Prikaza,1592-1768, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1895-1901), 1:202, 370; 2:37, 54, 59, 103; 3:17, 81, 82; 4:60, 76, 161. Burton, Bukharans, 482–3, understands the monopoly to have begun in 1653, relying on the historian Kurts. On p. 516 she suggests the monopoly began in 1657. Vilkov thought that the monopoly began in 1656. Vilkov, Remeslo i torgovlia, 213.

[56] PSZ 1, no. 215, 412–3. Burton, Bukharans, 482-3, 515.  Despite these harsh threats, I have yet to encounter any evidence of anyone being executed, beaten or exiled for smuggling rhubarb.  Indeed, PSZ 1, no. 215 contains a mitigating provision to be fair to those who might arrive at a customs post with rhubarb unaware of the new statute.

[57] Former Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leningrad Division, f. 187, op. 1, d. 126, l. 1, hereafter referred to as LOII-SPB.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ziiaev, Ekonomicheskie sviazi srednei Azii s Sibir’iu, 69.

[60] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 414, l. 27.

[61] Ibid., l. 58.

[62] Ziiaev, Ekonomicheskie sviazi srednei Azii s Sibir’iu, 69.

[63] Vilkov, Remeslo i torgovlia, 213.

[64] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 462, l. 133.

[65] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 462, ll. 34–6, 133.

[66] Ibid., ll. 136, 146–8.

[67] Ibid., l. 147.

[68] PSZ 1, no. 215, 412–3. A The Astrakhan exception was toughened in 1661. Burton, Bukharans, 483.  That Russia allowed foreigners to leave Russia with their rhubarb suggests that at the middle of the century they did not see the potential re-routing to Europe as a serious threat.  Given the relative impecuniousness of Russians and the lack of information about rhubarb use domestically, it is unlikely that the state’s policy was focused on domestic market sales. 

[69] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 499, ll. 210–17.

[70] Tamozhennye knigi Sibirskikh gorodov, 4 vols., ed. D.Ia. Rezun (Novosibirsk:  Ripel Plius, 1997-2001), 1:103.

[71] Foust, Rhubarb, 61; Burton, Bukarans, 442, 483.

[72] LOII-SPB, f. 28 op. 1 d. 667, l. 1.  Sava Turkskoi [sic] had delivered paper and office supplies to Tobol’sk in December 1655.  See RGADA, f. 214, stb. 499, l. 350.

[73] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 499, l. 178. Since no Moscow customs books before 1696 survive the hypothesis cannot be verified.

[74] Ibid., l. 177.

[75] RGADA, f. 1111, op. 1, d. 22, ll. 42, 43.

[76] Ibid., l. 48; d. 297, pt. 1, ll. 18, 26. 

[77] RGADA, f. 1111, op. 1, d. 22, l. 44.

[78] Ibid., l. 49.

[79] Ibid., ll. 53–4.

[80] Ibid., ll. 56–7.

[81] LOII-SPB, f. 28, op. 1, d. 558, l. 1.

[82] Ogloblin, Obozrenie 1:202.

[83] LOII-SPB, f. 28, op. 1, d. 556, ll. 9–11.

[84] G.F. Miller, Istoriia Sibiri, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1999–2005), vol. 3, no. 150, 372.

[85] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 414, l. 8.

[86] LOII-SPB, f. 28, op. 1, d. 555, ll. 5–6.

[87] 1 grivenka = 0.13 pud.

[88] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 462, l. 276.

[89] LOII-SPB, f. 28, op. 1, d. 555, l. 11.

[90] LOII-SPB, f. 28, op. 1, d. 562, l. 1

[91] Ibid., 1. 1v.

[92] Ibid., d. 556, ll. 12–13. The order said nothing explicit regarding kopytchatyi rhubarb, but perhaps it meant that the kopytchatyi sort, if found, was to be harvested, but that no resources devoted to its reconnaissance.

[93] Ibid., l. 4.

[94] Burton, Bukharans, 516.

[95] Ibid. 

[96] Ibid., 525.

[97] Trusevich, Posol’skie i torgovlie snosheniia Rossii s Kitaem, 108.

[98] Foust, Rhubarb, 215.

[99] One German diplomat in Russia from 1715–1719 reported that rhubarb was a Russian product that was dug up in Siberia “in great quantity.”  His expertise was dubious, but the comment is curious.  Foust, Rhubarb, 50.

[100] State Archive of Tiumen' Oblast, f. 29, d. 139, ll. 1–23v., hereafter cited as GATO. 

[101] Kurts, Sochinenie Kil’burgera, 106; Burton, Bukharans, 490, 516.

[102] LOII-SPB, f. 187, op. 1, d. 184, l. 3v.

[103] Ibid., ll. 1, 2, 3, 4v.

[104] RGADA, f. 214, stb. 414, ll. 62, 102.

[105] Ogloblin, Obozrenie 1:202.

[106] State Archive of Tiumen’ Oblast’-Tobol’sk filial, f. 156, op. 1, d. 1267, ll. 1–12; RGADA, f. 214, stb. 935, l. 3

[107] AI 5:91; Burton, Bukharans, 518.

[108] R.I. Kozintseva, “Uchastie kazny vo vneshnei torgovle Rossii,” Istoricheskie zapiski 91 (1973), 320.

[109] Foust, Rhubarb, 49.

[110] N.B. Golikova, Privilegirovannye kupecheskie korporatsii Rossii XVI-pervoi chetverti XVIII v., vol. 1 (Moscow:  Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1998), 166, 372. Ivan Ivanovich Isaev was the son of what was probably the last proper cohort of gosti.  His father’s path had been extraordinary.  Originally from Dubrov, Ivan Isaev, Sr., was taken prisoner at the outset of the Russo-Polish War in 1655.  He was taken to Moscow and worked as a slave in the household of the Russian military leader M.V. Zhidovinov.  After 16 years in servitude, he was released and became a taxpayer in the Meshchanskii borough of Moscow.  In 1678 he was taken into the Merchant Hundred corporation, along with his sons, Ivan, Semen, and Il’ia.  He held the tenure of gost’ from 1693–1710.  Note that, similar to many other seventeenth-century gosti, Ivan Isaev, Sr., had a very long career.

[111] Foust, Rhubarb, 50.

[112] Burton, Bukharans, 524.

[113] Foust, Rhubarb, 54.

[114] Ibid., 65.

[115] GATO, f. 29, op. 1, dd. 134, 139.

[116] Foust, Rhubarb, 57.

[117] Ibid., 58.

[118] Maria Solomon Arel, “The Arkhangel’sk Trade, Empty State Coffers, and the Drive to Modernize:  State Monopolization of Russian Export Commodities Under Mikhail Fedorovich,” in Modernizing Muscovy:  Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia, Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe, ed. (New York:  RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 181.

[119] Arel, “Arkhangel’sk Trade, Empty State Coffers, and the Drive to Modernize,” 182.

[120] In some ways, this brief episode is analogous to the Soviet situation in the 1970s.  While rhubarb profits never came close to those of oil as a proportion of the budget, one dynamic is similar:  certain factions recognized the theoretical needs for reform, but the large incoming profits muted any urgency for change.

[121] Foust, Rhubarb, 56.

[122] Ibid., 59-61.

[123] Ibid., 200.

[124] See for example:  Richard Adams Carey, The Philosopher’s Fish:  Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire (New York:  Counterpoint, 2005); Inga Saffron, Caviar:  The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy (New York:  Broadway Books, 2002); Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things:  How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (New York : Knopf, 1992).

[125] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis:  Chicago and the Great West, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

[126] Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange:  Biological Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); idem, Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[127] Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire:  Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2004); eadem, Colonial Botany:  Science, Commerce, and Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).