ABSTRACT
In 1756, towards the end of his career, the German academic Gerhard Friedrich Müller wrote an account of Siberian trade. In it, he noted that the Russian government restricted the trade of both tobacco and rhubarb, two coveted Eastern products that made their way from China through Siberia to Russia.2 While Russians would drink to each other’s health with chunks of dried rhubarb in the bottom of a glass of vodka (the rhubarb added for salubrious measure), tobacco, the fruits of the daughter of Jezebel’s grave, occupied a sinister role in the folk imagination.3 In other words, one was a virtue, one was a vice, even though, for Müller, they both belonged in the same category of things that came from China. This chapter injects a comparative perspective into this multi-faceted examination of tobacco’s place in Russian history and culture by examining the history of how two important plants-tobacco and rhubarb-were regulated by the Muscovite state and how those regulations were enforced in Siberia in the seventeenth century. A focused look at the history of tobacco alongside the history of other controlled substances in early modern Russia lays bare the pragmatic, mercantilist economic strategies that informed and anchored Muscovite tobacco policy, while also highlighting the particularly charged cultural baggage that tobacco carried with it. Cultural anxieties about tobacco confl icted with the state’s mercantilist aims and made for inconsistent state decrees and administrative practices. Illustrative of the pragmatism that guided so much of Muscovite politics and policies, Russia tinkered with its policies on both tobacco and rhubarb throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the state did not waiver in its commitment to enriching the treasury through the trade of these plants, it did alternate its tactics, sometimes selling tax-farms to Russians and/or foreigners, and sometimes taking direct control of the tobacco and rhubarb markets with its own administrators managing sale, distribution, and tax collections.
