ABSTRACT
For centuries the wealth of Russia has lain in her agricultural produce. She has been in this period a poor country because the good rainfall comes on poor soils, while the good soils have an unreliable rainfall: so Russia is traditionally a famine country, and the workers on the land have been both materially and politically weak. This gave a particular form to her feudalism, capitalism and early socialism, and accounts for many historical peculiarities, as compared with the development of central and western Europe. For example, when the salt monopolist Stroganov sent an annexing Cossack force into Siberia in the sixteenth century, he wanted not wool or wheat, but furs, in other words to extend a luxury trade at home on the basis of hunting, not farming, in the new area. This organizational combination of luxury and lack of production is familiar in Russian history.
