8 - Retail markets and consumption

Summary

The preceding chapters have shown that Voshchazhnikovo serfs were integrated into a larger market economy in a number of ways. They bought and sold labour and land and engaged in credit transactions across established socio-legal categories and geographical boundaries. But what about their consumption, and the retail markets for consumer goods? What goods did people in the countryside buy and what levels of material culture characterised the standard of living on this estate?

Discussions of the living standards of Russian peasants in this period have tended to focus mainly on food. Cross-sectional studies of grain and meat consumption are used to estimate the caloric intake of the ‘average peasant’ in various parts of the Russian empire, and those who consumed the most meat and dairy products are assumed to have had the highest standard of living. While better-off peasants may have consumed more meat on average than poorer peasants, this is nonetheless a very crude measure, which obscures important differences in consumption.

For one thing, it is based on the assumption that food was the only thing peasants consumed. According to this view, the Russian countryside was a largely natural economy, in which the little money in circulation was used to pay rents to landlords and purchase food for the household. Since peasants had no contact with wider markets that could have made consumer goods available, they faced tightly constrained decisions about how to allocate their cash resources.