Wages and Prices in Imperial Russia, 1703-1913

For a long time, neither economists nor historians bothered to ask about wages and prices in Russia. For Soviet social scientists it was enough to affirm the Marxist postulate that, for over a thousand years, from the feudal tenth century to the capitalist twentieth, the workers' standard of living had declined, and then simply to collect a quantity of facts to support this thesis. The renowned Soviet economist S. G. Strumilin, for example, asserted that in 1647 the real wage in the iron and steel industry was 18.4 times that in 1913, and in 1860--2.46 times higher. Western scholars, unfortunately, also showed little interest in wages and prices. As a result, people does not know for certain how the prices, wages, and incomes of Russians changed throughout the Imperial period. Available data are patchy and concerned largely with specific time periods: the first halves of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, and the second half of the nineteenth century up to the start of World War I. For 1700-1850 there is only a collection of unsystematized facts, and indeed the second half of the 1700s remains a blank. Certainly no one has yet constructed wage dynamics in any of the categories of workers for the entire Imperial period. Here, Mironov attempts to construct a general wage-and-price index for St. Petersburg during the first two hundred years of its existence.