Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [343]
Dear Savva: how close they had grown in the last four years. She was rather lonely sometimes. Alexander had become sick and this had made him rather uncommunicative. Sergei was employed in the Foreign Ministry nowadays, which kept him busy in St Petersburg and Moscow. Olga had recently married a handsome young guards officer with an estate near Smolensk, so she was absent. And Alexis, now married, had been posted down to the Black Sea, at the great port of Odessa. The previous month he had had a son, whom he had named Mikhail. But it might be years before Tatiana saw her first grandchild. So there’s only Ilya and me, really, she thought sadly. And though Ilya was at home, his large, placid head was usually in a book; one couldn’t talk to him about anything practical.
But Savva and his father were practical: that was what she liked about them. They ran two little factories in Russka now, each employing a dozen people. One wove woollen cloth, the other linen. And the two men were so well organized that they still had time to spare. Indeed, the previous year she had persuaded her husband to let Savva’s father go down to supervise the Riazan estate – with the result that its revenues immediately rose sharply. She often went into Russka to watch the Suvorins’ activities and talk to Savva about his business.
And it was these talks that had first led to a great realization, and her present secret plan.
For – though one would never have guessed it in the country houses of the gentry – Russia was slowly changing; and the change was taking place in the very region in which she lived.
There had always been several sources of wealth in Russia. The salt beds and the furs in the huge northern wilderness, which had once made the merchants of ancient Novgorod rich; the wonderful black earth, the chernozem, of the warm Ukraine; and since the time of Ivan the Terrible there had gradually been added the minerals of the Ural Mountains, far to the east, and some very modest trade from the huge, barely colonized wastes of Siberia that lay beyond.
Yet it was here, in the old Russian heartland around Moscow, where the weather was terrible and the land was poor, that the greatest strides were now being made. For here was the home of Russian manufacturing. Leather goods, metalwork, icon painting, cloth, linen, the printing of silks imported from the east, and most recently, cotton manufacture: these were light industries that could be set up in town or village. Then there were the old ironworks at Tula and the huge armaments factories of Moscow. The greatest market for iron, as well as many other commodities, lay only a few days to the east, where the Volga and the Oka met at the ancient frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod. In Catherine’s reign, an enterprising merchant family had even set up a glass factory in a village not twenty miles away from Russka. And above all, the provincial capital city of Vladimir, with a new industrial town called Ivanovo to the north of it, was becoming a huge new centre of the textile business.
By the standards of western Europe this new industrial and commercial activity was unimpressive. Under five per cent of Russians lived in towns, against twenty per cent in France and over thirty in England. But it was a beginning.
And to Tatiana, the more she understood it, the more exciting it became. Often Savva would remark to her: ‘Ah, Tatiana Ivanovna, what I could do if only I had more money to invest!’ She saw what huge opportunities there were and, having nothing else to occupy her active nature, brooded about them constantly.
‘If our serfs can set up little factories,’ she would challenge her husband, ‘we could set up big ones.’
It was a perfectly reasonable statement. Though