Paints, paper, and the “scissors” of prices: On economic backwardness of eighteenth-century Russia

The author of this article systematizes archival data on the prices of paper and paints in Russia between the 1710s and 1780s and consider the development of their production in the country. We use more than 160 archival sources, which allows to construct time series. The resulting numbers make the author doubt the “price revolution” in eighteenth-century Russia. The price jump was observed in the agricultural market, the prices of the considered industrial goods remained stable. Thus we can talk about the “scissors” of prices, the socioeconomic consequences of which are studied in the article. The author aims to explain the reasons for the success of replacing foreign products with domestically produced goods in Petrine Russia, as well as the reasons for the technological lag at the end of the century