Russia had little gold or silver, so it paid its way in soft gold
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Russia wanted Western European goods but had no gold or silver mines to pay for them. What it did have was fur. Sable and marten pelts became known as soft gold, the country's biggest source of wealth, and the hunt for them pulled Russian settlers all the way across Siberia.
Western Europe had hunted its own forests bare, so fur was scarce and costly there. Russian pelts bought lead, tin, textiles, firearms and sulphur from Europe, while trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East brought silk, spices and dried fruit. The state took its cut two ways: a tax of one pelt in ten on every catch and sale, and the yasak, a fixed tribute of sable skins demanded from Siberia's native peoples. The trade was old even then. As early as the tenth century, merchants of Novgorod were collecting fur tribute in the northern forests, and the city became the easternmost trading post of the Hanseatic League.
High prices set off a fur fever. Independent trappers, called promyshlenniki, worked in bands of 10 to 15 men, either sharing costs and pooling their pelts equally or hired by trading companies that kept two-thirds of the catch. Each man set at least ten traps and checked them daily through a season that began with the first snow. Expeditions often lasted two or three years, and since the journey home was hard and expensive, many simply stayed and settled.
The pull of fur redrew maps. By 1620 Russia controlled a vast area from the Urals to the Yenisey, and the search for sea otter pelts, first prized in China, eventually carried the empire across the Pacific into Alaska. From the seventeenth century until the later nineteenth, Russia was the world's leading fur supplier, and the sable still appears as a regional emblem in several Siberian provinces.
The system bred abuse. Unpaid governors often enriched themselves by extorting tribute several times over, and officials took hostages from native communities to enforce payment. North America followed a parallel path, as European sailors off Newfoundland began swapping knives for beaver pelts in the sixteenth century.
Source: Fur trade
