Salt production in the Russian empire. organization, excavation techniques, trade

• Main Author: Krokosz, Paweł
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Polish
• Published: Muzeum Żup Krakowskich Wieliczka 2014
• Subjects: hist; archeo; White Sea; Solovetsky; Kama; Staraya
• Online Access: https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/487349.pdf; https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/487349

The article presents the issues related to the Russian salt excavation and processing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Within these three centuries arose several strong salt production centers scattered in different parts of Russia. In the north, the important role was played by saltworks held by the Solovetsky monastery, supplying all the Pomor Coast (lands extending at the White Sea) with salt and production facilities operating in Sol’vychegodsk. In the region of central Russia, the most important one was located near Staraya Russa near Novgorod, which is one of the oldest centers of salt production in the Ruthenian lands and Sol’ Galitskaya with its shallow brine sources. In the mid-sixteenth century through the Stroganov family evaporated salt production developed in the basin of the Kama River, and the “salt company” created by one of its members—Grigoriy Stroganov – at the beginning of the eighteenth century supplied up to 60% of this product to the internal market. In the 1580s the exploitation of salt lakes near Astrakhan increased and the salt obtained there was used for salting fish delivered to many Russian cities. In the first half of the eighteenth century the tax authorities acceded to obtain salt from the Caspian waters of Lake Alton, which soon—due to the significantly lower production costs—was able to partly drive the salt coming from old salt production centers out of the market. Almost simultaneously with cheap Alton salt a small amount of salt mined in Sol’ilieck (the Orenburg Province) appeared in the sale. The salt delivered to the Russian recipient until the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries was acquired from three main sources: the sea, the salt lakes and underground sources of brine (later rock salt began to be operated on a larger scale). The salt evaporation technique, which developed in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, survived almost unchanged until the end of the nineteenth century. In all Russian salt production centers one type of a ...