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and by a few large-scale British-Russian manufacturers;but in the main the cotton and linen industry was in thehands of Russian merchant-manufacturer dynasties,many of them Old Believers, some of them freed serfs,a few of them ennobled merchants.The cotton, and to a lesser extent the flax, industryworked chiefly for the general Russian market and wasnot closely bound to the state. There was some concentrationof certain processes in factories, but the bulkof the weaving in particular was done in villages betweenMoscow and the Volga as a domestic industry, organizedthrough capitalist manufacturers and master middlemen.The cotton and flax industry was also distinguished bythe fact that it drew its hands mainly from a heterogeneousclass of hired labour or from serfs owing money duesbut not labour services to their masters. In contrast,the cloth and heavy industries depended on ascribedserfs, whose productivity was extremely low.On the basis of this serf labour the landed class fromthe middle of the eighteenth century had combinedagriculture with manufacture, based on their own rawmaterials, whether concentrated in workshops or distributedamong their serfs on a ' put-out' system. Therewas keen competition for labour with the state minesand foundries and with the enterprises of the merchantmanufacturers.This led to the landed class underCatherine the Great demanding various privileges prohibitingor limiting the further acquisition of peasants byany undertakings other than their own. They were for atime successful, and they also secured (1765) the valuablemonopoly of distilling.Nevertheless, subsequently between 1815 and i860the share of the landed class in manufacture steadilydiminished. Their serf labour was being found moreand more unsatisfactory. The legislation of Nicholas I(1825-55), however politically reactionary, favoured incertain respects the extension of the merchant-industrialistclass, which together now with some sections of thelandowners favoured emancipation of the serfs (cf. p. 141).By the middle of the century the economic links ofRussia with the West had so multiplied that radical354