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addition to extremely low purchasing power) by thebackwardness of communications, which remained stillin the mid-nineteenth century largely governed by thewaterways. These had indeed been extended by Peterthe Great's initiation of canal building, linking the upperVolga with St Petersburg, and by the expansion of hiscanal system under Catherine the Great, Paul andAlexander I. The first Russian steamboat had appearedas early as 1815 on the Neva, but there was no successfuldevelopment of steam navigation until the fifties. TheRussian navy by the time of the Crimean War was stillalmost entirely a sailing fleet, and in its few steampropelledships the screw had not, as in the British andFrench fleets, replaced the paddle-wheel.Roads, where they existed, were mere tracks. Eventhe few state routes were little better. Chaussees wereunknown until 1817, and undeveloped before 1840.Railways had only just begun, and Russia fought theCrimean War with only one line of importance, fromSt Petersburg to Moscow, opened in 1851. 1That war revealed at humiliating cost the all-roundweaknesses of the Russia of Nicholas I when pitted aloneagainst the West. Russia must be modernized andfreer scope given to those forces, already operatingwithin her on a small scale, which would transform hereconomically into a nineteenth-century state on theWestern level in material equipment and power. Thisinvolved the emancipation of the serfs (1861) and theother reforms of Alexander II (see pp. 77, 111, 135-139).Between 1861 and 1917 a new Russia was emerging,and in this economic westernization the state played anessential role, above all in four fields—finance and currency,foreign investment in Russia, tariffs, and railways.(1) The financial administration was reorganized, somepublicity provided for the national budget, and the statebank reformed (i860), as the sole note-issuing bank andas the controller of credit. The foundation of privatebanks, previously unknown in Russia, and of new credit1 The first railway was built some years earlier (1838). It ran fromSt Petersburg to the imperial palace of Tsarskoe Selo, a distance ofonly eighteen miles.356