ИСТИНА

This paper studies the banking of the Western regions of the Russian Empire, which mostly gravitated around the Baltic Sea, except for the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Western regions included the Baltic, Polish, Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Russian North-Western provinces. The Baltic provinces had a specific and relatively developed banking system in comparison with other parts of the Empire; banks were founded earlier there and earlier forms of collective and municipal banking ownership were preserved there. In the Western regions there was more evident difference between large financial centres and the periphery, which indicates better access to bank credit in small towns, whereas in the rest of Russia access to banking had only been possible in large centres for many years. The Western regions had close ties with the Empire’s leading financial markets in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which can be traced in archival data. Leading Russian banks actively established branches in the Western regions, on trade routes to Europe via railways and seaports. The Western regions had always been the regions of capital inflow, which can be revealed statistically, and this indicates the links with European markets. It was apparently the reason for the fast growth of Polish banking in the 1880s, at the time of a severe banking depression in Central Russia. It is interesting that the watershed between the Western financial markets and the rest of European Russia is visible even on maps, and this visual border remained in place in 1913, a phenomenon which is not fully explicable analytically yet.