There are many things, processes, habits, and traditions in our contemporary life that extend their roots deep into the far past. Moreover, it is often known with certainty that they emerged long ago, but it is difficult to find out the exact time of their origin due to the absence of authentic and above all documentary information. The same also applies to professions or certain human occupations. Yes, we know quite a few professions that lay the right claim to being the oldest, but it is difficult to identify their true age.
Wholly to the contrary is the destiny of one such a miscreant both now and in olden times human occupation as tobacco smuggler. In this case it is possible to find if not the exact birth date of the first Ukrainian tobacco smuggler then at least the year of his birth, 1758. What allows us to identify the exact origin time of this particular malefaction and reconstruct its primordial Ukrainian image is the report of Moscow merchant Pёtr Kablukov to the Kyiv governor’s chancellery, the official correspondence of the latter with the Kyiv magistrate, and records of the interrogations of the then Kyiv smugglers at the instigation of the same Kablukov. What kind of a person was that merchant from Moscow, who suddenly stood a chance to eternalize his name in such a risky business?
Pёtr Kablukov was then a representative of Russian Senator Count Pёtr Shuvalov to whom the State Senate entrusted by an ukase dated May 16, 1757 all export operations with Ukrainian tobacco for twenty years. Indeed, in the mid-eighteenth century, tobacco was exported from, not imported to, Ukraine by Kyiv Podil merchants Maksym Voloshenenko, Hryhory Veresenko, Semen Kozeletsky, Yosyp Petrenko, Zakhary Ruban, Ivan Pohorily, Ustym Bushychenko, and other local residents and Cossacks who, by “selling leaf Cherkasy tobacco overseas and abroad,” reaped a handsome profit. They did so until the Russian nobleman decided to pocket the money earned by exporting this aromatic Ukrainian commodity.
In September 1758 the Kyiv magistrate in obedience with the Senate’s order acquainted all the Podil tobacco dealers with the previous year’s Senate ukase, also forcing the traders to take a written commitment not to transport tobacco outside Ukraine without a special permission from Commissar Kablukov, i.e., after paying a certain excise duty to Count Shuvalov. This is this time, September 1759, that can be considered the birth date of tobacco smuggling in Ukraine. For the merchants did take a written commitment but never turned to the nicotine commissar for permission.
Did the year 1758 yield a poor tobacco crop in Ukraine? Nothing of the kind! Kablukov’s informers told him, and he reported to the regional chancellery that “the deliveries of tobacco from various Little Russian places have gone up quite significantly in comparison with previous years, and there has never been so much tobacco as now.” At the same time, neither the tobacco office nor the Vasylkiv and Mezhyhirya customs houses recorded any “certified passage of this tobacco from Kyiv abroad.” A not terribly difficult mathematical problem (something of the kind elementary school children solve, when water flows into one pipe and out the other) worried the chief of Kyiv’s tobacco office for quite some time. Apparently, watching the Kyivans did not convince the commissar that they consume too much tobacco. He left no stone unturned, trying to find an answer to how this tobacco was being taken out of Kyiv. In fact, Kablukov sent mountains of reports and inquiries to the gubernatorial chancellery and the magistrate, demanding information about all the local tobacco dealers, buying and selling prices, and the amount of tobacco sold annually in the city.
The information prepared by the magistrate listed only seven Podil residents who brought leafed tobacco into the city, sold it at will in their shops, or, after crushing the leaves, sold the powdered tobacco in small wholesale batches to tobacco women, the precursors of today’s little old ladies selling cigarettes near subway stations. Not impressive at all was also the quantity of raw tobacco stored by those merchants. In addition, the letter noted that none of the listed merchants “issued tobacco for foreign sale.”
As was to be expected, the experienced Moscow monger could not be fooled by any such primitive trick. Scrapping the last vestiges of trust in the local government body of Kyiv, Kablukov would henceforth appeal only to the Kyiv gubernatorial chancellery filled primarily by Russian bureaucrats: he found it far easier to deal with them, having the support of Count Shuvalov, one of the most influential Russian senators of the time. The commissary managed very quickly to convince the governor that in reality the Podil merchants hid much more tobacco than the magistrate thought and the reason they did so was their intent to secretly export it. Soon a wave of searches swept over the households of local merchants. However, the “dangerous” commodity was, as a rule, hidden in the countryside, so Kablukov’s action brought him no dividends. Following this, the commissar had to change his tack. Having talked the governor into detailing “a sizable military unit” and having hired paid agents, Kablukov at last managed to track down the Kyiv smugglers.
In June 1759, the commissary spotted Kyiv resident Oleksiy Bushychenko who, together with over twenty accomplices, had secretly brought leaf tobacco from the Left Bank to the city on 16 ox- drawn quadrupled carts. The dangerous load was sent for storage to one peasant, Hryhory Pylypenko, living in the village of Troyeshchyna. On the night of June 13 he “made a raft out of three oaks, put tobacco on it, paddled upriver, hid himself in it all day long, and then came back down to the River Starukha, where he is still hiding.” Kablukov was informed by his paid agents that Bushychenko was going to secretly forward his load to the “Polish town” of Rzesz Ч w “to sell it under contract” to a local Jewish merchant. Fully aware of his opponents’ intentions, Kablukov masterminded an operation resulting in him seizing this contraband. Yet, only six out of twenty Bushychenko’s accomplices were arrested. The rest and the ringleader of this illegal affair managed to slip through the commissar’s fingers.
Soon after, Kablukov succeeded in arresting Ustym Bushychenko, Oleksiy’s uncle, who tried to transship tobacco oaks disguised as cured fish to the “Polish town” of Chornobyl via the Mezhyhirya customs house. As the commissary established effective surveillance over the Kyiv area flows of commodities, this made it possible to arrest a number of other Kyiv smugglers, including the Oleksiy Bushychenko, in the early autumn of 1759.
Interrogations at the governor’s chancellery showed that the city had a type of association, a guild of what might be called smooth operators who for a certain fee organized the shipment of tobacco from Kyiv to the Dnipro’s then Polish bank. The Kyiv merchants, unwilling to enrich Count Shuvalov by their labor, brought tobacco from southern Left Bank to the city, from where the deft and daring operators would forward the goods to the Polish Kingdom into the hands of Polish or Jewish merchants. The organizers of these operations, who had clandestine shelters ready in nearby villages and a number of paid helpers, were also very good Dnipro riverboat pilots. As a rule, they inhabited Podil or Priorka. A certain Hapon, an inhabitant of Kurynivka, who specialized in shipping tobacco by land, especially troubled the Russian functionaries. There were also cases of smuggling by so-called foreign residents, for examples, those of Makariv. The latter, having brought 60,000 leafed tobacco bundles from Lokhvytsia to Kyiv, made a deal with Priorka resident Vasyl Vysotsky that he would forward the precious cargo via the Mezhyhirya customs office. The caravan Vasyl had organized at first took a third of the whole lot. But they were intercepted by a Russian mounted patrol at the approach to the customs house. Vysotsky and most of his helpers managed to flee, but all the contraband was seized by Kablukov. Having learned of the loss, the tobacco owners decided to take no more chances and reject the services of these supposed experts. Paying a required fee to the commissary, they legally carried their cargoes to the Right Bank.
But far from all Ukrainian merchants obeyed the law so much as to agree to give a part of their profits to Kablukov, who came God knows where from, and his periwigged master. What also promoted this dangerous smuggler’s blues was the fact that the Kyiv magistrate, a fully empowered body of local government, in fact stayed out of the campaign to combat tobacco smuggling. The brazen intrusion of the Russian authorities on the prerogatives of local government could not but raise the indignation of the fathers of this self-governed city. As the Kyiv gubernatorial chancellery kept calling on the magistrate to take part in the search for and arrest of such knaves as Hapon, Bushychenko, Vysotsky, and other operators, the magistrate keeps itself above all this mundane vanity with Olympian calm.
