Familiar Views

The MVD's Statistical Committee presented the data on inland navigation in multiple formats. This mosaic shows the data on shares of total value and volume of trade packaged in a way that makes great sense from a bureaucratic perspective and little to no sense from a geographical one: here the statisticians broke down the amount of trade flowing along the portions of rivers contained within the administrative boundaries of each province.

So what? The implication of this data is that the quantity of rubles or poods traded along a province's rivers had a unified effect on every square sazhen of the province. While at first glance the graphic representation of this data yields a comfortingly familiar map of European Russia divided into easily recognizable - and manageable - units, this is in many ways an absurd distortion of the relevance of riverine trade across imperial space.