In past centuries, the Russian peasant always combined with his agricultural work the making of everyday objects of wood, metal, and cloth. This craft, originally limited to the needs of the family, became a trade. Little by little, the development of a national market, specialization, and the necessity for the peasants in the less fertile regions to supplement their resources by extra work led to the concentration of handicrafts along the great trade highways. These roads led from Moscow towards the north (where the port of Arkhangel was founded at the mouth of the Duna at the end of the 16th century) via Zagorsk, Rostov, Volog-do, Kholomogory; towards the Urals and Siberia, via either Velikiy Ustjug, or Nijni Novgorod; and towards the south via Rizan.
At the very time that large-scale industry was developing, handicrafts still retained enormous importance. At the end of the 19th century, in the Moscow province, alongside 180,00 factory workers there were some 180,000 craftsmen (called "kustari"); in the province of Kostroma, there were 140,000 kustari against 35,000 factory workers. A large part of current needs was covered by the wood handicrafts (furniture, sledges, telega, boats, barrels, domestic utensils), and metallurgy (knives, forks, locks, fish hooks, pots and pans, samovars), to which could be added the craft working of precious stones (crosses, chaplets, icon frames) and textiles (ropes, fishing nets). These handicrafts were sold throughout Russia and even abroad: the wooden spoons that were a speciality of the villages of the middle Volga were sold as far as Persia. Russia also exported painted icons and musical instruments ("Italian" accordions). Whole villages specialized in a particular craft: those of the Semenov district (province of Nijni Novgorod) made furniture in the Russian style, those of the village of Sergevsk (60 kilometres north of Moscow), children's toys.
The industrial development of the 20th century had absorbed a large number of these activities and caused them to disappear. Art handicrafts still exist—popular in their sources of inspiration and based on century-old models; already by the 18th century they had attained perfection of form. At that time, peasant women began to indulge in the luxury of clothes of white moire embroidered chiefly in red, with patterns that were pecu­liar to each region and even to each locality, in the perfection of wood turnery and wood carving (the fronts and embrasures of the izbas, which formed a veritable lacework in the region of the middle Volga, the ornamental receptacles, and the coloured toys: nests of dolls (matrioshka) carved out of lime). But the craftsman also supplied well-off customers in the city with silver and gold, filigree and inlaid objects, lacquered boxes (Fedoskino, in the neighbourhood of Moscow, is the home of Russian lacquerwork), enamels, and ceramic vases.
During the 19th century, when handicraft work was increasing enormously in volume, its quality declined. At the end of the century, on the initiative of the Government and of some of the patrons of the arts, efforts were made to give it its rightful place again among national artistic productions. In the property of the industrialist Mamontov at Abramcevo (north of Moscow), a meeting-place for writers and painters, workshops for cabinet-making and wood-carving were set up in 1882 and for ceramics later, in 1889, and they utilized designs supplied by established artists. After the agonies of the Revolution the renaissance of popular art was one of the objectives of the Soviet Government. Though delayed by more urgent needs and by the effects of two wars, it is one of the characteristic features of the present artistic movement. Encouraged by the State, helped by the rise in the standard of living and the influx of tourists, it is evident in a diversity of products returning in style and form to the oldest and best traditions, their themes borrowed from story and legend as well as from recent revolutionary events.