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Abstract. The article explores the contemporary explanations of the dramatic inflation in Muscovy in 1660–1662. The accepted explanation in historiography is based on the quantity theory of money that was not known to the 16th century Muscovites as well as far from mainstream in the West. By answering the question of the reason for the price increase, contemporaries expressed their wider economic beliefs. The Moscow merchants thought that the prices had been rising because of supply shortages of bread combined with demand increase, monetization of both taxes and wages, general distrust in the newly introduced copper money as well as silver profiteering. These ideas are compared to the ideas of Juraj Krizanic whose economic thinking followed the greatest Western intellectual authorities in the subject, Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas Oresme. It is concluded that the economic thought of the Russian merchants was, in practical terms, on the same footing as that of Krizanic and his Western sources. This is in contrast to the widely accepted opinion that the Russian economic thought of the time was backward.
Keywords: monetary reform, copper money, inflation, economic thought, quantity theory of money, merchants, Juraj Krizanic.