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In 1068, Prince Gleb of Tmutarakan had the frozen Kerch Strait measured on the ice and carved the result into a marble slab: 14,000 sazhens. The Tmutarakan stone — still disputed, still famous — is the oldest surviving Russian measurement record, and it already shows the system mature: the sazhen (fathom), the vershok (fingertip), the pyad (span) were working units of a trading state.
For six centuries the units lived the usual body-based life: local, approximate, good enough. The arshin — from the Persian arsh, elbow — was the cloth-merchant’s unit, and merchants being merchants, they hired short-armed clerks to measure it out. Peter the Great ended the game around 1700: the arshin was fixed at exactly 28 English inches (71.12 cm), and iron-bound, state-stamped wooden rulers were distributed to every market in Russia. Measure fraud became a crime against the standard, not a negotiation.
The system’s last chapter belongs to an unlikely metrologist: Dmitri Mendeleev, of the periodic table, who as head of Russia’s weights-and-measures office oversaw the 1899 conversion to the metric system (completed under the Soviets in the 1920s). The old units were abolished — and promptly survived anyway: in proverbs (“measure seven times, cut once” was originally about the arshin’s cousins), in the pud kettlebell every Russian strongman still lifts, and in the striped verst posts that gave Russian its word for a barber’s pole.
Convert the old units in the Russian length converter, weight converter, and volume converter.