There is little question that the fur trade was a highly visible and significant component of Russian foreign trade. It was an important means for the Russians to obtain silver, luxury goods, fine woolen cloth, salt and other items from their trading partners. Fur also had diplomatic value, as gifts sent through emissaries by the Russian princes to foreign rulers colored and cemented relations with foreign powers. Control over the trade, furthermore, was repeatedly found to be a factor in political contests among the principalities of the Rus' and the mid-Volga lands. Although observation generally verifies these statements, it has been very difficult to measure the volume and value of the fur trade, and thereby determine just how significant, commercially and politically, the fur trade was.

References to the volume of fur traded in the pre-Mongol and early Mongol periods are non-existent, and even statements of the price of fur are rare and not necessarily reliable. More data are available from material on the Novgorod trade in the late and post-Mongol periods. These data relate to exported fur; consequently previous attempts to estimate the volume and value of the trade have been constructed on export data. Yet, there are a variety of problems with this approach. The data are incomplete. Although prices for some types of fur in European markets are available, it is not known how much of it was Novgorodian nor how much was traded in any given year.