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Russian Industry and the Making of a Russian Industrial Bourgeoisie

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The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–17

Part of the book series: St Antony’s/Macmillan Series

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Abstract

For much of the nineteenth century, Russian industrial development was shaped by the experience of serfdom and then, after Emancipation, by the persistence of feudal relations between landlords and peasants. The state, by allowing the nobility to mortgage serfs for non-productive as well as productive expenditure, by generously compensating it for the loss of serf ownership and by embarking on the construction of railways designed to expedite the grain trade, limited access to capital by industrial entrepreneurs. At the same time, the reinforcement of communal ties through collective responsibility for redemption payments favoured a cottage industry as opposed to a wage labour force. The existence of numerous state-owned enterprises including the State Bank, legal restrictions against national and religious minorities, and the perpetuation of the guild system defining the rights and obligations of the merchant estate, the kupechestvo, reinforced these limitations on private entrepreneurial activity and the development of a well-defined or even self-defined bourgeoisie in Russia.

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Notes

  1. There has been little work on this important question which, in view of the often cited conflict between the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the Ministry of Finance, is surprising. For two penetrating studies of the MVD see Daniel T. Orlovsky, ‘High Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1855–1881’, and Don Karl Rowney, ’Organizational Change and Social Adaptation: the Pre-Revolutionary Ministry of Internal Affairs’, in Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century eds Walter M. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980) pp. 250–82, 283–315. Rowney claims that ’the relatively privileged legal-social category of “noble” managed to retain a position of dominance in the central higher civil service as a whole ’ but admits that ’the simple denomination of “noble” concealed a great amount of variation…’ (pp. 302–3). Significantly, the War Ministry encompassed both modes thereby perpetuating intra-ministerial struggles.

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  3. One is reminded of that contrast which Antonio Gramsci drew between the West where ‘there was a proper relation between State and civil society’, and Russia where ‘the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous’ (A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (London, 1971) p. 238).

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  1. La Trobe University, Australia

    Dr Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Senior Lecturer in History)

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© 1983 Lewis H. Siegelbaum

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Siegelbaum, L.H. (1983). Russian Industry and the Making of a Russian Industrial Bourgeoisie. In: The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–17. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17316-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17316-7_1

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