Russia

Russia more quickly understood the advantages of gaining Western technology for economic, political, and military purposes. In many respects, Russia was in the best position of any other non-Western power in the 19th century. Russia had already obtained and mimicked Western shipbuilding and metallurgy technology since the reign of Peter the Great in the 17th century. By the early 19th century, Russia had been incorporated into the continent’s diplomatic scene, particularly after its efforts in the last phase of the Napoleonic Wars and the peace settlement at Vienna. Afterwards, Russians were not uncommon sights in Western capitals and the cultural ties between Russia and the rest of Europe became more solidified, although the long-standing suspicion of Russia’s strategic ambitions remained foremost in the minds of many Europeans.

Russia had some exposure to industrialization in the first half of the 19th century. Western agents assisted in the construction of steamboats and then railroads. The first steamboat appeared on the Volga River in 1815, and regular passenger and commercial service began five years later. The first railroad connecting St. Petersburg and its suburbs appeared in 1837, and in 1851 a line opened between St. Petersburg and Moscow. American engineers who gained the sponsorship of the Russian government gave the main impetus to the effort. George Whistler, father of the famous American painter James Whistler, was the key person in the railroad ventures. Although he noted the eagerness of the Russian workers he trained, Whistler was also disturbed by their slovenly behavior. Great Britain exported textile machinery to Russia in 1843, and a German in Manchester shipped materials to Russia and even encouraged a number of British workers to take employment in Russian textile mills. Russian entrepreneurs began a frantic importation of British machinery. The number of imported machines rose 30 times in the period from 1825 to 1860. Furthermore, these machines provided models for native machine manufacturing and by 1860 Russia manufactured more machines than it imported. The number of factories engaged in machine building jumped more than fourfold from nineteen in 1851 to ninety-nine less than a decade later. The majority of the revenues for these endeavors came from the Tsar’s taxation of his people to obtain money to lure entrepreneurs from Great Britain and the German states to Russia for their expertise.4

Despite these initial efforts, Russia did not industrialize prior to 1860 and remained first and foremost an agricultural nation. The ancient ties of serfs to the land prevented any significant move of peasants from rural to urban areas. Western powers also took great advantage of the Russians. As more Western investors poured into Russia, they secured the export of important products such as timber, hemp, grain, etc. for European markets, a fact that kept many peasants tied to the farm to whet this voracious appetite. Also, few Russian cities had developed even a primitive manufacturing tradition, making the transition that much more difficult. The artisan class was small and did not increase substantially even when Russian urban areas experienced some modest growth beginning in the 1860s. For decades Russia had to encourage the immigration of foreign artisans, particularly from Great Britain and Germany. To be sure, Russian exports rose dramatically for the first six decades of the 19th century, but that increase is misleading and resembled more the cases of India, the Middle East, and Latin America because they were primarily based on raw materials and resources aimed for Western use.

Russia renewed its efforts to industrialize in the 1860s. The disastrous results of the Crimean War (1854-1856) forced the Russian leadership to concede that it lagged behind the West in technological affairs. That conflict proved first-hand to Russia that the industrializing states of Great Britain and France had far surpassed it in the capability of rapidly transporting large numbers of men and high quality war material to the front lines with steamship power. Russia, on the other hand, possessed few railroads and had only several thousand miles of usable roads. Russia moved quickly in the 1860s. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 led to a host of other reforms, such as the creation of a state bank to centralize finances and credit and the enactment of new commercial laws to facilitate the growth of business. Railroad construction also proceeded at a healthy pace from 700 miles in 1860 to 21,000 miles in 1894 to 36,000 miles in 1900. By the 1870s, French, Belgian, German, and American firms and subsidiaries had established healthy operations in Russia. In addition, by that decade a large number of foreign engineers had arrived in Russia to direct the efforts of Russian workers. A number of nagging issues had to be addressed such as worker resentment of foreign managers, property disputes, and at times inadequate equipment. In spite of these difficulties, slow but steady progress was made.

After a period of retrenchment brought about by conservative tsarist regimes in the 1880s, a new industrial push occurred in the 1890s. The leading figure in this surge was Sergei Witte, the Russian Minister of Finance, who had the formidable task of instituting policy changes to strengthen the Russian state in the face of an evolving strategic challenges arising in Europe. Witte had earlier experience in the buildup of the Russian railroad network and stressed a further extension of the system, a program that doubled mileage in the decade from 1895 to 1905 and resulted in the important trans-Siberian railroad that connected the heartland of Russia to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean and made more readily available vast resources of coal and iron to support development of heavy industry. Witte also attempted to strengthen the Russian currency and monetary system by accumulating a substantial gold reserve.

These trends encouraged the growth of foreign capital in Russia, which in the 1890s represented roughly 20% of the investment in Russian industry. By World War I that amount had doubled. The number of industrial companies also had a healthy increase in the period from the emancipation of the serfs to the end of the century. Before 1860 only eighty companies existed in Russia. By 1873 the number had jumped to more than 3,500. In the 1890s, the number increased by more than 200%. The discovery of huge deposits of oil in the Caucuses in 1870 made Russia the world’s second leading producer by 1900. Other areas had similar growth: coal, 131%; pig iron, 190%; manufactured iron, 116%; and cotton manufactures, 76%. Overall industrial growth posted healthy gains from 6% in the 1880s to 8% in the 1890s, although after 1900 the growth slowed. Russia’s growth rate when compared to Western nations from 1860 to 1913 also attests to its potential and ability to compete. During that period Russia’s growth rate was roughly equal to the United States, twice that of Germany, three times that of France, and four times that of Great Britain, although it should be noted that Russia started from a lower position of comparison.5

Nonetheless, by the early 20th century, despite retaining a heavy reliance on an agrarian economy and the existence of a very conservative political regime opposed to significant change, Russia had climbed its way to the position as the fourth largest industrial nation in most identifiable categories. Success, at least on the surface, had been achieved. However, this rapid change and the momentum for further development clashed with other opposing forces at this propitious moment. Most Russian workers toiled in huge industrial enterprises. In 1900 about one-third of the Russian factory labor force worked in factories with a minimum of 500 persons, a figure more than two times that of Germany, and an additional one-quarter of Russian workers toiled in factories that employed 1,000 or more persons. The conditions facing these workers resembled those that Great Britain’s industrial laborers had experienced a half century earlier. Women and child labor was widespread and abuse was commonplace. Workers at times toiled fourteen hours day for low wages and faced fines or reduced pay for tardiness, low quality work, or resistance to authority. Many men left their families in the rural areas and moved to factory towns seeking work. This family separation created additional tensions and often resulted in a decline in morality, heavy drinking, and frequent job changes. Living conditions were often extremely depressing as exhibited by the makeshift construction of housing, overcrowding, poor or almost nonexistent sanitation, and the exorbitant prices in the factory owner stores. Other negative factors were also at work. Some foreign workers recruited for Russian factories had negotiated special privileges related to pay and other benefits, thus drawing additional resentment from Russian workers. The few feeble efforts to enact factory reform lacked adequate enforcement provisions.6

Worker’s efforts to organize and appeal for improvement began as early as the 1870s. The Russian workers movement had a distinctly different complexion than that of Western nations. The peasants who had labored under such strict conditions for so long carried their frustrations to the factory environment. Socialist ideas arrived in Russia at the same moment they circulated amongst intellectuals and worker organizers in Western Europe. The significant difference was that by the late 19th century, government action and political and social reform had begun to incorporate the workers into the overall fabric of Western society. Russian workers, on the other hand, faced the prospects of the conservative government’s policy of inaction in the area of reform and a prohibition of worker organizations and strikes. In addition, aristocratic and urban elites frequently looked upon the working classes with disdain, adding to their discontent and fueling more reasons for friction and some protest actions in the 1870s and 1880s. It was in the environment of the factory cities that Lenin and other Marxists found welcome support for their ideology in Russia and formed the Socialist Workers Party in 1898. As the 20th century dawned, economic hard times and a devastating loss in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 led to the great strike in 1905. The ensuing political revolution that year merely patched together a false sense of normalcy that would be disrupted in a dramatic fashion by World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Thereafter, the early promise of industrialization and modernization in Russia charted a divergent course from that of the West.