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The Industrialisation of Russia, 1700-1914
In this survey of the industrial development of Russia from Peter the great to the outbreak of the first world war, Mr Falkus describes the growth of industry in the wider contexts of agricultural and social circumstances and of the international environment within which industrialisation occurred. Account is taken of recent research both by Russian and non-Russian writers, and also of the differing interpretations of Russian industrial development found in Marxist and non-Marxist studies. An important feature of the survey is the examination of controversial issues in the literature of the subject: for example, the problem of whether there was an 'industrial revolution' in Russia before the Emancipation of the Serfs; the economic significance of the emancipation itself; and whether Russia had achieved a 'take-off' by 1914. Many of the statistical tables derive from Russian sources , and the Bibliography lists relevent works in English, russian and French.
- GenresRussiaHistoryNonfiction
100 pages, Paperback
First published November 9, 1972
About the author
Malcolm E. Falkus
12 booksEconomic Historian, currently Emeritus Professor at the University of New England.
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October 10, 2017Gives a brief run through and is a useful companion to reading on pre-Revolutionary Russia. Falkus starts off with the forced industrialisation carried out under Peter the Great (with a couple of nods to the seventeenth century) and about half of the material concerns the period from the emancipation of serfs in 1861 onwards.
An interesting aspect is that not only was industrialisation a highly politicised activity in Tsarist Russia but also that writing about it and studying it was no less political - as it would remain. In the surveys of industrial activity undertaken by the Tsarist government the emphasis was on large scale enterprises. Domestic workshops in towns and the countryside, which in so far as it can be estimated may have accounted for about a third of industrial output, were ignored. The focus has been on what for political or ideological reasons people wanted to see rather than accepting the reality of the Russian situation. Forexample the Putilov Works (iron and steel, later renamed the Kirov Factory) rather than Palekh (icons), or what the state wanted rather than what the consuming public were interested in.
This debate was repeated in Soviet Russia at the end of the New Economic Policy with one side urging the development of light industry catering towards consumer demand for bicycles, sowing machines and scythes which lost out to the grand ambition of producing tractors and tanks to serve state interests (Alec Nove's An Economic History of the USSR is a through introduction to the later period).
Consequences of this approach both before and after 1917 include a reliance on forced labour, a limit on the development of internal demand and cumulatively "a new dimension of backwardness" (p23) in general. The introduction of internal passports by Peter the Great, something only occasionally done away with by subsequent regimes, also limited the mobility of labour.
While there was industrial development it tended to be concentrated in certain areas, growth tended to be swallowed up in the per capita figures because the population was also growing and export of resources was (and was to remain, and still is) significant. Though, as today, those percentage growth rates had a huge impact upon the imagination of political commentators.
Ideology was also important in the form of emancipation provided to the peasants in 1861. Peasants had to compensate their former owners for the freedom and the traditional commune was not broken up - a political shibboleth for both the political Right and the Left in Russia.
Falkus' book provides a decent overview, an introduction to the historiography, suffers perhaps from the absence of a map and also from the concept of industrialisation as a whole which by skewing the debate to look for evidence of 'take-off' perhaps distracts from thinking more broadly in terms of economic and social development. Even given the most optimistic reading, Russia on the verge of WWI was a long way from being as a whole an industrialised economy and seems to have been some way from having either a large enough consumer base or a transportation network dense enough to support an industrialised economy. The story is largely about the centrality of politics and geo-political ambitions in determining the pattern of industrial development between Peter the Great and the First world war.
An interesting aspect is that not only was industrialisation a highly politicised activity in Tsarist Russia but also that writing about it and studying it was no less political - as it would remain. In the surveys of industrial activity undertaken by the Tsarist government the emphasis was on large scale enterprises. Domestic workshops in towns and the countryside, which in so far as it can be estimated may have accounted for about a third of industrial output, were ignored. The focus has been on what for political or ideological reasons people wanted to see rather than accepting the reality of the Russian situation. Forexample the Putilov Works (iron and steel, later renamed the Kirov Factory) rather than Palekh (icons), or what the state wanted rather than what the consuming public were interested in.
This debate was repeated in Soviet Russia at the end of the New Economic Policy with one side urging the development of light industry catering towards consumer demand for bicycles, sowing machines and scythes which lost out to the grand ambition of producing tractors and tanks to serve state interests (Alec Nove's An Economic History of the USSR is a through introduction to the later period).
Consequences of this approach both before and after 1917 include a reliance on forced labour, a limit on the development of internal demand and cumulatively "a new dimension of backwardness" (p23) in general. The introduction of internal passports by Peter the Great, something only occasionally done away with by subsequent regimes, also limited the mobility of labour.
While there was industrial development it tended to be concentrated in certain areas, growth tended to be swallowed up in the per capita figures because the population was also growing and export of resources was (and was to remain, and still is) significant. Though, as today, those percentage growth rates had a huge impact upon the imagination of political commentators.
Ideology was also important in the form of emancipation provided to the peasants in 1861. Peasants had to compensate their former owners for the freedom and the traditional commune was not broken up - a political shibboleth for both the political Right and the Left in Russia.
Falkus' book provides a decent overview, an introduction to the historiography, suffers perhaps from the absence of a map and also from the concept of industrialisation as a whole which by skewing the debate to look for evidence of 'take-off' perhaps distracts from thinking more broadly in terms of economic and social development. Even given the most optimistic reading, Russia on the verge of WWI was a long way from being as a whole an industrialised economy and seems to have been some way from having either a large enough consumer base or a transportation network dense enough to support an industrialised economy. The story is largely about the centrality of politics and geo-political ambitions in determining the pattern of industrial development between Peter the Great and the First world war.
Displaying 1 of 1 review