Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Russian society, law and economy

As ﬁnance minister, Witte tried to continue the economic course of Katkov

and Pobedonostsev. However, Witte soon began to move away from their

ideas for reasons of pragmatism, and between 1896 and 1898, when Witte’s

policies began to be seen as a ‘system’, they were actually a compromise

between the ideologists of the 1880s and the advocates of economic changes

of the 1860s and 1870s. The year 1896 became a turning point for Witte’s

own ideology: formerly a staunch defender of communal landownership, he

suddenly declared himself an ardent opponent of the idea. At the heart of

Witte’s strategy was speeding up the development of domestic industry. Until

the mid-1880s, Witte was inﬂuenced by Slavophile ideology.

However at the

end of the 1880s, his idol became the famous German economist and advocate

of protectionism, Friedrich List. In 1889 Witte published a small brochure

‘The National Economy and Friedrich List’. In it, Witte argued for rejecting

cosmopolitan views and instead following the teachings of List, the prophet

‘of Germany’s greatness, which was created by Bismark on the basis of his

[List’s] theories’.

It would seem that the tragedy of the 1892–3 famine should have had a

sobering effect on the proponents of higher taxes. Nevertheless, Witte, like

Vyshnegradskii, continued to use indirect taxation as an important source of

replenishing the budget. From 1892 to 1901, revenues from indirect taxation

increased by 50 per cent.

The spirits monopoly proved to be one of the most

effective methods of raising capital. In 1894 Witte introduced the monopoly

in four provinces (Perm, Orenburg, Ufa and Samara); later it was expanded

throughout the country. Distilling remained in privatehands, however the state

gained control over sales. Purifying the spirit and producing vodka occurred in

private factories but only to ﬁll state orders and under the supervision of excise

regulators. The sale of spirits, wine and vodka was under the sole purview of

the state.

In the autumn of 1892 Witte tried to increase the amount of paper money in

circulation by introducing a special ‘Siberian’ rouble to cover the costs of the

Trans-Siberian railway. Evidently, Vyshnegradskii did not tell Witte about the

Ministry of Finance’s long preparations to introduce gold coinage in Russia. N.

Kh. Bunge brought Witte’s attention to the dangers of inﬂationary policy, and

within a year the ﬁnance minister set about monetary reform in earnest. He

47 For Witte’s economic views, see: Laue, Sergei Witte; A Korelin and S. Stepanov, S. Iu. Vitte –

Finansist, politik, diplomat (Moscow: Terra, 1998); B. V. Anan’ich and P. Sh. Ganelin, Serge

Iulevich Vitte i ego vremiia (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000).

48 Quoted in Korelin, S. Iu. Vitte,p.314.

49 Shepelev, Tsarizm i burzhuaziia (1981), pp. 204–10; Shvanebakh, Nashe podatnoe,p.16.

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concluded the conversion operations begun by Vyshnegradskii and conducted

a series of measures aimed at stabilising the rouble in a reform announced by

the decree of 29 August 1897.

The amount of gold backing the rouble was

reduced by one-third. Thus one paper rouble was worth 66.6 kopecks of

gold. As a result of the reform the State Bank became an issuing institution

and was given the right to issue bank-notes. All paper money in circulation,

which totalled more than 300 million roubles, should have been backed in gold

entirely. The introduction of the gold standard, on the one hand, opened new

opportunities to obtain credit on European markets, but on the other hand, it

required that the government constantly ensure that the rouble was backed by

gold. Henceforth, the empire’s loans were often needed not only for military

expenditures, but to maintain the gold standard.

Foreign loans became one of the most important sources of ﬁnance for

Witte’s economic policies. He reorganised the system of commercial foreign

agents within the Finance Ministry and by the beginning of 1894 he had opened

agencies in Paris, London, Berlin and Washington, and later in Constantinople,

Brussels, Yokohama and many other cities. In 1898 commercial agents were

renamed agents of the Ministry of Finance and added to the ranks of Russian

embassies and missions. As a result of this reform Witte was able to receive

regular information about markets in Europe and other countries.

By the end of the 1890s, Witte began to advocate that Russia attract as much

foreign investment as possible. This policy faced serious opposition, led by the

Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, who favoured limiting foreign capital

investment in Russia, in particular in the oil industry.

Witte’s programme of encouraging foreign investment accompanied pro-

tectionism, increasing indirect taxation and the raising of the commerce tax.

This tax increase consisted of two parts: a main tax and an additional one.

Businessmen paid the main tax by purchasing permits to operate their busi-

ness. The tax burden was determined not by which guild the owners belonged

to, as had been the case under previous legislation, but by the size of their

business. The supplementary tax for joint-stock companies was divided into a

tax on capital and a tax on a percentage of proﬁt. It was levied only if proﬁts

exceeded 3 per cent of the ﬁxed capital. The supplementary tax for non-public

companies was divided into an arbitrary tax and a percentage tax on proﬁts.

The tax burden was determined by calculating the average proﬁts of various

enterprises.

Thus, a signiﬁcant part of the commerce tax was based on an

50 PSZ, 3rd series, vol. 17,no.14504.

51 PSZ, 3rd series, vol. 18,no.15601.

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archaic and primitive principle of apportioning taxation. Despite its imperfec-

tions, the new commerce tax increased state revenues. In 1898 collections from

trade and commerce were 48.2 million roubles, and in 1899 – after the new

commerce tax – 61.1 million roubles.

By the end of the 1890s, Witte’s economic programme had gained distinctive

characteristics. The Finance Ministry’s inﬂuence went far beyond its normal

sphere of activity, and Witte had much inﬂuence on overall domestic politics.

Witte linked Russia’s economic development with a determined effort to gain

access to markets in the East. In the second half of the 1890s, the Finance

Ministry attempted the so-called peaceful economic penetration of Manchuria,

Korea, Persia and Mongolia with the goal of preparing future markets for

Russian industry. Banks played a central role in this policy: the Discount-Loan

Bank of Persia, which was essentially a branch of the State Bank, and also the

Russo-Chinese Bank, which dealt with both Russian and foreign capital. Aided

by state and ‘neutral’ foreign capital, and through generous expenditures, the

government planned on doing what the weak Russian private initiative still

was incapable of undertaking. Witte hoped that within several years Russian

industry would reach a rather high level of development. Russian goods would

become competitive on the markets of Central Asia and the Far East, and

this would allow ‘the surplus from exports in Asia to pay the interest on

capital obtained in Europe’.

From the very beginning of his tenure as Finance

Minster, Witte regularly consulted with scholars. His assistants in important

economics problems were D. I. Mendeleev and also the well-known economist

I. I. Kaufman. Witte, perhaps more than any other minister, understood the

value of science in developing the productive power of the country. This

explains, in particular, his decision to create a network of polytechnic institutes

in Russia.

Witte’s programme to speed up the development of Russia’s industry bore

fruit. Industry grew particularly quickly in the mid-1890s. In the last forty

years of the nineteenth century the volume of industrial production in Russia

increased more than 700 per cent, while Germany’s increased 500 per cent,

France’s 250 per cent and England’s more than 200 per cent.

This great

increase in the pace of industrial production is partially explained by Russia’s

relatively weak level of industrial development at the beginning of the 1860s.

This was accompanied by relatively low productivity and low production of

52 S. Iu. Witte, Konspekt lektsii o narodnom i gosudarstvennom khoziaistve (St Petersburg: Fond

‘Nachala’, 1912), p. 485.

53 Materialy po istorii SSSR, vol. VI (Moskow: Nauka, 1959), pp. 167–8.

54 P. A. Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), p. 283.

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goods per capita as well. According to the Ministry of Finance’s statistics,

in 1898 cast-iron production per capita in Great Britain was 13.1 pood (old

measurement in Russia = 16 kg), 9.8 pood in the United States, 9.0 pood in

Belgium, 8.1 pood in Germany, 3.96 pood in France and 1.04 pood in Russia.

Great Britain extracted 311.7 pood of coal, Belgium – 204, the United States –

162.4, Germany – 143.8, France – 50.7, and only 5.8 pood in Russia. This lag in

production affected consumption and trade too. Russia’s trade turnover, 1,286

million roubles in 1897, was less than a third of that in Germany and the United

States, one-ﬁfth of that in Great Britain, and was only equal to the turnover of

Belgium.

In terms of capital, Russia was also poor. The total amount of capital in

public companies, trade and industry, and also city and village credit was

11 billion roubles. About half of this amount came from abroad. At the same

time, Germany’s capital worth was 30 billion roubles, and England’s was

60 billion.

The development of industry promoted the growth of the working class and

its consolidation. Data based on factory records, zemstvo documents and the

1897 census indicate that by the beginning of the twentieth century there were

14.5 million workers.

The development of industry also led to the growth

of cities and urban populations. According to the 1897 census the population

of both Moscow and St Petersburg was over one million. Cities gained an

industrial feel and image as well. Petersburg turned into a capital for machine

building. New areas of industry were being developed there: chemical and

electrical industry. The Moscow industrial region remained the strongest in

Russia. Besides old areas (the Central Industrial Region and the Urals) new

areas arose: the coal-metallurgical district in the south and the oil district in

Baku. The metallurgical factories in the south were built with foreign capital.

They were equipped with the newest technologies and became noted for

their high productivity. By the beginning of the 1890s, domestic production

satisﬁed 93.7 per cent of the country’s demand for cast-iron, 91.7 per cent of

demand for iron and 97.1 per cent of demand for steel.

By the beginning

of the twentieth century Russia became the world’s leading extractor of oil.

However, it was not able to keep this title and was overtaken by the United

States.

55 ‘Vsepoddaneishii doklad S. Iu. Vitte “O polozhenii nashei promyshlennosti” Fevral’ 1900’,

Istorik-marksist, 2/3 (1925).

56 L. M. Ivanov (ed.), Istoriia rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), p. 18.

57 D. I. Mendeleev, ‘Fabrichno-zavodskaia promyshlennost’ i torgovlia Rossii’, in D. I.

Mendeleev, Sochineniia (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1952), vol. XXI, p. 190.

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In post-1861 Russia there was an intensive railway-building campaign, espe-

cially between 1895 and 1899. Russia entered the twentieth century with the

second longest track in the world, and 40 per cent of it had been laid in the

1890s.

At the end of the 1890s and beginning of the 1900s, Russian was one of

the world’s leading grain suppliers, competing with the United States. Russian

grain exports in these years were nearly 500 million pood a year, about 20 per

cent of its total grain harvest.

A key ﬁnancial characteristic of turn-of-the-century Russia was the

extremely fast growth of the state budget. In 1867 revenues numbered only 415

million roubles. Thirty years later, they had increased to one billion roubles

and by 1908 to two billion roubles. Five years later the budget reached 3 billion

roubles. Over this whole period, however, the budget grew 2.4 times quicker

than national revenue. Increased budgetary expenditure greatly depended on

the income from the spirits monopoly.

As a result of the economic growth

of the 1890s, Russia came closer to the level of industrially developed states,

but did not reach it as Witte had planned.

By the 1880s the process of imperial expansion had ended. The expansion

was noteworthy in its asymmetry from an economic point of view. Poland and

Finland, Central Asia and Bukhara and the Caucasus clearly differedin their lev-

els of economic development and business culture. Poland and Finland served

as a bridge between Russian and European business culture. The economy

of Poland and especially Finland enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. For

instance, Finland possessed its own customs system and currency. Finland also

introduced gold money (zolotaia marka) twenty years before the gold standard

was started in the empire. Finland independently concluded foreign loans,

and during the First World War even acted as a creditor to the imperial gov-

ernment.

Areas where Islam was prevalent represented yet another level of

economic development. Muslim entrepreneurship had its speciﬁc features. In

these regions of the empire, even on the eve of the First World War, deals were

concluded on the basis of sharia. The multinational and multi-confessional

character of the empire affected the makeup of the Russian bourgeoisie and its

disunity. For example, representatives of inﬂuential ﬁnancial circles in Moscow,

58 A. N. Solov’eva, Zheleznodorozhnii transport Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow:

Nauka, 1975), p. 271.

59 T. M. Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), p. 275.

60 Iu. N. Shebaldin, ‘Gosudarstvennii biudzhet tsarskoi Rossii v nachale XX veka (do pervoi

mirovoi voiny)’, IZ, 56 (1959): 165.

61 See K. Pravilova, ‘Finliandiia i rossiiskaia imperia: politika i ﬁnansy’, IZ, 124, 6 (2003):

180–240; B. V. Anan’ich, ‘Zolotoi standart Finliandii i Rossii: ﬁnansovii aspect imperskoi

politiki’ in Rossiia na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov. Materialy nauchnykh chtenii pamiati professora

V.I. Bovykina, Moscow, 20 Jan. 1 999 (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), pp. 115–24.

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which were dominated by Old Believers, were very critical of their Petersburg

counterparts. The Riabushinskiis, for example, believed Petersburg was a city

of temptation, ‘a frightening city’, where ‘market orgies’ and ‘unprincipled

brokers’ reigned.

This disunity would inﬂuence the Russian bourgeoisie’s

role in the political life of the country.

Financial and commercial policy at the beginning

of the twentieth century

The world economic crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century and

the ensuing depression brought serious harm to the Russian economy. The

economy had not recovered when the country found itself locked in the Russo-

Japanese War of 1904–5.In1905 came revolution.

Witte’sreforms did not pass these tests unscathed. During the war economic

reforms were not possible. In addition, the Finance Ministry lost its special

role in determining overall government policy after the creation in 1905 of the

Council of Ministers, whose chairman was to play the role of prime minister.

In the same year the Ministry of Trade and Industry was formed, and the

Ministry of Agriculture was re-named and strengthened, thereby reducing the

Ministry of Finance’s previous domination of economic policy.

In 1903 Witte was forced to leave the Ministry of Finance. E. D. Pleske

replaced him as minister. Pleske was an experienced and knowledgeable

bureaucrat but was not connected with ﬁnancial or scholarly circles. The same

thing can be said of V. N. Kokovtsov, who headed the Ministry of Finance from

1904 to 1914, with a short break between 1905 and 1906. Until 1907, by Kokovs-

tov’s own admission, it was impossible even to think of any creative policies.

His key concern was to maintain the gold standard, and then support P. A.

Stolypin’s land reforms.

The revolutionary movement in Russia in November–December 1905 led

to a massive outpouring of gold from savings banks. At the end of Decem-

ber 1905, the State Bank had almost exhausted its statutory lending limit.

The fate of gold money in Russia depended on a large foreign loan. V. N.

Kokovstov was sent to Paris on an emergency mission to conclude a deal. His

trip coincided with the worsening of Franco-German relations over a conﬂict

in Morocco. The Moroccan crisis was supposed to be solved at an international

62 B. V. Anan’ich, Bankirskie doma v Rossii. 1860–1914. Ocherki istorii chastnogo predprinima-

tel’stva (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), p. 124.

63 V. S. Diakin, Dengi dlia sel’skogo khoziaistva (St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press,

1997), pp. 191–206.

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conference in Algeciras in January 1906. The French government repeatedly

announced that it was counting on Russian support at Algeciras. Nicholas II

ordered V. N. Kokovtsov to tell the French government in Paris that Russia

was prepared to support France at Algeciras. In return, the French agreed to

organise a small, and once the Algeciras conference was over, a large loan for

Russia.

On 29 December 1905 / 11 January 1906 a contract was signed with French

banks for a loan worth 100 million roubles. The situation was so critical in

Petersburg that ofﬁcials did not wait until the loan documents arrived from

Paris by post and hurried to add 50 million roubles to the balance of the State

Bank’s foreign accounts.

When on 18/31 March 1906 an agreement was ﬁnally reached in Algeci-

ras, the French ﬁnance minister allowed the Russian ambassador in Paris,

A. I. Nelidov, to begin negotiations with bankers for a larger loan. The Rus-

sian 5 per cent loan of 1906 was concluded on 9/22 April for a sum of 2,250

million francs, 1,200 million of which France paid, 330 million came from

England, 165 million from Austria, 55 million from Holland and 500 million

from Russian banks. The Russian government was unable to secure more inter-

national creditors for the loan: German, Italian, American and Swiss banks

refused to participate.

The 1906 loan allowed the preservation of Witte’s gold

standard.

The trials to which the Russian ﬁnancial system was subjected in the years

of war and revolution motivated Kokovtsov to reject further forced develop-

ment of domestic industry designed to catch up with the more economically

developed countries of Western and Central Europe.

The world economic crisis of 1900–3 slowed the growth of Russian industry

and resulted in more then 3,000 enterprise closures. In 1903 Russia boasted

23,000 industrial enterprises employing 2,200,000 workers.

In 1904 the rest of

Europe experienced growth while the Russo-Japanese War and revolution led

to the destabilisation of monetary circulation and a fall in industrial production

in Russia. After a series of poor harvest years beginning in 1906, Russia ﬁnally

produced a strong harvest in 1909. This immediately made an impact on

the general economic health of the country. According to customs statistics,

Russian exports were worth 1,300 million roubles in 1909, the highest ﬁgure of

64 B. A. Romanov, Ocherki diplomaticheskoi istorii russko-iaponskoi voiny, 1895–1907 (Moscow

and Leningrad: Izd. AN SSSR, 1955), p. 616.

65 B. V. Anan’ich, Rossiia i mezhdunarodnii kapital. Ocherki istorii ﬁnansovykh otnoshenii

(Leningrad: Nauka, 1970), pp. 170–6.

66 Shepelev, Tsarizm i burzhuaziia v 1904–1914 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), p. 15.

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The Russian economy and banking system

the decade by more than 325 million roubles. The trade surplus increased by

500 million roubles. This affected monetary circulation and increased Russia’s

gold reserves. By 1 January 1909 the gold reserve was 1,307 million roubles,

and by the end of the year the sum had reached 1,708 million roubles, having

increased by 401 million roubles.

Russia’s entrance into the Entente in 1907 strengthened Franco-Russia rela-

tions and coupled with renewed industrial growth promoted the development

of co-operation between French and Russian banks. In particular, the French

helped to improve the ﬁnances of the Petersburg private banks. In 1910 the

Northern and Russo-Chinese Banks united. Together, they formed the new

Russo-Asian Bank. During the years of economic growth before 1914 Franco-

Russian ﬁnancial groups were formed. From the Russian side, the main par-

ticipating banks were: the Petersburg International, the Russian Commercial-

Industrial, the Azov-Don, the Petersburg Discount-Loan, the Russian For-

eign Trade, the Russo-French, and the Siberian Commercial Bank; and from

the French side – Cr

edit Lyonnais, Comptoir National d’Escompte, Banque

Franc¸aise pour le Commerce et L’Industrie, Banque de L’Union Parisienne.

French and Russian banks co-operated on railway projects in Siberia, Turkestan

and the Caucusus and in joint operations in the Balkans.

The Franco-Russian ﬁnancial co-operation did not end German inﬂuence in

Russianbanking, whichcontinued to exist on the eve of the First World War. All

the major Petersburgbanks continued to workwith banks in Berlin andVienna.

English capital became an important factor only immediately before the war.

Petersburg banks undoubtedly played the central role in international banking

connections. By 1914 the eight largest Petersburg banks controlled 61 per cent

of the market share of joint-stock banks, which exceeded similar indicators

of banking concentration in England and Germany.

On the eve of the First

World War banks began to ﬁnance industrial enterprises more actively. Both

Petersburg and Moscow banks played an important part in the development of

industry in central Russia. The growing role of joint-stock banks affected their

relationship with the State Bank. After the gold standard was introduced in

Russia, the State Bank became the primary lending institution and commercial

bank. It retained its status as the ‘bank of banks’, but by 1914 it nevertheless had

less total ﬁnancial strength than the joint-stock banks. Fifty joint-stock banks

67 Anan’ich, Rossiia i mezhdunarodnyi,p.264.

68 On the participation of French banks in the Russian economy, see R. Girault, Emprunts

russes et investissements franc¸ais en Russie. 1887–1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973). V. I.

Bovykin, Frantsuzskie banki v Rossii. Konets XIX–nachalo XX vekov (Moscow: Rosspen,

1999).

419

Russian society, law and economy

with 778 branches boasted balances of 6,285 million roubles compared to the

State Bank’s 4,624 million roubles.

Banking houses also retained their inﬂuence in the economic life of the

country, especially in St Petersburg and Moscow. By 1913 there were sixteen

large banking houses in St Petersburg, including branches of Moscow ﬁrms.

Among them were the banking houses: Zachary Zhdanov and Co., Kaftal,

Handelman and Co., G. Lesin, A. I. Zeidman and Co., and I. E. Ginzburg. The

Ginzburg banking house played an important role not just in the economy, but

also in the cultural life of the capital at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In Moscow, the banking house of Riabushinskii remained very inﬂuential. In

1912 it was reorganised by the Riabushinskii brothers into a large joint-stock

commercial bank.

After the revolutionary events of 1905–7 the activity of political parties inten-

siﬁed, as did the consolidation of capital. These new party and business lead-

ers took the initiative to formulate a programme for the development of

Russia’s productivity and industry. These problems were regularly discussed

in St Petersburg at the meetings of the Council of Congresses of Represen-

tatives of Industry and Trade, where scholars and economists were invited

to present research. In Moscow, the Riabushinskii banking house became

a centre for such discussions, with debates on the economy taking place in

P. P. Riabushinskii’s apartment on Prechistinskii Boulevard. Famous historians,

economists and law scholars took part in these discussions, including M. M.

Kovalevskii, N. Kh. Ozerov, P. B. Struve and S. N. Bulgakov. Financial leaders’

concern with the productivity of the country was reﬂected in a new series of

commercial publications. In 1909–10 alone several newspapers and magazines

appeared which were devoted to economics and ﬁnance: Birzhevoi artel’shchik,

Finansovoe obozrenie, and the Bankovskaia i torgovaia zhizn’.

In 1911, at a meeting of the Congress of Representatives of Industry and

Trade, V. V. Zhukovskii, a St Petersburg businessman and one of the leaders

of the Council of Congresses deﬁned the role of commercial-industrial circles

in the following manner:

We must think about the general situation of the country. We must take a

systematic approach to solving the peoples’ tasks, we must try to be a part

of the very brains of the country, we cannot stop our ideological work. The

wealth of the people is based not only on the land, but also in the factories;

not only in money, but perhaps mainly in the people’s moral foundations

69 See B. V.Anan’ich, S. V. Kalmykov and Iu. A. Petrov, Glavniibank Rossii.Ot gosudarstvennogo

banka Rossiiskoi imperii k tsentral’nomu banku Rossiiskoi Federatsii. 1860–2000 (Moscow:

TSPP TSB RPH, 2000), pp. 63–4.

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The Russian economy and banking system

and values. And in this regard the commercial-industrial class needs to show

its work, its ideas, its conscience. And once we succeed in uniting, we will

have the right to deﬁne and work towards a government programme which is

drawn up from our commercial-industrial perspective and which is a synthesis

of our practical interests and our ideological viewpoints.

The growth of business organisations’ inﬂuence in the ﬁnancial life of Russia

was linked to the new industrial growth in the country. However, at least until

the beginning of the First World War, despite the co-operation of the state with

representatives of ﬁnancial circles, there were no signs of direct participation

by business circles in the formulation of economic policy.

Industrial growth was very strong in 1910 and continued until 1914.By1913

there were 29,315 industrial enterprises in Russia, employing 3,115,000 workers.

The average yearly growth of industrial production was 8.8 per cent. Its value

was 7,358 million roubles. Russia was second in the world in oil extraction,

third in demand for cotton, fourth in steel production, ﬁfth in coal extraction

and sixth in iron ore.

The grain harvest between 1909 and 1913 averaged 4,366.5 million pood

yearly. This allowed Russia to increase its grain exports signiﬁcantly, especially

from 1909–10. However, already by 1914 the yield of almost all grain crops was

dropping.

On the eve of the First World War co-operation between Russian and French

banks became even closer and more varied. The amalgamated railway loan

of 1914 for 665 million francs, or 249 million roubles became an important

event in Russo-French ﬁnancial relations. Representatives of a large syndicate

of powerful French banks helped ﬂoat the loan, as did a small syndicate of

provincial banks.

By 1914, seventy-one Russian industrial properties were listed on the Paris

stock market. Their total value was 642 million roubles, and they included

the stocks of ﬁfteen of Russia’s largest metallurgical factories, twelve oil

and ﬁfteen coal enterprises, and ﬁve banks. In Paris, stocks of Russian coal

enterprises were traded that amounted to 60 per cent of the total money

invested in these companies.

The French controlled 80 per cent of Russia’s

70 I. Glivits, ‘Politiko-ekonomicheskie vzglyady V. V. Zhukovskogo’, Promyshlennost’ i tor-

govliia (22 October 1916): 306–9.

71 Shepelev, Tsarizm. 1904–1914,p.23.

72 S. G. Beliaev, P.L. Bark i ﬁnansovaia politika Rossii 1914–1917 (St Petersburg: Izd. SPbu,

2002), p. 86.

73 B.A. Nikol’skii, Frantsiia i Rossiia (k 25-letiu franko-russkogosoiuza) (Petrograd: Red.Vestnik

Finansov, 1917), p. 15.

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