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

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Russian society, law and economy

foreign debts, and 35 per cent of foreign capital invested in Russia came from

France.

The Russian Empire entered the First World War with a signiﬁcant state

debt – more than 9 billion roubles. Of this, 4.3 billion roubles was foreign debt,

more than twice the value of all foreign investment in the Russian economy.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Russia had the second largest state

debt, after France, but had the largest loan repayments. From 1904 to 1908,

according to ofﬁcial statistics, Russia paid an average of 4.2 per cent interest

on its foreign loans, and in the next 5 years paid 4.5 per cent annually, while

France paid less than 3 per cent each year during the same period.

Despite economic growth, Kokovtsov’s policies became the object of sharp

criticism in the press and by a series of inﬂuential opponents in government.

Witte was one of the most uncompromising critics of Kokovtsov. He not only

started a campaign against Kokovtsov in the press but also spoke out against

him on 10/23 January 1914 at the State Council, accusing the minister of using

the spirits monopoly not to ﬁght alcoholism, but to ‘pump out money from

the people into state coffers’. ‘The Russian people’, said Witte, ‘spend one

billion roubles each year on vodka while the government spends only 160

million roubles on the Ministry of Education.’

The revenues from the sale

of spirits occupied an important place in the budget not only in Russia, but

in other countries as well. In the Russian budget, spirit sales were one of the

most important sources of income. In 1895 the state received 16 million roubles

from the sale of alcohol, and in 1913 – 675 million roubles. This was caused

partly by the government’s repeated increase of vodka prices.

In January 1914, Kokovtsov was removed from ofﬁce. I. L. Goremykin was

appointed prime minister, and P. L. Bark was placed in charge of the Min-

istry of Finance. After Bark’s appointment the government proclaimed a ‘new

course’ in economic policy. However, the First World War destroyed their

plans. After the war began, bread exports across European borders and the

74 P. Renouvin and J.-B. Duroselle, Introduction

a l’histoire des relations internationals (Paris:

Librairie A. Colin, 1964), p. 139.

75 See Gosudarstvennaia duma. Stenograﬁcheskie otchoty. Vtoraia sessiia, ch. III (St Petersburg,

1914), column 1140.

76 Anan’ich and Ganelin, Serge, p. 371.

77 Beliaev, P.L. Bark,pp.153–5. According to data collected by Beliaev, the average yearly

income in roubles for an Englishman was 309 roubles, of which he spent 32 roubles

on alcohol. A Frenchman spent 34 roubles of 256 on drink, while the average Russian

citizen spent 6 roubles, 83 kopeks out of 63 roubles annually on alcohol. Beliaev calcu-

lated his ﬁgures based on the data in two books by M. I. Fridman: Vinnaia monopoliia,

vol. I: Vinnaia monopoliia v inostrannykh gosudarstvakh (St Petersburg: Pravda, 1914.),

vol. II: Vinnaia monopoliia v Rossii (Petrograd: Pravda, 1916).

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The Russian economy and banking system

Black Sea straits nearly halved (from 647.8 million pood to 374 million pood).

Grain was Russia’s main export, and Germany was an important trading part-

ner. As a result, Russia lost its positive balance of trade as regards European

commerce and a negative balance of trade developed across Asian borders as

well. England became a key importer of Russian goods.

The war led to fewer

joint-stock companies being founded. The abolition of the spirits monopoly

at the beginning of war dealt a sharp blow to the budget. On 23 July / 5 August

Nicholas II signed a decree prohibiting paper money to be exchanged for gold

and expanding the State Bank’s issuing authority.

I. L. Goremykin’s govern-

ment believed these would be temporary wartime measures. However, the

gold standard proved incapable of surviving the First World War, not just in

Russia, but throughout the world.

With the onset of the war, given state military orders, government control

over industrial production inevitably increased.

Conclusion

Russia did not enjoy total entrepreneurial freedom, even on the eve of the First

World War, when political parties and bourgeois organisations had formed

inside the country. Until 1917 Russia retained a system where joint-stock com-

panies required state permission to incorporate. The tsar ignored suggestions

from industrialists, bankers and scholars to tear down the barriers hampering

the development of free enterprise. For example, Nicholas II did not react to

a paper given to him on this topic by the famous economist Professor I. Kh.

Ozerov. He drew the government’s attention to the fact that Russian industrial-

ists were starting their companies abroad, in France and England, where there

were no legal obstacles. I. Kh. Ozerov tried to convince Nicholas II to eliminate

restrictions for the European population of Russia, noting the United States’

success as regards co-operation between people of different nationalities in

the development of American productivity.

The idea of ‘Americanising’ the

Russian economy was rather widespread in economic literature during the

First World War. However, it cannot be said that it was universally accepted in

78 Beliaiev, P.L. Bark,p.86.

79 On 27 July / 9 August this decree was discussed in the State Duma and State Council and

became a law. See A. L. Sidorov, Finansovoe polozhenie Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny.

1914–1917 (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1960), p. 109.

80 See I. F. Gindin, Banki i ekonomicheskaia politika v Rossii (XIX–nachalo XX vekov). Ocherki

istorii i tipologii russkikh bankov (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), pp. 105–9; Beliaev, P.L. Bark,

pp. 272–3.

81 Vsepoddanneishaia zapiska I.Kh. Ozerova, 2 Sentiabria 1914, RGIA, Fond 560,op.38.

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Russian society, law and economy

Russian ﬁnancial circles. For example, the Riabushinskiis, leading representa-

tives of Old-Believer enterprises, tied their hopes to a rebirth of Europe after

the war and thus viewed the United States as a dangerous opponent.

Just before the war, in July 1914, the Council of Congresses of the Represen-

tatives of Trade and Industry sent the Council of Ministers a memorandum

arguing that a special meeting was needed to discuss measures to develop Rus-

sia’s productivity. This question continued to be discussed in business circles

during the war, along with the possibility of building wide-scale and ‘cultured’

capitalism in Russia.

But how should this ‘cultured capitalism’ look in Russia?

Theanswer to this question is one of the complexriddles of history.RuthRoosa,

who dedicated many years to the study of bourgeois societal organisations in

Russia, offered her theory on this mystery. She concluded that ‘Russian society

under the auspices of its business class in the twentieth century might well

have had more in common with the moderate socialism of Scandinavia, the

syndicalism of Italy in the 1920s, the authoritarian rule of Poland and the Baltic

states between the wars, or the pattern of industrial organization that emerged

in postwar Germany than with the open and competitive society that has been

the American ideal.’

Whether or not this is true, one thing is certain: the

government’s role in Russia’s economic development under any conditions

would have been very signiﬁcant given Russia’s social and economic traditions,

and the history of the formation of its entrepreneurial class.

The distinctive features of Russia’s economic development and the degree of

its backwardness have been a constant source of debate for historians. Until the

beginning of the 1930s, Soviet historiography featured lively polemics on this

subject, with a variety of viewpoints. At the end of the 1930s the Short History

of the All-Union Communist Party was published. In it, pre-revolutionary

Russia was described as a backward country dependent on foreign capital. This

viewpoint became mandatory for all students of Russian economic history in

the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s death, at the end of the 1950s and beginning

of the 1960s, a new polemic resurfaced on the distinctive features of Russia’s

economic development. Ultimately, the prevailing theory was one that said

Russia belonged to the group of countries with a neither very advanced nor

very backward level of economic development.

In Western historiography

until the beginning of the 1980s Alexander Gerschenkron’s theories dominated:

82 Anan’ich, Bankirskie doma,pp.126–7.

83 M. V. Bernatskii, ‘Pravitel’stvennyi nadzor nad kommercheskimi bankami’, Promyshlen-

nost’ i Torgovliia, 19/221 (14 May, 1916).

84 R. Roosa, Russian Industrialists in an Age of Revolution (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997),

p. 160.

85 K. N. Tarnovskii, Sovetskaia istoriograﬁia rossiiskogo imperializma (Moscow: Nauka, 1964).

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he argued that Russia had been backward and the government’s intervention in

the economy had been exceptional. However, in later years his views have been

revisited and revised.

In particular, Paul Gregory has suggested a newconcept

of the distinctive features of Russian economic development. He believes that

Russia possessed a market economy on the eve of the war, that agriculture,

‘despite serious institutional problems, grew just as quickly as in Europe’,

and that ‘if Russia had remained on a market-oriented model of development

after the war, its indicators of economic growth would have been no less than

before the war’: in other words, the pace of Russia’s development would have

surpassed the European average.

86 A. Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror: Four Lectures in Economic History

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Economic Backwardness in Historical Per-

spective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

87 P. Gregory, Ekonomicheskii rost Rossiiskoi imperii (konets XIX–nachala XX vekov) (Moscow:

Rosspen, 2003), pp. 248–9, trans. from the English (P. Gregory, Economic Growth of the

Russian Empire: New Estimates and Calculations). Also see P. Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy

1850–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1986).

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part v

GOVERNMENT

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Central government

zhand p. shakibi

Introduction

A study of the central government of the Russian Empire sheds light on three

important issues in the imperial era. How well did the institutions handle

the challenge of modernisation from above? How did the autocracy’s and

bureaucracy’s view of their respective roles in society change over time? What

were the major challenges related to effective governance from the centre and

how did the monarchy and bureaucracy handle them? By extension a solid

understanding of the workings of central government helps to determine the

extent to which it and its personnel held responsibility for the collapse of the

Romanov regime.

Peter the Great’s reform of the central government marked the begin-

ning of the imperial bureaucracy’s evolution on two different but equally

important and mutually linked levels. The ministerial bureaucracy from the

early nineteenth century staffed the so-called subordinate organs (podchinen-

nye organy), which at least theoretically handled activities in a designated ﬁeld,

such as ﬁnance or foreign affairs. The supreme organs (verkhovnye organy)

had the responsibility to manage and co-ordinate the activities of the subor-

dinate organs. The effectiveness of government depended on cadres at least

as much as institutions. Indeed, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, well-known con-

servative and tutor to the last two emperors, Alexander III and Nicholas II,

frequently stressed, ‘Institutions are of no importance. Everything depends on

individuals.’

Whilst his categorical rejection of the role of institutions is highly

debatable, we do need to take into account the dynamic between institutions

and human agents, the most important of whom was the emperor, in order

1 P. A. Zaionchkovskii (ed.), Dnevnik gosudarstvennogo sekretaria A.A. Polovtsova, 2 vols.

(Moscow: Nauka, 1966) vol. I, p. 315.

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Government

to obtain a more coherent understanding of how the central organs actually

functioned.

Subordinate organs (podchinennye organy)

For most of his reign Peter the Great (1689–1725), occupied with transforming

Russia into a great European power, relied primarily on the form of central

government he had inherited. His predecessors, the ﬁrst Romanovs, governed

through some forty chancelleries (prikazy) which constituted the heart of

the central governing organs. Noble servitors, often of boyar level, headed the

prikazy: under them served non-noblecadres.Responsibilitiesand jurisdictions

of the prikazy greatly overlapped and frequently contradicted each other,

making difﬁcult even relatively efﬁcient government, including the extraction

from society of resources needed to support Peter’s military campaigns.

Peter, who had acquainted himself with the bureaucratic machines of some

of the great powers of Europe, understood that this unwieldy structure could

not help him realise his goal of making Russia a major European power. Like

many of his fellow monarchs, Peter believed that more effective governing

institutions provided the best mechanism for solving economic and societal

ills. As a result, in the last seven years of his reign (1718–25) Peter set his sights

on introducing radical change in Russia’s central governing organs, a process

which marked the end of the country’s patrimonial state.

His plan on the one hand of founding a system of subordinate organs

operating on rational concepts of administration similar to those of Western

and Central Europe, and on the other hand of maintenance of the autoc-

racy’s establishment of the norms and rules for the bureaucracy remained

a goal of Russia’s monarchs until the end of the dynasty. However, as

time would show, the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the

emperor made realisation of this goal difﬁcult. Peter’s immediate concern

was improvement of the government’s taxing mechanism, establishment of

budgetary controls and supervision over expenditures. Along with this came

2 For good basic reference texts see: A. Turgeva, Vysshie organi gosudarstvennoi vlasti i

upravleniia Rossii IX–XX vv. (Moscow: S-ZAGS, 2000); D. N. Shilov, Gosudarstvennie deiateli

Rossiliskoi Imperii, 1802–1917 (St Petersburg: European University Press, 2003); O. Chusti-

akov (ed.), Gosudarstvennii stroi Rossiiskoi Imperii nakanune krusheniia (Moscow: Izd. MGU,

1995); J. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–

1796(London: Princeton University Press, 1984); G. Mironov, Istoriia gosudarstvarossiiskogo

XIX vek (Moscow: Nauka, 1995); M. Raeff, ‘The Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial

Russia’, AHR 84 (1979); G. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government (Urbana: Uni-

versity of Indiana Press, 1973). P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvenniiapparat samoderzhavnoi

Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977).

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Central government

greater centralisation of power and increased governmental penetration into

society.

The heart of the system of subordinate organs was the colleges. Initially

there were Foreign Affairs, War, Navy (which also looked after gun manu-

facture and the forests), Mining (which was also charged with the minting of

money), Manufacture, Revenue, Control, State Expenditure, Commerce and

Justice.

Each college was headed by a president chosen by Peter from his clos-

est associates under whom in turn served a small group of ten to eleven trained

ofﬁcials who collectively took decisions within the college’s purview.

A poor

level of co-ordination between the individual college’s various departments

characterised the new system. However, the colleges were an improvement

on the previous prikaz system. One of the major reasons for the emergence of

the Russian Empire as a great power in the eighteenth century was this new

administrative structure which proved effective in tax collection and military

recruitment.

At the same time the Ottoman Empire’s failure to copy such

reforms played a large role in its decline.

But a great degree of overlapping

remained. Frequently one area of activity fell under the jurisdiction of sev-

eral colleges. That government was not divided into administrative, judicial,

legislative and ﬁscal functions, but rather into blocks of activities helped cre-

ate the conditions for institutional autonomous existence and also for poor

responsiveness to co-ordination and integration from above.

During the remainder of theeighteenth century these centrifugal tendencies

strengthened. Increasingly, individual heads of the colleges in private meetings

with the monarch enacted policy in a haphazard manner. However the real

power of the colleges and their ability to make policy were dependent to a

large degree on the monarch and the inﬂuence of various groups around him

or her. Not infrequently a college was charged with implementing policies

which it had played no part in making. Whether the colleges made policy

or the monarch and his or her closest servitors did so, overall co-ordination

was poor. Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) weakened the colleges with her

Statute of Provincial Reforms of 1775 which transferred most of the their

responsibilities to provincial governors. However, the central bureaucracy

3 Throughout the eighteenth century various colleges appeared and then were abolished

according to the needs of the time.

4 Several small departments handling various aspects of a college’s portfolio made up each

college. Moreover, attached to each college was a chancellery which handled adminis-

trative issues.

5 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)

pp. 133–5. However, Hughes adds: ‘If the grand aim of the exercise was to impose order’

and ‘to make Russia better governed’ Peter’s reforms were not very successful.

6 D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 140.

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