Government Policies and the Industrialization of Russia

Abstract

If we were to reconstruct a blueprint of the Russian government's goals and priorities for industrial development in the late nineteenth century, it would include the following: (1) development of a network of internal transportation, (2) stabilization of the ruble in foreign exchanges through convertibility and the buildingup of an export surplus as a prerequisite for enabling the Russian government to borrow abroad, and (3) stimulation of the development of new industries in Russia and their protection in their “infancy.” Given the relative success of Russia's industrialization during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and the important role that the government played in this effort, there is no justification for outright rejection or condemnation of Russian government economic policies. There were, however, serious shortcomings in particular government policies, and the presumed effects that they had upon the industrialization process were not always desirable. This essay is a modest attempt to reexamine Russian government policies on the assumption that the industrialization of Russia was a continuing goal of the state policies beginning with the 1880's and one of relatively high priority. The implication of the analysis is that if some of the defects of the state's policies had been avoided, the process of industrialization in Russia would have proceeded at least at as fast a pace and the economic costs to Russian society would probably have been smaller.

Political Legitimacy and Technology Adoption

“…Even Gerschenkron (1962, 19, italics ours) Gerschenkron (1962, 125) also suggests that by the 1890s, "the fear of industrialization, so much in evidence in the 1860s, was gone." While the extension of the rail system beginning in the 1860s was encouraged primarily as a means of increasing troop mobility and war mobilization (Gerschenkron 1965;Kahan 1967), 27 pro-industrial policies were largely opposed until the 1880s, decades after the end of the Crimean War. Numerous requests to the bureaucracy proposed by the powerful Russian Industrial Society in the late 1860s and 1870…”

The rural/urban wage gap in the industrialisation of Russia, 1884-1910

“… See Gregory and Sailors (1976) for the importance of Gerschenkron's writing in a political frame; see alsoBarkai (1973),Goldsmith (1961) andKahan (1967).…”

An attempt to analyze the development of capitalism in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the perspective of the revolutionary period

“…Russia under the influence external and internal political processes DISCUSSION PLATFORM banks. They established absolute dominance in the economy of the country, taking over the whole branches of Russian industry 25 . Monopolies concentrated over 80 % of production of certain products in their hands (syndicates 'Prodamet', 'Med', 'Prodvagon') 26 .…”

“…The emphasis was placed on how good life was in Tsarist Russia, as well as on industrial achievements of Russia at the time 34 . A popu- 25 Bovykin V. century. Peasants as an economic class within the framework of feudal formation turned into enslaved communities of purely social nature.…”