Late Imperial Russia and the Economic Origins of Revolution

In 1917, Russia had fallen into chaos. The imperial government of Czar Nicholas II was catapulted from power by a groundswell of popular anger. While World War I undoubtedly played a huge role in causing bitter feelings toward the imperial government, there is one other factor that is sometimes overlooked by historians. Economic development, especially industrialization and agricultural growth, had already begun under the reign of Czar Nicholas II and his imperial predecessors, and was not merely the product of Bolshevik economic reforms (as Lenin would probably have wanted everyone to believe). But what Nicholas apparently did not realize at the time was that Russia’s industrialization and agricultural growth would actually contribute to the discontent that ultimately cost him his throne, and his life.
Obviously Lenin and the Bolsheviks in general would never have wanted to give any kind of credit to their former czar, but like it or not, they probably would not have been able to get a lot of their economic reforms underway to begin with if economic development had not already begun in the late 1800s. Around that time, Russia was attempting to industrialize. It was still very agrarian, with uneducated peasants who had only recently been freed from serfdom in 1861. Even the noble class had it tough. Luckily, things began to improve somewhat under the czar in the early 1900s. By 1914, coal output was 10 times greater than it was 30 years prior. Manufacturing and mining output jumped 6% between 1907 and 1914. Russia was the 4th largest producer of textiles, with Moscow being a critical center for textile factories, and they were making enough cotton to cut back on importing American cotton. Oil, paper, copper and mineral production was increasing, thanks in part to one of the czar’s advisors, Sergei Witte, who built up the Donets Basin into a mining center. Witte had the support of Nicholas II with industrial projects (Service, p. 4). He encouraged foreign investment in the Russian economy, and stabilized the ruble by making it into a convertible currency based on the gold standard in 1897. For a time, foreign investment in Russia was greater than domestic investment (Rogger, p. 103)! Perhaps the most important economic achievement of the czars was the Trans Siberian Railroad, approved by Czar Alexander II and overseen by Sergei Witte. It had cost 1.5 billion rubles, an expense second only to Russia’s involvement in World War I. This was a huge breakthrough in Russian history, because it enabled more rapid transfer of goods, not to mention people, from one part of the empire to another. Railway growth was especially rapid during the 1890s, thanks in part to government encouragement of private railway enterprise, and railway mileage doubled between 1889 and 1902 (Seton-Watson, p. 116). It also helped develop Siberia to a certain extent. Despite all of this progress, there was a problem. Industrial development was, in general, centralized in certain areas to the extent that it became lopsided. This was actually an unintended side effect of the emancipation of the serfs. While it is tempting to think of the serfs as being mostly agrarian farmers, plenty of serfs also worked in mines. The conditions in these mines were usually so poor that once the serfs had the option to finally go elsewhere, they did just that. The metal industry in the Urals suffered greatly in the 1860s, with one district in the area losing almost 30% of its workers as they left for other places (Seton-Watson, p. 115). Of course, this emigration helped build up other industrial centers, where the peasants now flocked to, but this was probably not a good thing from a social perspective. With the new industrial workers gathered in certain areas, it became easier for them to communicate their growing grievances with one another, rather than if they had been spread far apart and isolated.
While Nicholas II focused a lot on industrialization, agricultural progress was somewhat slow and uneven. Despite periodic famines (which would continue to plague Russia even after the revolution), Russians began to diversify their crops and expand the amount of cultivated land. By 1913, Russia’s grain production per capita jumped a stunning 35% compared to 1890 (Service, p. 5). Agricultural concerns would become a focus later on, but until the early 1900s, most emphasis was placed on industry.
Unfortunately, working conditions in imperial Russia were abysmal, and heavy state spending on industrial projects (and war) did not translate into an allocation of a lot of money to actually improve labor conditions. The workers labored for 15 hours a day, 6 days a week, lived in unsanitary barracks and usually had to sleep in the same beds. Not surprisingly, diseases such as syphilis were widespread. Workers could not form trade unions, collectively bargain or legally strike. Managers could be extremely harsh, and severe injuries due to factory equipment (and the managers themselves!) were not unheard of. Corporal punishment could be used against peasants until 1904. Wages were still poor, especially in the wake of increased government spending under Witte’s reforms. In 1882 the imperial government had originally tried to help out a little bit by prohibiting children under the age of 12 from working, as well as women during the night. The imperial government set up inspectors to try to enforce these directives with a factory inspectorate, but this agency was woefully ineffective. The men in this agency were known to be quite dedicated to exposing foul conditions, but the imperial government refused to let them publish the results of their findings (Rogger, p. 110). Eventually, the imperial government decided that these inspectors were too sympathetic to the industrial workers and replaced them with hard-line inspectors in 1897. These new ones warned factory workers to inform them if and when a strike was planned, and that any kind of strike would not be tolerated. Local authorities were told by the Ministry of the Interior to use whatever means necessary, including extrajudicial methods, to stop strikes. A special police apparatus was set up near many industrial centers to go after strikers at the first sign of trouble (Rogger, p. 111). This step backward infuriated many of the industrial workers. As far as the imperial government was concerned, the fact that there were even inspectors to begin with showed how much the imperial regime cared about its people, so there was even less reason to tolerate strikes. Large-scale industries had almost 2.4 million workers (Davies, p. 40 ), and smaller-scale industries had almost 11 million workers, so the workers were by no means an insignificant minority even though 90% of the country was still agrarian. The industrial classes were growing in numbers.
While it is important to understand that Russians had plenty of non-labor related grievances against the czar (i.e. lack of democracy, lack of press freedom, etc.), the plight of the industrial working classes fueled a crucial strain of the opposition that eventually emerged, namely the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party, which Vladimir Lenin joined. Originally, this party did poorly in Russia. It had its origins in independent workers groups, including the Moscow-based Union of Workers in 1894 and the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg in 1895. It was officially formed in 1898 by nine delegates from these and other workers organizations (Rogger, p. 114), although none of the organizers of these delegates were actually workers, including Lenin! Although he and other members of the party could not ignore the fact that most of Russia was still agrarian, they still maintained that the industrial classes would promote a revolution against the imperial government. Personally, Lenin doubted that any such revolt would happen during his lifetime, an understandable sentiment given the fact that the industrial classes were still a minority in the early 1900s and the fact that the party itself had been infiltrated and driven further underground or into exile by the imperial government within less than a year of its founding. Still, if Russia had never tried to industrialize to begin with, then the party would not have had that leg to stand on in the first place! The party itself was internally divided, and split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the former being more moderate and the latter being more radical. Despite being dealt serious blows by the imperial government, the Social Democratic Party was not dead, and Lenin would not be silent. While a divided and weakened opposition party might have appeared to be the czar’s dream come true, as long as the working classes were left without any kind of voice, they would be much more inclined to see Lenin’s voice as their own.
One of the czarist government’s top okhrana (the czar’s intelligence organization) officials, Sergei V. Zubatov, had an interesting idea. He shrewdly decided to allow the creation of okhrana-controlled labor unions for workers starting in 1901, which allowed them to decry their working conditions while not letting the desire for labor changes morph into a desire for political change. Some revolutionaries and dissidents referred to this practice as police socialism (Clowes, p. 144), or perhaps more derisively as zubatovshchina after Zubatov himself. This strategy failed to split up or to contain workers’ anger, and industrial entrepreneurs in particular felt that their own needs were not being addressed. The unions began to be seen as shams. Zubatov saw the handwriting on the wall and tried to persuade the imperial government to actually make some labor reforms, but to no avail. Strikes erupted in 1903, and Zubatov was demoted. His unions were disbanded, but the government made a critical mistake at this time. It failed to ensure that the okhrana’s former collaborators within these unions would actually remain loyal afterward. This problem would emerge later on. In the meantime, there were industrial groups prior to Zubatov’s experimental unions, so his idea was not totally unprecedented. Groups of mine owners began convening in annual meetings as early as 1874, and a Permanent Consultative Office of Iron Industrialists was formed in 1887 to represent factories all over Russia. An equivalent group for oil producers emerged around the same time (Clowes, p. 118). There were a few reasons why these groups did not work. First and most important was the fact that the representatives at these groups were all industrial owners, not workers, and were thus not very well inclined to take workers’ concerns into great consideration. Also, there were not a large number of these groups, especially when compared to the soviets that would later form. Another problem was that these groups tended to be dominated by large companies and firms, which could direct proceedings as they saw fit. Finally, the imperial Ministry of Finance was given the authority to send its own representatives to attend the meetings. There was no incentive for dissent from the perspective of the industrial owners, who were doing pretty well for themselves, nor did anyone dare criticize the czar in front of his representatives at these congresses!
The effects of a lack of any substantive channel of dissent would dramatically appear in 1905. Foreign policy blunders and a bad harvest led to a strike in January of 1905 in St. Petersburg. This touched off more unrest, and in September one of the okhrana’s collaborators in the unions, Fr. Georgiy Gapon, organized a peaceful march in St. Petersburg in September, but it was not an anti-czar march. The okhrana apparently did not have as much loyalty among its informants as it had thought! Many Russians still tended to still see the czar as benevolent and thought that he would help them if only he knew how tough things were. Unfortunately, police opened fire on the crowd, enraging the country and turning them against Nicholas II. “Bloody Sunday” became infamous, along with the now “Bloody Nicholas.” Nicholas himself was not happy with what his security forces did, but it was too late. Chaos broke out. By October there was a general strike (even ballerinas joined in!) throughout the empire. Soviets, or councils to oversee the strikes, began to form. Without a voice anywhere else, the people took to the streets. This forced the czar to cave in at last and issue the October Manifesto, allowing the creation of the State Duma of the Russian Empire. This succeeded in calming things down temporarily and splitting the opposition. It also had the added benefit of bringing opposition parties out into the open, where they could be watched more easily. If Nicholas had done this before the October revolt, he might have been able to coax more of the opposition to the surface where he could either strangle it or water it down before it snowballed into the revolt.
Nicholas appointed Pyotor Stolypin as his prime minister to calm Russia down in the wake of the 1905 unrest, and Stolypin decided to concentrate reforms on agriculture rather than industry. He believed that if he focused on making the farmers happy, that he could eliminate most of the dissent. Remember that the strong focus on industrialization of the late 1800s did not leave as much room for focusing on improving the agricultural sector. The former serfs on the farms were often laboring under difficult conditions. The emancipation edict in 1861 did not discharge the serfs from their debts, and many serfs felt that they should not have to pay for land that belonged to them to begin with (Lincoln, p. 88). The government required the peasant communities to hand over “redemption payments” over the next 49 years. Stolypin’s reforms included reorganizing the farming system to allow farmers more mobility, as well as the development of farmers’ cooperatives and private ownership for individual peasants of their land. He worked to get rid of the mir system of collective ownership of land by village elders, and transferred ownership to single families in the countryside. He also worked to communicate new methods of land augmentation to the peasants, and wanted to provide more agricultural education to the farmers. He provided credit lines to the peasants to give them more purchasing power. Stolypin’s reforms from 1906 to 1914 succeeded in pacifying the countryside.
While the countryside was doing marginally well as a result of the reforms (although many farmers were still suffering), the cities, where most of the industrial workers were centered, remained restless. Little had been done to help the industrial classes, and in 1912 police shot at a group of striking gold miners in Siberia. Sympathetic demonstrations burst forth, and another wave of anger from the industrial sector crested in St. Petersburg in 1914. Yet, in a strange twist of fate, the opposition was suddenly albeit briefly neutralized when World War I broke out. Pro-czar fervor swept throughout the country. Unfortunately for Nicholas, this sudden spike in support was followed by a much sharper drop. The war went badly, the loyalty of his German czarina was in question (although in reality she didn’t care much for her German cousin Wilhelm) and the economy began to spiral out of control. Russia was already in serious debt in the early 1900s thanks to all of the state’s spending on industrial projects. The country had a huge national debt, and once World War I erupted, the country was forced to print more money, causing inflation. Transportation failures led to food shortages in the cities. A 1905-style revolt erupted in 1917, but because most of the czar’s troops (plus the czar himself) were fighting the Germans, there was not a lot that could be done to stop it. By the time Nicholas tried to head back to St Petersburg, it was too late. The rest is, as they say, history.
At one point after the 1905 revolution, Stolypin made a shrewd and surprisingly progressive insight. He warned that if Russia did not get serious about rectifying its economic and political problems that the imperial government could crumble due to an “endless cycle of contradictions that characterize our times.” (Wcislo, p. 242) Despite being a defender of the monarchy, he was right. One of imperial Russia’s greatest internal contradictions was the way in which its economy developed. In the late 1800s industrial growth skyrocketed but without as much emphasis on agriculture. This compelled Stolypin to focus on farmers once he was appointed as prime minister, and although he succeeded in ameliorating the agrarian peasants, the imperial government did not do enough to provide the industrial workers with an effective voice at the same time. They either had the police control the unions or the unions consisted of no more than corporate bosses and imperial representatives. Marxist parties like the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks provided a voice that no one else would, and unfortunately for the czar, it was a radical voice. The other emerging parties from the 1905 revolt, such as the Kadets, tended to focus more on political reforms and the needs of landowners, and not the economic concerns of the workers (Clowes, p. 34). Stolypin warned that he needed peace in order to make more reforms. If his reforms were to have concentrated more on giving the industrial sector a greater say, then he might have succeeded in saving the monarchy, or at least delaying its collapse.
A fundamental problem was thus that imperial Russia put too much emphasis on one part of its economy (industry) without giving it an effective voice and then had to hurry to help the other part (agriculture) catch up without solving all of the industrial workers’ problems! And in the meantime, the workers turned to the radical ideas of people like Lenin who gave them the only strong voice available. Perhaps Russia wanted too much too quickly. Maybe the czar should have tried to focus equal amounts of money and attention on both the industrial and agricultural sectors of the economy, and allow a slow but steady development. Getting involved in World War I was the straw the broke the camel’s back, but Russia’s uneven economic development without any real political voice for the people that needed one ultimately contributed a great deal to the fall of the Romanov dynasty.

Bibliography

Clowes, Edith W., et. al. Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton University Press, 1991.

Davies, R. W., ed. From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Rogger, Hans. Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881-1917. New York: Longman Group Limited, 1983.

Service, Robert. A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Decline of Imperial Russia 1855-1914. Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1952.

Wcislo, Francis William. Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914. Princeton University Press, 1990.

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