The remarkable difference in size between the urban professional and working classes and the rural peasants showed – its slow economic development. The low numbers of urban workers was a sign that Russia had not achieved the major industrial growth that had taken place in the nineteenth century in such countries as Germany, Britain and the USA.
This is not to say that Russia was entirely without industry. The Urals region produced considerable amounts of iron,and the chief western cities, Moscow and St Petersburg, had extensive textile factories. Most villages had a smelting works, which enabled them to produce iron goods, and most peasant homes engaged in some form of cottage industry, producing wooden, flaxen or woollen goods to supplement their income from farming.
However, these activities were all relatively small scale. The sheer size of Russia and its undeveloped transport system had limited the chances for industrial expansion. A further restriction had been the absence of an effective banking system. Russia found it hard to raise capital on a large scale.
All Images: Pexels.com
It had not yet mastered the art of successful borrowing and investment, techniques that help to explain why expansion had been so rapid in western countries. Russia’s financial sluggishness had discouraged the rise of entrepreneurialism.
Russia’s unenterprising industrial system was matched by its inefficient pattern of agriculture. Even though four-fifths of the population were peasants, a thriving agrarian economy had failed to develop. Indeed, the land in Russia was a source of national weakness rather than strength. Not all the empire’s vast acres were good farming country. Much of Russia lay too far north to enjoy a climate or a soil suitable for crop growing or cattle rearing. Arable farming was restricted mainly to the Black Earth region, the area of European Russia stretching from the Ukraine to Kazakhstan.
The great number of peasants in the population added to the problem. There was simply not enough fertile land to go round. Under the terms of the Emancipation Decree of 1861, the ex-serfs were entitled to buy land, but they invariably found the price too high.
This was caused both by a shortage of suitable farming territory and by the government’s taxation of land sales, imposed in order to raise the revenue needed to compensate the landowners for the losses caused by emancipation. The only way the peasants could raise the money to buy land was by borrowing from a special fund provided by the government. Consequently, those peasants who did manage to purchase property found themselves burdened with large mortgage repayments that would take them and their families’ generations to repay.
Among Russia’s governing class, which was drawn from less than one per cent of the population, there was a deeply ingrained prejudice against granting rights to the mass of the people.
Over 80 per cent of the population were peasants. They were predominantly illiterate and uneducated. The existence in the second half of the nineteenth century of an uneducated peasantry, suspicious of change, and living with large debts and in great poverty, pointed to the social, political and economic backwardness of Imperial Russia.
Various attempts to educate the peasants had been made in the past, but such efforts had been undermined by the fear among the ruling class that any improvement in the conditions of ‘the masses’ might threaten their own privileges. It was commonplace for officials in Russia to speak of the ‘safe ignorance’ of the population, implying that any attempt to raise the educational standards of the masses would prove highly dangerous, socially and politically.
Economic policies:
In spite of all the bitterness created by these policies, the period was one of rapid economic expansion. For a time it seemed that Russia might become a modern industrial nation. This was largely due to the work of two outstanding ministers – Count Sergei Witte, who served during the early part of Nicholas Il’s reign, and Peter Stolypin, who held office during the middle years.
In the face of resistance from the very regime they were trying to serve, Witte and Stolypin sought to modernise Russia. Russia was enjoying real economic growth. The figure below shows its industrial output compared with other European countries. However, one has to be cautious in interpreting the data. Given its backwardness, Russia was starting from a much lower level of production. For example, although its 96.8 per cent growth looks to be over twice that of Britain’s, it was playing catch-up and had a long way to go.
The Russian government wanted factories so that Russia could become rich and powerful like Britain, USA and Germany. Industry was also needed to strengthen Russia’s ability to defend herself. Russia’s industrial backwardness had contributed to her defeat by Britain and France in the Crimean War (1854-56). In the period after 1900, European countries began an arms race, relying on their defense industries. The only way for Russia to survive this threat seemed to be to make as many weapons as her enemies. This meant industrialization as quickly as possible at any cost. The scale of industrial expansion in Russia during this period was remarkable.