A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

12 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism

The city of St. Petersburg exemplified the transformation of Russia in the decades after the emancipation of the serfs. As the nineteenth century progressed, it changed from an administrative capital of government buildings and aristocratic residences with a seaport into a major industrial center served by railroads as well as the ever-expanding port and the older canal system.

Though built as a seaport on the Baltic, the shape of the older St. Petersburg was created by the Winter Palace and the ring of military and government buildings around it. Most of these were classical in style, and three or four-stories high at most. Peter had wanted to concentrate the actual government on the north side of the Neva River, on Vasil’ev Island, but the site was too remote in the absence of permanent bridges, and in any case the government needed to be near the center of power, the tsar. Thus the Winter Palace, on the south side of the river and near the western end of Nevskii Prospekt, the main street, quickly became the center of the city. The General Staff of the army and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were right across the Palace Square, the Ministry of Finance nearby, as well as the Senate, the Council of State, and other major offices. Only the expanded Ministry of the Interior came to occupy new buildings on the Fontanka River farther to the south. Trade and commerce, until mid-century, were concentrated along Nevskii Prospekt and on Vasil’ev Island, the latter home to the city’s large German and foreign merchant population.

The transformation of the city began to speed up after the Crimean War, as railroad building and new industries began to change the landscape. In these years St. Petersburg’s port was a great asset, for much of the equipment and raw materials for the new industries came from abroad. The great industrial boom of the 1890s changed all that, as Russia began to rely more on internal resources. Metallurgy and machine building became the city’s biggest industries. Located primarily on the outskirts, the huge factories with smoking chimneys replaced the suburban villas, forests, and villages of former times. The port turned into a giant ship-building yard. Factories with newer technology, such as the electric industries, were built in the center of the town, so that the city never acquired the radical social segregation characteristic of Western cities at the time. The industrial boom also brought a tremendous expansion in banking and finance, centered still on Nevskii Prospekt and the adjoining streets.

The economic boom changed the city in other ways. The population doubled between the 1890s and 1914, from about a million to around two million. Most of these new residents were workmen, living in barracks near the main factories, often without their families who remained back in their native villages. At the other end of the social scale, the newly rich bankers and railroad kings bought or built grand mansions on the river near the center of town. Many of the great aristocrats were heavily invested in the new industries, and their increased wealth showed itself in ever more luxurious residences in and around the city. The boom also brought a new middle class into being, employees of the new businesses, engineers and technicians, and the many schoolteachers, doctors, and retailers who served them. The burgeoning population and its needs brought a boom in construction, especially along the central streets and on the northern edge of the city. The new buildings displayed the architectural fads of the time, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque, and often the Russian versions of art nouveau. The strictly classical St. Petersburg was becoming a much more eclectic city, but the classical core remained. Builders were not allowed to build higher than the Winter Palace, so there were limits to the scope of change. The result was also a city very much less densely built up than Paris or Berlin, even if much of it lacked formal public parks.

Daily life changed, especially after 1900. New department stores sprang up around the city, one off Nevskii Prospekt even built as an investment by the Imperial Corps of Guards Regiments. Farther down the street were the new Singer Sewing Machine building and the Eliseev Delicatessen, with its imported and domestic stocks for the wealthy gourmet. The city sponsored or built telephone service, and new sewer and water systems were financed through loans from foreign banks. In 1907 Westinghouse and Russian investors opened the city’s first electric tram lines, which quickly came to cover most of the city. Electric lights lit up the main streets in the center and more and more gas lights in other parts of town illuminated the winter dark and fog. New bridges across the Neva contributed to the charm of the city’s waterfront but also made communication among its various parts easy for the first time.

The social life of the city was centered on the court. Until the 1890s the court balls and other grand events provided a glittering backdrop to the dramas of life and politics in the capital. The great aristocratic houses were not far behind. They too put on magnificent entertainments, some of them in private theaters in their palaces, like the one in the Yusupov palace, with professional artists. The great imperial theaters, especially the Mariinskii, were another venue for the display of wealth by the old aristocracy and the newly rich as well. For the intelligentsia and the middle classes, the legitimate stage, state financed and private, provided the more “advanced” culture they craved. On the edges of the city where the working people lived were popular theaters, many of them outdoors in the summer, which provided cheap entertainment for the masses. A whole range of restaurants, from the elite establishments off Nevskii Prospekt to the lowest dives on the edge of town, filled the various needs of a variegated population. St. Petersburg was very much the artistic center of Russia. The imperial ballet at the Mariinskii Theater was the darling of the aristocracy, but the opera and stage flourished as well. Most of the new trends in Russian painting, from World of Art to suprematism, came into being in St. Petersburg, and the major writers from the 1890s onward were almost all based in the city.

For all its artistic glory, St. Petersburg remained quintessentially a center of political power. After 1905 the main newspapers of the legal political parties were published in St. Petersburg, reporting on the government as well as the new Duma. The Duma occupied the old palace of Catherine’s favorite Potemkin, to the east of the main center of power. Politics remained the principal concern of the tsar, and his presence in the city was essential to the functioning of the state. In actual fact Nicholas II spent relatively little time in the city itself, preferring a quieter life at nearby Tsarskoe Selo or Peterhof, or even his Crimean estates. He rarely attended the theater, restricting his social events to court balls and a few other crucial ceremonies, a practice that did not win the approval of the aristocracy. The tsar and his advisors were nervous about public appearances in the face of the persistent terror campaign waged by the populist revolutionaries, and Nicholas personally preferred a simple life with his family. These were understandable decisions, but they contributed to the drift and instability of power at a time of rapid social and political change. The state had been central to Russian development for centuries, and suddenly the ship seemed to have no pilot.

In no area did the policies of the Russian state have more unintended consequences than in economic and social development. The reformers of the 1860s, as well as count Sergei Witte a generation later, tried to encourage industrial capitalism while conserving as much of the existing social structure as possible. The government sponsored railroad building throughout the period, both private and state projects, helping to secure loans from abroad and awarding lucrative contracts to Russian businessmen. It constructed the tariff system to favor railroad building and then later in the century moved to a more protectionist system to encourage Russian industry. The maintenance of the landed gentry and the peasant community remained a basic goal, however, even at the expense of industrial development. The maintenance of the peasant community restricted the movement of peasants out of the village to join the industrial labor force, but it could not prevent it. The survival of gentry landholding, under siege from the new economic forces, was also a government goal. Even Prime Minister Stolypin’s attempt to loosen up the village community after 1907 was a gradualist program designed to strengthen the gentry, not undermine it. Ultimately, however, the state could only influence, not direct, the evolution of Russian society. Factories sprung up, banks and other financial and commercial institutions grew, even when government rules hindered them. State-sponsored development programs like railroad building created whole new towns and new industries that the increasingly archaic state administration could not direct in the ways that policy demanded. Modern cities with newspapers and tram lines, restaurants and amateur cultural institutions created forms of life unknown in the older Russia but essentially the same as those in Western Europe and America. Whatever the government did, Russia was becoming modern, slowly but relentlessly.

The driving force in the changes to Russian society was industrialization. At the end of the Crimean War Russia was not without industry, for the textile industry in Central Russia – in Moscow and surrounding towns – was flourishing and working with mostly modern equipment, steam-driven looms, and other machinery. At the head of that industry were a whole series of native businessmen, mostly of peasant origin and many of them Old Believers in religion. Some families from the Old Believer communities, including the Morozovs, Riabushinskiis, and Guchkovs, built factories in Moscow and other towns in the surrounding areas. Their faithful adherence to the inward-looking and occasionally xenophobic variants of Old Belief did not prevent them from buying English and German machinery and hiring foreigners to run it and teach their workmen. The founders of all these great business dynasties had moved from the peasantry or small-scale trading to owning factories and even banks by the 1840s, and they set their children – sons and daughters alike – to master foreign languages and learn about the modern world, including its new technology. If the Old Believers were perhaps the richest of the Moscow industrialists and bankers, Orthodox businessmen flourished as well, such as the Tretyakovs, who rose from the ranks of provincial shopkeepers to own textile factories in Moscow, Kostroma, and elsewhere. In Petersburg the businessmen were more cosmopolitan, for alongside Russians (mostly Orthodox) were Germans, Englishmen, Swedes like the Nobel family, and the Jewish banker Baron Horace Ginzburg. Businessmen in St. Petersburg concentrated less on textiles and more on metallurgy and new technology as well as finance and a flourishing import-export trade. Other centers quickly emerged in the south, the Baltic provinces, and Poland. In Poland most of the bankers and manufacturers were German or Jewish, while in southern Russia the Jewish Poliakov brothers, railroad kings and eventually bankers, made deals with Russian and Polish noblemen in the sugar beet business. In the south the Welshman John Hughes founded Iuzovka, the first major metallurgical center in the Don River Basin, the coal and iron area that came to be known as the Donbass. Today it is Donetsk in the Ukraine.

In the first years after emancipation, however, the textile industry was by far the most successful. The Moscow textile manufacturers were a colorful group, with Old Believers and Orthodox rubbing shoulders with noblemen-turned entrepreneurs. Many of them ran their factories with marked paternalism, building cheap housing, places for entertainment, and schools. Timofei Morozov was one of these, an Old Believer who ran his business largely on his own and with an iron hand. His factory was noted for the high quality of its products, made with English machinery and (until the end of the century) imported cotton. He also provided medical facilities and various forms of welfare for his workers, as well as the usual housing and entertainment. He struggled tirelessly with working class drinking habits, both from religious conviction and the realization that drunk or hung over workers could not perform high quality work for him. Morozov remained very much in the old world, for his cultural patronage went to the history and the culture of Russia before Peter. He also had many connections among the Slavophiles, whose publications were heavily subsidized by the Moscow businessmen. None of this did him any good when the market for textiles contracted suddenly early in the 1880s: he responded by cutting wages and demanding more from his workers. They responded with riot and destruction in January 1885 – one of the first major strikes in Russian history. The age of paternalism was passing, though his son Savva tried to keep it going for another twenty years. Eventually management of the firm, like so many others, passed to engineers and the middle level of management, replacing the personal style of the older businessmen.

Important as the textile industry was, it relied on imported equipment and did not solve the overall problem of Russian economic development. The results of the Crimean War made it abundantly clear to the government that something had to be done. As the state moved toward emancipation of the peasantry, it simultaneously moved to encourage a massive program of railroad building. Railroads were the crucial infrastructure of the nineteenth century, providing the freight services essential to industrialization. In a country with Russia’s vast distances and natural resources spread over thousands of miles, they were even more necessary. Without railroads Russia could not enter the modern age. The center of the efforts to build railroads was the Ministry of Finance, especially in the tenure of Mikhail Reutern (1862–1877), a Baltic German nobleman who had worked under Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich. Reutern had a difficult problem, for the Crimean War had left the treasury depleted, and the emancipation settlement demanded even more expenditures. Though a principled supporter of private industry, he realized that Russia lacked capital. Reutern and most of the progressives in the government were convinced that railroads were vital, and that they could be built by private initiative, given an adequate supply of capital. Reutern’s predecessors had turned to the French Credit Mobilier bank, which formed a large company to build Russian railroads. This attempt proved an expensive failure, and only after 1866 did the real boom begin, this time with Russian financing at the center of the operations. The Russian treasury continued to provide guarantees and sometimes direct subsidies often kept secret from the public, but most of the initiative and capital was private.

The private investors not surprisingly came from the ranks of businessmen with good government contacts and often from the ranks of government officials. Some, like P. G. von Derviz and K. F. von Meck, were Russian-German officials who left government service to build railroads. Others had gotten their starts in farming the state vodka monopoly. The vodka monopoly had produced huge fortunes, and provided much of the private capital for investment, as well as the crucial government contacts.

The great “railroad king” of the era, Samuel Poliakov, had started out working in the vodka monopoly around his native town of Orsha in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. He came into contact through that activity with Count I. M. Tolstoi, briefly the Minister of the Post and the Telegraph. Poliakov quickly abandoned the vodka business to become a construction contractor, working on a variety of railroad projects with the patronage of Tolstoi. By the 1870s he was famous throughout Russia for the speed and efficiency (if not always the quality) of his work, landing lucrative contracts with the army during the Russo-Turkish War. The Jewish Poliakov had plenty of Christian rivals as well as business partners, and the partners were Moscow textile manufacturers and bankers and a variety of aristocratic grandees. Railroad building necessarily involved collaboration between business and government, and thus every railroad builder had his patrons and paid agents throughout the administration. As in other countries engaged in rapid railroad construction (France and the United States, for example) the age’s greatest technical marvel was also the most powerful engine of corruption. To complicate matters, foreign capital remained crucial, and the treasury stepped in with guarantees to reassure the French, German, and Belgian investors. Though the state guaranteed and regulated virtually all of the rail companies, until the 1890s most Russian railroads remained in private hands.

Railroads required great amounts of iron, steel, and coal, and Russia had plenty of iron ore and coal, but few facilities to process them. The Urals iron industry was old-fashioned – technically backward – and just too small to supply Russian needs. The government thus adopted a tariff policy that allowed the importation of rails, rolling stock, and industrial materials like scrap metal at low tariffs. It encouraged Russian metal working plants, like the Putilov factory in St. Petersburg, to produce rails and other equipment with imported scrap metal and pig iron. By the 1890s Russia was moving toward an industrial society.

Engineering was an important part of that development. Russia, however, lacked modern engineering schools. The only institution of that sort was the Mining Institute that dated from the time of Catherine the Great. Such schools stood under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance, the principal state agency behind economic development from the Crimean War onward, and it quickly moved to encourage engineering education. The St. Petersburg Technological Institute, founded in 1828 as a trade school and named for tsar Nicholas I, reorganized itself in the 1860s under rector Ilya Tchaikovskii (the composer’s father) into a thoroughly modern engineering school. It was joined by similar schools in Riga (1862) and Khar’kov (1885). Older trade schools in Moscow were reorganized on the St. Petersburg model. The end of the century saw another new wave of foundations. The Warsaw and Kiev Polytechnical Institutes came in 1898, followed by another school in Siberian Tomsk in 1900. In St. Petersburg the Technological Institute had concentrated on mechanical and chemical engineering and did not address many emerging engineering specialties that had come to play increasing roles in the industrial age. The young Abram Ioffe, the future builder of Soviet physics, found its physics department small and antiquated. In 1899 the minister of finance Sergei Witte and the now world famous chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev organized yet another new institution, the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Here the students could specialize in electronics, shipbuilding, metallurgy, physics, or even economics. Ioffe, after more training in Germany, moved to the new institute, a move fraught with major significance in later years. Russia was beginning to train more and more engineers alongside the foreigners heretofore so prominent in building Russia’s railroads, bridges, and factories.

Russian agriculture did not keep pace with industrialization. The Emancipation Statute burdened the peasantry with redemption payments, but also conserved the village structure that had existed under serfdom. The now free peasants did not own their land, which remained the property of the community. To leave the village, the peasant had to have the permission of that community, which in practice meant the village elders. The village was responsible for the redemption payments and taxes, not the individual peasant. Better-off peasants could and did own or rent land outside the village allotments, but the great mass of the peasantry survived on the village land alone, still occasionally redistributed as families grew or died out.

Figure 11. Russian Peasant Girls around 1900.

Russian peasant farms were much less productive than European and even less than American. Chemical fertilizer was unknown, natural fertilizer was inadequate, and machinery was a rarity confined to gentry estates. The peasantry was too poor and too burdened with the redemption payments and rent to accumulate the resources that would be necessary to modernize their farms, and the nobility, except for the great aristocracy, also was unable to move beyond the traditional routine. Only in a few favored areas, like the Ukraine and the south, did the presence of commercial crops like sugar beets and nearby export ports for grain allow more modern agriculture to develop. There machinery appeared on a few great estates together with more modern methods of crop rotation. In most of Russia the village community encouraged the maintenance of routine agriculture, and most of the crops stayed in the village to feed the peasants. Still the growing towns and railroad network provided a much greater market than existed before. In central and northern Russia the peasants turned to dairy farming and more profitable grains like oats to supply the new and growing markets. The Transsiberian Railroad turned the Siberian peasantry toward massive exports of butter and other dairy products to European Russia, and by 1914 the Siberian peasantry was so prosperous that American companies had opened dozens of stores in the region to sell agricultural machinery, something unimaginable west of the Urals. Market gardening spread around the big cities, and even remote regions eventually were pulled into the seemingly unlimited export market for grain. In these areas a thin layer of better-off peasants emerged with better ties to the market and slightly more modern practices, and were quickly dubbed kulaks (kulak meaning “fist”) by their neighbors. The black earth regions of southern Russia, however, potentially the country’s richest land, remained the domain of impoverished peasants working with ancient methods, consuming their own grain, and gazing longingly at the massive gentry estates that surrounded them.

Not surprisingly Russian villages, even the more prosperous ones, lived at a standard unknown for decades in Europe. Peasant houses were still small, usually one-room buildings without a chimney – the smoke went out a hole in the roof or the window – and the livestock shared the space in winter. Several generations shared the same house. Dirt, crowding, and simple ignorance were the basis of medieval levels of hygiene. Not surprisingly typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, and in some areas even malaria flourished. In areas where many male peasants worked in the cities syphilis was endemic. Smallpox could not be eradicated because the number of trained vaccinators was tiny, and many peasants hid in the forest from the vaccinators, convinced that the vaccination was the mark of Antichrist. In the middle years of the nineteenth century child mortality was at forty percent, though it declined noticeably by 1914. Though homespun cloth increasingly gave way to industrially produced fabrics, clothing remained homemade and most peasants still wore the traditional shoes made of birch bark. Alcoholism and heavy drinking were the norm: on Sundays in many villages the township courts did not meet because the male population was too drunk for serious deliberations. Husbands routinely beat their wives. The traditional values, centering on religion and folk wisdom were unchallenged, and religion still meant only the Sunday liturgy, which was rarely supplemented by a brief homily from the priest. Little could change with the great majority of peasants being illiterate. Only around 1900 did the slow growth of rural education begin to have an effect, as the younger generation in the villages came to be literate in larger numbers. Small rural libraries came into existence, and soon acquired a noticeable readership. The zemstvos put scarce resources into health care as well as education, and by 1914 vaccination was beginning to make a modest dent in the high levels of disease and mortality.

The greatest change to peasant society was the enormous increase in migration out of the villages, both permanent and temporary. The factories of St. Petersburg and the Moscow region drew more and more workers, both men and women (many textile workers were women). The rapid expansion of the railroad and of the cities, large and small, meant a huge demand for construction workers and other seasonal laborers, and many areas of rural Russia by 1900 were virtual “women’s kingdoms” for much of the year, as the men went north for the factories and construction and south to work on the great estates. Though grain production per capita rose slowly after 1861, it was not enough to prevent periodic famines, like the catastrophic events of 1891. Official encouragement of grain exports did not help. The peasantry remained poor and convinced that its poverty was the result of the unequal distribution of land. Though noble landholding fell slowly but relentlessly after emancipation, by 1913 roughly half of the land still remained in the hands of a few tens of thousands of noble families. The other half was the property – burdened by redemption payments – of some 120 million peasants.

THE LAST DECADES

The 1890s witnessed an economic boom that went far to transform Russian industry, if not the whole of Russia. For the first time heavy industry began to catch up to textiles and other light industries. The Donbass came into its own as a major coal and steel area, while St. Petersburg acquired more and more plants that serviced a modern economy. This was the great age of metal technology, not just in Russia but throughout the world, and the St. Petersburg metal working plants were able to produce most of the innumerable metal parts that made up railroad engines and bicycles, samovars, and wood stoves. Newer technologies were mainly represented by branches of European or American companies, like the German Siemens-Halske electric plant that produced electric motors for the Russian market. The Nobel petroleum interests, producing kerosene from Baku oil, and the Nobel diesel engine factory in St. Petersburg, were other examples. In the traditional industries and banking, Russian entrepreneurs predominated, though the colorful pioneers of the 1860s were dying off and their replacements were more impersonal syndicates and trusts. Some of their sons continued in business, others became art patrons, and yet others gambled away their inheritance in Monte Carlo.

The boom of the 1890s was the product of the business cycle not government policy, but the Ministry of Finance under count Witte certainly helped it along. Witte was a commanding figure in the government, more far-sighted than his colleagues and energetic to a fault. He inherited a new protectionist tariff from his predecessor, and enforced it rigorously to the satisfaction of Russian businessmen. In 1897 he put Russia on the gold standard, a move that enormously strengthened its international economic position. At the same time Witte was not an advocate of unlimited free enterprise: in his tenure in office the government took over most of the private railroads, and indeed his greatest accomplishment was the state’s construction of the Transsiberian railroad, already begun in 1891. Witte’s contribution was to propose a comprehensive plan for the line, taking into account the whole region and the problems of supply and construction, with the result that the tsar quickly approved his plan. By 1905 it was largely complete, though with single track only on certain segments and one flaw that almost proved fatal: Witte ran the line through Manchuria rather than inside the Russian border and in doing so helped provoke Japan to attack in 1904.

In 1900 Russia experienced its first major recession after the industrial boom. Primarily a stock market crash and financial crisis, it affected the metal and coal complex more than any other, and the response of the industry (with government support) was to form syndicates and trusts to regulate production. The French investors who figured heavily in this sector of the Russian economy supported this syndication of the industry as well. Light industries, textiles, food and drink, and other consumer-oriented businesses were much less affected by the recession and continued to grow. The 1905 revolution naturally disrupted production as well as politics, but when the government reestablished its authority in 1907, economic prosperity returned, for the recession came to an end.

Figure 12. The Ilya Muromets, designed by Igor Sikorsky for the Russian air force in 1914, the first successful four-engine aircraft.

The last years before the outbreak of the First World War saw a return to prosperity, and the further modernization of Russian city life. Cities, including the small ones, now housed about fifteen percent of the population. Telephones, motorcars, electric trams, mass media, advertising, and even the beginnings of the cinema turned Russian cities into modern centers. Not just St. Petersburg, but also Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa, and Kiev became largely modern cities. Large apartment blocks arose in place of the older courtyard houses filled with trees that still predominated in smaller centers and the more traditional parts of Moscow. Luxurious and not so luxurious stores opened, with the latest fashions from Paris or Vienna. Restaurants, cafés, and hotels became major social centers, replacing the aristocratic clubs of the past. Automobiles appeared on the streets, and by 1914 there was intense public interest in air flight. Modern social organizations, like the Boy Scouts, took root in the major cities. St. Petersburg, Odessa, parts of Moscow, and some of the industrial cities differed only in degree from their European counterparts.

It was the Russian village, still largely unmodernized, if not unchanging, that made Russia backward by European, if not Asian, standards. After 1907 Prime Minister Stolypin pushed his famous plan to create independent farmers, on the model of European peasants, outside the village communities, and some peasants took advantage of the opportunity. Most of them, however, greeted the scheme with relentless hostility, and the numbers that did opt for independent farms were too small to have any substantial effect by the time that war broke out. A more promising change in rural life was the migration of the peasantry to Siberia and the Kazakh steppe of Central Asia. Here the peasants became more independent farmers on their own, without conflict with pre-existing village communities, though the native Kazakhs were not happy with the loss of some of their prime grazing lands. In Siberia the native population was much smaller and such conflicts were few, so that on the eve of the war, Siberia seemed to be coming into its own for the first time, not just as a place of mines and convict labor but as a land of rural settlement, growing industry, and booming towns. The Urals as well was growing rapidly, just beginning to overcome the legacy of the outdated local iron industry of the past. None of these regional shifts, however, were yet extensive enough to change the overall pattern of Russian society: a sea of backward agriculture dotted with larger or smaller islands of modern industry and society.

The large-scale economic changes of the decades between 1861 and 1914 had all sorts of unexpected or at least unplanned effects. The government stuck to the older system of classification by social estate – gentry, merchants, townspeople, and peasants – but social change rendered it increasingly irrelevant. Millions of peasants actually spent most of their lives as urban workers. Businessmen came from all sorts of backgrounds, not just urban families but noble and peasant families. The intelligentsia had representatives of virtually every social group, if townspeople and nobles (often only technically nobles) predominated. Economic development rearranged the ethnic pattern of the empire. St. Petersburg added a Jewish community to its many other ethnic groups, some 35,000 people (officially) in 1910, the largest community outside the Pale. Masses of peasants and townspeople poured into the new industrial cities in the Donbass – Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and many others – producing a multi-ethnic but Russian-speaking area. The Baku oil fields brought thousands of Armenians and Georgians to the largest city in the Azeri provinces.

The lives of women changed, if not to the same degree at all levels of society. For noblewomen, already with property rights greater than those typical of bourgeois Europe, life went on as before. Noblewomen either supported an aristocratic life and the government or military career of their husbands and fathers by an endless round of parties and social occasions, or they managed the estates for absent spouses. Many noblewomen, however, like their male counterparts, took advantage of the new educational opportunities that emerged in the reform era. For the men those opportunities were more places in universities or new sorts of institutions, like the engineering schools. For women the change was much more radical, because starting in 1858, the government began to radically expand the network of secondary schools for girls as part of the general expansion of education. By the 1880s there were already 50,000 girls in the new schools, and they continued to expand into the twentieth century. Even more radical was the appearance of university education for women. Earlier universities were closed to women, but in 1858–1863 there were experiments with opening them. Conservative fears, prompted in part by the nascent revolutionary movement’s advocacy of women’s liberation, led the government to shut the doors. Into the gap stepped the liberal intelligentsia, which started private university courses for young women in 1869. The lecturers were normally university professors who took on the extra duties, often for free, as part of a general commitment to the liberalization of society. The emancipation of women was a major cause to liberals as well as radicals, as both saw the patriarchal family as a mirror of the political autocracy that ruled the country. Finally in 1876 the government authorized “women’s courses” that offered a university training but no degree, other than in certain professions such as teaching and midwifery, deemed suitable for women. Ever inconsistent, the government left open one loophole: foreign degrees were recognized in the Russian Empire, so a woman who received a degree in one of the few foreign institutions (mainly in Switzerland) that admitted women obtained a degree recognized officially in Russia. Ironically, the Russian women at Swiss universities found that there were no Swiss women in the universities, only Russians, Poles, and some young women from Serbia and other Balkan countries.

The new educational opportunities attracted women from well beyond the nobility. The daughters of the intelligentsia, the clergy, and the middle classes joined them in the women’s courses. The transformation of Russian urban society created new professions that women entered and even dominated. In addition to medical work and teaching at various levels in both town and country, office work on the soon-to-be ubiquitous typewriter created a whole new stratum of employed young women from the middle classes. The telephones of the time required manual connections and switchboards, and women found work here. These trends were particularly marked after about 1900 in the larger cities, and this meant that for the first time Russian women of the middle classes were working outside the home.

In the working classes, the proportion of women in the factories grew from about twenty percent in the 1880s to thirty percent on the eve of the war. Most of them worked in textile or other light industries. The rapid growth of the cities meant a huge demand for domestic labor in the form of cooks and maids, most of them inevitably women. Some of these women were already born in the cities, but like the men, most of them were migrants from the villages. In the villages the traditional family patterns persisted, and in areas where out-migration was not important, the lives of peasant women changed little over the course of time. In the cities women workers were more likely to be illiterate than men, were paid less than male counterparts, and endured the unwanted attentions of male supervisors and foremen. In the end, however, working class women had their revenge: it was the women in the bread lines in March 1917, who began the revolution that brought down the monarchy. Once their men joined, the Romanov dynasty came to an end.

Ultimately the most important social result of the increasing industrialization of Russia was the appearance of the factory working class. At the time of the emancipation there were a bit less than a million miners and factory workers, but by 1913 their number had grown to a bit over 3 million, with perhaps another half a million railroad and other transport workers. These 4 million formed the core of the working class, alongside many more seasonal workers in construction and agriculture and some 1.5 million domestic servants. In a country of some 180 million people these were a small minority, but they were strategically placed. They worked in industries that used increasingly modern equipment, and the elite of the working class, the skilled metal workers, performed tasks of considerable technical complexity, cutting precision parts following blueprints supplied by the engineers. For such skilled workers, some education was necessary, and for all the workers, a mental break with the village routine and adjustment to city life was essential.

City life was in itself a whole new world for young migrants from the countryside. Most of them male and living without families for years, they slept in barracks put up by the factory owners. The barracks were notorious, but the managers put them up precisely because they actually kept workers at the factory, since the fast pace of urbanization meant a permanent shortage of housing. Married workers and some single men who found places outside the barracks ended up renting “corners,” parts of basements partitioned off by clotheslines. Sanitation was minimal, and the crowding in the poorer areas of St. Petersburg made it the tuberculosis capital of Europe. A city nevertheless afforded more than a village. Cheap theaters and musical halls provided entertainment, and in the summer were often outside. For those who wanted to better themselves, there were small popular libraries and reading rooms, and popular literature boomed – the first tabloid newspapers and cheap adventure stories appeared on the streets. Workers were increasingly literate. In 1897, 60 percent of male workers were literate, and 35 percent of women workers were literate, but in St. Petersburg the figures were 74 percent and 40 percent, respectively.¹ At the same time, the absence of mass education for workers beyond the most elementary meant that many had little formal education but sharp intelligence and a thirst for knowledge.

While the work took them out of the village routine, it soon established another routine of its own. Ten and twelve hour days were normal, with only Sunday and a few hours on Saturday off. Pay was low, but the low skill level of most workers meant that Russian labor was expensive to the employer in spite of the low wages. Conditions were probably not radically worse than in the West, but labor unions and strikes were forbidden, so even the most elementary improvements were hard to come by. The 1885 strike at the Morozov textile works near Moscow brought new factory legislation, requiring managers to at least pay the workers on time. On the whole there was little government supervision of the workplace, and ironically the major result of the government’s efforts was the Factory Inspectorate. It had little power to enforce proper conditions, but its voluminous reports and statistics left a treasure for historians.

Those historians would not have been much interested in the Factory Inspectorate’s records had the Russian working class not become the recruiting ground and principal base of the revolutionary movement. The populists of the 1870s had already attempted to recruit workers, but their great hope was the peasantry, not the workers. The emergence of Marxism in the 1880s under the leadership of Georgii Plekhanov changed the focus. For Russia Marxism was an exotic import, a German ideology with entirely West European roots. In exile in the West, Plekhanov observed the growing strength of Marxist socialism in Germany and was deeply impressed. Armed with a new worldview, Plekhanov rejected the entire heritage of Chernyshevsky and populist ideology. The populists had believed that industrial capitalism in Russia was an artificial growth, the result of the economic policy of the autocracy. Once the autocracy was overthrown, they thought capitalism would disappear and the peasants would build socialism out of peasant communities and artisanal collectives. As a Marxist, Plekhanov believed that the growth of capitalism in Russia was inevitable. It might not grow swiftly, but it was growing and creating a working class – the proletariat, who, in Karl Marx’s words was, “the class called to liberate humanity” and the class that would bring socialism. For the time being, however, Plekhanov and his tiny band of exiles remained in Switzerland translating Marx into Russian and smuggling pamphlets across the Russian border.

It was the industrial boom of the 1890s that gave the Marxists their chance, and from then on their influence and strength grew from year to year. Small Marxist groups appeared in the larger cities, led by young men and women from the intelligentsia like Vladimir Lenin and Iulii Martov, distributing leaflets and organizing reading groups to spread the new ideas. By 1898 they were able to form a party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Alongside the Marxists the populist strain in the Russian revolutionary movement revived, producing a series of small groups committed to a peasant revolution but in practice recruiting among workers. They combined the older belief in the socialist potential of the village community with the Marxist notion that the workers would organize socialism in the industrial cities. Much of their activity went into terrorism (which the Marxists rejected), but ultimately the populists were able to form a party in 1901–02, the Party of the Socialists-Revolutionaries to rival the Marxist Social Democrats.

Thus the industrialization of Russia had brought forth new social classes, the businessmen who owned and ran the factories and the workers who toiled within them. It created new forms of urban life and new opportunities for women. Ultimately it also created the social forces that would blow Russian society apart.

¹ In Russia as a whole, in the same year, only 29 percent of men and 13 percent of women were literate. In France, Germany, and northern Europe by the 1890s literacy was nearly universal for both men and women. The Russian figures were matched only in southern Italy, and even Spain was slightly ahead. By 1914 Russian literacy rates reached about 40 percent of the whole population, with great differences between women and men.