Russia under the Old regime

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cultivated minority evinced little interest in public affairs, shying away from all politics and the limelight which politics brought with it. Its noncommercial energies were directed primarily towards cultural patronage, in which towards the end of the nineteenth century businessmen displaced the impoverished landed class. The widow of a self-made railway magnate discreetly subsidized Tchaikovsky; another railway builder, Sawa Mamontov, founded the first opera company in Russia, and helped support Mussorgskii and Rimskii-Korsakov. Chekhov's Moscow Art Theatre was financed with merchant money. The best collection of the Russian school of painting was assembled by the Moscow merchant Tretiakov. It was the descendants of two serf entrepreneurs, Morozov and Shchukin, who put together Russia's outstanding collection of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist art.

These were die visible upper echelons. The rank and file continued to live in a world of its own, isolated and self-contained - a world which the critic Dobroliubov called the 'Kingdom of Darkness'. Its outstanding characteristics were an intense nationalism coupled! with fear of western influences, and deep loyalty to autocracy whose protective tariff policy enabled this class to withstand foreign competition. When in the 1880s, the Ministry of Finance begain to promote large-scale industrial development, native entreprenteurship once again showed little inclination to commit itself. The situation resembled that familiar from the seventeenth century: state initiative, foreign money and management. The second phase of Russia's industrialism, involving the development of steel, coal, petrol, chemical and electrical industries, found Russia's middle class unprepared and unwilling. Russia had missed the chance to create a bourgeoisie at a time when that had been possible, that is on the basis of manufacture and private capitalism; it was too late to do so in an age of mechanized industry dominated by joint-stock corporations and banks. Without experience in die simpler forms of capitalist finance and production, the Russian middle class lacked the capacity to participate in economic aictivity involving its more sophisticated forms.

It is enough to survey the leading branches of heavy industry created in Russia in the late nineteenth century to see the: decisive role which foreigners played in their development. The modeirn coal and steel industries located in the Donets-Krivoi Rog region (of the Ukraine were founded by the English and financed by a combination of English, French and Belgian capital. The Caucasian oilfieldis were developed by English and Swedish interests. Germans and Belgiams launched Russia's electrical and chemical industries. Indeed, the texctile mills of central Russia, founded by serf entrepreneurs, were the only truly modern indus-