Consider the invention of systems to manufacture steel (1850s), a strong and elastic form of iron that revolutionized weapons and made possible a global economy by transforming shipping. Steel took off thanks in part to the invention of the electric motor (1880s), which made possible mass production: the standardization of core aspects of products, the subdivision of work on assembly lines, the replacement of manual labor by machinery, the reorganization of flow among shops.48 These new production processes boosted world steel production from half a million tons in 1870 to twenty-eight million by 1900. But the United States accounted for ten million; Germany, eight; and Britain, five; a small number of countries had almost all the steel. To this picture one could add the manufacture of crucial industrial chemicals: synthetic fertilizers for boosting agricultural yields, chlorine bleach to make cotton, and explosives (Alfred Nobel’s nitroglycerine dynamite, 1866) for mining, railroad construction, and assassinations. As some countries succeeded at modern industry, the world became divided between advantaged industrializers (Western Europe, North America, Japan) and disadvantaged raw material suppliers (Africa, South America, much of Asia).
Competitive modern attributes also included finance and credit facilities, stable currencies, and stock companies.49 But in many ways, the new world economy rested upon peasants in the tropics who supplied the primary products (raw materials) necessary for industrial countries and, in turn, consumed many of the goods produced from their raw materials. Commercialization spurred specialization away from subsistence—in China, for example, vast acreage of subsistence agriculture had been converted to cotton to feed the English cotton mills—with the result that the spread of markets made possible huge increases in production. But that spread also undercut diverse crop raising (to minimize subsistence shortfalls) and reciprocal social networks (to enhance survival), meaning markets undercut the traditional methods for coping with cyclical drought, which was chronic. El Niño airflows (the recurrent warming of the Pacific Ocean) export heat and humidity to parts of the world, creating an unstable climate for farming: torrential rains, floods, landslides, and wildfires, as well as severe droughts. The upshot was three waves of famine and disease (1876–79, 1889–91, 1896–1900) that killed between 30 and 60 million people in China, Brazil, and India. In India alone, 15 million people died of famine, equal to half the population of England at the time. Not since the fourteenth-century Black Death or the sixteenth-century disease destruction of New World natives had there been such annihilation. Had such mass death occurred in Europe—the equivalent of thirty Irish famines—it would be regarded as a central episode of world history. Besides the effects of commercialization and weather, additional factors came into play: The collapse of a U.S. railroad bubble, for example, led to an abrupt decline in demand for key tropical products. Above all, colonial rulers compounded the market and climate uncertainties with inept and racist rule.50 Only in Ethiopia in 1889 was absolute scarcity an issue; these were not “natural” famines but man-made ones, the consequences of a world subjected to great power domination.
Modernity’s power could be woefully mismanaged. While India was experiencing mass starvation, between 1870–1900, grain exports to Britain were increased, from 3 million to 10 million, supplying one-fifth of British wheat consumption. “Famine,” admitted one British official in 1907, after thirty-five years of service, “is now more frequent than formerly and more severe.”51 But the British themselves were responsible. They had built the fourth largest railroad network in India to take advantage of their colony, but this technology that could have brought relief instead took food away. The British viceroy in India, Lord Lytton, opposed on principle local officials’ efforts to stock grain or interfere with market prices. He demanded that the emaciated and the dying work for food because, he insisted, food relief would encourage shirking from work (not to mention cost public funds). When starving women attempted to steal from gardens, they were subjected to branding, and sometimes had their noses cut off or were killed. Rural mobs assaulted landowners and pillaged grain stores. British officials observed the desperation and reported it back home. “One madman dug up and devoured part of a cholera victim, while another killed his son and ate part of the boy,” one report from India noted. The Qing rulers in China had resisted building railroads, fearing their use in colonialist penetration, so the capacity in China for famine relief was limited. Huge peasant revolts broke out—the Canudos war in Brazil, the Boxer rebellion in China (where posters noted: “No rain comes from Heaven. The Earth is parched and dry.”). But the peasants could not, at that time, overthrow formal or informal imperialism.
Markets and a world economy made possible previously unimaginable prosperity, but most of the world had a difficult time appreciating the benefits. To be sure, the new world economy was not all encompassing. Many pockets of territory lived outside the opportunities and the pressures. Still, the world economy could feel like a force of nature. Electricity spurred soaring demand for copper (wires), drawing Montana, Chile, and southern Africa into the world economy, a chance for newfound prosperity, but also for subjecting their populations to wild price swings on world commodities markets. The consequences were huge. Beyond the waves of famine, the collapse of one bank in Austria in 1873 could trigger a depression that spread as far as the United States, causing mass unemployment, while in the 1880s and 1890s, Africa was devastated by recessions outside the continent—and then swallowed up in an imperial scramble by the modernity-wielding Europeans.52
Imperial Russia faced the modernity challenge with considerable success. It became the world’s fourth or fifth largest industrial power, thanks to textiles, and Europe’s top agricultural producer, an achievement of Russia’s sheer size. But here was the rub: Russia’s per capita GDP stood at just 20 percent of Britain’s and 40 percent of Germany’s.53 St. Petersburg had the world’s most opulent court, but by the time the future Stalin was born, Russia’s average lifespan at birth was a mere thirty years, higher than in British India (twenty-three), but no better than in China, and well below Britain (fifty-two), Germany (forty-nine) and Japan (fifty-one). Literacy under Tsar Nicholas II hovered near 30 percent, lower than in Britain in the eighteenth century. The Russian establishment knew these comparisons intimately because they visited Europe often, and they evaluated their country not alongside third-rate powers—what we would call developing countries—but alongside the first-rank. Even if Russian elites had been more modest in their ambitions, however, their country could have expected little respite in the early twentieth century, given the unification and rapid industrialization of Germany and the consolidation and industrialization of Japan. When a great power suddenly knocks at your country’s door, with advanced military technology, officers who are literate and capable, motivated soldiers, and well-run state institutions and engineering schools back home, you cannot cry “unfair.” Russia’s socioeconomic and political advance had to be, and was, measured relative to that of its most advanced rivals.54
Even contemporary revolutionaries recognized Russia’s dilemmas. Nikolai Danielson, the lead translator of Marx’s Das Kapital into Russian, worried that his preferred path for Russia of an unhurried, organic evolution to socialism via the peasant commune (a small-scale, decentralized economic organization) could not survive the pressures of the international system, while Russia’s bourgeoisie was not up to the challenge either. “On the one hand, emulating England’s slow-paced, 300-year process of economic development might leave Russia vulnerable to colonial domination by one or another of the world’s great powers,” Danielson wrote in a preface to the 1890s Russian edition of Das Kapital. “On the other, a headlong, Darwinian introduction of ‘western-style’ free markets and privatization might produce a corrupt bourgeois elite and a destitute majority—without any increase in productivity rates.” Russia seemed to face a frightful choice between colonization by European countries or new depths of inequality and poverty.55
For the tsaris
t regime, the stakes were high and so were the costs. Even after conceding the Great Reforms, Russia’s rulers continued to feel increasing fiscal limits to their international aspirations. The Crimean War had clobbered state finances, but the revenge victory in the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–78) cost Russia still more treasure. Between 1858 and 1880, Russia’s budget deficit soared from 1.7 to 4.6 billion rubles, which required huge foreign borrowing—from Russia’s geopolitical rivals, the European great powers.56 Corruption meant that substantial sums of state money went unaccounted for. (Treatment of state revenue as private income was perhaps most outlandish in the Caucasus, a sinkhole of imperial finance.)57 True, Russia escaped the fate of the Ottomans, who became a financial and geopolitical client of Europe, or of the Qing (1636–1911), who doubled the size of China, in parallel to Russia’s expansion, only to go flat broke and be subjected to a series of profoundly unequal international treaties, including at the hands of Russia.58 By the early 1900s, Russia’s state budget tended to be in surplus, thanks to taxes on sugar, kerosene, matches, tobacco, imported goods, and above all, vodka. (The Russian empire’s per capita alcohol consumption was lower than elsewhere in Europe but the state ran a monopoly on sales.)59 At the same time, however, Russia’s army budget eclipsed state expenditure on education by a factor of ten. And even then, the war ministry incessantly complained of insufficient resources.60
Competitive great-power pressures did help drive an expansion of Russia’s higher education system in order to produce state functionaries, engineers, and doctors.61 But the autocracy came to dread the very students it desperately needed. When the autocracy tried to strangle moves for university autonomy, students went on strike, which led to campus lockdowns.62 Of those arrested in the Russian empire between 1900 and 1905, the vast majority were under thirty years of age.63 Similarly, industrialization had taken off from the 1890s, giving Russia many of the modern factories critical to international power, yet industrial workers were striking, too, for an eight-hour workday and humane living conditions, leading to lockdowns. Rather than permit legal organizations and try to co-opt the workers—as was initially tried by a talented Moscow okhranka chief—the autocracy fell back upon repressing the workers whom the state’s own vital industrialization was creating.64 In the countryside, whose harvest remained the state’s preeminent economic determinant, Russian grain exports fed large swaths of Europe while domestic food consumption grew, despite comparatively lower Russian yields on sown land.65 But in spring 1902, in the fertile Poltava and Kharkov provinces of the south, peasants burst into mass rebellion, looting and burning gentry estates, demanding land-rent reductions as well as free access to forests and waterways, thereby prompting the novelist Lev Tolstoy to address petitions to the tsar.66 The next year in western Georgia’s Kutaisi province, among the forty square miles of vineyards and tea leaves of Guria, peasants were provoked by inept tsarist repression, and rebelled. The province lacked even a single industrial enterprise, and the uprising threw the Social Democrats for a loop. But after the peasants gathered, drew up demands, elected leaders, and took mutual oaths to loyalty, Georgian Social Democrats sought to lead them. Rents paid to landowners were reduced, freedom of speech was allowed, and the police were replaced by a new “red” militia in an autonomous “Gurian Republic.”67
Imperial Russia had more than 100 million rural inhabitants living under extremely diverse conditions. Every country undergoing the modernization compelled by the international system was torn by social tensions. But Russia’s tensions were magnified by the autocratic system’s refusal to incorporate the masses into the political system, even by authoritarian means. And many would-be revolutionaries who had abandoned peasant-oriented Populism for worker-centric Marxism faced a rethinking.
CRUSHING DEFEAT IN ASIA
For Russia, the inherent geopolitical imperative of achieving the attributes of modernity was rendered still costlier because of its geography. Great Britain’s attempted containment of Russia failed: the Crimean War defeat on Russian soil had helped provoke a spasm of Russian conquest into Central Asia (1860s–80s) on top of a seizure of the Amur River basin from China (1860). But those land grabs had deepened Russia’s challenge of having sprawling geography and a difficult neighborhood. The Russian empire—unlike the world’s other great continental power—was not safely nestled between the two great oceans and two harmless neighbors in Canada and Mexico. Russia simultaneously abutted Europe, the Near East, and the Far East. Such a circumstance should have argued for caution in foreign policy. But Russia had tended to be expansionist precisely in the name of vulnerability: even as forces loyal to the tsar had seized territory, they imagined they were preempting attacks. And once Russia had forcibly acquired a region, its officials invariably insisted they had to acquire the next one over, too, in order to be able to defend their original gains. A sense of destiny and insecurity combined in a heady mix.
Russia had reached the Pacific in the seventeenth century but never developed its vast Asian territories. Dreams of trade with the Far East went unrealized, owing to the lack of reliable, cost-effective transport.68 But then Russia built the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1903) linking the imperial capital with the Pacific.69 (The United States had completed its transcontinental railroad in 1869.) Military and strategic considerations dominated Russia’s railroad project as military circles clamored for a railroad not out of fear of Japan but of China. (Opponents of the railroad favored a naval buildup.)70 But some officials put forward visions of force marching Siberia’s economic development (in 1890, all of Siberia had 687 industrial enterprises, most of them artisanal and nearly 90 percent of them in food-processing and livestock).71 The Trans-Siberian proved to be the most expensive peaceful undertaking in modern history up to that time, involving colossal waste, unmechanized exertion, and press-ganged peasant and convict labor, all of which paralleled construction of the contemporaneous Panama Canal (and presaged Stalin’s pharaonic Five-Year Plans).72 Russia’s engineers had been dispatched on study trips to the United States and Canada in the 1880s, but back home they employed none of the lessons on the need for stronger rails and sturdy ballast.73 Still, against domestic opposition and long odds, the line had been built, thanks to the willpower and clever manipulations of Finance Minister Sergei Witte.
Witte had been born in 1849 in Tiflis to a Swedish-Lutheran family (on his father’s side) that had converted to Orthodoxy and served the Russian state in midlevel positions on the empire’s southern frontier. His mother’s family had higher status. Witte completed gymnasium in Kishinev and university in Odessa, where he began his long career by managing the Odessa railroads, making them profitable. In 1892, in the aftermath of the famine of 1891, he became finance minister in St. Petersburg. Just forty-three years old, with low imperial rank initially, widely dismissed as some kind of “merchant” (kupets), and with Ukrainian-accented Russian, Witte nonetheless became the dominant figure in turn-of-the-century imperial Russian politics, forcing even foreign policy into the purview of his finance ministry.74
Witte did not have the entire field to himself, of course. Just in terms of the executive branch of the state, he had to reckon with the ministry of internal affairs, the umbrella for the okhranka, as well as the regular police. In many ways, Russian governance, and even Russian politics, pivoted on the two great ministries, internal affairs and finance, and the rivalry between them. Both finance and internal affairs connived to expand at the central level, and to extend their writ into locales.75 On the occasion of their joint one hundredth jubilee in 1902, each published a history of itself. Internal affairs told a story of imposing and maintaining domestic order, especially in rural Russia; finance, of the productive exploitation of Russia’s natural and human resources, whence revenues could be collected.76 Despite being overwhelmingly a peasant country, Russia had no separate agricultural ministry per se, though it did have an evolving, relatively small-scale (until 1905–6) ministry that was responsible for land
, most of which belonged to the state or the imperial household.77 A ministry of communications (railways) as well as one of commerce and industry existed as satellites of the powerful finance ministry. By the early 1900s, the budgetary resources commanded by the finance ministry exceeded by several times those available to internal affairs and its police.78 The finance ministry was the great bureaucratic empire within the Russian empire.79
Witte also had to contend with the court. He came from a merely middling family background, was ill mannered, and had married a Jewish woman, all of which raised hackles in court society. But the physically imposing Witte, who had a massive head and torso, on short legs, imposed order on imperial budgets, filling state coffers by introducing the alcohol monopoly.80 Also, he vastly broadened a recent finance ministry practice of vigorously pushing industrialization, and he did so by attracting foreign capital, playing off the French and Germans. Witte saw foreign debt as a way to help spur the accumulation of native capital. He also cherished the state machinery. Above all, Witte emphasized the geopolitical imperative of industrializing. “No matter how great the results so far, in relation to the needs of the country and in comparison with foreign countries our industry is still very backward,” he wrote in a memorandum in 1900, urging Nicholas II to maintain protective tariffs. Witte added that “even the military preparedness of a country is determined not only by the perfection of its military machine but by the degree of its industrial development.” Without energetic actions, he warned, “the slow growth of our industries will endanger the fulfillment of the great political tasks of the monarchy.” Russia’s rivals would seize the upper hand abroad and achieve economic and possibly “triumphant political penetration” of Russia itself.81 Like Stalin would, Witte lopsidedly prioritized heavy and large-scale industry at the expense of light industry and the welfare of the overwhelmingly rural population. Witte’s ministry put out deliberately inflated consumption statistics to cover up the burdens imposed.82 As it happened, Witte also scribbled his orders in pencil directly on the memoranda of subordinates (“Discuss this again”) (“Write a summary abstract”), and worked late into the evenings, both viewed as distinguishing traits of the future Soviet dictator. Witte further anticipated Stalin by a habit of pacing his office while others in attendance had to sit.
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