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 sta
te 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 develop
ment. 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.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 26