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 comp
lex 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 cam
e 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.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 27