The results were impressive: a growth rate for total income of around 5 per cent per annum during the 1890s and again after 1907, combined with technological modernisation in key industrial sectors such as iron and steel, oil and engineering. New industrial regions came into existence, including the Donbass coal basin and the oil industry of the Caucasus, although it is worth noting that tsarist industrialisation tended to consolidate pre-existing regional disparities. For example, investment in modern metalworking and textile factories in the Baltic lands took place in an environment that was already relatively highly developed in terms of educational attainment and income per head.
Russia's industrial upsurge sparked controversy at the time, and its welfare consequences have been debated ever since. Conservatives bemoaned the intrusion of a modern financial sector and foreign investment in Russia, and charged Witte with the neglect of agriculture. In an influential assessment Alexander Gerschenkron defended Witte's strategy, on the grounds that it enabled the Russian state to substitute for factors of production that were
for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
missing or in short supply. Chief amongst these were skilled labour and capital. By stabilising the exchange rate, imposing high tariffs and launching a propaganda offensive, the tsarist state encouraged the inflow of foreign direct investment. Advanced technology imported from Western Europe enabled Russian entrepreneurs to substitute capital for labour. Yet underpinning the strategy was a government willingness to maintain a high level of demand for the output of heavy industry, and this entailed in the view of some observers injurious taxation of the peasant population and depressed levels of household consumption. Gerschenkron believed that this was a small price to pay for economic development. Elements in this story have been challenged: thus Gerschenkron neglected regional differences in peasant welfare, understated autonomous industrial growth and discounted the impact of state-financed rearmament in asserting that the state's role diminished after 1905. However, his overall interpretative framework has proved remarkably stimulating and durable.
Industrialisation had important demographic consequences. The rate of migration to new centres of industry increased (Witte's critics decried the squalor of new settlements, and bemoaned the crime that they associated with urban overcrowding). As a result, on the eve of the First World War around 16 per cent of the population lived in urban centres. Witte deliberately encouraged population migration, partly because he saw colonisation as a solution to 'rural overpopulation' in Russia's central agricultural region. The tempo of economic development greatly increased the settlement of Russians in far-flung corners of the empire, including Central Asia, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic lands. Non-Russian minorities in turn began to settle in larger numbers in Russia's expanding cities. By 1914, for example, around 15 per cent of the empire's Latvian population lived outside the Baltic region, the result of a generation of economic development and migration to European Russia. However, few observers attributed any significance to this at the time.
These developmental imperatives continued to operate during the First World War. Around 140,000 workers, including prisoners of war, were set to work building railway lines, such as between Petrozavodsk and Murmansk. They included Kazakh rebels who were punished for having opposed conscription in 1916. In general, however, the mainsprings of wartime migration betrayed other, non-developmental impulses. Jews, Germans and other 'alien' populations were forcibly removed from the borderlands during 1915, and resettled in European Russia (for Russia's Jews this forced migration marked the end of the infamous Pale of Settlement).
Historians have been relatively kind in their assessment of the tsarist great leap forward. The growth rates and structural change were remarkable. All the same, on the eve of the First World War the gap between Russia and more developed countries had actually widened in terms of income per capita - a consequence of Russia's rapid population increase and the size of the unreconstructed rural sector. Traditional forms of tsarist governance persisted; in particular, there was a surfeit of arbitrary intervention in economic life that probably had a corrosive effect on entrepreneurship. The post-revolutionary generation would continue to grapple with the issue of Russia's relative economic backwardness and to experiment with forms of economic administration.
The radical privatisation impulse (i): pre-1917 experiments with land reform
The majority ofthepopulation in tsarist Russia continued to support itself from agriculture. Peasant farming gave cause for concern, because it was believed that traditional methods of cultivation condemned successive generations to poverty. Hence attention shifted to the prevailing forms of peasant agriculture. Following widespread peasant unrest in 1905 and 1906 Prime Minister Stolypin targeted the traditional land commune (obshchina), in the expectation that it would be replaced by a class of 'sturdy and strong' farmers who enjoyed full title to the land. A growing number of economists and other social scientists bemoaned the restrictions that the commune was believed to impose on peasant farmers and its deleterious consequences for the growth of agricultural productivity. Particular attention focused on the custom of redistributing allotment land, which was believed to act as a disincentive to improvements in cultivation, and on the fragmentation of peasant allotments. The edict of 9 November 1906 enabled peasant heads of household to petition for communal allotment land to be transferred into their personal ownership. Where such a household had more land than would be allotted at the next redistribution, its head was entitled to purchase the excess on very favourable terms, with the help of a Peasant Land Bank. The commune was obliged to comply with any such request within one month. Furthermore, the head of a household was entitled to demand the consolidation of scattered strips. Provision was also made for the entire commune to embark on land consolidation, provided two-thirds of its members agreed. Where a commune appeared to resist, the government was entitled to intervene on behalf of the 'separator'.
The reformers faced an uphill struggle to convert - the word is used advisedly, since so many embarked on their task with missionary zeal - Russian peasants from subsistence farming to a capitalist ethic. Much of their analysis overlooked the fact that the land commune governed all aspects ofpeasant life, from the allocation of scattered strips of land (itself a kind of insurance against risk) and the use of communal pasture to the maintenance of rural infrastructure and the apportionment of taxation. Thus a householder's request to privatise his plot had far-reaching consequences, which the government sought to minimise by insisting that the household retained other rights of membership of the commune, such as access to meadows and pasture. Many peasants resented the claims oftheir neighbours who sought to take advantage of the new legislation, and there were stories of intimidation. Besides, subordinate members of the separating household begrudged the new powers vested in the hands of the paterfamilias. Nor did the reformers dissuade the majority from the view that their prospects would be greatly enhanced by a revolutionary redistribution of the land privately held by noble landowners. But the reform impulse amongst a new generation of Russian agronomists swept all before it, and these enthusiasts themselves did not shrink from intimidation. Much publicity attended the creation ofindependent farms (khutora), idealised and actively promoted by government Land Organisation Committees. More than one million households took advantage of consolidation between 1907 and 1915; this implies that around 8 per cent of peasant communal land underwent full reorganisation. Particular enthusiasm for enclosure was demonstrated in the southern provinces of European Russia where cereal production became increasingly commercialised.