I'm currently on a Russian history reading kick and working on an alternate history where I want to give Russia something of a redemption story, as it seems like Russia has kind of gotten the shit end of the stick throughout history. I believe there's something of a lens of historical inevitability around Russian history, saddled with unproductive soil, without the civic traditions of Western Europe, subject to invasion by the Mongols, but by all rights, Russia has the opportunity to be a truly great power. The major defects within Russian history I see are:
1: Serfdom- Serfs were always going to be more unproductive pound-for-pound than free laborers,
This opinion was not universally shared. For example, during the work of the Codification Commission of CII the merchants had been asking for the right to have serfs because the serfs-
managers were more reliable and effective than their hired counterparts and the same was said about the
masters in the manufactures.
As a side note, during the Pugachev Rebellion the serf-workers of many Ural manufactures were not joining and even resisting the rebels because both the Cossacks and Bashkirs had been destroying the plants and mines thus depriving their workers of the means to sustain themselves.
serfdom limited economic opportunity for the Russian peasantry and for Russia overall as it limited the overall size of the creative class.
An overwhelming majority of the Russian peasantry did not have too much of the economic opportunity both during and after the serfdom because a “creative class” was always quite small in any social group. However, a reasonably intelligent owner usually was not preventing the entrepreneurship-inclined serfs because their obrok (cash) was going to be higher, or even much higher than what he could get from barschina (a regulated number of days the serfs had to work on the owner’s property).
And some of these creative serfs had been doing impressively well. For example, one of the counts Sheremetiev (one who married his former serf woman) was “collecting” the millionaires serfs (“millionaires” could be exaggeration but definitely very rich) just for the fun of having them: they were conducting their businesses but he was refusing to take their payoffs considering situation amusing. One of them got a release for a timely presented barrel of the oysters.
So the whole system was quite complicated.
And even though the Emancipation of the Serfs did have positive impacts, not providing the serfs with substantial amounts of land, plus saddling them with the redemptions payments, imposed a pretty harsh burden on their ability to become truly engaged citizens.
This is, again, a stereotype which does not make too much sense (no offense to you, this is what everyone was taught to believe). The land legally belonged to the land owners so the government could not provide them with something which it did not own. The most that it could do was to arrange for a mandatory provisioning the serfs with a part of the
landowner’s land for which a landowner had to be compensated. To make this easier to the peasants, the government paid off the landowners (cheating them in a process) so the peasants had to repay debt to the government over 40 years at 5% annual. “Saddling” notion is silly because government simply did not have money to absorb the debt to the landowners and the rest was a byproduct of the low efficiency of the majority of fully free peasants who almost immediately split into three groups, bottom, middle, and top with the relevant problems and, at the end, the bottom and lower middle group had unpaid part of their debt forgiven
To address the land point, the government established a system of purchasing an extra land which the owners (already cheated by the state and short of money) had been selling and this land was sold exclusively to the peasant communities. Did not help much because population was growing faster and the “non-creative” majority kept sticking to the community model which was preventing increased productivity.
So blaming everything on the real or imaginable oppressors and social injustice is a simplest thing but how come that many members of the same class were doing reasonably well or very well?
I’m not even going into the issue of post-emancipation endemic drinking which hit hard not only the peasants but the Ural plants as well. Both conservative and liberal Russian literature of that period full of this subject. When most of your money are being spent on a booze, you’ll have problem with paying taxes even in the most advanced liberal society like the US. 😉
2: The inability to foster a stake in the system- Russia's system of governance seems to have had an extremely hard time trying to get its various social classes to engage with the system.
Really? In a bureaucracy-ruled country (by definition of NI) the social classes can’t avoid being heavily engaged with the system.
The nobility wanted to protect their privileges and attempts at reforms were often seen as threatening those privileges.
As with everything else, this was much more complicated. Most of the “service class” (bureaucracy, military and other state employees) were not hereditary nobility or nobility at all. Which privileges exactly are you talking about in RE post-emancipation? Serf-ownership was gone. The civic service was full of the people who were not nobles and many of those who were, became nobles just by virtue of raising to a certain rank in the service. Situation with the military was pretty much the same: the officers’ ranks had been full of the former kantonists and while AII abolished the institution, raising from the ranks was sufficiently common.
The landowners represented a small minority among the service class even in the early XIX but, of course, the government was reluctant to destroy them. Except that the Emancipation Reform had been formulated and implemented by the members of the noble class with the high-ranking people involved also being the landowners who seemingly did not care too much about their “privileges”, real or imaginable.
The peasants rejected attempts to interfere in what they saw as "their lives" with even modern farming strategies or technologies being rejected.
Besides the fact that their majority were not too smart, there was an objective reason for their conservatism. Community was working for their advantage by providing certain social back up, collective work, helping each other and easier way of communicating with the administration including collective responsibility for the taxes. A drawback was that the model required an equality of the land distribution by size and quality. As a result, each year a peasant family was getting a different set of the disjointed narrow land strips. There was no sense in using fertilizers because the next year these strips would belong to somebody else and, because population was growing, so was the number of families between which the land had to be divided and the strips were getting more narrow. Eventually going down to a size physically preventing use of the more advanced equipment even if there were money to buy it. Which, quite often, was not even the case because an average peasant could not afford it under the protective system and buying something for the whole community would not work due to the disputes regarding who is getting the stuff first, etc.
But getting out of that system required special legislation and its enforcement because a person who was getting out was taking with him a solid peace of the common land, etc.
3: Lack of capital- Which kind of derives from the above two problems. Because of poor utilization of labor and the poor quality of the soil, Russia was never able to generate the kind of capital it needed, until the late nineteenth century French loans, to really bootstrap itself into the modern age.
Interesting notion, taking into an account that most of the French loans went to the armaments and, sometimes to the railroads and other
state programs. By the time Witte pushed these loans on a big scale during the reign of NII, the Russian manufacturing was already developing well attracting a lot of the foreign
investments.
Besides nobility and peasants there was also a huge and fast growing class of those who were neither: capitalists of all “sizes” and types (bankers, industrialists, rural capitalists, merchants, etc.), “educated classes” (doctors, educators, engineers, lawyers, etc.), workers (industrial and not).
But the capital shortage was, indeed, a problem especially in the XVIII - XIX, due to the shortage of the credit institutions.
Partly it's sheer size hampered it as well, any investments would have to be on a colossally bigger scale than anything done in Prussia, Austria, France, or even the United States.
The size was big but this does not mean that the whole empire had to be developed on the same level: there were huge areas practically uninhabitable and some of the strategically important areas having noticeable shortage of the population. But the distances were, indeed, a killer.
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong or to improve on my interpretations, my knowledge of Russian and Soviet history is still very surface level. But, what I'm trying to figure out, is where the course of Russian history could have been corrected?
Corrected in which sense?
When could the lives of the serfs be improved?
Part of correction: absence of the countless wars during the XVIII - XIX century would remove some of the economic burden, etc. but OTOH, it would not improve international position and physical size of the Russian Empire so what is your priority?
Could Russia have industrialized earlier?
It was industrialized quite early. The problem was that by a number of reasons, which I can’t fully identify, its industry was not
modernized in a timely fashion.
Could they have avoided the terrorist battles of the 1870s and 1880s?
Easily. Just start executing them after a speedy trial by the military courts with no options like exile or prison. To make process more effective, introduce the awards for delivering or pointing out whereabouts: according to the Marxism, the material interest is a mighty stimulating factor. And, yes. create a really effective political police apparatus and
make it independent from the Interior Ministry and Ministry of Justice. 😉
Is there a path for Russia to reform itself into something more resembling the British constitutional monarchy or at the very least, the Imperial German system?
Why the British constitutional (AFAIK, Britain does not have a constitution) monarchy has to be an attractive example? OTOH, something similar to the German system was introduced in 1905.
