The Beginnings of Industrialisation

Abstract

HOW far was Russia on the path to industrialisation at the time of Emancipation in 1861? The major developments, certainly, occurred after this time. It was only in the last two decades of the nineteenth century that a significant upturn in the pace of industrial growth becomes demonstrable, and it was in these years that much of Russia’s industrial base — in particular the coal and iron of the south and the petroleum of the Caucasus — was laid. Yet a number of Soviet specialists have stressed the importance of changes which took place in the industrial sector prior to 1861. They have applied the term ‘industrial revolution’ to the period between the mid-1830s and the Emancipation, while Yakovlev has even argued for an industrial revolution in the period 1790–1825.3 And Soviet historians in general are increasingly pointing to the eighteenth century as the origin of ‘capitalist manufacture’ in the country. Such an emphasis is a useful corrective to those accounts of Russian industrialisation which virtually ignore the earlier period, regarding the economy as ‘traditional’, and overlooking the significant developments which in fact took place. For during the years between the accession of Peter the Great (1682–1725) and the Emancipation, numerous changes had occurred in Russia’s industrial structure, changes the more impressive in that they occurred within the institutional framework of a serf society.