Early Industrialization in Russia
DBQ Exercise
As advanced social studies students and rising juniors, the time has come to
confront document-based exercises like those you will face in Advanced Placement®
classes during the next two years. Below you will find examples of different types of
documents that pertain to early industrialization in Russia. The first piece is a tertiary
source I compiled from various secondary sources including your textbook and serves to
provide background and context. Document A is the report of an imperial inspector
about Russian factories, a primary source document from the 1880s excerpted in your
textbook. Document B is excerpted from the Communist Manifesto written by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, also a primary source. Document-based essay
questions ask you to weave together your knowledge of a period or an event with your
interpretation of various types of documents. The essays generally ask you to consider
one or more sides of an historical problem or to trace change over time. After you have
read the documents below, I will provide an essay question for you to discuss and to
attack in your notebooks.
We have already said that Imperial Russia had a predominantly agricultural
economy. The Crimean War that lasted from 1853-1856 found Russia pitted against both
Great Britain and France in a contest over access to the Middle East. The British and the
French beat the Russians even though the war was fought in Russia’s backyard. Their
victory was even understood by Russia to be because these two nations had industrialized
whereas Russia had not. Great Britain and France were able to practice “force
projection” and supply their troops sufficiently to push the Russian Bear back. The result
of the war for Russia was a series of Czars bent on bringing about economic reform.
Transportation was the key starting point for Russian industrialization. Roads
were inadequate because they were too muddy during the warms months when farmers
had crops to take to markets. Rivers were therefore the most important “highways,” and
where a river was not convenient the Czars set about digging canals (or ordering their
serfs to do it). Rivers froze, though, in the Russian winters and remained impassable for
sometimes as much as 6 or 7 months of the year. Railroads posed a potential solution.
The construction of the first two steam-powered railroads in Russia was completed in
1836, and their location is telling. Yes, one railroad was built between a factory and a
mine, but the other railroad was built between St. Petersburg and the Winter Palace of the
Czars and was reserved for their exclusive use.
By the late nineteenth century, however, the more practical factory-to-mine idea
prevailed. A network of European Russian railroads existed by the 1870s just after the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861 provided a potential urban labor force for
industrialization. Then the Minister of Finance from 1892-1903, Count Sergei Witte,
read a book. In it he discovered that the key for bringing a rural nation into the industrial
age was railroad transportation. His backing of the construction of the Trans-Siberian
railroad beginning in the 1880s is what propelled him to his high office by the 1890s.
This famous Russian railway remains the longest continuous railway on earth, and when
it was completed in 1903 it connected European Russia (at the Ural Mountains) with the
Pacific Ocean at the crucial port city of Vladivostok. Even by 1890 there was five times
the amount of railroads across the Russian Empire as there had been in 1860.
The Russian railroad boom in turn stimulated expansion of the Russian iron and
coal industries just as the United States railroad boom had done so for America. Half of
all the metal products produced in Russia during this time period were railroad rails. The
amount of coal produced between 1892 and 1903 tripled. By 1900 railroads were the
largest industrial employer in Russia with 400,000 workers. In the process of spanning
Asia with a rail line, Asian Russia was developed at a faster pace than European Russia
had been. To pay for all this, Russia became a huge exporter of grain in order to get its
hands on foreign currency so it could by Western machines. The primary goal of all this
activity was to make changes in Russia that could regain the ground lost in military
strength.
Russian industrialization built on this base with modern factories in Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and in a few Polish cities. Some of these factories were the largest in the
world at the time. Russia first industrialized printing, metalworking, and textile
manufacturing. At the head of these economic reforms, Count Witte carefully
reorganized Russia’s finances. He put Russia on the gold standard and thus stabilized the
ruble. He got the Czar to enact high tariffs to protect budding Russian industries and
reformed the banking system. He also attracted foreign investment. Russian factories
were built with Western money, largely from the British and the French who now sought
to strengthen their old enemy as a balance to the rise of Germany as a nation. Count
Witte said, “The inflow of foreign capital is . . . the only way by which our industry will
be able to supply our country quickly with abundant and cheap products.” I bet he read
that in a book, too. As a result of this need for capital, however, Russia went into debt to
foreign creditors. Half of Russia’s factories were owned by foreigners outright, and
almost all the other half belonged to the Czar. Count Witte openly acknowledge his goal
in all this was to make Russia like the United States, an industrial/agricultural giant. Still,
Count Witte recognized what all Combined Studies students should recognize,
“Knowledge is one of the most essential forms of capital.” Count Witte was also a great
backer of schools. For his pains, Count Witte was made the Prime Minister by 1905 and
served two Czars.
By the early twentieth century Russia was ranked fourth among steel-producing
nations. The Russians were second only to the Americans in petroleum production. I
hasten to add, however, that this success was based on Russia’s immense size and its
huge supplies of natural resources rather than on efficiency from thorough
industrialization. Most factory workers remained either unskilled or semi-skilled and
therefore there never arose a thriving middle class as had occurred in Western
industrialized countries. Russia was still largely agricultural and with all the emphasis on
urban economic reform her agriculture remained backward. With the bulk of the
population still on farms using traditional methods and with the absence of an
enterprising middle class, the Czar and his ministers remained the only source of reform
initiatives, and soon they had other things on their minds, like revolutions and wars.
Only a tiny class of what might properly be called businessmen and professionals arose in
Russia prior to the Russian Revolution, and they weren’t enough to initiate the
widespread prosperity other nations had enjoyed as the result of industrialization.
Document A
In the majority of factories there are no special quarters for the workers. This
applies to workers in paper, wool, and silk finishing. Skilled hand craftsmen like brocade
weavers can earn good wages, and yet most of them sleep on or under their looms, for
lack of anything else. Only in a few weaving factories are there special sleeping quarters,
and those are provided not for the weavers, but for the other workers—the winders and
dyers, etc. Likewise, the velveteen cutters almost always sleep on the tables where they
work. This habit is particularly unhealthy, since the work areas are always musty and the
air is saturated with dye fumes—sometimes poisonous ones. Carpenters also generally
sleep on their workbenches. In bastmatting factories, workers of both sexes and all ages
sleep together on pieces and mats of bast which are often damp. Only the sick workers in
these bast factories are allowed to sleep on the single stove. . . . Work at the mill never
stops, day or night. There are two twelve-hour shifts a day, which begin at 6:00 A.M.
and 6:00 P.M. These men have a half-hour for breakfast (8:30-9:00) and one hour for
dinner (1:00-2:00).
The worst violations of hygienic regulations were those I saw in most of the flaxspinning mills where linen is produced. . . . Although in western Europe all the dustproducing carding and combing machines have long been covered and well ventilated, I
saw only one Russian linen mill where such a machine was securely covered. Elsewhere,
the spools of these machines were completely open to the air, and the scotching apparatus
is inadequately ventilated. . . .
In many industrial establishments the grounds for fines and the sizes of fines are
not fixed in advance. The factory rules may contain only one phrase like the following:
“Those found violating company rules will be fined at the discretion of the manager.”
The degree of arbitrariness in the determination of fines, and thus also in the
determination of the worker’s wages, was unbelievably extreme in some factories. In
Podolsk, for instance, in factories No. 131 and No. 135, there is a ten-ruble forfeit for
leaving the factory before the expiration of one’s contract. But as applied, this covers
much more than voluntary breach of contract on the worker’s part. This fine is exacted
from every worker who for any reason has to leave the factory. Cases are known of
persons who have had to pay this fine three times. Moreover, fines are levied for so
many causes that falling under a severe fine is a constant possibility for each worker. For
instance, workers who for any reason came into the office in a group, instead of singly,
would be fined one ruble. After a second offense, the transgressors would be
dismissed—leaving behind, of course, the ten-ruble fine for breach of contract.
In factory No. 135 the workers are still treated as serfs. Wages are paid out only
twice a year, even then not in full but only enough to pay the workers’ taxes (other
necessities are supplied by the factory store). Furthermore this money is not given to the
workers directly, but is sent by mail to their village elders and village clerks. Thus the
workers are without money the year around. Besides they are also paying severe fines to
the factory, and these sums will be subtracted from their wages at the final year-end
accounting.
Extreme regulations and regimentation are very common in our factories—
regulations entangle the workers at every step and burden them with more or less severe
fines which are subtracted from their often already inadequate wages. Some factory
administrators have become real virtuosos at thinking up new grounds for fines. A brief
description of a few of the fines in factory No. 172 is an excellent example of this variety:
on October 24, 1877, an announcement was posted of new fines to be set at the discretion
of the officer for fourteen different cases of failure to maintain silence and cleanliness.
There were also dozens of minor fines prescribed for certain individual offenses: for
example, on August 4, 1883, a huge fine of five rubles was set for singing in the factory
courtyard after 9:30, or at any time in any unauthorized place. On June 3, 1881, a fine
was to be levied from workers who took tea, sugar, bread, or any kind of foodstuffs into
the weaving building, “in order to avoid breeding any insects or vermin.” On May 14,
1880, a fine was set for anyone who wrote with pencil, chalk, or anything else on the
walls of the dyeing or weaving buildings.
Document B
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in
a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on
an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes. . . .
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society
has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new
conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature: It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each
other—bourgeoisie and proletariat. . . .
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized
by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The
manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the
manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds
vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized
industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern industry,
the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. . .
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. . . .
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into
the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory,
are organized like soldiers. . . .
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and
retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually
into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale
on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large
capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of
production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number;
it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength
more. . . .
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is
on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced
conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than that
of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because
the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following
proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things. . . .
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare
that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians
have nothing to lose by their chains. They have the world to win.
Working me of all countries, unite!