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The Autonomous State and Economic Development: Industrial Administration in Russia, 1880–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Extract

The broad objective of this study is to ask whether there have been basic continuities in Russian state industrial administration across the Revolutionary divide. The question takes as generally agreed that the state's role in the national economy after 1917 was larger than previously. Given the expanding state role in economic operations during World War I, the period of War Communism and the Five-Year-Plan (Stalin) era, the main question addressed by this study necessarily focuses on the state and its organizations as initiators and controllers of industrial development before 1917. Did the war, the Revolution of 1917, and the political programs that followed establish a new trajectory for the role of the state or were they characteristic of and predictable from the behavior of state organizations before 1917?

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Articles
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Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1995

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References

Notes

1. North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York, 1990), 100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4. The most helpful examples are in Gatrell, “Industrial Expansion,” and idem, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (New York, 1986), esp. the introduction and chaps. 1 and 2; Gregory, Paul R., Russian National Income, 1885–1913 (New York, 1982), chaps. 6, 7Google Scholar; Kahan, Arcadius, “Government Policies and the Industrialization of Russia,” Journal of European Economic History 27 (December 1967): 460–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crisp, Olga, Studies in the Russian Economy Before 1914 (London, 1976), 3334 and passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6. Gerschenkron, “Economic Backwardness,” 2.

7. Gerschenkron, “Russian Agrarian Policies,” 246. Emphasis mine.

8. Ibid., 229–46.

9. Ibid., 248.

10. Ibid., 247.

11. Gerschenkron, “Economic Backwardness,” 7.

12. Ibid., 18.

13. Ibid.

14. On emancipation, see note 6 above; on judicial and administrative reforms, see “Economic Backwardness,” 19.

15. Gerschenkron, “Economic Backwardness,” 20.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 28–29.

18. Ibid., 29.

19. The historiographical discussion presented here is not intended to be comprehensive but only to indicate the range of reinterpretations of Gerschenkron's view of continuity in Russian history. For fuller discussion of the relevant perspectives, see Don K. Rowney, “The State-Economy Relation in Russia: An Historiography of the Long-Scale View” (manuscript available from the author), which will be published in 1995 in Istoricheskie zapiski (Moscow).

20. For example, la. Laverychev, V., “Gosudarstvennyi kapitalizm v poreformennoi Rossii,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 1 (January-February 1982): 2038Google Scholar; Gindin, I. F., “Politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva v otnoshenii promyshlennykh monopolii,” in Ob osobennostiakh imperiaUzma v Raossii (Moscow, 1963)Google Scholar; Olegina, I. N., Industrializatsiia SSSR v angliiskoi i amerikanskoi istoriografii (Leningrad, 1971)Google Scholar, and idem, Kritika kontseptsii sovremennoi amerikanskoi i angliiskoi burzhuaznoi istoriografii po problemam industrializatsii SSSR (Leningrad, 1989).

21. Kahan, “Government Policies,” 466, 468.

22. Ibid., 468–69, 474–76.

23. For example, Gatrell, “Industrial Expansion,” 99–110; Crisp, “The Pattern of Industrialisation in Russia,” in Studies, 33–54; Gregory, Russian National Income, 123–79; Hoch, Steven L., “The Banking Crisis, Peasant Reform, and Economic Development in Russia, 1857–1861,” American Historical Review 46 (June 1991): 795820CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olegina, Industrializatsiia v istoriografii, 86—92; Laverychev, “Gosudarstvennyi kapitalizm,” 20—38.

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28. Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy; Davies, ed., From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy.

29. Mann, Michael, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 25:2 (1984): 185213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Mann, , ed. The Rise and Decline of the Nation State (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar. For additional discussion of state development in this sense, see Laverychev, V, Edelberg, Ingrid, and Gunther, Renate, “Staatsmonopolistischer Kapitalismus im Vorrevolutionaren Russland,” Jahrbuch für Wirt schaftsgeschichte 44 (1985): 5767Google Scholar; Argenbright, Robert T., “The Russian Railroad System and the Founding of the Communist State, 1917–1922” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1990).Google Scholar

30. Cf. North, Institutions; idem, “A Transaction Cost Theory of Politics,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 2:4 (1990): 355–67; and Institutions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (Winter 1991): 97112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Mann, “Autonomous Power,” 190.

32. Ibid., 204–5.

33. Ibid., 205.

34. Ibid., 201. Emphasis mine.

35. Ibid., 210.

36. North, Institutions, 4.

37. Ibid., 27–35.

38. Ibid., 5.

39. For a good general introduction to this subject together with an excellent bibliography, see Cross, Rod, “On the Foundations of Hysteresis in Economic Systems,” Economics and Philosophy 9 (1993): 5374CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A more genial and often-cited discussion is found in David, Paul A., “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review (May 1985): 332—37Google Scholar. For an application to the contemporary situation of transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe, see Stark, David, “Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 6 (Winter 1992): 1754.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. North, Institutions, 9, 80.

41. Ibid., 99–100.

42. Ibid., 58–59.

43. Gregory, Russian National Income.

44. For example, Kuznets, Simon, Economic Growth and Structure: Selected Essays (New York, 1965), 181Google Scholar, 142–212; also idem, Modem Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, 1966); Rosecrance, Richard, The Rise of the Trading State (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Kennedy, Paul, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

45. Gregory, Russian National Income, 153—90.

46. The linear regression of State Expenditure on time is 0.94; that of Investment, 0.82. The two series, State Expenditure and Investment, are intercorrelated at 0.82.

47. Gregory, Russian National Income, 56—57, and Appendixes F and G, 249—64.

48. McNeill, William H., The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982)Google Scholar; Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 194–346; Fuller, William C. Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, 1985), 4774.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Gatrell, “Industrial Expansion.”

50. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 47–74.

51. Gregory, Russian National Income, Table G. 1, 261, Table G.4, 263.

52. Ivanovskii, V. V., Uchebnik administrativanogo prava. (Politseiskoe pravo: Pravo vnutrennago upravleniia.) 3d ed. (Kazan, 1908)Google Scholar; Deriuzhinskii, V. F., Politseiskoe pravo: Posobie dlia studentov. 2d ed. revised and enlarged (St. Petersburg, 1908).Google Scholar

53. Ivanovskii, Uchebnik, 388.

54. Owen, Thomas C., The Corporation Under Russian Law: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy (New York, 1991), chaps. 4—6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also idem, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855–1905 (New York, 1981).

55. Deriuzhinskii, chap. 9, “Fabrichnoe zakonodatel'stvo,” 526–35.

56. That is, an interest that goes beyond the mere right to tax activities and consists instead of at least a potential arbitrary right of ownership. As discussed by DeLong and Shleifer, this is characteristic of absolutist regimes. See De Long, J. Bradford and Shleifer, Andrei, “Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution” (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 4274, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Rowney, Don K., Transition to Technocracy: The Structural Origins of the Soviet Administrative State (Ithaca, 1989), chap. 2.Google Scholar

58. This is a modification of the terminology employed in Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, 1967).

59. For a discussion of the preoccupations of the pre-industrial Russian state in wartime, see Pintner, Walter M., “The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 53 (1984): 231–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kahan, Arcadius, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar, chap. 8. For the 1915 decrees, see “O nekotorykh merakh k obezpecheniiu toplivom uchrezhdenii armii i flota i putei soobshcheniia a ravno chastnykh predpriiatii, rabotaiushchikh dlia tselei gosudarstvennoi oborony,” Sobranie uzakoneniia, st. 865 (31 March 1915); “O rasprostranenii polnomochii, prisvoennykh Ministru Putei Soobshcheniia Imennym Vysochaishim Ukazom 4 ogo Marta 1915 goda, na dela po obezpecheniiu toplivom gosudarstvennykh i obshchestvennykh uchrezhdenii,” Sobraniie usikoneniia, st. 1091 (2 May 1915); “O Predostavlenii Ministru Torgovli i Promyshlennosti Osobykh Polnomochii po Obshchemy Rukovodstvu Prodovol'stvennym Delom v Imperii,” Sobrannie uzakoneniia, st. 1169 (19 May 1915); “Ob utverzhdenii pravil o Poriadke i usloviiakh raspredeleniia tverdago mineral'hago topliva mezhdu potrebiteliami,” Sobraniie uzakoneniia, st. 1215 (29 May 1915).

60. Ob utverzhdenii polozheniia ob Osobom Soveshchanii dlia ob'edineniia meropriatii po obezpecheniiu deistvuiushchei armii predmetami boevogo i material'nago snabzheniia,” Sobraniie uzakoneniia, st. 1280 (7 June 1915).

61. See the summary in Pravitel'stvennyi vestnik, no. 182 (Wednesday, 19 August–1 September, 1915), 1, cols. 2, 3.

62. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 446.

63. Consumption, according to one source, is “what consumers do.” More helpfully, that same discussion makes clear the inherent competition between consumption and investment. It mentions only obliquely, however, the degree to which the state and private consumers potentionally compete for shares of national income. Cf. Pennant-Rea, Rupert and Emmott, Bill, The Pocket Economist (Cambridge, 1983), 37Google Scholar. Comparatively and over time, moreover, apparently small variations in the ratio of consumption to investment and state expenditure have made substantial differences in rates of economic growth and military power.

64. See Kuznets, Economic Growth and Structure, 30–38. See also idem, “Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations: VII. The Share and Structure of Consumption,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 10:2, pt. 2 (January 1962), and the discussion of this view in the case of consumption in Japan in Kazushi Ohkawa, “Personal Consumption in Dualistic Growth,” in Ohkawa, Kazushi and Hayami, Yujiro, eds., Economic Growth: The Japanese Experience Since the. Meiji Era, (Tokyo, 1973), 2:655–77.Google Scholar