The conditions for the emergence of capitalism in Russia (an economic system based on private property and free enterprise) developed only in the second half of the 19th century. As in other countries, he did not appear from scratch. The signs of the birth of a completely new system can be traced back to the Petrine era, when, for example, in the Demidov Ural mines, in addition to serfs, civilian workers worked.
However, no capitalism was possible in Russia until the enslaved peasantry existed in a huge and poorly developed country. The liberation of the villagers from slavery in relation to the landlords was the main signal of the beginning of new economic relations.
The end of feudalism
Russian serfdom was abolished by Emperor Alexander II in 1861. The former peasantry was a class of feudal society. The transition to capitalism in the countryside could only happen after the stratification of the rural inhabitants into the bourgeoisie (kulaks) and the proletariat (farm laborers). This process was natural, it occurred in all countries. However, capitalism in Russia and all the processes accompanying its appearance had many peculiar features. In the village, they consisted of preserving the rural community.
According to the manifesto of Alexander II, the peasants were declared legally free and received rights to own property, engage in crafts and trade, conclude transactions, etc. Nevertheless, the transition to a new society could not take place overnight. Therefore, following the reform of 1861, communities began to appear in the villages, the basis for the functioning of which was communal land ownership. The team monitored an equal division into individual plots and a three-field arable system, in which one part was sown with winter crops, the second with spring crops, and the third was left under steam.
Stratification of peasants
The community equalized the peasants and impeded capitalism in Russia, although it could not stop it. Part of the villagers became poor. One-layer peasants became such a layer (for a full-fledged economy two horses were required). These village proletarians existed at the expense of earning on the side. The community did not let such peasants into the city and did not allow them to sell plots that they formally belonged to. Free de jure status did not correspond to de facto status.
In the 1860s, when Russia embarked on the path of capitalist development, the community delayed this evolution due to its commitment to traditional farming. The peasants within the collective were not required to take the initiative and take the risks for their own enterprise and desire to improve agriculture. Compliance was acceptable and important to conservative villagers. By this, the then Russian peasants were very different from the Western peasants, who had long since become farmers-entrepreneurs with their own commodity economy and marketing of products. For the most part, the domestic inhabitants of the villages were collectivists, because of which the revolutionary ideas of socialism were so easily spread among them.
Agrarian capitalism
After 1861, landowner economies began to rebuild on market methods. As in the case of peasants, a gradual stratification process began in this environment. Even many inert and inert landowners had to understand from their own experience what capitalism is. A definition from the history of this term necessarily includes mention of civilian labor. However, in practice, such a configuration was only a cherished goal, and not the initial state of affairs. At first, after the reform, the landowners' economies were kept at the workings of peasants, who took the rented land in exchange for their labor.
Capitalism in Russia has taken root gradually. The peasants who had just been liberated, who went to work for the former owners, worked with their inventory and cattle. Thus, the landowners were not yet capitalists in the full sense of the word, since they did not invest their own capital in production. Then working out can be considered a continuation of the dying feudal relations.
The agricultural development of capitalism in Russia was in the transition from archaic natural to more efficient commodity production. However, even in this process, old feudal features can be noted. The peasants of the new quenching sold only part of their products, consuming the rest on their own. Capitalist marketability suggested the opposite. All products had to be sold, while the peasant family in this case bought their own food at the expense of their own profit. Nevertheless, already in its first decade, the development of capitalism in Russia led to an increase in demand for dairy products and fresh vegetables in cities. Around them began to form new complexes of private gardening and animal husbandry.
Industrial Revolution
An important result brought about by the emergence of capitalism in Russia was the industrial revolution that swept the country . He was fueled by the gradual stratification of the peasant community. Craftsmanship and handicraft industries developed.
For feudalism, the characteristic form of industry was craft. Having become widespread in the new economic and social conditions, it has become a craft. At the same time, resellers appeared who linked consumers of goods and manufacturers. These buyers exploited handicraftsmen and lived off trading profits. It was they who gradually formed a layer of industrial entrepreneurs.
In the 1860s, when Russia entered the path of capitalist development, the first stage of capitalist relations began - cooperation. At the same time, the process of a difficult transition to wage labor began in large-scale industries, where until then only cheap and disenfranchised serf labor had been used for a long time. The modernization of production was complicated by the disinterested owners. Industrialists paid workers low wages. Poor working conditions markedly radicalized the proletariat.
Joint Stock Companies
In total, capitalism in Russia in the 19th century experienced several waves of booming industry. One of them occurred in the 1890s. In that decade, the gradual improvement of economic organization and the development of production technology led to a significant growth of the market. Industrial capitalism entered a new developed phase, the embodiment of which were numerous joint-stock companies. The figures for economic growth at the end of the 19th century speak for themselves. In the 1890s industrial output doubled.
Any capitalism is in crisis when it degenerates into monopoly capitalism with bloated corporations that own a certain economic sphere. In imperial Russia, this did not fully happen, including due to versatile foreign investment. Especially a lot of foreign money flowed into transport, metallurgy, oil and coal industry. It was at the end of the 19th century that foreigners switched to direct investment, whereas earlier they preferred loans. Such contributions were explained by greater profits and the desire of businessmen to earn.
Export and Import
Russia, having not yet become an advanced capitalist country, did not have time before the revolution to proceed with the massive export of its own capital. The domestic economy, on the contrary, willingly accepted injections from more developed states. Just at that time, “surplus capital” accumulated in Europe, which was looking for its own application in promising foreign markets.
There were simply no conditions for the export of Russian capital. Numerous feudal remnants, huge colonial outskirts, and relatively unimportant development of production prevented him. If capital was exported, it was mainly exported to eastern countries. This was done in the form of production or in the form of loans. Significant funds settled in Manchuria and China (a total of about 750 million rubles). Transport was a popular area for them. About 600 million rubles were invested in the China-East Railway.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian industrial production was already the fifth largest in the world. At the same time, the domestic economy was the first in terms of growth. The beginning of capitalism in Russia was left behind, now the country was hastily catching up with the most advanced competitors. The empire also occupied a leading position in terms of concentration of production. Its large enterprises were the workplaces of more than half of the entire proletariat.
Specific traits
The key features of capitalism in Russia can be described in several paragraphs. The monarchy was a country of a young market. Industrialization began here later than in other European countries. As a result of this, a significant part of industrial enterprises was recently built. These facilities are equipped with the latest technology. Mostly such enterprises belonged to large joint-stock companies. In the West, the situation remained exactly the opposite. European enterprises were smaller and their equipment less sophisticated.
With significant foreign investment, the initial period of capitalism in Russia was distinguished by the triumph of domestic and not foreign products. Importing foreign goods was simply unprofitable, but investing money was considered profitable. Therefore, in the 1890s. subjects of other states in Russia belonged to about a third of share capital.
The construction of the Great Siberian Railway from European Russia to the Pacific Ocean gave a serious impetus to the development of private industry. This project was state-owned, but raw materials for it were purchased from entrepreneurs. For years to come, the Trans-Siberian Railway has provided many manufacturers with orders for coal, metal and steam locomotives. On the example of the highway, one can trace how the formation of capitalism in Russia created a sales market for a wide variety of sectors of the economy.
Domestic market
Along with the growth of production, market growth also took place. Sugar and oil became the main items of Russian exports (Russia accounted for about half of world oil production). Massively imported cars. The share of imported cotton decreased (the domestic economy began to focus on its Central Asian raw materials).
The folding of the domestic national market took place in conditions when labor was the most important commodity. The new distribution of income was in favor of industry and cities, but infringed on the interests of the village. Therefore, the agricultural regions lagged behind in socio-economic development compared with industrial areas. A similar pattern was characteristic of many young capitalist countries.
The development of the domestic market was facilitated by all the same railways. In the years 1861-1885. 24 thousand kilometers of tracks were built, which amounted to about a third of the length of the tracks on the eve of the First World War. Moscow became the central transportation hub. It was she who connected all the regions of a huge country. Of course, such a status could not but accelerate the economic development of the second city of the Russian Empire. Improved communications facilitated communication between the outskirts and the center. New interregional trade relations arose.
It is significant that during the second half of the 19th century, bread production remained approximately at the same level, while industry everywhere developed and increased its output. Another unpleasant trend was anarchy in rail tariffs. Their reform took place in 1889. The government undertook to regulate tariffs. The new order greatly helped the development of the capitalist economy and the domestic market.
Contradictions
In the 1880s monopolistic capitalism began to take shape in Russia. Its first sprouts appeared in the railway industry. In 1882, the Union of Rail Manufacturers appeared, and in 1884, the Union of Rail Mount Manufacturers and the Union of Bridge-Building Plants.
The industrial bourgeoisie was formed. Its ranks included large merchants, former farmers, tenants of estates. Many of them received material incentives from the government. Merchantry was actively involved in capitalist entrepreneurship. The Jewish bourgeoisie has developed. Due to the Pale of Settlement, some of the outlying provinces of the southern and western stripes of European Russia were overflowed with merchant capital.
In 1860, the government founded the State Bank. It became the foundation of a young credit system, without which the history of capitalism in Russia does not seem. She stimulated the accumulation of financial resources from entrepreneurs. However, there were circumstances that seriously hindered the increase in capital. In the 1860s Russia survived the "cotton famine", economic crises occurred in 1873 and 1882. But even these fluctuations could not stop the accumulation.
Encouraging the development of capitalism and industry in the country, the state inevitably embarked on the path of mercantilism and protectionism. Engels compared Russia at the end of the 19th century with France of the Louis XIV era, where the protection of the interests of domestic producers also created all the conditions for the growth of manufactories.
The formation of the proletariat
Any signs of capitalism in Russia would not have made any sense if a full-fledged working class had not been generated in the country. The impetus for his appearance was the industrial revolution of the 1850-1880s. The proletariat is the class of a mature capitalist society. Its appearance was the most important event in the social life of the Russian Empire. The birth of the working mass changed the entire socio-political agenda of a vast country.
The Russian transition from feudalism to capitalism, and, consequently, the emergence of the proletariat were swift and radical processes. In their specifics, there were other unique features that arose due to the preservation of the remnants of the former society, the estate system, landlord tenure and the protective policy of the tsarist government.
In the period from 1865 to 1980, the growth of the proletariat in the industrial branch of the economy amounted to 65%, in the mining - 107%, in the railway - an incredible 686%. At the end of the 19th century, there were about 10 million workers in the country. Without an analysis of the formation of a new class, it is impossible to understand what capitalism is. The definition of history gives us a dry statement, but behind the laconic words and numbers were the fates of millions and millions of people who completely changed their way of life. The labor migration of the vast masses has led to a significant increase in the urban population.
Workers existed in Russia before the industrial revolution. These were serfs working in manufactories, the most famous of which were Ural enterprises. Nevertheless, the liberated peasants became the main source of growth for the new proletariat. The process of class transformation was often painful. The impoverished and lost peasants were fed into the workers. The most extensive withdrawal from the village was observed in the central provinces: Yaroslavl, Moscow, Vladimir, Tverskaya. Least of all this process affected the southern steppe regions. Also a small departure was in Belarus and Lithuania, although it was there that agrarian overpopulation was observed. Another paradox was that people from the outskirts, and not from the nearest provinces, sought industrial centers. Many features of the formation of the proletariat in the country were noted in his works by Vladimir Lenin. The “Development of Capitalism in Russia,” dedicated to this topic, was published in 1899.
The low wages of the proletarians were especially characteristic of small industry. It was there that the most merciless exploitation of workers was traced. The proletarians tried to change these difficult conditions with the help of difficult retraining. Peasants engaged in small crafts became distant migrants. Among them, transitional economic forms of activity were common.
Modern capitalism
The domestic stages of capitalism associated with the tsarist era can only be considered today as something remote and infinitely divorced from the modern country. 1917 . . .
. , 1990- . .
The transition to the market was announced at the end of 1991. In December, price liberalization was carried out , resulting in hyperinflation. Then the voucher privatization began, which was necessary for the transfer of state property to private hands. In January 1992, a Freedom of Trade Decree was issued, opening up new business opportunities. The Soviet ruble was soon abolished, and the Russian national currency defaulted, collapsed and denominated. Passing through the storms of the 1990s, the country built a new capitalism. It is in his conditions that modern Russian society lives.