Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Main dates in Russian and Soviet history
- Glossary
- Map 1 Republics, cities and major towns of the USSR at the end of the 1930s
- Map 2 Agricultural regions of the USSR (including the Virgin Lands)
- Map 3 Industrial regions of the USSR
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Tsarist economy
- 3 War Communism, 1918–1920
- 4 The New Economic Policy of the 1920s
- 5 Measuring Soviet economic growth
- 6 Soviet economic development, 1928–1965
- 7 The Soviet economic system, 1928–1965
- 8 Soviet industrialisation in perspective
- Further reading
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
2 - The Tsarist economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Main dates in Russian and Soviet history
- Glossary
- Map 1 Republics, cities and major towns of the USSR at the end of the 1930s
- Map 2 Agricultural regions of the USSR (including the Virgin Lands)
- Map 3 Industrial regions of the USSR
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Tsarist economy
- 3 War Communism, 1918–1920
- 4 The New Economic Policy of the 1920s
- 5 Measuring Soviet economic growth
- 6 Soviet economic development, 1928–1965
- 7 The Soviet economic system, 1928–1965
- 8 Soviet industrialisation in perspective
- Further reading
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
Summary
The power of the tsars over their multi-national empire was exercised through the creation of a centralised state. From the sixteenth century onwards they sought intermittently to establish Russia as a great European power. But Russia was economically and socially less advanced than her rivals; and successive tsars sought to strengthen her economic and military might. Peter the Great (1694–1725) used serf labour on a large scale to construct from scratch the Western-style capital St Petersburg on the Baltic (known as Petrograd in the period 1914–24, and Leningrad in the period 1924–91). He also used serf labour to build up a charcoalbased iron industry, largely for military purposes, in the Urals on the borders of Europe and Asia.
During the early nineteenth century, the Russian market widened considerably, and a cotton-based textile industry developed rapidly, largely using imported machinery from Britain. The growth of the internal market occurred in spite of the continuance of serfdom in Russia longer than in the rest of Europe. Perhaps the most important event in Russian nineteenth-century history was the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II's Emancipation Act of 1861. Peasant emancipation paved the way for further economic development. It was now easier for former serfs to participate in the market – and even essential for them to do so, as they had to earn money by selling products on the market, or by selling their labour, in order to pay the high redemption charges imposed by the 1861 Act.
Historians used to argue that the main economic consequence of the Ȧct was to free labour for employment in industry: industrial labour was scarce before 1861 because the peasants were tied to the land.
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- Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev , pp. 6 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998