Leon Trotsky

“ A considerable part of the so-called internal loans, i.e., loans realized through the home credit departments, were in no way distinguished from foreign loans, because they were in reality placed with foreign capitalists. Proletarianising and pauperising the peasantry by heavy taxation, absolutism converted the millions of the European Stock Exchange into soldiers and battleships, into prisons and into railways. ”

“ When, in the second half of the nineteenth century, capitalist industry began to develop widely, it did not encounter any urban crafts but, in the main, only village handicraft. ‘For the one and a half million factory workers, at the most, that there are in Russia’, writes M. Milyukov, ‘there are still not less than four million peasants engaged in domestic manufactures in their own villages, who continue to carry on at the same time their agricultural occupations. ”

“ The necessity for concentrating the population arose out of the growth of large factory industry. The nucleus of the population of a modern town, at least of a town possessing some economic and political significance, is the sharply differentiated class of wage-workers. ”

“ It was guided in its sympathies and antipathies by the principles formulated by the Dutch bankers Hoppe and Co., in the conditions for the loan to Tsar Paul in 1798: ‘interest must be paid irrespective of political circumstances’. The European Stock Exchange was even directly interested in the maintenance of absolutism, for no other government could guarantee such usurious interest. State loans, however, were not the only means whereby European capital was imported into Russia. ”

“ The essential economic feature of the modern town lies in the fact that it works up raw materials supplied by the country. For that reason conditions of transport are decisive for it. Only the introduction of railways could so greatly widen the sources of supply for the town as to make it possible to concentrate such large masses of people. ”

“ In previous revolutions the latter found its support in the urban petty-bourgeoisie: craftsmen, small shopkeepers, etc.
Another reason for the disproportionately large political role played by the Russian proletariat is the fact that Russian capital is to a considerable extent of foreign origin. This fact, according to Kautsky, resulted in the growth of the number, strength and influence of the proletariat being out of proportion to the growth of bourgeois liberalism.
As we have said above, capitalism in Russia did not develop out of the handicraft system. ”

“ Thus, the Russian towns, like the towns under the Asiatic despotisms, and in contrast to the craft and trading towns of the European Middle Ages, played only the role of consumers. In the same period the towns of the West more or less successfully established the principle that craftsmen had no right to live in the villages, but the Russian towns never strove after such aims. ”

“ The shorter summer in comparison with the West allowed a longer winter leisure. Owing to these factors, manufacturing industry was never separated from agriculture and was not concentrated in the towns, but remained in the countryside as an occupation auxiliary to agriculture. ”

“ But the modern Russian towns differ from the old ones not only in the number of their inhabitants but also in their social type: they are centres of commercial and industrial life. The majority of our old towns played hardly any economic role ”

“ Out of over 16,000 households, according to the census of 1701, not more than 7,000, that is, 44 per cent, were settlers and craftsmen, and even these lived in the State suburb and worked for the palace. ”