Peter Berngardovich Struve

“ The economic and political evolution of Russia, as indeed in no less measure the general cultural development of the land, is marked by one original distinguishing trait. In order clearly to understand this originality, one fundamental all-determining peculiarity of Russian history, and above all of her economic evolution, must be steadily kept in mind. Russia has never ceased to be a land which continues to colonize and be colonized within its own bounds. ”

“ Without the heroic effort that was implied in the full and decisive renunciation of alcoholic liquors, which proceeded from the moral will of the whole nation, Russia could not have overcome her backwardness, that low level of the individuals who make up the mass of the nation which is our historical heritage. The progressive and collective impulse embodied in the command of the State overcame the backwardness and inertness of a multitude of weak individuals. ”

“ The real strength is embodied in the enormous Russian population which lives in that region, and which desires, in order to be able to breathe freely, to receive into its own hands the keys of its own house. ”

“ Thus are being laid the economic foundations of that Russia which must by its nature be a great peasant democracy, based on free co-operation of a multitude of small cultivators, working on their own land.
It is a country of a peasant democracy growing in all respects—both in quantity and in quality—and at the same time it is a whole world in itself. ”

“ For England, looked upon as an industrial country, is as compared with other European nations a young country, and one in which industrial evolution has been far less closely connected with town life than in Italy, Germany, and France. In Russia, as a country still younger industrially than England, this is perhaps even more clearly in evidence. Even the very foundations of industrial development in the two countries are alike. Adam Smith clearly saw the connection between the development of English industry and the commercial expansion of England. ”

“ At this solemn moment, so critical for Russia, the position of Russia in the struggle which foes have forced upon her is based upon a living historical right, that is to say, on an historical right which is combined with real strength and living necessity. The historical right in question is the great civilizing work, chiefly economic in character, which has been accomplished by the Russian people on the shores of the Black Sea. ”

“ Often when one speaks of the traditional struggle carried on by Russia with Turkey, the conqueror of the Byzantine Empire, it is forgotten that this struggle has been waged in reality not by armies, not by the fleet, but by the agriculturist, who has turned steppes periodically laid waste by nomadic invaders into an extremely rich agricultural region, with a large Russian population. ”

“ Forming for customs purposes a single territory—with the exception of Finland, an exception which is really an anomaly, to be explained by purely historical reasons, simply because at the time of the annexation of Finland it was impossible to establish a proper customs control over the long coast line of the new territory—and with a population the vast majority of which lives under the same code of civil law, Russia is yet a complex of territories in different economic conditions and in different stages of economic development. ”

“ Terrible are the sufferings and the sacrifices of war, but, if amidst this horrible bloodshed any consolation is possible, it is the faith that sufferings and sacrifices will yet lead to the uplifting of human nature and so will provide a basis for true welfare in every respect, in economic life as in everything else. ”

“ The artificiality of St Petersburg, founded in 1703, is quite different in kind from the artificiality of—shall we say, Karlsruhe, founded in 1715—quite apart from the impossibility of drawing comparisons in point of size between the Duchy of Baden and the Empire of Russia. Petrograd, considered both historically and economically, is a town colony on a gigantic scale, deliberately set down "on the banks of the desolate waters"—so run the words of Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, who sang the praises of the mighty founder of the Empire. ”

“ Russia and America are the two wings, so to speak, of the great movement in economic development, which originated in Western Europe a little over a century ago, and thence has spread eastward and westward. They both borrowed from this centre the new technical equipment of machinery and power for production and transportation, and adapted it to their similar needs [20] ."
I will summarize. Russia is a country of immense agricultural forces and possibilities. And this place occupied by agriculture in the economic life of Russia at the same time secures her industrial development. ”

“ I at any rate am firmly convinced that the production of souls of a good quality is the most lucrative national manufacture. And therefore the favourable external conditions under which, as I have explained, Russia lives, are from my point of view important above all as conditions of the production of that which Ruskin again called "human worth." ”

“ As our first example, let us take agriculture. At the present day it may be taken as firmly established that the typical Russian village community, with its periodical redistribution of land to secure fair partition, is not an early or primitive institution, but a comparatively late adaptation of the peasant group on whose shoulders lay the burden of paying the taxes and performing the labour-services exacted by the landowner or the State. ”

“ In Russia there are large resources of human energy, and we are now well aware that the existence of so large a quantity of energy stored in the form of human beings is not due to some inexorable law of nature, but is historically determined by definite psychological factors. But we economists also know that the quality of the constituents of a population is of enormous importance to its economic life. ”

“ The making of Russia is at once a centripetal and centrifugal process. The most fertile provinces or governments of European Russia, those situated in the south, are called New Russia; for these are regions of steppes, of which agricultural colonists took possession only at the close of the eighteenth or at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While the Russian Lancashire is the centre of Russia, the region adjoining Moscow, the chief Russian coalfields are situated in new, colonial Russia. ”

“ It was the consequence of the fact that only as a politically united whole could the land make progress in all respects, and that only a single ethnical element—that which formed the Muscovite State—possessed the political talent required. But this political structure,—a complex of widely differing economic regions united in the form of an Empire,—and the predominance of the Russian element, impose, and particularly in the economic sphere, an enormous burden of responsibility. ”

“ If it may be said that the Russian textile industry—in part too the hardware industry—is of country and of peasant origin, yet in the history of that industry the State, the landowners, and the town handicrafts all played a certain, and no unimportant part. The whole of the eighteenth century is marked by the attempt to create factory or large scale industry in Russia at a blow. ”

“ In those days, under the influence of contemporary facts and of the doctrine which we associate with the name of Malthus, people dreaded a large population and its rapid increase. In the intervening century mankind has found out how to rationalise reproduction on purely individualistic lines, and now all are more alarmed by the danger of a stoppage in the growth of population, which threatens the most highly civilized part of the world to-day. Russia is the only large country where the birth-rate has in recent years shown practically no tendency to diminish. ”

“ Further, there is such a thing in human beings as "economically essential quality," if I may be permitted to use the phrase.
If one were to believe certain representations of the Russian people which have recently been given currency in England, such economic qualities are entirely foreign to that people. In these representations the Russian people is depicted as a religious anarchist caring nothing for the things of this world, as an Eastern people of contemplators, with no aptitude for the "bourgeois" life and conduct of Western peoples. ”

“ All this means that Russia, taken economically, is an empire which may become self-sufficient within its own borders on the largest scale. But this self-sufficiency or αὐτάρκεια does not in the least exclude the most animated exchange with other countries. It must be borne in mind that various countries stand at any given moment on various planes of economic evolution. And these differences, which are historical but daily perpetuated through all changes, make it inevitable that various countries should be in need of one another at any moment. ”

“ It would be a tempting task to distinguish the various elements of Russian economic life as they lie before us at the critical moment when Russia became a great power and definitely entered the European world on equal terms with other nations. It has been contended that the economic evolution of Russia before Peter the Great did not lead to a development of town life in the forms characteristic of Mediaeval Europe. It has also been said that feudalism never existed in Russia. ”

“ Russia is building up her culture not in a confined space already occupied and settled, but in a free colonial area which is continually expanding, and at the same time is constantly connected territorially with the centre from which it expands. When the Russian State was being formed, the Moscow region was such a centre. ”

“ All that can be said is that the cultural and political importance of the process is more evident in the northern movement than in the advance to the Black Sea. But on the other hand, this southern movement is of enormous economic importance. The European shores of the Black Sea, consisting of the most fertile provinces of European Russia, are in the economic sense the genuine creation of the Russian people, conquered by them from nomads and Nature. ”

“ We are going on multiplying, and if we succeed—and evidently we are already beginning to succeed—in lowering the death-rate through the increase in material well-being which accompanies the spread of education, the rate of growth of the population of Russia ought to continue to show an upward trend for a considerable time to come, or in any case not fall below the fairly high level at which it stood in the years immediately preceding the war. ”

“ In the case of Russia, in spite of the prevailing system of "natural economy," the enormous size of the State, which readily divides itself into an industrial and an agricultural region, has long meant the existence of a very large and growing internal market. By supplying the needs of this market Russian industry is enabled to grow and to develop. ”

“ Further if we remember that in Siberia and in the Urals Russia possesses a practically inexhaustible supply of iron ore, you will realise what a great economic future awaits her as a whole. In speaking of the economic future of Russia, it should never be forgotten that Russia should be taken as a whole, that is, European and Asiatic Russia together. For instance, European Russia, in the matter of coal supplies, stands lower than Great Britain and Germany, but it is just in this respect that Siberia is an inexhaustible store ”

“ For all other European countries the process of colonization either came to an end long ago, or has assumed the form of the foundation of overseas colonies. For Russia, on the other hand, colonization is still going on within her own bounds, somewhat after the fashion of the German colonizing process between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, which created a great part of present-day Germany, and destroyed Slavonic peoples and Slavonic states which have now passed into oblivion. ”

“ The agricultural Russia is that steadily growing market on the basis of which Russian industry will develop. The Russian peasant democracy is still in swaddling clothes, and its development in the atmosphere of economic independence and political freedom will mean the growth of industrial culture throughout the Empire. ”

“ Russia is, too, the land where serfdom continued to exist after it had disappeared from all other European countries, and this in spite of the existence of free land to which the agricultural population could escape. Here we have an example of precisely that commixture of old with new which characterises the whole economic development of Russia. One naturally asks oneself the question: How could serfdom maintain its hold in Russia till 1861 ”

“ There is, however, one peculiarity of Russian economic life, which, although it is almost certainly of a temporary character, is yet extremely important for the present day and for the near future. The period in which we live is in one respect a direct contrast to that in which our forefathers lived a hundred years ago. ”

“ In den Steppen gahrt, treibt und gestaltet es sich still, aber gewaltig. Die Seidenwürmer spinnen, die Bäume erheben ihr Haupt, das Getreide wachst und greift um sich. Alles drängt und ringt nach Luft und Licht. ”

“ Every State of any size represents a considerable variety of natural and historical conditions. This variety it is which determines the division of a nation into different economic regions. The extent, however, to which such individual regions differ from each other is different in different countries. ”

“ Thus, a certain international division of labour has a tendency to strike deep roots and to establish firmly certain special functions. Even Russia has such specialities in the field of industry. All countries can manufacture rubber galoshes, but in Russia an enormous number of people use galoshes, and Russians are so accustomed to wear them, that Russia, having created a large production of this article, has also been able to develop a considerable export of galoshes. ”