The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (48 page)

That was, perhaps, just one more sign of an “immature” economy, as was the fact that the largest part of Russian industry was devoted to textiles and food processing (rather than, say, engineering and chemicals). Its tariffs were the highest in Europe, to protect industries which were simultaneously immature and inefficient, yet the flood of imported manufactures was rising with every increase in the defense budget and railway building. But perhaps the best indication of its underdeveloped status was the fact that as late as 1913, 63 percent of Russian exports consisted of agricultural produce and 11 percent of timber,
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both desperately needed to pay for the American farm equipment, German machine tools, and the interest on the country’s vast foreign debt—which, however, they did not quite manage to do.

Yet the assessment of Russian strength is worse when it comes to
comparative
output. Although Russia was the fourth-largest industrial power before 1914, it was a long way behind the United States, Britain, and Germany. In the indices of its steel production, energy consumption, share of world manufacturing production, and total industrial potential, it was eclipsed by Britain and Germany; and when these figures are related to population size and calculated on a per capita basis, the gap was a truly enormous one. In 1913 Russia’s per capita level of industrialization was less than one-quarter of Germany’s and less than one-sixth of Britain’s.
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At base, the Russia which in 1914 overawed the younger Moltke and the British ambassador to St. Petersburg was a peasant society. Some
80 percent of the population derived its livelihood from agriculture, and a good part of the remainder continued to have ties to the village and the commune. This deadening fact needs to be linked to two others. The first is that most of Russia’s enormous increase in population—61 million new mouths between 1890 and 1914 alone—occurred in the villages, and in the most backward (and non-Russian) regions, where poor soil, little fertilizer, and wooden plows were common. Secondly, all the comparative international data of this period show how inefficient Russian agriculture was overall—its crop yield for wheat being less than a third of Britain’s and Germany’s, for potatoes being about half.
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Although there were modern estates and farms in the Baltic region, in so many other areas the effect of the communal possession of land and the medieval habit of strip-farming was to take away the incentive for individual enterprise. So too did the periodic redistribution of the lands. The best way to increase one’s family share of land was simply to breed more and more sons before the next redistribution. This structural problem was not aided by the poor communications, the unpredictable but dreadful impact of the climate upon the crops, and the great disparity between the “surplus” provinces in the south and the overcrowded, less fertile “importing” provinces in old Russia proper. In consequence, while agricultural output did steadily increase over these decades (at about 2 percent annually), its gains were greatly eroded by the rise in population (1.5 percent annually). And because this enormous agricultural sector was increasing its
per capita
output by a mere 0.5 percent annually, the
real national product of Russia
was only expanding at about 1 percent per head
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—much less than those of Germany, the United States, Japan, Canada, and Sweden, and of course, a quite different figure from the much-quoted annual
industrial
increases of 5 or 8 percent.

The social consequences of all this are also a factor in any assessment of Russian
power
. Professor Grossman observes that “the extraordinarily swift growth of industry tended to be associated with great sluggishness—and even significant reverses—in other sectors, especially in agriculture and personal consumption; it also tended to outpace the modernization of society, if one may be permitted the phrase.”
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It is, in fact, a most seeming phrase. For what was happening was that a country of extreme economic backwardness was being propelled into the modern age by political authorities obsessed by the need “to acquire and retain the status of a European Great Power.”
¹³⁶
Thus, although one certainly can detect considerable self-driven entrepreneurial activities, the great
thrust
toward modernization was state-inspired and related to military needs—railways, iron and steel, armaments, and so on. But in order to afford the vast flow of imported foreign manufactures and to pay interest on the enormous foreign debt, the Russian state had to ensure that agricultural exports (especially
wheat) were steadily increased, even in period of great famine, like 1891; the slow increase in farm output did not, in many years, imply a better standard of living for the deprived and undernourished peasantry. By the same token, in order to pay for the state’s own extremely heavy capital investments in industrialization and in defense expenditures, high (chiefly indirect) taxes had to be repeatedly raised and personal cqnsumption squeezed. To use an expression of the economic historians, the czarist government was securing “forced” savings from its helpless populace. Hence the staggering fact that “by 1913 the average Russian had 50 percent more of his income appropriated by the state for current defense than did the average Englishman, even though the Russian’s income was only 27 percent of that of his British contemporary.”
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The larger social costs of this unhealthy combination of agrarian backwardness, industrialization, and top-heavy military expenditures are easy to imagine. In 1913, while 970 million rubles were allocated by the Russian government to the armed forces, a mere 154 million rubles were spent upon health and education; and since the administrative structure did not give the localities the fiscal powers of the American states or English local government, that inadequacy could not be made up elsewhere. In the fast-growing cities, the workers had to contend with no sewerage, health hazards, appalling housing conditions, and high rents. There were fantastic levels of drunkenness—a short-term escape from brute reality. The mortality rate was the highest in Europe. Such conditions, the discipline enforced within the factories, and the lack of any appreciable real rise in living standards produced a sullen resentment of the system which in turn offered an ideal breeding ground for the populists, Bolsheviks, anarchosyndicalists, radicals—indeed, for anybody who (despite the censorship) argued for drastic changes. After the epic 1905 unrest, things cooled off for a while; but in the three years 1912–1914 the incidence of strikes, mass protests, police arrests, and killings was spiraling to an alarming degree.
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Yet that sort of ferment paled by comparison with the issue which has frightened all Russian leaders from Catherine the Great to the present regime—the “peasant question.” When bad harvests and high prices occurred, they interacted with the deep resentments against high rents and grim working conditions to produce vast outbreaks of agrarian unrest. After 1900, the historian Norman Stone records:

Yet when the minister for the interior, Stolypin, tried to reduce this discontent by breaking up the peasant communes after 1908, he simply provoked fresh unrest—whether from villages determined to keep their communal system or from newly independent farmers who swiftly went bankrupt. Thus, “Troops were needed on 13,507 occasions in January 1909, and 114,108 occasions that [whole] year. By 1913, there were 100,000 arrests for ‘attacks on State power.’ ”
¹⁴⁰
Needless to say, all this strained a reluctant army, which was also busy crushing the resentful ethnic minorities—Poles, Finns, Georgians, Latvians, Estonians, Armenians—who were seeking to preserve the grudging concessions over “Russification” which they had obtained during the regime’s weakness in 1905–1906.
¹⁴¹
Any further military defeat would once again see such groups striving to escape Muscovy’s domination. Although we do not have the exact breakdown, there was doubtless a heavy proportion of such groups in the staggering total of two million Russians who got married in August 1914—in order to avoid being drafted into the army.

In short, it is not simply from the perspective of the post-Bolshevik Revolution that one can see that Russia before 1914 was a sociopolitical tinderbox, and very likely to produce large conflagrations in the event of further bad harvests, or reductions in the factory workers’ standards of living, or—possibly—a great war. One is bound to use the words “very likely” here, since there also existed (alongside these discontents) a deep loyalty to czar and country in many areas, an increasingly nationalistic assembly, broad Pan-Slavic sympathies, and a corresponding hatred of the foreigner. Indeed, there was many a feckless publicist and courtier, in 1914 as in 1904, who argued that the regime could not afford to appear reticent in great international issues. If it came to war, they urged, the nation would firmly support the pursuit of victory.
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But could such a victory be assured, given Russia’s likely antagonists in 1914? In the war against Japan, the Russian soldier had fought bravely and stolidly enough—as he had in the Crimea and in the 1877 war against Turkey—but incompetent staffwork, poor logistical support, and unimaginative tactics all had had their effect. Could the armed services now take on Austria-Hungary—and, more particularly, the military-industrial powerhouse of imperial Germany—with any better result? Despite all of its own absolute increases in industrial output in this period, the awful fact was that Russia’s productive
strength was actually
decreasing
relative to Germany’s. Between 1900 and 1913, for example, its own steel production rose from 2.2 to 4.8 million tons, but Germany’s leaped forward from 6.3 to 17.6 million tons. In the same way, the increases in Russia’s energy consumption and total industrial potential were not as large, either absolutely or relatively, as Germany’s. Finally, it will be noticed that in the years 1900–1913 Russia’s share of world manufacturing production
sank
, from 8.8 percent to 8.2 percent, because of the expansion of the German and (especially) the American shares.
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There were not encouraging trends.

But, it has been argued, “by the yardstick with which armies were measured in 1914,” Russia
was
powerful, since “a war which tested economics and state bureaucratic structures as well as armies” was not anticipated by the military experts.
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If so, one is left wondering why contemporary references to German military power drew attention to Krupp steel, the shipyards, the dyestuffs industry, and the efficiency of German railways
as well as
front-line forces.
¹⁴⁵
Nonetheless, if it is simply the military figures which matter, then the fact that Russia was creating ever more divisions, artillery batteries, strategic railways, and warships did impress. Assuming that a war would be a short one, these sorts of general statistics all pointed to Russia’s growing strength.

Once this superficial level of number-counting is discarded, however, even the military issue becomes altogether more problematical. Once again, the decisive factor was Russia’s socioeconomic and technical backwardness. The sheer size of its vast peasant population meant that only one-fifth of each annual cohort was actually conscripted into the armed forces; to have taken in every able-bodied man would have caused the system to collapse in chaos. But those peasants who were recruited could hardly be regarded as ideal material for a modern industrialized war. Thanks to the crude and overheavy concentration upon armaments rather than the broader, more subtle areas of national strength (e.g., general levels of education, technological expertise, bureaucratic efficiency), Russia was frightfully backward at the
personnel
level. As late as 1913 its literacy rate was only 30 percent, which, as one expert has tartly remarked, “was a much lower rate than for mid-eighteenth-century England.”
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And while it was all very well to vote vast sums of money for new recruits, would they be of much use if the army possessed too few trained NCOs? The experts in the Russian general staff, looking with “feelings of inferiority and envy” at Germany’s strength in that respect, thought not. They were also aware (as were some foreign observers) of the desperate shortages of good officers.
¹⁴⁷
Indeed, from the evidence now available, it appears that in almost all respects—heavy artillery, machine guns, handling of large numbers of infantry, levels of technical training, communications, and
even its large fleet of aircraft—the Russian military was acutely conscious of its weaknesses.
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The same sort of gloomy conclusions arose when Russia’s planned mobilization and strategic-railway system were examined in detail. Although the
overall
mileage of the railway network by 1914 seemed impressive, once it was set against the immense distances of the Russian Empire—or compared with the much denser systems of western Europe—its inadequacy became clear. In any case, since many of these lines were built on the cheap, the rails were often too light and the bedding for the track too weak, and there were too few water tanks and crossings. Some locomotives burned coal, others oil, others wood, which further complicated things—but that was a small problem compared with the awkward fact that the army’s peacetime locations were quite different from its wartime deployment areas and affected by its deliberate dispersion policy (Poles serving in Asia, Caucasians in the Baltic provinces, etc.). Yet if a great war came, the masses of troops had somehow to be efficiently transported by the inadequate staff of the railway battalions, of whom “over a third were wholly or partly illiterate, while three-quarters of the officers had no technical training.”
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