Epilogue

The Kantian intuition that inspired this monograph is twofold. First, it was a tacit cultural and economic transition, spanning over half a century, rather than a time-limited and blood-stained revolution, that cumulatively modernized the steppes economies of the Euroasian continent-nation up to World War I. Second, the transition was catalyzed irreversibly by the development of the railways. The discontinuous manifestation of the post-Crimean War era was followed by the concession of peasant rights in the 1861–1863 emancipation by the Imperial political power structure as reflected in Count Witte’s system. This along with the extension of the arms of the Tsarist state across Russia’s vast spaces in the form of the Iron Horse—likened to a spider web—is well explained in the opening chapters of this monograph. Thus, my thesis suggests that paradoxically a democratization process emerged during that half-century of interaction between the railroads and the peasant commune village (the obshchina) and was codified ex post in the Stolypin reform of 1906. The growing share of the peasant population that carried internal passports attests to an avalanche-like exodus of peasant otkhodniks—wage laborers—to the industrial agglomerations of knowledge in the country’s urban centers (Fujita et al., 2001; Burds, 1998). Three voluntarily and rationally knit peasant associations—the landsman-based (zemliachestvo) crafts workshop (artel) and the village commune—mitigated the risks of seasonal wage work and migration and partly freed the peasants of their dependence on agricultural sources of income (Johnson, 1979; Troyat, 1961). Peasants could now accumulate human capital individually (Brooks, 2003) and form networks on a competence basis (Hodgson, 1999) in contractual labor associations (Coase, 1937), rendering effective the demand for universal suffrage (Ascher, 1988) amid reduced costs of collective action (Barzel, 2002). These third-party enforcement organizations (Barzel, Greif, 2006), I argue, catalyzed the transition from autocracy to constitutional monarchy.