From Janus to Janus: Peter I, Nicholas II, and Industrialization

In this chapter, I expose my thesis, and the evidence behind it, to the tension between Alexander Gerschenkron’s notion of abstract continuity in history and Michael Confino’s historical-uniqueness approach. By alluding to the long-term perspective that links the Petrine modernization characteristics of stable dictatorship to those of Stalin, or what Anisimov (The reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through coercion in Russia. Sharpe, 1993) calls “progress through coercion.” Alexander Gerschenkron, although conceptualizing Nicholaean Russia as a consensual monarchy, concurs with Gregory’s quantitative assessment of the Tsarist Russian government’s expenditure structure. To prioritize military use when allocating physical and human capital—a perennial determinant of backwardness—an imperial monolithic stably dictatorial government, as Gerschenkron (Economic backwardness in historical perspective. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962) and Anisimov (The reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through coercion in Russia. Sharpe, 1993) point out, must establish the supremacy of the common over individual welfare, such being typical of a war economy (Sztern, 1994). This condition historically legitimizes individual subservience and degradation, both of which hamper innovation. This explains why, due to a historical vicious cycle, Tsarist Russia became a backward importer of technology. The historical-uniqueness approach, however, allows us to distinguish between Nicholas II’s modernization and Peter I’s earlier version. Nicholas’ dual-purpose railroad technology, as opposed to Peter’s imports for the Baltic fleet in the eighteenth century, allowed broad population strata to acquire human capital, bringing on a cultural revolution. The railroads stimulated the growth of domestic commodity markets, resulting in a short-term net increase in transaction costs on account of specialization. This time-limited increase forced the ruler to make democratizing allodial concessions, entailing the delineation of property rights, to bring transaction costs back down. The Stolypin land reform, instituted at a Hayekian political-rationality lag that, according to the Coasian paradigm, caused transaction costs to accumulate, was incongruent with the non-participatory systems that had typified the Tsarist autocracy until then.