It is very sad to note on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution that gossip tales about the superiority of tsarist Russia over the USSR have become official ideologemes. This also saddens those who are not even close admirers of the Bolsheviks - just distortion of historical facts and outright lies depress the scientific community, and many ordinary citizens. But, in the meantime, a lot of documents, memoirs and statistical data have been preserved that can lead to the feelings of the monarchists.
Valentin Katasonov, a scientist-economist, professor of the Department of International Finance at MGIMO, assures that many of today's assessments of the economic situation of the Russian Empire distort the real situation, and on the eve of the First World War and the 1917 revolution it was already quite difficult.
“Outwardly, everything seemed to be pretty decent. But, you know, any national economy can be thought of as the economy of a large company that has its own assets and its own liabilities. trade network, ports, etc. But the fact is that there are liabilities - these are debt obligations for loans, investments. That is, this kind of external well-being was achieved at the price of the fact that we increasingly fell into dependence on Western investors and Western creditors.
If we talk about numbers, on the eve of the First World War, the debt of the Russian Empire amounted to more than 10 billion gold rubles, during the war we actively took out loans, and by 1920 (together with interest) the debt ran into 18.5 billion gold rubles.
“As for the assets of this“company”called the Russian Empire, then, relatively speaking, these assets were very peculiar - they were mainly enterprises in the raw material sector of the economy or enterprises for the primary processing of raw materials,” says Valentin Katasonov. steel and pig iron, oil production and some kind of oil refining, but to a lesser extent. There were, of course, elements of processing enterprises, but in general, of course, such a skewed structure of the economy was striking."
Industry
Nevertheless, today the idea is officially broadcast that industrialization began under Nicholas II. Nakanune. RU wrote earlier about the prevalence of foreign capital in the industry of the Russian Empire.
“They understood that Russia was lagging behind the West, they understood that Russia needed industrialization, although even such a word was not used. that accelerated industrial development is necessary, the same Finance Minister Sergei Witte spoke about this, says Valentin Katasonov.
But Witte had in mind a qualitatively different "industrialization" - not the one that will become the basis for a powerful state, because it will be carried out at the expense of foreign capital.
"Foreign capital does not need manufacturing enterprises in the Russian Empire that would compete with enterprises in Germany, France, and the United States. That is, it was such a one-sided" industrialization ", a dependent type of economic development. Therefore, what can be said about all these distortions, about the "industrialization of the era of Nicholas II" - there was no industrialization, it was an unhealthy development. Unhealthy, one-sided development of the economy in the interests of foreign capital, "says Doctor of Economics Valentin Katasonov.
The situation in the village
Peasants occupied 80% of the Russian Empire. And in a traditional, pre-industrial society, the peasantry always constitutes the overwhelming majority of the population. The number of the peasantry in the country has not diminished - where is your vaunted "industrialization"?
The situation of the peasants was not only bad, it was rapidly deteriorating. The community divided the allotment into foodies, which led to a rapid population growth at the turn of the century and to agrarian overpopulation at the beginning of the 20th century. More than half of the peasants had an allotment "below the subsistence level," that is, hunger was a permanent condition of a significant part of the country.
Finance Minister Bunge wrote: "When the population increased, the allotted land was not enough to feed the peasants and to provide them with the means to pay taxes … When crop failures joined this … then the situation of the peasants in whole counties and even provinces became disastrous …".
The reforms that Witte tried to introduce would have delayed the collapse, but would not have canceled the catastrophe. The peasants did not have stabilizing grain supplies, so any crop failure led to hunger. Many classics have also written about the situation in the Russian countryside. Let's turn to the mastodon of Russian literature and social thought at the beginning of the century - to Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, he described his trip to different counties like this:
"The food consists of herbal cabbage soup, whitened if there is a cow, and unbleached if there is no cow, and only bread. In all these villages, the majority have sold and pledged everything that can be sold and mortgaged. There are four horses and four for ten yards. cows; there are almost no sheep; all the houses are so old and bad that they barely stand. All are poor, and everyone begs to help them. "If only the guys had a little rest," the women say. "And then they ask for folders (bread), and There is nothing to give, and I will not fall asleep having dinner "(…) I asked to change three rubles for me. There was not even a ruble of money in the whole village. In addition, landless soldiers' children live in this village. A whole suburb of these inhabitants has no land and is always in poverty, now but with expensive bread and with a sparse supply of alms in terrible, horrible poverty.”From the hut near which we stopped, a ragged dirty woman came out and went to a heap of something lying on the pasture and covered with a caftan that was torn and permeated everywhere. her 5 children. A three-year-old girl sick in extreme heat with something like influenza. Not that there is no question of treatment, but there is no other food, except for the crusts of bread, which the mother brought yesterday, leaving the children and running off with a bag for a fee. The woman's husband left in the spring and did not return. These are roughly many of these families."
The classic saw the problems of the Russian people and named the reasons: shortage of land - because half of the land remained with the landowners or overbought by the rich; from laws that protect factory owners and capitalist machinery more than the workers themselves; from vodka, to which the peasants have been taught for years, because it is the main income of the state; from the military system of "soldierchina" - taking away young people healthy, young, but returning depraved, old, sick. What else? Officials, taxes. Why are these troubles? "From ignorance, in which it (the people) is deliberately supported by government and church schools," Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of the century.
Modern defenders of the empire write that thanks to the reforms of Alexander II and the policies of Alexander III, an unprecedented rise in the Russian economy began in the 1890s. Customs tariffs provided an influx of foreign capital for the organization of production. For a quarter of a century, the growth rates of the Russian economy have exceeded those of all other developed countries. Agriculture on the eve of the revolution also showed significant growth: in 1908-1912 alone, compared with the previous five-year period, wheat production increased by 37.5%, and Russia became the main - "world" - exporter of grain.
Indeed, in 1913 there was the largest harvest in the history of pre-revolutionary Russia, but this event did not cancel the famine. They were starving in Yakutia and adjacent territories (while grain was exported abroad), there the famine did not stop at all since 1911. Local and central authorities were practically not interested in the problems of helping the hungry. The villages died out completely.
If you look at the figures, then even the postulate is doubtful that the Russian Empire "fed the whole of Europe," and that foreign countries were piled high with our butter and eggs. In this successful 1913 year, the Russian Empire exported 530 million poods of all grain, which amounted to only 6.3% of the consumption of European countries (8.34 billion poods). And where did we feed "all of Europe"? But such testimonies about the "world grain exporter" were left by witnesses - in particular, journalist and writer Viktor Korolenko:
I know many cases when several families were united together, chose some old woman, together supplied her with the last crumbs, gave her children, and they themselves wandered into the distance, wherever their eyes looked, longing for the unknown about the children left behind … stocks disappear from the population, - family after family goes out on this mournful road … Dozens of families, joining spontaneously in crowds, which were driven by fear and despair to the highways, to villages and cities. (…) Figures that are truly frightening. renditions, again whole clouds of the same hungry and the same frightened people came out of the destitute villages …
As the loan drew to a close, begging intensified amid these fluctuations and became more and more common. The family, which served yesterday, went out with the bag themselves today. I had the hope that when I manage to announce all this, when I loudly tell the whole of Russia how in Lukoyanovo itself a little girl asks her mother "to bury her alive in the land", then, perhaps, my articles will be able to provide at least some influence on the fate of these Dubrovki, raising bluntly the question of the need for land reform, at least at the beginning of the most modest one."
To stop the flight of the poor from the villages, the authorities brought in troops and Cossacks, who blocked the path of the starving. Anyone who had a passport could leave the village in the free Russian Empire, but not everyone had one. The document was issued only for a certain period, and after its expiration, the person was considered a vagabond, and he could be beaten with sticks, imprisoned or sent to exile.
When today we are told about the amazing export of grain, they forget to say that the tsarist government took confiscatory measures - not only the surplus was confiscated - but the peasants tried to hide bread for themselves in order to save themselves from starvation in winter. They were hiding zealously, because the future export of the world leader in the export of grain was extracted by force. Immodest export earnings were divided among themselves by 1% of the elites, effective managers - families of landowners close to the court, small crumbs went to the industry (they mainly built railways to export more grain as far as possible), and you say industrialization … Maybe has it been like this all over the world? No, this is the data provided by the Academy of Geopolitical Problems in its report.
The French, for example, consumed 1.6 times more grain than the Russian peasants. And this is in a climate where grapes and palms grow. If in numerical terms, the Frenchman ate 33.6 pounds of grain per year, producing 30.4 pounds and importing another 3.2 pounds per person. The German consumed 27, 8 poods, producing 24, 2, only in the dysfunctional Austria-Hungary, which had survived the last years, the consumption of grain was 23, 8 poods per capita.
The Russian peasant consumed meat twice less than in Denmark, and seven to eight times less than in France. The Russian peasants drank milk 2.5 times less than the Dane, and 1, 3 times less than the French.
The Russian peasant ate eggs as much as 2, 7 (!) G per day, while the Danish peasant - 30 g, and the French - 70, 2 g per day.
Another thing is that our contemporary is lazy to look at the evidence from open sources, he believes at his word to what is pleasant to believe in - about paradise in the Russian Empire. Yes - the defenders of the tsarist way of life agree with us and explain for the general development - the main branch of the Russian economy was agriculture, which gave 55.7% of income: "But if we ignore the" progressive "development criteria, it was also a great advantage, for the peasant way of life was more Orthodox than industrial-urban ".
This is how this "more Orthodox" way of life is described by the scientist-chemist and agronomist Alexander Engelhardt, he lived and worked in the village, left to posterity a fundamental study of the reality of the Russian village - "Letters from the Village":
“Anyone who knows the village, who knows the situation and life of the peasants, does not need statistical data and calculations to know that we are not selling bread abroad from an excess … In a person from the intellectual class, such a doubt is understandable, because it is simply not believed, how is it that people live without eating. And yet, this is really so. Not that they did not eat at all, but malnourished, they live from hand to mouth, eat all kinds of rubbish. Wheat, good clean rye, we send abroad, to the Germans, who they will not eat all kinds of rubbish … Our peasant farmer does not have enough wheat bread for a baby's nipple, the woman will chew the rye crust that she herself eats, put it in a rag - suck it."
While the Russian tsar practiced shooting at crows, the ministers hoped to blind the laws on primary education, and 1% of the country's population crunched a French bun, February tried to prevent a social revolt, a peasant war, which future temporary workers had foreseen by reading reports on the state of affairs in the village.
After the storming of the Winter Palace a hundred years ago, the first decisions of the Bolsheviks were the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. The new government announced the nationalization of "land, mineral resources, waters and forests."
"Russia was pregnant with a revolution, it is no coincidence that a few years before his death Lev Tolstoy writes in his diary that he had a dream - a revolution took place in Russia not against private property, but against property in general," historian Andrei Fursov said in an interview with Nakanune. RU. Well, that's how it happened, that's why Lenin once called Leo Tolstoy the mirror of the Russian revolution."
