Labour and Industrialization in Russia

Abstract

Introduction By ‘industrialization’, for the purpose of this study, is understood a process of change in time at the centre of which is a switch from manufacture of commodities by hand to that using machinery and mechanical motive power. It marks the rise of ‘modern industry’, absorbing increasing proportions of fixed capital relative to circulating capital. Its corollary is the factory system, entailing the problems of recruiting, training, and managing a spatially concentrated labour force and of apportioning resources between various factors of production in accordance with the nature of the individual enterprise and its ultimate aim of maximizing profit. In the long run, and at a pace and in patterns differing with individual economies, industrialization releases processes of change in the nature of society, in the composition of the labour force, in the structure of the GNP, and in incomes per head. In Russia ‘modern industry’ of any significance dates from the 1830s, when it was confined by and large to the cotton-spinning and beet-sugar industries. By 1861, a date conventionally regarded as the watershed separating modern from traditional Russia, about 85 per cent of sugar and about 90 per cent of cotton yarn was produced in factories by mechanical means. In these two industries there was undoubtedly continuity across the watershed of the Emancipation of serfs in 1861. Other industries, however, were only marginally affected by the new methods of manufacture: cotton-weaving remained at the handicraft stage, and mining, metallurgy, and metal-processing in particular remained backward and traditional.

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