INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT

Russia till Lately a Peasant Empire—­Early Efforts to Introduce Arts and
Crafts—­Peter the Great and His Successors—­Manufacturing Industry
Long Remains an Exotic—­The Cotton Industry—­The Reforms of Alexander
II.—­Protectionists and Free Trade—­Progress under High Tariffs—­M. 
Witte’s Policy—­How Capital Was Obtained—­Increase of Exports—­Foreign
Firms Cross the Customs Frontier—­Rapid Development of Iron Industry—­A
Commercial Crisis—­M.  Witte’s Position Undermined by Agrarians and
Doctrinaires—­M.  Plehve a Formidable Opponent—­His Apprehensions of
Revolution—­Fall of M. Witte—­The Industrial Proletariat.

Fifty years ago Russia was still essentially a peasant empire, living by agriculture of a primitive type, and supplying her other wants chiefly by home industries, as was the custom in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.

For many generations her rulers had been trying to transplant into their wide dominions the art and crafts of the West, but they had formidable difficulties to contend with, and their success was not nearly as great as they desired.  We know that as far back as the fourteenth century there were cloth-workers in Moscow, for we read in the chronicles that the workshops of these artisans were sacked when the town was stormed by the Tartars.  Workers in metal had also appeared in some of the larger towns by that time, but they do not seem to have risen much above the level of ordinary blacksmiths.  They were destined, however, to make more rapid progress than other classes of artisans, because the old Tsars of Muscovy, like other semi-barbarous potentates, admired and envied the industries of more civilised countries mainly from the military point of view.  What they wanted most was a plentiful supply of good arms wherewith to defend themselves and attack their neighbours, and it was to this object that their most strenuous efforts were directed.

As early as 1475 Ivan III., the grandfather of Ivan the Terrible, sent a delegate to Venice to seek out for him an architect who, in addition to his own craft, knew how to make guns; and in due course appeared in the Kremlin a certain Muroli, called Aristotle by his contemporaries on account of his profound learning.  He undertook “to build churches and palaces, to cast big bells and cannons, to fire off the said cannons, and to make every sort of castings very cunningly”; and for the exercise of these various arts it was solemnly stipulated in a formal document that he should receive the modest salary of ten roubles monthly.  With regard to the military products, at least, the Venetian faithfully fulfilled his contract, and in a short time the Tsar had the satisfaction of possessing a “cannon-house,” subsequently dignified with the name of “arsenal.”  Some of the natives learned the foreign art, and exactly a century later (1856) a Russian, or at least a Slav,