Thomas C. Owen - Böcker

Professor Owen examines corporate capitalism under the Tsarist and late Soviet regimes. Covering two hundred years from the Tsarist period through perestroika and into the present, he demonstrates the historical obstacles that have confronted Russian corporate entrepreneurs and the continuity of Russian attitudes toward corporate capitalism.

This monograph - based largely on memoirs, diaries, archival documents and other primary sources - represents a comprehensive social history of the Moscow merchants in the period between 1855 and 1905. The author first examines the essential aspects of traditional merchant culture in the early nineteenth century. He then discusses the emergence of 'capitalist' manufacturers and traders, a group who implemented modern business techniques in the 1840s without however, adopting the political liberalism of the western bourgeoisie. Committed to economic modernisation as a means of redressing Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War, these merchants cooperated with sympathetic intellectuals in railroad management, banking, journalism and the struggle to gain tariff protection. The study concludes with an analysis of the 'bourgeois' class consciousness that resulted from the Moscow commercial-industrial leaders' conflicts with both the tsarist government and the militant labour movement during the Revolution of 1905. Owen contributes to discussions about the distinctive features of Russian social and economic development in the final years of the Russian Empire.

This study analyses the legal framework imposed on corporations by the imperial Russian Government. It stresses the dual nature of the bureaucracy's policy toward modern capitalist enterprise: encouragement for the sake of economic development, and regimentation in the interest of maintaining autocratic control. By illuminating the political nature of the autocracy's economic agenda, Professor Owen seeks to explain why Russian corporate law became increasingly restrictive toward the end of the imperial period. Attention is also given to the practices of Russian capitalists, whose occasional abuses of corporate power justified restrictive laws in the eyes of officials. The emphasis of this study on the uneasy accommodation between tsarist autocracy and the modern corporation clarifies aspects of Russian political, economic, and cultural life that hindered the development of capitalism on the eastern periphery of Europe.

This study analyses the legal framework imposed on corporations by the imperial Russian Government. It stresses the dual nature of the bureaucracy's policy toward modern capitalist enterprise: encouragement for the sake of economic development, and regimentation in the interest of maintaining autocratic control. By illuminating the political nature of the autocracy's economic agenda, Professor Owen seeks to explain why Russian corporate law became increasingly restrictive toward the end of the imperial period. Attention is also given to the practices of Russian capitalists, whose occasional abuses of corporate power justified restrictive laws in the eyes of officials. The emphasis of this study on the uneasy accommodation between tsarist autocracy and the modern corporation clarifies aspects of Russian political, economic, and cultural life that hindered the development of capitalism on the eastern periphery of Europe.

Fedor Chizhov built the first railroad owned entirely by Russian stockholders, created Moscow’s first bank and mutual credit society, and launched the first profitable steamship line based in Archangel. In this valuable book, Thomas Owen vividly illuminates the life and world of this seminal figure in early Russian capitalism.Chizhov condemned European capitalism as detrimental to the ideal of community and the well-being of workers and peasants. In his strategy of economic nationalism, Chizhov sought to motivate merchants to undertake new forms of corporate enterprise without undermining ethnic Russian culture. He faced numerous obstacles, from the lack of domestic investment capital to the shortage of enlightened entrepreneurial talent. But he reserved his harshest criticism for the tsarist ministers, whose incompetence and prejudice against private entrepreneurship proved his greatest hindrance.Richly documented from Chizhov’s detailed diary, this work offers an insightful exploration of the institutional impediments to capitalism and the rule of law that plagued the tsarist empire and continue to bedevil post-Soviet Russia.

Ruth Roosa's long-awaited study focuses on the most important business organization in imperial Russia. the Association of Industry and Trade, the nerve center of Russian capitalism in the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The author's comprehensive, nuanced analysis of the Association's policy positions on Russian economic development has no peer. Of particular interest are the insights the study affords into the peculiarities of Russian business -- including the operation of semi-monopolistic syndicates and the role of imported capital, banks, and the autocratic state. It supplies historical perspective on some of the more perplexing features of the new Russian capitalism.Roosa was a pioneer in the study of early twentieth-century Russian capitalism. This volume, prepared for posthumous publication by her friends and colleagues, makes her work available at a time when it has new resonance and relevance.

This is a comprehensive interpretive history of Russia from the defeat of Napoleon to the eve of World War I. It is the first such work by a post-Soviet Russian scholar to appear in English. Drawing on the latest Russian and Western historical scholarship, Alexander Polunov examines the decay of the two central institutions of tsarist Russia: serfdom and autocracy. Polunov explains how the major social groups - the gentry, merchants, petty townspeople, peasants, and ethnic minorities - reacted to the Great Reforms, and why, despite the emergence of a civil society and capitalist institutions, a reformist, evolutionary path did not become an alternative to the Revolution of 1917. He provides detailed portraits of many tsarist bureaucrats and political reformers, complete with quotations from their writings, to explain how the principle of autocracy, although significantly weakened by the Great Reforms in mid-century, reasserted itself under the last two emperors. Polunov stresses the relevance, for Russians in the post-Soviet period, of issues that remained unresolved in the pre-Revolutionary period, such as the question of private property in land and the relationship between state regulation and private initiative in the economy.