russian corporate capitalism from peter the great to perestroika dec 1995

[...]... 251 Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika The main industrial areas in European Russia up to 1917 From Hugh SetonWatson, The Russian Empire, 1801-1914, 1967, by permission of Oxford University Press 1 Introduction: The Challenges of Russian Business History The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves Heraclitus1 The. .. policies, the managerial skills of the corporate directors, and the flexibility of the local traders contrasted sharply with the Russian bureaucrats' tutelage, the inexperience of the Russian- American Company's managers in St Petersburg, and the tendency of local agents to deplete as rapidly as possible the stock of furbearing animals on the northern Pacific coast.8 Corporate growth in the Russian Empire... centuries, came to Russia as a fully mature economic institution Efforts by Russian merchants to emulate the creators of the great trading companies of the Dutch, English, and French empires came to naught in the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great (176296) Insurance companies, banks, and stock exchanges succeeded best in Russia when they combined the organizational structure of their European... accommodation of the corporate elite to the tsarist autocracy, a fascinating feature of late imperial Russian history, Timothy McDaniel coined the felicitous term "autocratic capitalism. "32 It will also be recalled that Max Weber, as he pondered the fate of Russian democracy in the wake of the Revolution of 1905, detected in the modern corporation a tendency toward bureaucratization inimical to the constitutional... lay in the future Particularly ominous was the failure, within two decades of its founding, of the Russian Livestock Insurance Company, the only large corporation specifically devoted to the improvement of agriculture in this predominantly agrarian society 20 Russian Corporate Capitalism The irregular expansion of the capacity of the corporate environment remained the dominant pattern The theory of... this book, then, is to explore the political and cultural currents that have shaped the institutions of corporate capitalism in the Russian Empire before 1914 and in the era of glasnost If this account helps to explain the uniqueness of Russian capitalism in the near future, then it will have achieved its purpose 2 Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700-1914 By assiduously entering into detail,... appear to me to strike just the right balance between moral commitment and scholarly detachment: "Whether the ancient Western The Challenges of Russian Business History 13 dream of a free and rational society will always remain a chimera, no one can know for sure But if the men of the future are ever to break the chains of the present, they will have to understand the forces that forged them."29 The pace... hinder the emergence of institu- 12 Russian Corporate Capitalism tions of capitalism and of attitudes conducive to corporate enterprise, then and now The concept of historical causation employed here rejects both randomness and rigid determinism Rather, it adopts what North and other theorists of economic history call "path dependence," borrowed from the history of technology This approach examines the. .. by analyzing the evolution of the entire population of corporations in the Russian Empire over the long term, from their first appearance, in the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725), to the period of their highest development under Nicholas II (1894-1917), on the eve of World War I An unprecedented level of accuracy was possible because the database of corporations includes information from every charter... hazards Nevertheless, the anticapitalist attitudes expressed during the late tsarist period and those that emerged in the era of perestroika bear a striking resemblance to one another because they grew out of the same cultural tradition There is an important political dimension to this investigation as well The fate of Russian capitalism mirrored the weakness of the liberal tradition in Russian culture, . w0 h0" alt="" Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika This page intentionally left blank Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika THOMAS . Indicator of Corporate Size, 175 Appendix C: Tables, 180 Appendix D: Figures, 190 Notes, 201 Works Cited, 231 Index, 251 Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika The . perhaps, the leading personalities of Russian capitalism will receive the attention that they deserve. To date, the institutions of capitalism in the Russian Empire have remained at the periphery