(^268) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
Russia, poor Russia, was the epitome of state-driven development.
The push, from the sixteenth century, was to catch up with the West
by adoption of Western ways. The push was fitful, partly because it was
motivated from above and not every tsar was so inclined, partly because
each effort was so exhausting. Who paid the bill? The serf—who else?
Modernization from above rested on forced labor. In the long run,
however, the whole country paid. Serfdom fostered stupid arrogance
above; greed and envy, resentment and gall below. Even after emanci
pation, these attitudes remained to pose the biggest obstacle to Russ
ian development.
Just as the big banks in Germany preferred to put their money into
the capital-intensive branches of heavy industry, so in Russia the state
gave its support above all to mining and metallurgy, encouraging the
formation of huge enterprises—the megalomaniac pursuit of giantism.
Russian blast furnaces, we are told, were larger than the German (a few
were), illustrating what for some was a law of backwardness: the later,
the bigger and faster. (Economists today speak of leapfrogging—every
generation needs its key words and jargon.) And once state-sponsored
industrialization had made enough progress, the accumulated capital
financed investment banks comparable in function and strategy to their
German predecessors.
The result was considerable but fragile. Russian industrial product
rose 5 to 6 percent a year between 1885 and 1900, and again between
1909 and 1912. Railroad mileage doubled between 1890 and 1904,
and iron and steel output increased ten times from 1880 to 1900. Be
tween 1860 and 1914, Russia went from the seventh to the fifth largest
industrial power in the world. No small achievement, but long forgot
ten, because later, after the revolutions of 1917, Communist spokes
men and their foreign adulators rewrote history so as to blacken the
reputation of the tsarist regime, while throwing favorable testimonies
down the memory hole.
They need not have worked so hard at vilification. Tsarist Russia
had an abundance of flaws. The country was schizophrenic in its con
trasts and contradictions: a poorly educated, largely illiterate population
with spots of intellectual and scientific brilliance; a privileged, self-
indulgent aristocracy contemptuously resisting modernization; a ra
bidly radical revolutionary movement—sables and rags, vintage brandy
and cheap vodka, broken crystal in the officers' mess, broken earthen
ware in the isbas. The push to economic development awakened a
sleeping giant, brought it into contact with more advanced countries,
nora
(Nora)
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