THE EMERGENCE OF THE ST. PETERSBURG INDUSTRIALIST COMMUNITY, 1870 TO 1905: THE ORIGINS AND EARLY YEARS OF THE PETERSBURG SOCIETY OF MANUFACTURERS (RUSSIA)

Although the role played by industrial entrepreneurs in Russia's economic growth between the Emancipation and 1905 and their influence on tsarist labor and economic policies have been acknowledged by many observers, their social and political history have, until the publication of several recent studies on the Moscow entrepreneurial community, attracted little scholarly attention. In particular there has been no detailed study of the industrialists of St. Petersburg who, by the early twentieth century, comprised as active and influential group on one of the empire's leading industrial centers.This study considers industrialist responses to the controversy in the 1860's and 1870s over tariff policy which first led a few industrialists to break their traditional pattern of passivity and then to the economic depression of the 1880s and to early labor legislation. It next traces the efforts by a new generation of industrialist spokesmen in the 1890s to speak out on behalf of the collective interests of Petersburg industrialists. Encouraged by the opportunities presented by the industrial boom of the 1890s and challenged by the government's more active intervention in labor-management relations, a few leading industrialists by 1897 successfully organized a significant number of their peers into an effective representative organization, the Society of Manufacturers.My study then investigates the degree of influence the Society was able to exert on governmental economic and labor policies and considers the extent to which the industrialists of capital had, by the eve of 1905, begun to transcend their narrow parochial concerns and their interest-group mentality to see themselves as part of a larger socio-economic group, a class, the interests of which were not always compatible with the existing autocratic political system. The revolution of 1905 forced a fundamental reorientation of the Society of Manufacturers away from lobbying within the bureaucracy, thus marking the end of an era and ushering in a new period in the history of the Petersburg industrial community.The main goal of my study is to investigate the information of the Petersburg industrial community in the post-Emancipation period and the activities of the Petersburg Society of Manufacturers, which represented it by the turn of the century. I endeavor to elucidate the composition of that community, the characteristic features of its most prominent members, and the impact of these features on the emergence of an organized community of industrialists.