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MIT 21H 912 - Study Notes

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21H.912 Week 11 Russia & Backwardness Key Terms: Useful Dates & Names: backwardness 1825: Decembrist Revolt mir 1854-56: Crimean War emancipation of the serfs 1861 Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) Slavophiles v. Westernizers Alexander II (r. 1855-81) Alexander III (r. 1881-94) Nicholas II (1894-1917) The Development of Backwardness Europe itself was not uniformly wealthy and powerful. Relatively poorer and weaker states, as well as regions within states, e.g. Romania, Ireland, S italy, and Poland were unable to participate in imperialist ventures. Indeed, they were themsevles vulnerable at times to the empire-building of other European states—see maps. Russia was a special case in that it was both an imperial, expanding state, yet it was distinctly backward. Agriculture and industry are being carried out according to methods that are no longer “socially necessary” as Marx would say or in other words, not using the most advanced methods in practical use at the time. Agriculture and industry are labor-intensive rather than capital intensive. As we talked about in the first lecture, long-distance and local trade, urbanization and the ability to feed non-food producers are all required to form cities, and that extensive bureaucracies existed in the world long before the development of capitalism. We can indeed point to the industrial revolution as creating backwardness—in other words, slowness to change was the norm worldwide. In the context of world history over the last 500 years, the exceptional thing is the Industrial Revolution and the dynamics of industrial capitalism—yet if we examine media, textbooks, etc., we see that most people in the West explain “backwardness” as being the exceptional condition which requires explanation. This brings us to a second definition of backwardness: An ideological view of certain normal areas in the world as peripheral or backward and the contrasting areas of intense industrialization as “normal”. Industrialization and backwardness are both outcomes of developing capitalism. Along the same lines, one can think of “backward” agricultural areas with labor-intensive, undercapitalized production methods as part of the same system as capital-intensive, mechanized production. The ideological inversion of what was “normal” and what was “exceptional” is as old as the Industrial Revolution itself. Its leading theory of free trade, Adam Smith, claimed, against the mercantilists, that economic growth was natural for societies. In societies, individual pursued rational self-interest. If economic growth was not taking place, Smith argued, then some external factors must be stopping it. Smith assumed that producers have the desire to commoditize all or most of their output in response to the possibility of trade … [and] that the producers will have the ability and the liberty to allocate their resources as they see fit.The conundrum of the IR is still with us: what is it that causes economic growth and what political solution ought people tolerate in the quest to overcome slow economic growth? Russia & Backwardness Russia like all places we might investigate as “backward” had its own historical conditions that shaped its confrontation with the IR in W Europe. Its own IR did not take place until the 1890s after 20 years of halting efforts. In the years after the Fr Rev, Russia established a name for itself as the most reactionary power in Europe. The tsars of the early 19th c, part. Nich. I, developed a police state so rigid that in 1848 when revolutionary movements spread across all the rest of Europe, Russia remained untouched. Nich I’s own sever rejection of any W influences whatsoever was shaped by his experience of coming to power in the wake of a nobles’ revolt in 1825—Decembrist Revolt. Between 1848 and the Crimean War, there were more than 100 peasant revolts—however, the army was able to suppress them. It was the Crimean War in 1854-56 that finally forced on almost all Russians, including the new tsar Alexander II, the need for change. The Crimean War was the result of British and French efforts to keep Russia from gaining control of the Balkans and Constantinople— see Map. The reasons for Russia’s utter failure in this war, which was fought much closer to its own soil and to which Britain and France devoted only a fraction of their own military power, were manifest to all: inefficiency, crippling lack of skills among the army, which was manned mostly with serfs, and technological inferiority. Russia would have to change or face losing its status as a great power. Reform The way in which reform actually took place illustrates one of the oddities of Russian politics that specifically related to backwardness: a despot and a progressive were likely to be one and the same person. Alex II, who put through major reforms, was himself no liberal. He imposed his reforms as an autocrat, as an absolute ruler. He stated to the nobles in Moscow: The existing order of serfdom cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below. There was no dialogue with Russians interested in the problem of reform, no forum for exchange, and certainly the majority of the Russian people whose lives were the object of reform efforts were never consulted: the serfs. The most important of Alex II’s reform was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Bureaucrats drew up the edict, then Alex II forced it on Russian nobles. It provided for the state to purchase land from the nobles, and for the land to then be distributed by the state to the freed serfs. Serfs now had the freedom to marry without the lord’s permission, to seek justice in the courts instead of having to receive it from the lords, were freed from the most cruel kinds of corporal punishment that had been lords’ prerogative, and supposedly worked their own land. However, the freed serfs remained bound to the land because another part of the arrangement was that they had to pay off the state for the parcels that had been bought from the lords. The basic decision to compensate the lords therefore crippled serf emancipation from the beginning. There was not enough land to go around, and peasants were not free to go elsewhere. To make sure that peasants paid their debt to the state, they were organized into a structure that was traditional to Russian society, but now was under the direct


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MIT 21H 912 - Study Notes

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