Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia ─ The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914

Four decades prior to World War I, coal and steel managers working in the Donbass region formed Russia's first major industrial advocacy group, the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers. Founded by southern industrializers who ran the country's most important coal and steel industry, the organization quickly grew to become one of the most powerful in the empire, influencing government policy from its inception in the 1870s until the Revolution of 1917. The members who made up this important group as well as their collective effort to modernize Russia are the focus of The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia.
McCaffray draws from a wide array of sources to reveal the intellectual, cultural, and social underpinnings of Russia's early industrialization. Representing nearly sixty firms responsible for most of the south's coal and steel production, the middle-class men who ran tsarist Russia's coal and steel industry composed a substantial portion of Russia's technical intelligentsia. What emerges is a portrait of self-conscious modernizers, motivated in part by professional and class considerations, in part by their shared faith that modern, large-scale industry would elevate not only themselves but also their country and compatriots.
McCaffray shows how the engineer-managers of the Donbass became enmeshed in the grand project of creating industrial capitalism with a Russian face, in particular, how they were involved in all aspects of the workers' welfare question in the early twentieth century. In illuminating their ultimately frustrated efforts, she sheds light on the difficulties in establishing West European-style capitalism in tsarist Russia and offers insights into the crisis and collapse of the Russian old regime. She further suggests that the economic ideas of Russia's middle class as well as other segments of Russian society made it unlikely that Russia would build a system of capitalism resembling that of the West.
The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia presents for scholars of Russian and modern European history a new perspective on late imperial Russia by bringing to light a group of individuals previously unstudied. While it supports the emerging notion in recent Western scholarship that Russian elites were fragmented at the end of the Old Regime, McCaffray's analysis of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers will initiate fresh discussion of the values and the cultural-economic assumptions of Russian modernizers.

Susan P. McCaffray is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.