Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age (review)

Fedor Chizhov (1811–1877) has long been undervalued in the history of Imperial Russia, despite his manifest importance in journalism, Slavophile ideology, the development of industry, railroads, banking, and economic thought. The reasons for this neglect are twofold. From a practical point of view, the source that most illuminates Chizhov and his context—the candid and detailed diary he kept from the age of fourteen—has not been available to western researchers until recently, and Soviet (and later Russian) researchers made little use of it. The reason for this neglect is significant: as a conservative and a capitalist, his biography stands opposed to the bulk of Russian historiography, which emphasizes the failures of liberalism or the successes of radicalism, on the one hand, and the persistence of feudalism and the rise of socialism, on the other. This highly readable, deeply researched, and insightful biography of Chizhov by Thomas Owen, one of the leading economic historians of Imperial Russia, ought to extirpate this unreflective marginalization of conservative capitalism.

Owen's monograph is unusual in Russian economic history for two reasons. First, he clearly articulates a conservative ideology of modernization. This framework, which Owen calls 'Slavophile capitalism,' consisted of "a peculiar blend of paternalism toward the masses and encouragement of ethnic Russian economic activity..." (p. 8). Thus, Chizhov advocated industrialization protected by state-sponsored tariffs against German and British economic dominance, a paternalistic attitude on behalf of entrepreneurs and managers toward peasants and workers, an attention to economic development for the benefit of ethnic Russians in terms of industries developed (such as Chizhov's unsuccessful hopes for a Russian silk industry), and hostility toward the Poles, Jews, and Germans who occupied many of the crucial links in the evolving Russian economy—largely because Orthodox Moscow merchants had scorned these sectors. These ideas, forcefully articulated by Chizhov as economic pundit, drew on the German historical school of economic thought in opposition from English laissez-faire doctrines (although apparently not directly from Friedrich List).

There remained, in Owen's analysis, three fundamental paradoxes built into Slavophile capitalism that would prove fatal to its success for Russia's future: "how to maintain Christian morality in Russia while borrowing capitalist institutions from Europe; how to reconcile xenophobia to the universal logic of the market, especially in a multinational empire; and how to appeal to the autocratic state for aid even as it repressed the civil liberties essential to the development of capitalism" (p. 91). Owen elaborates these contradictions with deft analysis, and the particulars comprise the strongest points of the book. In particular, the traditional Slavophile contempt for the (Westernized) Russian bureaucracy fed into a rejection of government regulation, while existing in tension with calls for government protection. In his frustration with government inefficiency, and recognizing that his entire program relied upon its patronage, Chizhov was led almost unconsciously to a critique of state intervention that echoed Weber's rational–legal opposition to autocracy. A strange place indeed for a Slavophile to find himself.

The second unusual feature of this book is its biographical presentation. Most economic history, not least in the Russian context, is presented either as statistical analysis or as a sociological account of a cohort and Owen's previous studies of Russian corporations admirably have exhibited both forms. A biography is a different project, because it concentrates on the perspective of a single individual, and economic activity almost by definition takes place on a much broader canvas. The task, therefore, is to select an individual who was uniquely placed to provide a perspective on the larger societal developments and whose actions were crucial in changing the face of the economy. Chizhov proves an excellent choice for both goals.

Chizhov began his career as a mathematician at St. Petersburg University, and his radicalization to the right was a product, more than anything else, of his lengthy sojourn in...