† In September-November 1891, as the news of the crop failures spread abroad, the price of 4 percent Russian bonds dropped from 97.5 to 87, raising the return from 4.1 percent to 4.6 percent: René Girault, Emprunts Russes et Investissements Français en Russie, 1887–1914 (Paris, 1973), 197.
*IM, No. 2–3 (1935), 135. John P. McKay [Pioneers for Profit (Chicago, 1970), 37] believes that in 1914 “foreigners held at least two-fifths of the total of nominal capital of corporations operating in Russia.”
† Vitte, Vospominaniia, II, 501. Although basically correct, this claim is an exaggeration, since the Extraordinary Budget, based on foreign borrowings, also paid a good part of the defense expenditures. It was also used for debt servicing.
*McKay, Pioneers, 383–86. McKay stresses, in addition to capital investments, the great contribution made by foreigners in bringing to Russia advanced industrial technology: Ibid., 38283.
†Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life, 3rd ed. (New York, 1951), 541. Other historians estimate that in 1914 Europeans held between $4.5 and $5.5 billion in U.S. bonds: William J. Shultz and M. R. Caine, Financial Development of the United States (New York, 1937), 502.
‡Leo Pasvolsky and Harold G. Moulton, Russian Debts and Russian Reconstruction (New York, 1924), 112. To these figures must be added the value of products turned out by cottage industries (kustarnaiapromyshlennost’), which Pasvolsky estimates at approximately 50 percent of the above: Ibid., 113.
*Based on statistics in Jürgen Nötzold, Wirtschaftspolitische Alternativen der Entwicklung Russlands in der Ära Witte und Stolypian (Berlin, 1966), 110.
*See below, Chapter 6.
†P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletii (Moscow, 1973), 34. Zaionchkovskii provides a table showing Russian army involvement in suppressing disorders between 1883 and 1903 (Ibid., 35). The subject is treated at length in William C. Fuller’s Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
*In 1886 the Russian army had at most twelve Jewish officers: Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, 201–2.
*Matitiahu Mayzel in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, XVI, No. 3/4 (1975), 300–1. According to Zaionchkovskii (Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, 320n.–321n.), the number of nobles attending the Academy at the turn of the century was very small.
†This was in contrast to the Japanese army, which paid great attention to ideological indoctrination: Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton, N.J., 1985). Russian soldiers received no indoctrination: A. I. Denikin, Staraia armiia (Paris, 1929), 50–51.
*According to the 1897 Census there were in the Empire 1,220,000 hereditary dvoriane (of both sexes), of them 641,500 native speakers of “Russian” (i.e. Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian): N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia Vseobshchaia Perepis’ Naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g.: Obshchii Svod, II (St. Petersburg, 1905), 374. Dvoriane thus constituted nearly 1 percent of the population.
*One desiatina equals 2.7 acres or 1.1 hectares.
3
Rural Russia
In the early 1900s, Russia was overwhelmingly rural. The peasantry constituted four-fifths of her inhabitants by legal status and three-quarters by occupation: the same proportion as in France on the eve of her revolution. Agriculture was far and away the largest source of national wealth. Russia’s exports consisted primarily of foodstuffs. The small industrial working class issued directly from the village and maintained close links with it. In terms of her social and economic structure, therefore, Imperial Russia resembled more an Asiatic country like China than Western Europe, though she considered herself a part of Europe, in whose politics she actively participated as one of the great powers.
