Russian Imperial Library era find

[edubs31]

Makes sense to me Tsarfan. Obviously certain areas of the modern world spring forth and develop because of the abundance of natural resources available. My home state of Pennsylvania being a good example of this. The world's two largest steel producers once upon a time were both found here. US Steel founded in what was already fast becoming a major city of Pittsburgh (not exactly the hinterlands in this instance). But the other, Bethlehem Steel, being a pretty good example of what you're talking about, just maybe? Strategically located in the Lehigh Valley and not far, but nowheres near the city limits of New York and Philadelphia.

Certainly unlike the situation in St. Petersburg. Of course the American industrial model differed greatly from the Russian one at the turn of the century as well. Not only in terms of each country's dependence on manufacturing, but also the role that government played in their economies.

[Tsarfan]

Of course the American industrial model differed greatly from the Russian one at the turn of the century as well. Not only in terms of each country's dependence on manufacturing, but also the role that government played in their economies.

Exactly . . . which is why I think in Russia the location of factories was very much in control of the state.  This had been the model for Russian industry since at least the time of Peter the Great, when he built factories at state expense and turned them over to private owners to run, sent promising talent abroad to acquire the technical skills necessary, created a new class of industrial serfs to man them, determined what goods were manufactured (based primarily on his military aspirations), and chose where they would be located.  The soviet-era planned economy and notorious 5-Year Plans were nothing new for Russia.

Creating a powder keg of revolutionary workers in the immediate environs of the government center was de facto government policy.  When a government claims the right to control every aspect of national economic life, a decision not to act is as much a policy decision as is a decision to act.  And the government had every reason to know it was sitting on this powder keg.

In the fifty years preceding the 1917 revolution, St. Petersburg's industry grew at a rate neither faster nor slower than other large Russian cities (with the exception of Kiev which grew tenfold), as reflected in its quadrupling of population.  This reflects a government policy of not viewing St. Petersburg as a special case in terms of location of industry.  Yet in the one month of December 25, 1905 to January 25, 1906 the government arrested 2,000 people in St. Petersburg for labor violence.  From 1907 to 1910 the Okhrana intervened to reduce St. Petersburg union rolls from 63,000 to 12,000, laying yet another fuse in the capital with their repressive measures.  A government survey of 12,000 St. Petersburg industrial workers in 1909 indicated 93 percent of them drank heavily.  All this on top of the fact that it was a St. Petersburg labor protest seeking an audience with the tsar which occasioned the Bloody Sunday massacre which destroyed the regime's prestige internationally and triggered a nation-wide revolution internally.  Yet even after Bloody Sunday the government did nothing to slow the growth of the industrial labor force in St. Petersburg.  It sought only to suppress it politically.

[TimM]

Silicon Valley, Boston's Route 128, and Seattle did not become the seats of the American digital revolution because they had huge populations of software engineers already living there.  The engineers migrated to where the founders set up shops in their own backyards

I'm guessing you're referring to men such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

[Tsarfan]

Silicon Valley, Boston's Route 128, and Seattle did not become the seats of the American digital revolution because they had huge populations of software engineers already living there.  The engineers migrated to where the founders set up shops in their own backyards

I'm guessing you're referring to men such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Yes.  Most great companies are built not where labor resides or even where related technology resides, but where it is personally most convenient for the owners.  Silicon Valley did not become what it did for any reason other than the founders of the core companies of the Valley happened already to have personal connections to the region.  Hewlett-Packard was founded in Palo Alto, California, near where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had graduated from Stanford University in 1935.  Steve Jobs of Apple, who helped make Silicon Valley the world’s epicenter of personal computing, was born in nearby San Francisco.   His founding partner, Steve Wozniak, was born in nearby San Jose.

If the presence of an expanding skilled labor force, clusters of related technology, and the presence of high-powered engineering schools (such as Berkeley and Stanford) were the reasons for this gathering, then Bill Gates would have gone there to found Microsoft.  Instead he founded it a thousand miles away in Seattle, Washington, the town in which he was born and raised.

Likewise, Boston's Route 128 evolved as another computing epicenter on the opposite coast for no other reason than the likes of Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, who founded Digital Equipment Corporation near Boston in 1957, happened to meet each other while working at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

Perhaps even more illustrative of this point is the case of the American aerospace industry.  In its early days it shared many of the core technologies and skills needs with the budding automotive industry, which was getting underway in the upper midwest.  In fact, the Wright brothers were midwesterners, born in Millville, Indiana and Dayton, Ohio.  Yet the great pioneers of aerospace engineering and manufacturing located their companies not in the midwest but in southern California.  Why?  Because that is where their personal lives were anchored.  Donald Douglas, a Brooklyn native, founded Douglas Aircraft in 1921 in Long Beach, CA., the place where he had met his wife in 1916.  Glenn Curtiss, another New York native and another founder of the U.S. aerospace industry, founded his company in San Diego where he had been serving as a flight instructor for the Army and the Navy.  The Loughead brothers (pronounced “Lockheed”) were California natives and founded their company in Santa Barbara in 1912.  When it failed, Allen Loughead founded the Lockheed Aircraft Company in Hollywood in 1926.

The situation in late imperial Russia seems to have been little different.  Factories were not built in Russia's largest cities because there was an existing skilled industrial labor base there or because key technologies were gathering there.  (An exception to this might be the industrial growth around Ekaterinburg and other large Ural manufacturing centers based on the region's metal and mineral reserves.)  They were built where they were built for more personal reasons.  And a government that often sought to exert its control over the most minor activities of its citizenry let it happen haphazardly and with nary an eye to the disruptive social forces that were being unleashed as these factories attracted massive waves of migratory workers in from the countryside and left them to fend for themselves in cities where housing availability and services chronically lagged well behind population growth.  Moreover, in St. Petersburg especially, it confronted the workers with some of the most opulent displays of excess wealth and arbitrary power in the world.

[Alixz]

A lot of University towns in the US are "sleepy" college towns. They have no large industry and are not close to the source of the technology that everyone now uses. However, New Haven, Ct the seat of Yale University, one of the oldest colleges in the US, is not a "sleepy" college town because New Haven was and in some ways still is an important harbor town.

Just drive through New Haven on Route 95 and you will see the massive oil storage tanks on the edge of the harbor. Much of the gas and heating oil that is needed in the Northeast is brought in through New Haven harbor.

I think the same of Boston. While Boston is the capital of MA and New Haven is not the capital of CT, both are harbor and university cities. Both have a huge low income population and both have an alien registration problem even though they are far from the boarders of the countries that the immigrants come from.

Neither had a "city plan" that  would have put the universities at a distance from the harbors.

While Washington, DC did have a viable city plan, it is not only the seat of US government but also a college town - VA is so very close and - it is also a harbor.

Factories and dock facilities and universities are built shoulder to shoulder without the benefit of city planning.

It doesn't matter if it is St Petersburg, or Washington, DC or Boston or New Haven or even New York City.

In an effort to bring in a sound tax base, every city and every government will work to bring in whatever it takes to give it one.

I don't know if Nicholas II thought of the tax base in his country, but I am sure that Witte and others did. No one said, "Let's bring in new manufacturing jobs  but we should put them farther from the city to preserve the status quo.

[Tsarfan]

I don't know if Nicholas II thought of the tax base in his country, but I am sure that Witte and others did. No one said, "Let's bring in new manufacturing jobs but we should put them farther from the city to preserve the status quo."

I think that last line is very revealing both of the differences between the U.S. and Russia and the motives of the Russian government to industrialize.  The agenda of the imperial government seems to have had very little to do with job creation and more to do with creating wealth for the state and the established oligarchy.  Job creation is of little positive economic or social consequence unless it is accompanied by a wider distribution of wealth and the creation of buying power among a wider population.  The steps taken by Nicholas' government to contain labor costs and to keep the factory owners as unhindered by regulation as possible were not engineered for those purposes.

One has only to look at the stock ownership roster of the Lena Gold Fields, the infamously harsh management of which occasioned one of late imperial Russia's most brutal massacres in 1912 when several hundred striking workers were shot by tsarist police with more than 150 killed.  That ownership roster included Alexei Putilov (of Putilov Arms fame), Sergei Witte, and Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna.

[TimM]

Yes.  Most great companies are built not where labor resides or even where related technology resides, but where it is personally most convenient for the owners.  Silicon Valley did not become what it did for any reason other than the founders of the core companies of the Valley happened already to have personal connections to the region.  Hewlett-Packard was founded in Palo Alto, California, near where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had graduated from Stanford University in 1935.  Steve Jobs of Apple, who helped make Silicon Valley the world’s epicenter of personal computing, was born in nearby San Francisco.   His founding partner, Steve Wozniak, was born in nearby San Jose.

If the presence of an expanding skilled labor force, clusters of related technology, and the presence of high-powered engineering schools (such as Berkeley and Stanford) were the reasons for this gathering, then Bill Gates would have gone there to found Microsoft.  Instead he founded it a thousand miles away in Seattle, Washington, the town in which he was born and raised.

To think, the technology we're using right now owes its exitence to most, if not all, of these men.

[Petr]

Tsarfan you make very good points but I can't blame NII for not insisting that there be no plants built in the vicinity of St. Petersburg. As you point out plant locations are often based on individual choices, e.g., the location or preferences of their founders. Russia then did not have what we take for granted, i.e., well developed zoning laws (for that matter neither did the US). I think that it is possible that many plants were located in close proximity to St. Petersburg for convenience sake. Remember also plants often develop as outgrowths of existing facilities as suppliers congregate near their customers.   It's easy to say in hindsight that this was an error on the government's part if viewed from a political point of view (i.e., putting a radicalized urban workforce near the seat of government) but I can see how the government could have been influenced by the demands of investors even assuming it took into account the social consequences. We have many examples in the US of plant sitings at the behest of founders despite the local problems they cause just like we have governmental incentives for plant sitings (most often tax holidays). Thus, I can't necessarily blame NII's government for adopting policies fostering investment, both domestic and foreign, given the need to industrialize the country (look at our current Presidential debate). The California aircraft industry that you cite developed in highly urban areas when arguably it would have been better to have cited the plants outside the cities.  I just don't think that plant sitings were subject to that level of critical governmental political analysis that in hindsight might have been advisable and, in fact, if anything the political analysis probably favored the construction of manufacturing facilities where ever investors wanted them to be built. Furthermore, while the government was an autocracy, it did not have the same level of dictatorial control that Stalin had when he moved the armament manufacturing plants east of the Urals (neither was the government facing the same imminent threat in 1880-1914 that Stalin faced with the German invasion) so citing Stalin's efforts may not be an apt analogy. But, of course, you are correct that numerous mistakes were made at various times which could have possibly changed the course of history.  I just think NII made many more important errors which helped bring about the downfall of the monarchy but plant sitings was not one of them in my view.  

[Alixz]

Strikers were shot wounded and killed in other countries during the late 1800s and the early 1900s. It was not uncommon for the governor of the state involved to call in the state militia (our version of the National Guard).

Also there was the Bonus Army upheavals in Washngton DC in 1932 ;

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time, visited their camp to back the effort and encourage them. On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired and two veterans were wounded and later died. Veterans were also shot dead at other locations during the demonstration. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the army to clear the veterans' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children  were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

Again Russia is not the only country to turn on workers and soldiers and use deadly force to make its case.

In the Homestead strike it was Carnegie and Frick who were the owners not the government, but the militia was called in when Pinkerton and his men couldn't do the job they wanted.

I am not absolving Nicholas II of what his troops and his government did to his people, but it was common practice at that time.

[Tsarfan]

I just think NII made many more important errors which helped bring about the downfall of the monarchy but plant sitings was not one of them in my view.  

There is certainly a large dollop of speculation in my argument here, and might-have-beens are history study's biggest trap into which I do fall on occasion.

However, if there had not been a mass of roused workers thinking the tsar was sitting in a palace up the street, there would not have been a Blood Sunday in 1905.  For instance, the Lena Goldfields massacre was as cynically brutal, but happening as it did in Siberia instead of the capital caused it to have far fewer ramifications for the stability of the monarchy.

And if government ministers in February 1917 had been getting telegrams about food and fuel riots in Kiev or Moscow or Ekaterinburg instead of witnessing them outside of their office windows and on their way home, might their resolve have held long enough for the crisis to have ebbed away -- as even the labor leaders felt was happening -- before Nicholas disastrously ordered precipitant action on the night of February 25 that he felt necessary to defend the seat of government and that turned ebbing street protests into a full-blown revolution?

If the large military garrison that was needed to keep peace among St. Petersburg workers had not been there to be infected with revolutionary propaganda and consequently to go over to the other side in the latter phase of the February Days, might the government have had more options to get the situation under control with troops on whose loyalty it could depend?

Think of it this way . . . .  Hundreds of thousands of peasants on the march in the countryside at the peak of the Pugachev rebellion were not enough seriously to unsettle Catherine II's government.  But a few hundred Streltsy located in the environs of Moscow during Peter I's childhood were enough to engineer a coup that killed several of his family, enough to keep the Regent Sophia a constant threat to Peter the adult, and enough to cause Peter to race back from western Europe finally to annihilate them once and for all as a threat to the throne.

As I said earlier, Proximity is Politics.  And it has an enormous magnifying effect on the perception of threat, making small numbers able to accomplish what far larger numbers could not without the advantage of proximity.

I think the presence of masses of disaffected workers in the precincts of St. Petersburg was a huge factor in setting up the government missteps that brought on revolution both in 1905 and 1917.

[TimM]

Strikers were shot wounded and killed in other countries during the late 1800s and the early 1900s. It was not uncommon for the governor of the state involved to call in the state militia (our version of the National Guard).

Then there was the Kent State shooting of the students by the National Guard in 1970, only forty-two years ago.  Four students were killed.

Of course, the NG are not full time soldiers, rather they are civilians who have civilian jobs and are only called up when needed.  So I can see why someone might have panicked and overreacted, when the full time military might have held back.  

I wonder if things would have been any different had they, or the cops, full time cops, handled it.

[Alixz]

Tim - I don't know. I was around when that happened and I have seen many shows and read a lot about it in the past 42 years.

I don't know if regular police would have acted differently. I am not even sure that the local police would have had jurisdiction. The universities have their own police departments and security forces. Someone must have appealed to the Governor of Ohio to bring in the National Guard.

From 1968 through 1972 (which were the Nixon years) the mood of the country was so confused and everyone was at odds with each other over the Vietnam War that it is hard to tell what was the right move.

The people who lived through the Depression and then World War II saw the protesters as ingrates who didn't appreciate all they had been given by the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents. The young people - not just the students - were beginning to try out their own philosophy and opinions on a national scale.

Those National Guardsmen were young as well, but maybe not as ill trained as one would think. Then as now, the National Guard goes on maneuvers one weekend a month and for two weeks every year. Not what the regular army gets, but not an insubstantial amount of training. In the 1970s the National Guard was a way to avoid full time military service, but as you now see, the National Guard units serve in the war zones just as much as the regular military does.

Those young guardsmen might have been nervous and unsure of what to do, not because they were badly trained, but because they were there to deal with fellow Americans, some of whom were their age. And, those guardsmen might have wondered why those entitled students who were attending school on student deferments were holding demonstrations against what they saw to be their country's duty.

There was still a draft in the 1970s and the only way to avoid military service in a "hot zone" was to get a student deferment or move to another country or join the National Guard. Canada was one of the preferred destinations of those who were called "draft dodgers".

I was perplexed by the headlines in 1972 and I am still perplexed by the controversy that the Kent State shooting caused. In our new improved "medicated" generation where psychiatrists and psychologists rule and anger management is the order of the court, it is hard to understand how differently people saw things and reacted to the things that happened during that time.

I have yet to understand why, in almost all countries where young people protest, the universities are the "hot beds" of activism. Young people can barely afford to go to school and their parents sacrifice much to put them there and yet the students seem to have a lot of time to meet and argue and protest.

I ask that about the student body in Russia during the early 1900s and especially during the period just before the war.

But this is about the government firing on its own people and the placement of heavy industry near the seat of government. While Kent State fits one of those statements it does not fit the other.

[edubs31]

Also there was the Bonus Army upheavals in Washngton DC in 1932 ;

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time, visited their camp to back the effort and encourage them. On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired and two veterans were wounded and later died. Veterans were also shot dead at other locations during the demonstration. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the army to clear the veterans' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children  were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

MacArthur greatly exceeded his orders though as usual it ended up President Hoover shouldering much of blame. I remember hearing somewhere that after hearing the news, FDR who was vigorously campaigning against Hoover, turned to an aide and said, "this elects me!"

I don't know if regular police would have acted differently. I am not even sure that the local police would have had jurisdiction. The universities have their own police departments and security forces. Someone must have appealed to the Governor of Ohio to bring in the National Guard.

Alixz I agree with your statements. Didn't Jerry Rubin speak at the campus just days earlier and successfully whip the student body into an anti-authority/establishment/capitalist/Nixon/War frenzy? Not to suggest what happened at Kent State wasn't an awful tragedy or that the students had it coming. But is this not the case of a powder keg scenario requiring but a small spark to explode?

I have yet to understand why, in almost all countries where young people protest, the universities are the "hot beds" of activism. Young people can barely afford to go to school and their parents sacrifice much to put them there and yet the students seem to have a lot of time to meet and argue and protest.

It's all about coming of age and tuning in. Furthermore at school you are surrounded by people of your own generation so naturally you're going to have more in common with them than you probably would in a standard work environment where people are all different ages. Aside from that it's easy to connect the dots. School is where one goes to learn and get involved in activities, and suddenly in college you are typically learning about new things...this spurs on new ideas and motivates like minded individuals to discuss matters that aren't necessarily related to the curriculum. Plus the age is a typical college student is perfect timing for turning them into a radical. They are now adults but still young and naive enough to have the energy to fight for what they perceive is necessary change.

This is where I agree most strongly with Tsarfan's initial criticism of placing your factory workers in close proximity to your educated liberals itching for the opportunity to make a social/political statement. Certainly they had a frighteningly large group of under-educated, disenchanted and radically susceptible factory workers to pull from and inspire. What I'm not convinced of is how much the government, and certainly Tsar Nicholas, were aware or even should have been aware of this error in planning.

It is interesting how often the leaders of a movement will be the ones with very little stake (or little to gain) from the success of the movement itself. We see this when looking at common terrorists who tend to be upper-middle class and better educated than their society as a whole. We see this in revolutions where the leaders often come from privileged backgrounds (Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky, etc) while most of those who they lead do not. On a more peaceful level we often see this in many, usually liberal, organizations where it's the higher-income uber-educated white folks who think it's their duty to stand up for the poorer, disenfranchised, and/or minorities who often are too busy dealing with their own struggles to be bothered by some soap box rhetoric.

[Alixz]

I agree with your statement about coming of age. Young people who just a few months earlier were in high school and worrying about the Senior Prom are now considered adults and left on their own to take over the duties that their parents had been undertaking for the past 18 years.

They are suddenly "set free".

The other interesting thing about the leaders of the protests in the 1960s and 1970s is that just about all of them joined "the establishment" and began earning lots of money and doing the corporate "grind" within about 10 years of their hey day as activists.

They found out in the long run that the only way to live and live comfortably was to join the crowds that they had agitated against.

Sort of like Lenin and Krupskaya moving into the homes of the aristocrats that they so hated and using their furniture and driving their cars.

[TimM]

The Communist leaders of Eastern Europe preached against "rich capitalists", while they lived like a bunch of millionaires.

In the 1970s the National Guard was a way to avoid full time military service

Didn't Dubya join the Guard to get out of going to Vietnam, or at least that is what I heard.