Serious scholarly study of the imperial Russian civil service is almost entirely the product of the past decade, and although several important works have appeared, virtually no quantitative material on the social characteristics of the bureaucracy is available. The imperial government did not publish and probably did not compile statistics on such matters as the social origin, wealth, religion, or education of its civil employees, but the raw data for a partial compilation are available in personnel records (formuliarnie spiski) of individual officials, which are preserved in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.

From even before the time of Peter the Great, and down to the present day, Russia has had a tradition of active state participation in manufacturing and extractive industry. However, both the nature and extent of governmental activity has varied greatly in different periods. The purpose of this essay is to determine what place government policy during the twenty-one-year term of Count Egor Kankrin as minister of finance (1823-44) has in this long-standing “mercantilist” tradition. Both Kankrin and Nicholas I, who usually followed Kankrin's advice on economic policy, were unquestionably conservative in matters of political and social policy, but there is no necessary connection between the political views of Russian rulers and their attitude toward industrial development. Men as different in political outlook as Peter the Great, Witte, and Stalin all favored vigorous state action of one sort or another to promote industrial development, but none of them were political liberals.

No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

No abstract