Russian Corporate Capitalism From Peter the Great to Perestroika PDF Download

Author: Thomas C. Owen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195357140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the three perspectives of geography, economic policy, and ideology, this work examines corporate capitalism under the tsarist and late Soviet regimes. Thomas C. Owen discovers a remarkable history of thwarted effort and lost opportunity. He explores the impact of bureaucratic restrictions and reveals the entrepreneurial capabilities of Russia's corporate founders from various social groups as well as the prominence of Poles, Germans, Jews, Armenians, and foreign citizens in the corporate elite of the Russian Empire and its ten largest cities. The study stresses continuities between tsarist and late Soviet periods, especially in the persistence of anti-capitalist attitudes, both radical and reactionary. A provocative final chapter considers the implications of the weak corporate heritage for the future of Russian capitalism.

Author: Joseph R. Blasi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722220
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The first book to describe Russia's massive economic transformation for an American audience, Kremlin Capitalism provides a wealth of data and analyses not previously available in this country. The authors articulate the political and economic goals of Russian privatization, examine the current ownership of the largest enterprises in Russia, and chart the serious problem of corporate governance in the new private businesses. Kremlin Capitalism is based on the only continuous study of Russian privatization throughout the Russian Federation from 1992 to the present. The authors tracked down the story of the transition in the cities, towns, and villages of fifty of Russia's eighty-nine provinces, updating their findings after the June 1996 election. The result is an up-to-the-minute report of the largest property transfer in history and an analysis of one of this century's most significant economic transformations. The volume also characterizes the position of workers in terms of unemployment, wages, union power, and their changing role as employee shareholders.What really happened when Russia privatized its economy? The Kremlin brokered the initial struggle among different interest groups eager to claim a portion of Russian property: workers, managers, the Mafia, the old Soviet bureaucracy, regular citizens, entrepreneurs, Russian banks, and foreigners. While competing with one another, all struggled to free themselves from seventy years of Communist economic culture. Four years after the process began, have large companies learned to offer goods and services profitably and pay dividends to shareholders? Individual stories come alive as the book explores problems Russians face in structuring a new economic system, defining the ownership and governance of thousands of corporations one by one. Russian economic practices are being forged in the heat of fierce political struggles between resurgent Communists and nationalists and old Soviet managers, on the one hand, and more liberal elements of its infant democratic system on the other. Whether a few big conglomerates and the powerful banks and holding companies from Soviet days will dominate the new Russian economy to the exclusion of most citizens remains to be seen.Many questions persist. How will billions of dollars of capital be raised to retool, restructure, and reorient the heart and soul of Russia's economy? Will open stock markets stimulate a new economic order or will that new order be imposed through strong state supports and subsidies? What role will be played by shadowy conglomerates that are trying to shape a disorganized economy into something resembling the old Soviet system? The authors note the paradox of a capitalism conceived, designed, implemented, and evaluated by the Kremlin when one aim of reform is to allow market forces to play freely. Kremlin Capitalism asks whether rapid privatization has catalyzed or complicated the transition to a more liberal political and economic system, a question that will reverberate for decades.

Author: Jeffrey Surovell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351731181
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: highly innovative work which challenges mainstream approaches to the study of Russian policy with its groundbreaking application of Marxism and dependency theories. Using class analysis, it examines, in a meticulously documented study, what is perhaps the most important issue in world politics today: Russia and the West. Unconventional yet powerful, it nevertheless comes up with highly persuasive conclusions. Whether one agrees with its challenging conclusions or not, they cannot be ignored.

Author: Thomas C. Owen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674015494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Fedor Chizhov built the first railroad owned entirely by Russian stockholders, created Moscow’s first bank and mutual credit society, and launched the first profitable steamship line based in Archangel. In this valuable book, Thomas Owen vividly illuminates the life and world of this seminal figure in early Russian capitalism. Chizhov condemned European capitalism as detrimental to the ideal of community and the well-being of workers and peasants. In his strategy of economic nationalism, Chizhov sought to motivate merchants to undertake new forms of corporate enterprise without undermining ethnic Russian culture. He faced numerous obstacles, from the lack of domestic investment capital to the shortage of enlightened entrepreneurial talent. But he reserved his harshest criticism for the tsarist ministers, whose incompetence and prejudice against private entrepreneurship proved his greatest hindrance. Richly documented from Chizhov’s detailed diary, this work offers an insightful exploration of the institutional impediments to capitalism and the rule of law that plagued the tsarist empire and continue to bedevil post-Soviet Russia.

Author: Linda M. Randall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113595741X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Reluctant Capitalists examines Russia's plodding, sometimes painful, journey toward a free-market. Through case studies, interviews and first-hand observation, Randall tells us of Russia's economic troubles and offers suggestions for making market reform work.

Author: Nat Moser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351999532
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book examines the development of the Russian economy from tsarist times to the present through the lens of the oil industry. It considers the role of the state, business-state relations, foreign participation, enterprise performance and technology. Besides providing much rich detail on the changing nature of the oil industry, the book also puts forward important conclusions, including the fact that in the late nineteenth century private enterprise rather than the state was the principal driver of economic development, and that after the collapse of the Soviet Union incumbent managers were more effective in running their companies than financier entrants, whose main concern was short-term gain.

Author: David Lockwood
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443812307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Why wasn’t there a successful bourgeois revolution in Russia? Was it because Russian capitalists were too servile in their relationship with the Tsarist autocracy? Or was it because Russian states (Tsarist, republican and Soviet) were just too strong? This book is a political history of the Russian capitalist class from 1850 to 1917 that seeks to answer these questions. The book covers the consistent opposition of the Russian bourgeoisie to the Tsarist autocracy up to and including the revolution of 1905. It then considers its alliance, from 1909, with ‘new state’ elements – officials, politicians, army officers and technical experts who were convinced of the possibility of reform and renovation through a radically reorganised state, cleansed of its autocratic detritus. Such a reorganisation was expected as a result of the Great War. While these ideas came to a temporary fruition in the February Revolution of 1917, they also laid the basis for a much more demanding Soviet state in October – and the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. The book ends with a consideration of the wider implications for the concept of the bourgeois revolution-implications that stretch well beyond Russia-that are revealed by the rise and fall of the Russian bourgeoisie.

Author: A. I. U. Polunov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317460480
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive interpretive history of Russia from the defeat of Napoleon to the eve of World War I. It is the first such work by a post-Soviet Russian scholar to appear in English. Drawing on the latest Russian and Western historical scholarship, Alexander Polunov examines the decay of the two central institutions of tsarist Russia: serfdom and autocracy. Polunov explains how the major social groups - the gentry, merchants, petty townspeople, peasants, and ethnic minorities - reacted to the Great Reforms, and why, despite the emergence of a civil society and capitalist institutions, a reformist, evolutionary path did not become an alternative to the Revolution of 1917. He provides detailed portraits of many tsarist bureaucrats and political reformers, complete with quotations from their writings, to explain how the principle of autocracy, although significantly weakened by the Great Reforms in mid-century, reasserted itself under the last two emperors. Polunov stresses the relevance, for Russians in the post-Soviet period, of issues that remained unresolved in the pre-Revolutionary period, such as the question of private property in land and the relationship between state regulation and private initiative in the economy.

Author: Polunov
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9780765630162
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive interpretive history of Russia from the defeat of Napoleon to the eve of World War I. It is the first such work by a post-Soviet Russian scholar to appear in English. Drawing on the latest Russian and Western historical scholarship, Alexander Polunov examines the decay of the two central institutions of tsarist Russia: serfdom and autocracy. Polunov explains how the major social groups - the gentry, merchants, petty townspeople, peasants, and ethnic minorities - reacted to the Great Reforms, and why, despite the emergence of a civil society and capitalist institutions, a reformist, evolutionary path did not become an alternative to the Revolution of 1917. He provides detailed portraits of many tsarist bureaucrats and political reformers, complete with quotations from their writings, to explain how the principle of autocracy, although significantly weakened by the Great Reforms in mid-century, reasserted itself under the last two emperors. Polunov stresses the relevance, for Russians in the post-Soviet period, of issues that remained unresolved in the pre-Revolutionary period, such as the question of private property in land and the relationship between state regulation and private initiative in the economy.

Author: Jonathan A. Grant
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Jonathan A. Grant has written a highly original study of the Putilov works—the most famous industrial conglomerate in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the emergence of a capitalist system in the Russian federation in the 1990s, scholarly debate over the nature of Russian capitalism has been revived, and with this study, Grant issues a major challenge to the conventional wisdom on the nature of the Russian economy in the years before the Bolshevik revolution. Grant argues that the Putilov Company, which manufactured arms for the Russian state and a wide range of heavy industrial equipment for civilian use, adopted business practices that resembled the experiences of large machinery and armaments manufacturers in Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. This interpretation runs directly counter to the traditional and widely held view that Russian capitalism was shaped by the tsarist state's orders and subsidies and that the tsarist system was incompatible with the development of modern capitalism. Grant makes direct comparisons between Putilov and the famous western firm of Krupp and Vickers, illustrating similar business decisions made by both companies in terms of diversification of the product line and a penchant for private (as opposed to state) markets for primary income. Grant has gone beyond Soviet works on the Putilov plant, examining archival documents of the company and offering critical comments on both Soviet and Western scholarship on Russian economic and social history from the perspective of this important industrial enterprise. Grant not only repeatedly demonstrates that the Putilov firm responded effectively to the changing market for its wide range of industrial products but also shows that the tsarist regime provided far more of the "systemic regularity" needed for capitalist development than generally believed. Grant's work is a significant contribution to this ongoing debate, offering a much-needed case study of Russian business history and a comparative study that extends across national boundaries. Big Business in Russia is essential reading for graduate students in Russian and European history and will also appeal to American and European business leaders eager to understand the historical background of the current economic challenges facing Russia.