The role of Old Believers enterprises : evidence from the nineteenth century Moscow textile industry

The early accumulation of capital and the pioneering of capitalist enterprise have been undertaken in many countries by heterodox religious communities. The role of the Old Believers (further OB) in the early development of Russian industry and trade was noted by many economic historians (Blackwell, 1965; Gerschenkron, 1970; Beliajeff, 1979; Stadnikov, 2002; Kerov, 2004; Raskov, 2012); however, empirical and statistical research on the topic is still scarce. Therefore one of our goals is to analyze the role of the OB entrepreneurship in a dynamic dimension using statistical data. Taking advantage of official censuses of 1850, 1857 and, what is more important, 15 archive sources for confessional data for 1808 - 1905 and 7 industrial reports, we analyze the role of the OB firms in the Moscow textile industry for the period of 1832 - 1890. We find that the share of the OB firms in turnover and employment was over-proportionate prior to 1879, which hints at a higher propensity to entrepreneurship. The turnover per worker of the OB firms was significantly higher only in the wool sub-sector. Additionally, the OB firms tended to employ more labor. We capture the continuous process of the rise and fall of the OB entrepreneurship, especially in cotton-paper and wool weaving sub-sectors. Bearing in mind cyclical waves of repressions against the OB, we can state, that the performance of their firms was impressing. We discuss the Weber thesis and the Petty-Gerschenkron argument, and state that various factors contributed to their success: working ethics and minority status; social capital, networking and access to interest free financing; own informal institutions and reputation mechanisms; human capital and literacy

Marxism before Marxism: Nikolaj Sieber and the birth of Russian social-democracy

The Swiss-Russian economist Nikolaj Sieber was one of the first who wrote about Marx in Russia. In this article we reconstruct the development of his thought by mobilising evidence about the intellectual and political context he lived in. We document his involvement within the Ukrainian national movement of the 1870s and argue that this closeness was consistent with his take on the capitalist evolution of the Russian Empire. We discuss his importance in the Russian debates on the future of the peasant commune and of Russia and conclude that his interpretation of Marx and capitalism was crucial for the development of the Russian social-democratic party

Socialist Agrarian Utopia in the 1920s: Chayanov

The specific focus of this paper is to re-examine two agrarian utopias of Alexander Chayanov (1888–1937): mostly The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the Land of the Peasant Utopia (1920) and partly the scientific prediction of the future development of agriculture The Possibilities of Agriculture (1928), in the context of the discussion of socialism and in particular Chayanov’s theory of non-capitalist economic systems (1924). The manifestation of peasant socialism that he envisages, with a form of economic organization that is based on total cooperation and inspired by the criticism of extreme coercion related to proletarian socialism (alongside his thoughts on the new paths to the large-scale collective organization of agriculture), provides us with new insights into Chayanov’s economic thinking. The paper discusses the role of the family in Chayanov’s peasant utopia. The answers to “uncomfortable” theoretical questions about the worker’s incentives, the use of coercion and the emergence of a new elite appearing under socialism are central to Chayanov’s theory of non-capitalist development. The partial comparison of scientific and peasant utopias shows different perspective to various issues and questions. In a broader context, the paper aims to show that utopias deserve a special attention in the history of economic thought and in the study of Chaynov’s legacy