lord to another lord. The radical philosopher Peter Kropotkin, one of the founders of modern anarchism, left a vivid depiction of the way serfdom worked during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled Russia from 1825 until 1855. He recalled from his childhood
stories of men and women torn from their families and their villages and sold, lost in gambling, or exchanged for a couple of hunting dogs, and transported to some remote part of Russia … of children taken from their parents and sold to cruel or dissolute masters; of flogging “in the stables,” which occurred every day with unheard of cruelty; of a girl who found her only salvation in drowning herself; of an old man who had grown grey-haired in his master’s service and at last hanged himself under his master’s window; and of revolts of serfs, which were suppressed by Nicholas I’s generals by flogging to death each tenth or fifth man taken out of the ranks, and by laying waste the village … As to the poverty which I saw during our journeys in certain villages, especially in those which belonged to the imperial family, no words would be adequate to describe the misery to readers who have not seen it.
Exactly as in Austria-Hungary, absolutism didn’t just create a set of economic institutions that impeded the prosperity of the society. There was a similar fear of creative destruction and a fear of industry and the railways. At the heart of this during the reign of Nicholas I was Count Egor Kankrin, who served as finance minister between 1823 and 1844 and played a key role in opposing the changes in society necessary for promoting economic prosperity.
Kankrin’s policies were aimed at strengthening the traditional political pillars of the regime, particularly the landed aristocracy, and keeping the society rural and agrarian. Upon becoming minister of finance, Kankrin quickly opposed and reversed a proposal by the previous finance minister, Gurev, to develop a government-owned Commercial Bank to lend to industry. Instead, Kankrin reopened the State Loan Bank, which had been closed during the Napoleonic Wars. This bank was originally created to lend to large landowners at subsidized rates, a policy Kankrin approved of. The loans required the applicants to put up serfs as “security,” or collateral, so that only feudal landowners could get such loans. To finance the State Loan Bank, Kankrin transferred assets from the Commercial Bank, killing two birds with one stone: there would now be little money left for industry.
Kankrin’s attitudes were presciently shaped by the fear that economic change would bring political change, and so were those of Tsar Nicholas. Nicholas’s assumption of power in December 1825 had been almost aborted by an attempted coup by military officers, the so-called Decembrists, who had a radical program of social change. Nicholas wrote to Grand Duke Mikhail: “Revolution is on Russia’s doorstep, but I swear that it will not penetrate the country while there is breath in my body.”
Nicholas feared the social changes that creating a modern economy would bring. As he put it in a speech he made to a meeting of manufacturers at an industrial exhibit in Moscow:
both the state and manufacturers must turn their attention to a subject, without which the very factories would become an evil rather than a blessing; this is the care of the workers who increase in number annually. They need energetic and paternal supervision of their morals; without it this mass of people will gradually be corrupted and eventually turn into a class as miserable as they are dangerous for their masters.
Just as with Francis I, Nicholas feared that the creative destruction unleashed by a modern industrial economy would undermine the political status quo in Russia. Urged on by Nicholas, Kankrin took specific steps to slow the potential for industry. He banned several industrial exhibitions, which had previously been held periodically to showcase new technology and facilitate technology adoption.
In 1848 Europe was rocked by a series of revolutionary outbursts. In response, A. A. Zakrevskii, the military governor of Moscow, who was in charge of maintaining public order, wrote to Nicholas: “For the preservation of calm and prosperity, which at present time only Russia enjoys, the government must not permit the gathering of homeless and dissolute people, who will easily join every movement, destroying social or private peace.” His advice was brought before Nicholas’s ministers, and in 1849 a new law was enacted that put severe limits on the number of factories that could be opened in any part