Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in Late Imperial Russia, 1868-1917 (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies) [Hardcover]

Jonathan Grant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999 | Series: Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies

Jonathan 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Grant's case study tests and challenges accepted ideas about Russian capitalism at the end of the Old Regime. The Russian company described here had much in common with West European giants such as Krupp and Vickers, and Grant's book should be read by anyone interested in the question of Russian uniqueness." -- Susan McCaffray, University of North Carolina at Wilmington

"This account offers a valuable examination of the company's industrial strategy as it moved from rail and locomotive production into the manufacture of armaments and warships. Grant's bold thesis that the Pulitov enterprise's strategy resembled that of the leading European arms producers-Vickers, Creusot, Skoda, and Krupp-adds a new and welcome dimension to the lively debate over the nature of Russian capitalism under autocracy." -- Thomas C. Owen, Louisiana State University

About the Author

Jonathan Grant is assistant professor of modern Russian history at Florida State University, Tallahassee, and is the author of numerous articles, most recently "Banks, Boards, and the Question of Bank Dominance in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of the Putilov Company, 1907-1914" published in Essays in Economic and Business History, and seven articles about the relationship between tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Modern East Europe, 1815-1989. He lives in Tallahassee, FL.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822941104
• ISBN-13: 978-0822941101
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,790,398 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in Late Imperial Russia, 1868-1917 (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies) (Hardcover)

Since most studies of Russian industrialization tend to examine the capitalist system as a whole and downplay the role of individual firms, Jonathan Grant's Big Business in Russia fills an important niche. Originating from his Ph.D. dissertation (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), this in-depth study of the St. Petersburg-based Putilov Company, Imperial Russia's largest arms manufacturer, advances our understanding of Russian industrial history at the micro level. The few specialists who have explored business activity in Imperial Russia have focused either on firms established by foreigners or non-industrial firms (e.g. banking, publishing, or insurance). Grant, now an assistant professor of modern Russian history at Florida State University in Tallahassee, poses the question: "Did Russian businessmen conduct their affairs in a unique way based on an essentially different understanding of the market and state, or did they pursue strategies for growth that would have been intelligible to their contemporaries in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States?" (p. 1). Grant concludes that Putilov's market behavior did not differ from that of the key Western arms manufacturers such as Krupp, Skoda, Vickers, and Scneider-Creusot. Thus, Grant maintains, Russian business behavior was not "deviant." The board of directors at the Putilov Company followed expansionist strategies as aggressive as any of its Western counterparts, hesitating neither to jettison old product lines, nor to invent new ones based on market forecasts. Hence Grant's study shows that the state's role in the Putilov Company-still extant today as the Kirovsky Zavod--has been exaggerated.
The book is divided into seven chronological chapters: 1) "The Rise and Fall of a Rail Manufacturing Giant: N. I. Putilov and the Putilov Company, 1868-1885;" 2) "Engineering Growth: Locomotives, Artillery, and Diversification Strategies, 1885-1900;" 3)"The Russian Krupp: Putilov and the Artillery Business, 1900-1907; 4) "Banks, Boards, and Naval Expansion: The Question of Bank Dominance, 1907-1914;" 5) "Putilov at War, 1914-1917; 6) "Conclusion: Between State and Market;" and 7) "Epilogue: Putilov's Successors." Grant's Introduction skillfully reviews the scholarly literature on Russian industrial history.
Because the Putilov factory had experiences typical of other industrial enterprises in Late Imperial Russia, Grant's choice of a case study is ideal. Originally purchased and owned by Nikolai Ivanovich Putilov (1817-1880), the factory was dependent on the tsarist state, then sold out to foreign investors whence it became a joint-stock company (p. 4).
Grant's wide use of foreign archival documents contributes to the book's uniqueness. He draws extensively on the Putilov factory's correspondence with banks and government offices from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg, as well as its correspondence with the tsarist army and navy from the Russian State Archive of the Navy in St. Petersburg and from the Russian State Military-Historical Archive in Moscow. For the discussion of Putilov's armaments production in Chapters Two and Three, Grant used the records of the Main Artillery Administration (Glavnoe Artilleriiskoe Upravleniye), as well as British Admiralty intelligence reports located in the British Public Record Office (Kew, Surrey, United Kingdom). In addition, he found the company's published annual account books, housed at the Moscow-based Lenin Library, to be largely reliable, despite rumors by a Soviet scholar that they may have been falsified (p. 15).
While Grant defends admirably his argument about the Putilov Company, one wishes he had extended it a bit farther. If "the image of Russia as fundamentally exceptional in its economic development should be discarded," and if Russian capitalists before the Bolshevik Revolution were just as astute as their Western counterparts, what made Soviet Russia so vulnerable to the mythology of Marxist economic and political theory?
In any case, serious graduate students interested in Russian and European business history should read Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in conjunction with other key works such as Susan McCaffray's The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Thomas C. Owen's Entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire, 1861-1914 (M.E. Sharpe, 1996); and Ruth A. Roosa's and Thomas Owen's Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: the Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917 (M.E. Sharpe, 1997).---Johanna Granville, Ph.D., Stanford University