The multiplicity and diversity of the Russian and then Soviet empires have been nothing short of an obsession in the historiography of the past quarter-century. The present fascinating volume brings together sixteen prominent German and Russian historians to address a vital, and fraught, aspect of this multiplicity: the nexus between religion (specifically, religious minority) and commerce and entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century. With the ghost of Max Weber hovering more or less explicitly in the background, contributors examine the mindsets, community structures, individual ambitions, and negotiations with state regulation that different religious-ethnic groups—specifically, Jews, Germans, Old Believers, and Muslims—brought to the tumultous and sometimes uneven economic growth of the industrializing nineteenth century.
Following a series of three framing introductory articles, Matthias Winterschladen and Lutz Häfner set the stage with a locally-based discussion of young Moscow entrepreneurs’ resistance to the regime, and the ethnic-religious dimensions of entrepreneurship in the provincial city of Saratov in the second half of the century. A set of five articles turns to the question of Jewish entrepreneurship, meticulously tracing the evolution of legislation regulating the assimilation of the Jewish population from the Polish partitions to the late-nineteenth-century pogroms (Galina N. Ulianova), documenting the vicissitudes of the participation of Jewish businessmen in the commercial infrastructures of St. Petersburg (Sergei K. Lebedev, Pavel V. Lizunov), and telling the story of two important entrepreneurial and banking families, the Ginzburgs and the Poliakovs, and their role as public figures (Johannes Raschka, Iurii Petrov). In each of these very different articles, the ways in which individual actors negotiated the considerable limitations on physical movement, social advancement, and commercial success take center stage.
Germans come next, and introduce a different set of issues: Germans were foreigners or descended from foreigners, and likely to be voluntary settlers in the empire. The authors recreate the image of Germans in literature and business (Klaus Heller), a collective portrait of German large-scale entrepreneurs in St. Petersburg (Wolfgang Sartor), the role of Germans in the Moscow chemical industry (Iurii A. Petrov), and a sketch of the prominent Knoop family (Dittmar Dahlmann). There seems to be less emphasis on religion in this section, but the articles are replete with tactile detail. We learn, for example, that marriage outside the ethnic group was relatively unlikely until the third generation; and that the Knoop family was able to forge a far-reaching network of international connections, building upon the empire they built in Russia. As Eric Lohr has also shown, German businessmen were thoroughly squeezed out of the economy in the course of World War I.
The Old Believers are relatively underrepresented in this volume, with one piece by Valerii V. Kerov. Kerov sets out to concretize the trope of Old Believers’ propensity for commerce, documenting their commercial activity, and success, in various regions of the empire. In Moscow, for example, fully 75% of entrepreneurs and workers in the cotton industry professed the Old Belief. Kerov further argues that specific communal structures gradually gave way to individual and family entrepreneurship and proposes that certain ethical principles (among them the evolving image of the businessman or khoziain) in the belief system played into commercial success. Repressive legislation, while it might have been one stimulus for Old Believers to channel their energies into economic activity, was neither a decisive nor a unique factor.
While Radik R. Salikhov and Ramil΄ R. Khairutdinov examine the workings of Muslim (mostly Tatar) entrepreneurship in Kazan΄ with its significant Muslim population, Mikhail K. Shatsillo engages the minority Muslim communities of the imperial capitals. If Muslim entrepreneurship was a world apart even in the early nineteenth century, by the early twentieth Muslim traders and businessmen had become almost fully integrated into “mainstream” merchant networks, belonged to Russian guilds, and were able to influence the course of politics in their regions. Like Kerov, Salikhov and Khairutdinov address Weber's suggestion that religious minorities, because limited in their spiritual expression, tend to channel their energies into economic activity. Salikhov's examination of Islamic modernism and the construction of “new teaching” schools, particularly in Kazan, shows how reformers were able to shape their local environment without coming into conflict with the central government.
The present volume grew out of an extended Russian-German research project that culminated in January 2009, when participants gathered at Bad Honnef on the outskirts of Bonn to discuss entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire from 1815 to 1914, focusing on confessional and ethnic structures, local politics, charitable activities, and with a comparative glance at the German Empire over the same time period. Protestanten und Altgläubige is the second publication to result from this collaborative venture: an overlapping but distinct version in Russian, Chastnoe predprinimatel΄stvo v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Etnokonfessional΄naia struktura i regional΄noe razvitie, XIX-nachalo XX v., came out with ROSSPEN in 2010. While some of the articles are precisely duplicated, in translation, others are new or substantially different. An interesting advantage of this double format is that, for example, a reader more interested in Old Believers can read Kerov's much longer piece—nearly a monograph, replete with archival materials, statistics, and personal stories—in the Russian version.
Capitalism, private entrepreneurship, and their history became a topic of near-universal fascination in Russia as the new economy struggled to find its sealegs in the 1990s, and took off in earnest in the first decade of the new millenium. Protestanten und Altgläubige, while a significant contribution to the blizzard of incredibly detailed archival scholarship on all matters commercial, stands apart in its attention to links with religion and ethnicity. The nineteenth-century Russian Empire emerges as a brilliant, interactive patchwork of cultures and communities, each with its strategies for commercial success and local political influence, in which individuals and families played the defining role. The bourgeoisie of the Russian empire is abundantly in evidence, rather than missing, weak, or apolitical, as Soviet-era historiography insisted.
Although, by now, neither empire, nor commerce, nor religious minority are neglected topics, their combination leaves plenty of room for exploration. This important volume's broad scope and precision of documentation place the conversation on a high level. The book is dedicated to the memory of the much-beloved and highly influential St. Petersburg historian, Boris Vasil΄evich Anan΄ich, who did much to define this collective agenda and who died in 2015.
