Ranking large firms can be an important analytical tool for business historians. In the past, researchers have compared such lists in order to explain the success or failure of a company or an entire industry. Comparative national lists of the largest enterprises can illustrate the level of development of national economies. Analyzing such lists helps us to understand the role the state does play in creating and sustaining large firms. Global ranking lists are a means to analyze the relationship between business performance and economic development.
Since the late 1960s, business historians have been actively composing and using listings in their studies, including lists of the largest employers.Footnote 1 However, for the period just before World War I researchers still have at their disposal mostly lists of the companies operated in western Europe and North America. Consequently, our present knowledge about the history of big business and the emergence of modern enterprise during the Second Industrial Revolution is mostly based on studies of American and western European companies. If scholars conceptualize big business and its global effect, it should be based on a more representative dataset; otherwise, their results only apply to the western part of the world. Adding a new dataset on business performance outside of North America and western Europe can contribute to a better understanding of Western business history as well, since many large companies founded by American and western European entrepreneurs operated in eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.
The aim of this study is to compile the hundred largest employers in the Russian Empire in 1913 in a list that can contribute to existing rankings of large companies.Footnote 2 A study of significant employers in Russia (the largest European country by territory, with one of the largest economies) will allow a more representative analysis of large businesses at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the most popular ways to measure the size of a company is by calculating the number of its employees. Since large employers are not necessarily equal to the largest enterprises, it is also possible to rank total assets, revenues, market capitalization, and nominal capital. As Howard Gospel and Martin Fiedler point out, measurement by employment favors labor-intensive firms and industries that, at the same time, may not be asset-rich or have high market valuations.Footnote 3 However, combined with other criteria showing the company's financial performance, number of employees can be used to measure a company's size. In addition, since the largest employers concentrated a large amount of the labor force, the present analysis can also be useful for studying labor markets and labor relations.
Compiling a list of the largest employers requires solving a number of methodological questions concerning the source validity, which is an important prerequisite for proper interpretation. A discussion between David Jeremy, Douglas Farnie, and Peter Wardley uncovered some methodological issues in lists they had compiled of the largest employers in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as those connected to the range and impact of cyclical and seasonal variations of the workforce, the impact of casual and part-time labor, and the problem of mergers and acquisitions.Footnote 4 Based on sources from the Russian Empire, this study will corroborate the arguments that are adduced in the historiography.
Finally, lists of the largest firms can offer a better understanding of business processes when put into a comparative contextual analysis. This article demonstrates that the largest employers in Russia were comparable in size with those in Germany and the United Kingdom. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate the largest firms operating in Russia into analyses of big businesses in Europe in order to have a more representative dataset.
The List
The hundred largest employers in the Russian Empire in 1913 are ranked in the appendix. The list includes the name of each firm, number of employees, type of ownership, major economic sector of activity, the associated International Standard Industrial Classification codes, and geographical location of its major economic activity.Footnote 5 This list includes companies of all economic activities apart from public administration, agriculture, armed forces, education, human health, and social work.Footnote 6 It covers the entire territory of the Russian Empire in 1913, including the Kingdom of Poland, but it excludes the Grand Duchy of Finland.Footnote 7
Each company among the top hundred employers in the Russian Empire circa 1913 employed at least 5,200 people; the median value is 12,450. Some employers smaller than the hundred largest were nonetheless very big companies. Overall, more than 135 enterprises that operated in Russia employed at least 4,000 individuals. The hundred largest enterprises employed a total of 1,689,918, that is, 1 percent of the entire population of the Russian Empire (without Finland).Footnote 8
Regarding the regional distribution of these firms, the largest employers in Russia can be characterized as provincially orientated. Although Saint Petersburg and Moscow accounted for more than half the total corporate headquarters, the absolute majority of the hundred largest employers operated in a Russian city different from where their headquarters were located.Footnote 9 Saint Petersburg, situated in the North of Russia, hosted a few large enterprises, such as the Putilov Works Co., with 13,513 workers; the Russian-American Rubber Company, with 11,100 workers; and some state-owned weapon manufacturers. As Table 1 shows, around 60 percent of the largest employers and number of employees originated from the Central, Southern, and Volga-Ural regions.Footnote 10 These were regions where either mineral resources (Donets Basin and Ural) or labor (Moscow region) were concentrated.
Regional Distribution of the Hundred Largest Employers in the Russian Empire, ca. 1913
Source: Appendix.
Table 2 shows that in 1913 it was still those industrial sectors that had emerged in the First Industrial Revolution and were largely powered by steam that dominated. Textiles, transportation, and heavy industry altogether accounted for more than 90 percent of the largest employers by personnel. Nonetheless, at this point there were already a few firms whose primary activity related to sectors that emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution, such as petroleum refining and rubber manufacturing.
Sectoral Composition of the Hundred Largest Employers in the Russian Empire, ca. 1913
Source: Appendix.
Table 3 shows that the absolute majority of Russia's largest employers were private and public companies. Incorporated joint-stock companies and partnerships with their headquarters in Russia, along with three freestanding corporations headquartered in London and Paris, aggregated 69 percent of the companies on the list. However, twenty-eight state-owned enterprises in the list of the hundred largest companies employed almost half of the entire workforce. Eight of the ten largest Russian employers were state-owned companies. By comparison, only one state-owned enterprise was among the ten largest employers in the United Kingdom, while in Germany, five out of ten were state owned in 1912. According to data collected by Peter Wardley, in the same year forty of the hundred largest employers in the world were state-owned companies.Footnote 11 State-owned enterprises were the only contributions to the global list from many countries all over the world. Therefore, comparison with other countries shows that the significant number of state-owned enterprises among the largest employers was not a phenomenon exclusive to Russia.Footnote 12
Ownership Distribution of the Hundred Largest Employers in the Russian Empire, ca. 1913
Source: Appendix.
The Russian government concentrated its entrepreneurial interests in particular sectors, mostly those with a direct military relevance. Aside from railways, the postal service, and weapon manufacturers, the only other state-owned companies traded alcoholic beverages (which was a state monopoly) and operated a few metallurgy enterprises in the Ural region. It seems that the Russian government was ready to leave all sectors to private entrepreneurial initiative except for those of armament and transportation. This approach characterized many other European countries as well.
Sources and Methods
There is no source that would contain data on the workforce of all significant companies in the Late Russian Empire, only on individual firms or smaller groups of them.Footnote 13 Therefore, data for this list were collected from different reference materials published by governmental departments and public organizations. Additional information was gleaned from industrial and business histories and company records, as well as with the help of archivists and curators of corporate museums.
The basic source underlying the data is the list of manufacturing enterprises in a volume entitled The Factories in the Russian Empire published in 1914 (hereafter, List of Factories 1914) by the Association of Industry and Trade, a representative organization of Russian businesspeople.Footnote 14 It includes information on the enterprises that operated in mining and quarrying, manufacturing, and utilities.Footnote 15 The compilers of the List of Factories 1914 and of other similar lists (see Table 4) collected information by sending questionnaires to the owners of the enterprises.Footnote 16
Published Lists of Manufacturing Enterprises in the Russian Empire, Early Twentieth Century
Sources: Vasilii E. Varzar, Spisok fabrik i zavodov Evropeiskoi Rossii [List of Factories and Plants in European Russia in 1900–1902] (Saint Petersburg, 1903); Vasilii E. Varzar, Spisok fabrik i zavodov Rossiiskoi imperii [List of Factories and Plants of the Russian Empire in 1908] (Saint Petersburg, 1912); Spisok fabrik i zavodov Rossii. 1910 god [List of Factories and Plants in Russia in 1910] (Moscow, 1910); Leon K. Ezioranskii, Fabrichno-zavodskie predpriiatiia Rossiiskoi imperii [The Industrial Enterprises of the Russian Empire in 1909] (Saint Petersburg, 1909); Dmitrii R. Kandaurov, Fabrichno-zavodskie predpriiatiia Rossiiskoi imperii (iskliuchaia Finliandiiu) [The industrial enterprises of the Russian Empire] (Petrograd, 1914).
The List of Factories 1914 and other published factory lists each failed to take into account some Russian manufacturing enterprises of various sizes. The omissions, however, mainly concern small-scale enterprises that are not critical for this study. The editors of the List of Factories 1914 assured readers that they had checked all of the most relevant information directories previously published as well as lists of enterprises in order to avoid omissions.Footnote 17
One of the most problematic aspects regarding published information on a firm's workforce is that individual establishments with the same owner were included separately in the lists of enterprises published by the government or business organizations. For example, one of the largest Russian employers, the Briansk Rail and Machinery Company, incorporated nine enterprises, including machinery and metallurgy plants, coal and iron ore mines, lumber, and brick factories in five different provinces of the Russian Empire. Since a firm could have more than one operational unit, data about companies and their business units were organized into a relational database for this research. The database consists of two tables: the one with data on the companies related via a one-to-many relationship to the one containing information on specific operational units such as location, primary economic activity, and number of employees. With the help of this structure, the analysis could be built on the total number of all operational units belonging to a company.
The database was filled in a number of steps. The list of incorporated firms was taken from the RUSCORP database.Footnote 18 To it was added all operational units with at least 1,000 employees. At this stage, fifty state-owned and private unincorporated firms were added to the list of companies. Next, all other smaller operational units of the same firm were added to the already filled large units. Then the index was checked, and all remaining firms with at least four operational units were included in the database. This algorithm ensured that all companies with at least 4,000 employees appeared. Nevertheless, in order to ensure complete coverage, all establishments employing over 2,000 workers in all of the factory lists mentioned in Table 4 have been double-checked.
Information on the railway companies was extracted from the statistical digest published by the ministry of transport of the Russian Empire; this provided information on the workforce of state-owned and private railroad companies from 1913.Footnote 19 The 1913 statistics of employees in the branches of the main department of the Posts and Telegraphs was taken from the statistical yearbook published by the ministry of internal affairs.Footnote 20 Workforce numbers for other state-owned manufacturing enterprises were specified in the official reports and statistical yearbooks issued by their respective departments.
The top one hundred list includes the state-owned Post Office, railroads, and the state-owned company trading alcoholic beverages (kazennye vinnye sklady), but excludes state-owned financial, health care, and educational institutions so as to make the list of the largest Russian employers comparable to preexisting published lists. However, in addition to those presented in the appendix, some further government departments also employed a huge number of people. The Russian Armed Forces under the control of the ministry of war totaled 1.3 million in 1912.Footnote 21 In 1914, the naval ministry managed a total of 55,744 officers and lower ranks.Footnote 22 Over 82,000 medical staff worked in 7,860 hospitals in 1911.Footnote 23 This top one hundred list does not cover the agriculture sector, either, which also could include large employers. There were probably some large employers among water transport companies and docks that have been omitted in this study.
The accuracy of the number of employees in the sources has been one of the main concerns of researchers. All previously published lists of factories have been based on information provided by company owners or factory administration. Surveys conducted by state departments involved factory and mining inspectors; their role, however, was mostly to assist the interviewees and to repeat requests to the administrators of the operational units in cases of obvious errors and omissions.Footnote 24 Therefore, it is difficult to estimate the accuracy of workforce numbers as well as other technical indicators of the enterprises delivered by the company management or enterprise administration during the survey. The law obliged managers to keep their lists of workers updated, and therefore managers knew precisely how many workers they employed.Footnote 25 However, employers sometimes did not have actual information on the exact number of their part-time workers.
Variations in the timing of the collection of employment data as well as the different approaches toward counting part-time labor resulted in a wide variation of numbers in workforce statistics. The labor market was unstable in the Late Russian Empire, experiencing significant annual and seasonal fluctuations. For example, in 1914 an average of 185,823 miners worked at coal mines in the Donbas, the main coal- and iron-producing region of the country. However, within the same year, the number fluctuated between 215,460 (in January) and 137,460 (in July).Footnote 26 While the index of maximum variation of the workforce in mining and quarries in the United Kingdom was 103.7 percent in 1907, in the Donbas mining industry it was 118.2 percent in the same year, with an average of 133.4 from 1900 to 1914.Footnote 27
Annual fluctuation in the workforce is partly due to the different approaches applied when calculating part-time and auxiliary labor. In some cases, contemporary statisticians excluded auxiliary (vspomogatel'nye) workers from the total workforce, while others included them in the total number of workers. Since auxiliary workers were an essential part of the entire labor force, their inclusion or exclusion could sufficiently impact the total. Statistics from the ministry of transportation indicate that 37 percent of workers of the private and state-owned railroad companies were part-time and/or casual workers in 1913.Footnote 28 The same proportion of auxiliary workers (37 percent) was noted by statisticians of the mining department at enterprises located in the Ural region in 1907.Footnote 29 However, this does not mean that they were all part-time employees. In most cases, auxiliary work was a term used by statisticians for workers operating in fuel procurement, loading, and building.Footnote 30
If managers did know the workforce numbers, whether they told the truth in the records is another question. Since sharing such information about their enterprises in public was optional, not obligatory, there is no reason to suspect the owners or managers of misstating the data in the provided materials. In cases where archival company records contain information about the company workforce and can therefore allow comparison with the List of Factories 1914, the comparative analysis does not show a significant difference in these numbers. Overall, although this source of data is still imperfect, the List of Factories 1914 offers the most complete comprehensive compendium of information about employers in Russia in the early twentieth century.
That being said, use of this source requires that several methodological issues be solved first. For instance, how can one deal with the monopolistic associations between large companies and the code-diversified economic activities among them? From the late nineteenth century, due to the processes of cartelization and monopolization typical in all industrialized economies, large companies consolidated into business groups, interfirm networks, and cartels. Should subsidiaries be included in the list separately or should they be consolidated with the parent firm? Christine Shaw, Martin Fiedler, and Howard Gospel, when creating the list of the largest British and German employers, counted a subsidiary as part of the parent firm if the latter held more than 50 percent of the voting capital.Footnote 31 Nonetheless, it is extremely difficult in the Russian case to define the owner of shares since shares were often not registered but were in the anonymous bearer form.Footnote 32 Estimates for the allocation of stocks among all large companies would require a special study. Therefore, the top one hundred list includes state departments and firms authorized by the Russian government to act as a single entity despite the level of dependency on the parent company. Subsidiaries of multinational corporations such as the Singer Company, registered in Russia in 1897 by the American Singer Manufacturing Company, will be considered as a separate firm as well.Footnote 33 Three freestanding companies (the British-owned New Russia Company Ltd. and two French-owned companies, the Russian Mining and Metallurgy Union Co. and the Krivoy Rog Iron Ore Co.) were included in the list because their prime operating assets were located in the Russian Empire.
The Singer Company can also be used to demonstrate the difficulties of defining the principal economic activity of some firms. In the scholarly literature, Singer is strongly associated with the manufacturing sector; however, the majority of Singer employees in the Russian Empire worked in the service sector. The Russian subsidiary employed 5,567 workers and administrators for its sewing machine factory in Podolsk (Moscow region) in 1914. In addition, its sales division—with its head office, three regional offices, and estimated 4,000 depots, stores, and shops—engaged a total of 27,439 people in Russia. Therefore, in the list of the hundred largest employers it appears under two separate codes: 475 (Retail sale of other household equipment in specialized stores) and 282 (Manufacture of special-purpose machinery). Another example, the British-owned New Russia Company, which operated in the Donbas region, employed 17,980 workers in 1913, including 9,935 miners and 8,045 factory workers.Footnote 34 It was coded 051 (Mining of hard coal) and 241 (Manufacture of basic iron and steel).
Railroads in Russia represent another difficult case. Many Russian railroads were registered as private businesses by 1913. However, the Russian government had guaranteed payment of interest and dividends on the securities of the private railroads. The railroad engineers for both private and state-owned railroads were graduates of state education institutions. The board of directors for each private Russian railroad included a representative of the ministry of ways and communication. The government established railroad tariffs.Footnote 35 However, Russia was not unique in this respect. Youssef Cassis completely excluded railways from his analysis of European big business in the early twentieth century, explaining that they were “increasingly regulated” by the state.Footnote 36 Fiedler and Wardley each included both private and state-owned railroads in their lists of the largest employers in Germany and Britain, respectively.Footnote 37 Wardley combined the dates for the Russian state-owned railroad enterprises as a single entity when compiling the list of the world's hundred largest employers of 1912.Footnote 38 Although the Russian state purchased many railroads from private businesses in the late nineteenth century, these railroads operated in a manner resembling that of separate companies in many respects. Therefore, they are listed in the appendix as separate employers.
Comparative Context
The lists published previously originate from various years around 1910, which allows a comparative analysis between the largest firms in Russia and firms in other countries. Fiedler and Gospel's list of the hundred largest British and German firms measured by employment, from 1907 to 1911, was used for comparison here.Footnote 39 According to estimations by Jeremy and Farnie on the United Kingdom, data cited for 1907 might underestimate a firm's 1913 position by as much as 10 or 15 percent.Footnote 40 Consequently, an international comparison would place Russian companies in a better position in the ranking than they would have held in 1907.
Table 5, with its descriptive statistics of the hundred largest companies, shows that the minimum number of employees for entry into the top one hundred was 4,000 for Germany, 5,000 for the United Kingdom, and 5,213 for Russia. The maximum company size was 486,318 employees for German firms, 203,600 for British firms, and 80,010 for Russian firms. The significant difference between mean and median, as well as high skewness and kurtosis coefficients in the case of Germany and the United Kingdom, indicates that values were distributed extremely steeply in these two countries. The distribution of Russian firms was moderately smooth compared with that of their western European counterparts. In other words, big employers in Russia were more similar to one another in size than were those in the United Kingdom and, especially, in Germany.
Descriptive Statistics of Lists of the Hundred Largest Employers
Sources: For Russia, see appendix; data for Germany and United Kingdom adapted from Martin Fiedler and Howard Gospel, “The Top 100 Largest Employers in UK and Germany in the Twentieth Century,” Cologne Economic History Paper no. 3 (2010): 1–67.
Railroads and heavy industry accounted for 91 percent of employers in Germany, 74 percent in the United Kingdom, and 60 percent in Russia. These industries especially favored new technologies that allowed firms to achieve scale and scope effect.Footnote 41 Table 6 demonstrates that Russia's light industry had a significantly larger share than did German and British industries. Textile companies mostly contributed to the high share of the manufacturing sector. In Russia, the thirty-three largest textile companies employed 285,281 workers, or 17 percent of all workers among the hundred largest employers. In comparison, eight textile companies in the United Kingdom employed 103,980 workers, or 6.7 percent of the total top one hundred employers, while in Germany only one textile company, with 8,000 workers (0.4 percent), entered the top one hundred list.
Sectoral Composition of Largest Employers in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia
Sources: For Russia, see appendix; data for Germany and United Kingdom adapted from Martin Fiedler and Howard Gospel, “The Top 100 Largest Employers in UK and Germany in the Twentieth Century,” Cologne Economic History Paper no. 3 (2010): 1–67.
The outstanding share of textile companies in Russia compared to Germany and Britain can explain the smoother distribution of the hundred largest employers in the Russian Empire: the coefficient of variation of the textile employers was 51 percent; that of metallurgy and metalworking employers was 66 percent.
Manufacturers of nonmetallic mineral products such as brick, pottery, and glass were usually small scale in the Russian Empire. Therefore, the presence of Matvei Kuznetsov Porcelain and Pottery Company, the largest Russian porcelain manufacturer, is surprising in the list of the largest employers. At the same time, no tobacco firm is on the list for Russia, while tobacco companies were among the largest employers in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Asmolov Company, the largest Russian tobacco firm, based in Rostov-on-Don, employed 3,860 workers, and the second largest, the Laferm Company, based in Saint Petersburg, employed 2,880 workers in 1913.
Eight firms among the top one hundred U.K. employers were in trade and financial services, while Germany and Russia had only one firm each in the commerce and banking sector. Overall, the largest German and Russian employers were less varied in their economic activities than those in the United Kingdom.
The hundred largest employers in the Russian Empire collectively employed 1.53 million (or 43 percent) of all 3.94 million manufacturing and transportation workers.Footnote 42 By comparison, the hundred largest companies in the United Kingdom in 1907 collectively employed a total of 1.5 million workers, or 8.2 percent of the entire workforce.Footnote 43 That same year, the hundred largest companies in Germany collectively employed a total of 2.0 million workers, or 7.5 percent of all employees in the country.Footnote 44 However, calculated as a percentage of the whole urban population, the workforce concentration in the largest Russian enterprises is not that striking: 7.0 percent in Russia, 5.4 percent in Germany, and 4.3 percent in the United Kingdom.Footnote 45
There are several explanations for the higher labor concentration in Russia compared to the United Kingdom and Germany. One possible cause could be the peculiarities of how labor statistics were calculated in the Russian Empire. Olga Crisp noticed that official industrial statistics excluded many microscale enterprises if they did not use mechanical engines and they employed fewer than sixteen employees. Also, many firms that were listed among the largest ones were in fact composed of numerous operational units. Therefore, the real level of labor and production concentration could be substantially lower than statistical tables show.Footnote 46 However, even at the scale of separate operational units, the concentration of workers was still very high: in 1913 each of the hundred largest factories and plants in the Russian Empire exceeded 3,500 workers, and each of the top fifty exceeded 5,400.
One explanation for the high level of workers' concentration might be the low productivity of labor in Russia as compared to western Europe.Footnote 47 To achieve the scale and scope effect, companies operating in the Russian Empire had to employ more workers than did their Western counterparts. Another explanation might be the peculiarities of Russian incorporation law. There was no general incorporation in the Russian Empire, and those firms that chose to incorporate had to go through a complicated and time-consuming process.Footnote 48 This limited the number of corporations in the Russian Empire compared to countries with more open incorporation processes. In 1910, there were 10 corporations for every million people in Russia (the lowest rate in Europe), while there were 2,913 in the United States, 1,241 in the United Kingdom, and 403 corporations per million people in Germany.Footnote 49 Consequently, it was often easier to unite the interests in an already existing company than to found a new one.
Alexander Gerschenkron suggested two more explanations for the high level of workers' concentration. First is the issue of a general lack of educated managers in tandem with a larger number of subordinates compared to the ratio in western European enterprises. Second, the Russian government favored the development of larger enterprises and neglected small businesses. Russian bureaucrats preferred to deal with big businesses because it opened up ample opportunities for bribery.Footnote 50
Table 7 presents summary statistics of the combined list of the hundred largest employers in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia. Almost half of the companies on the list originated in Russia. However, due to the presence of a few mammoth firms, German companies employed the relative majority of employees on this list. Several gigantic German companies topped the list, but in the bottom quartile, German companies were smaller than those in the United Kingdom and Russia. Both the German and U.K. lists are topped by six companies that significantly exceeded the size of their Russian equivalent. In the upper-middle group (ranked between 6 and 64), Russian companies were larger than their equivalents on German and British lists.
The Hundred Largest Employers Combined from Firms Operating in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia, 1907–1914
Sources: For Russia, see appendix; data for Germany and United Kingdom adapted from Martin Fiedler and Howard Gospel, “The Top 100 Largest Employers in UK and Germany in the Twentieth Century,” Cologne Economic History Paper no. 3 (2010): 1–67.
The above explanations of national contributions in part reflect the size of markets and national economies. A country's contribution to the aggregated top one hundred list can correct this bias when related to its size. Although Russia contributed forty-eight companies to the aggregated list of the largest employers, it had 3.0 companies to 10,000 inhabitants, while Germany had 3.5 and the United Kingdom 7.2.Footnote 51 Consequently, the United Kingdom had many more large employers than Germany or Russia relative to the size of its population.Footnote 52
Conclusion
Data for the list of the largest employers in Russia were collected from various documents published by governmental departments and business organizations on individual operational establishments because none of the sources contain comprehensive data on firms operated in Russia. The compilation of such a list raises a number of general methodological issues that need to be sorted out case by case, such as the number of operational units under the same owner as well as the sectoral belonging of all subsidiaries under a parent firm.
Although the primary aim of the article is to publish a list of the hundred largest employers in the Russian Empire in 1913 and to explain methodological issues arising from the character of sources, some conclusions relevant to the discussions of big business historiography can be suggested based on this new empirical evidence. The most important is a general one: it is necessary to include the largest employers that operated in Russia in the analysis of European big businesses in order to have a more representative dataset since they are comparable in size. Another important conclusion concerns the role of state in big business in the Russian Empire. While most of the largest employers in Russia were private and public corporations, a few gigantic state-owned enterprises operated with a significant number of employees. However, comparison with other countries shows that a significant presence of state-owned enterprises among the largest employers was a common phenomenon elsewhere in the world at that time.
In 1913, most of the large employers in Russia were capital-intensive enterprises such as railways and manufacturers of basic metals and metal products, as well as machinery. Germany and Britain display a very similar pattern in this respect. However, one-third of large employers in Russia were labor-intensive textile factories. The significant share of textile enterprises among the largest employers in Russia is especially striking in a comparative context: only eight textile companies in the United Kingdom and one in Germany are included on their lists of the largest employers.
The largest employers clustered either in the densely populated regions, with the most favorable labor markets, or moved workers to places where significant mineral resources were located. Analysis of the list confirms the observations presented in previous literature concerning the extraordinarily high level of workers' concentration in Russia. This phenomenon has been attributed to the low productivity of labor in Russia as compared to western Europe. However, processes of concentration of workers and production were a characteristic phenomenon for all industrialized economies in the Second Industrial Revolution.
Finally, it should be kept in mind that the largest employers are only a part of big business; such a system of ranking based on the number of employees is biased toward labor-demanding enterprises such as manufacturing. It hides the real significance of financial organizations and firms in other low-labor-demanding services. Still, employment offers an important measure of how the size of corporations changed over time, by region, and by economic activity. In the future, the list of the largest employers in the Russian Empire can be amplified and balanced by lists of the largest companies measured by revenues, profits, assets, and market value. In addition, since the largest employers concentrated a large amount of the labor force, the present list can also be useful for studying labor markets and labor relations.
Appendix
The Largest Employers in the Russian Empire, ca. 1913
