The High Politics of Defence, June–September 1915

Abstract

The rapid industrialization of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had willy-nilly laid the foundations for the formation of an indigenous industrial bourgeoisie. This process was not, however, accompanied by an aggrandizement of political power which its Western counterparts had obtained as part and parcel of their economic ascendance. During the first year of the Great War it became apparent that the state would have to draw on the economic strength which industrialists could command to furnish the necessary articles of war. But the Tsarist administration was loath to relinquish control over the deployment of the empire’s economic resources of the country. The creation of the Special Council was a partial concession to private industry as represented by a ‘commercial-industrial circle’. But the Petrograd financier-industrialists who comprised the circle were the least likely to demand political changes, having established a close partnership with the military departments.