Daily life changed, especially after 1900. New department stores sprang up around the city, one off Nevskii Prospekt even built as an investment by the Imperial Corps of Guards Regiments. Farther down the street were the new Singer Sewing Machine building and the Eliseev Delicatessen, with its imported and domestic stocks for the wealthy gourmet. The city sponsored or built telephone service, and new sewer and water systems were financed through loans from foreign banks. In 1907 Westinghouse and Russian investors opened the city’s first electric tram lines, which quickly came to cover most of the city. Electric lights lit up the main streets in the center and more and more gas lights in other parts of town illuminated the winter dark and fog. New bridges across the Neva contributed to the charm of the city’s waterfront but also made communication among its various parts easy for the first time.
The social life of the city was centered on the court. Until the 1890s the court balls and other grand events provided a glittering backdrop to the dramas of life and politics in the capital. The great aristocratic houses were not far behind. They too put on magnificent entertainments, some of them in private theaters in their palaces, like the one in the Yusupov palace, with professional artists. The great imperial theaters, especially the Mariinskii, were another venue for the display of wealth by the old aristocracy and the newly rich as well. For the intelligentsia and the middle classes, the legitimate stage, state financed and private, provided the more “advanced” culture they craved. On the edges of the city where the working people lived were popular theaters, many of them outdoors in the summer, which provided cheap entertainment for the masses. A whole range of restaurants, from the elite establishments off Nevskii Prospekt to the lowest dives on the edge of town, filled the various needs of a variegated population. St. Petersburg was very much the artistic center of Russia. The imperial ballet at the Mariinskii Theater was the darling of the aristocracy, but the opera and stage flourished as well. Most of the new trends in Russian painting, from World of Art to suprematism, came into being in St. Petersburg, and the major writers from the 1890s onward were almost all based in the city.
For all its artistic glory, St. Petersburg remained quintessentially a center of political power. After 1905 the main newspapers of the legal political parties were published in St. Petersburg, reporting on the government as well as the new Duma. The Duma occupied the old palace of Catherine’s favorite Potemkin, to the east of the main center of power. Politics remained the principal concern of the tsar, and his presence in the city was essential to the functioning of the state. In actual fact Nicholas II spent relatively little time in the city itself, preferring a quieter life at nearby Tsarskoe Selo or Peterhof, or even his Crimean estates. He rarely attended the theater, restricting his social events to court balls and a few other crucial ceremonies, a practice that did not win the approval of the aristocracy. The tsar and his advisors were nervous about public appearances in the face of the persistent terror campaign waged by the populist revolutionaries, and Nicholas personally preferred a simple life with his family. These were understandable decisions, but they contributed to the drift and instability of power at a time of rapid social and political change. The state had been central to Russian development for centuries, and suddenly the ship seemed to have no pilot.
In no area did the policies of the Russian state have more unintended consequences than in economic and social development. The reformers of the 1860s, as well as count Sergei Witte a generation later, tried to encourage industrial capitalism while conserving as much of the existing social structure as possible. The government sponsored railroad building throughout the period, both private and state projects, helping to secure loans from abroad and awarding lucrative contracts to Russian businessmen. It constructed the tariff system to favor railroad building and then later in the century moved to a more protectionist system to encourage Russian industry. The maintenance of the landed gentry and the peasant community remained a basic goal, however, even at the expense of industrial development. The maintenance of the peasant community restricted the movement of peasants out of the village to join the industrial labor force, but it could not prevent it. The survival of gentry landholding, under siege from the new economic forces, was also a government goal. Even Prime Minister Stolypin’s attempt to loosen up the village community after 1907 was a gradualist program designed to strengthen the gentry, not undermine it. Ultimately, however, the state could only influence, not direct, the evolution of Russian society. Factories sprung up, banks and other financial and commercial institutions grew, even when government rules hindered them. State-sponsored development programs like railroad building created whole new towns and new industries that the increasingly archaic state administration could not direct in the ways that policy demanded. Modern cities with newspapers and tram lines, restaurants and amateur cultural institutions created forms of life unknown in the older Russia but essentially the same as those in Western Europe and America. Whatever the government did, Russia was becoming modern, slowly but relentlessly.
The driving force in the changes to Russian society was industrialization. At the end of the Crimean War Russia was not without industry, for the textile industry in Central Russia – in Moscow and surrounding towns – was flourishing and working with mostly modern equipment, steam-driven looms, and other machinery. At the head of that industry were a whole series of native businessmen, mostly of peasant origin and many of them Old Believers in religion. Some families from the Old Believer communities, including the Morozovs, Riabushinskiis, and Guchkovs, built factories in Moscow and other towns in the surrounding areas. Their faithful adherence to the inward-looking and occasionally xenophobic variants of Old Belief did not prevent them from buying English and German machinery and hiring foreigners to run it and teach their workmen. The founders of all these great business dynasties had moved from the peasantry or small-scale trading to owning factories and even banks by the 1840s, and they set their children – sons and daughters alike – to master foreign languages and learn about the modern world, including its new technology. If the Old Believers were perhaps the richest of the Moscow industrialists and bankers, Orthodox businessmen flourished as well, such as the Tretyakovs, who rose from the ranks of provincial shopkeepers to own textile factories in Moscow, Kostroma, and elsewhere. In Petersburg the businessmen were more cosmopolitan, for alongside Russians (mostly Orthodox) were Germans, Englishmen, Swedes like the Nobel family, and the Jewish banker Baron Horace Ginzburg. Businessmen in St. Petersburg concentrated less on textiles and more on metallurgy and new technology as well as finance and a flourishing import-export trade. Other centers quickly emerged in the south, the Baltic provinces, and Poland. In Poland most of the bankers and manufacturers were German or Jewish, while in southern Russia the Jewish Poliakov brothers, railroad kings and eventually bankers, made deals with Russian and Polish noblemen in the sugar beet business. In the south the Welshman John Hughes founded Iuzovka, the first major metallurgical center in the Don River Basin, the coal and iron area that came to be known as the Donbass. Today it is Donetsk in the Ukraine.
In the first years after emancipation, however, the textile industry was by far the most successful. The Moscow textile manufacturers were a colorful group, with Old Believers and Orthodox rubbing shoulders with noblemen-turned entrepreneurs. Many of them ran their factories with marked paternalism, building cheap housing, places for entertainment, and schools. Timofei Morozov was one of these, an Old Believer who ran his business largely on his own and with an iron hand. His factory was noted for the high quality of its products, made with English machinery and (until the end of the century) imported cotton. He also provided medical facilities and various forms of welfare for his workers, as well as the usual housing and entertainment. He struggled tirelessly with working class drinking habits, both from religious conviction and the realization that drunk or hung over workers could not perform high quality work for him. Morozov remained very much in the old world, for his cultural patronage went to the history and the culture of Russia before Peter. He also had many connections among the Slavophiles, whose publications were heavily subsidized by the Moscow businessmen. None of this did him any good when the market for textiles contracted suddenly early in the 1880s: he responded by cutting wages and demanding more from his workers. They responded with riot and destruction in January 1885 – one of the first major strikes in Russian history. The age of paternalism was passing, though his son Savva tried to keep it going for another twenty years. Eventually management of the firm, like so many others, passed to engineers and the middle level of management, replacing the personal style of the older businessmen.