In 1900 Russia experienced its first major recession after the industrial boom. Primarily a stock market crash and financial crisis, it affected the metal and coal complex more than any other, and the response of the industry (with government support) was to form syndicates and trusts to regulate production. The French investors who figured heavily in this sector of the Russian economy supported this syndication of the industry as well. Light industries, textiles, food and drink, and other consumer-oriented businesses were much less affected by the recession and continued to grow. The 1905 revolution naturally disrupted production as well as politics, but when the government reestablished its authority in 1907, economic prosperity returned, for the recession came to an end.
Figure 12. The Ilya Muromets, designed by Igor Sikorsky for the Russian air force in 1914, the first successful four-engine aircraft.
The last years before the outbreak of the First World War saw a return to prosperity, and the further modernization of Russian city life. Cities, including the small ones, now housed about fifteen percent of the population. Telephones, motorcars, electric trams, mass media, advertising, and even the beginnings of the cinema turned Russian cities into modern centers. Not just St. Petersburg, but also Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa, and Kiev became largely modern cities. Large apartment blocks arose in place of the older courtyard houses filled with trees that still predominated in smaller centers and the more traditional parts of Moscow. Luxurious and not so luxurious stores opened, with the latest fashions from Paris or Vienna. Restaurants, cafés, and hotels became major social centers, replacing the aristocratic clubs of the past. Automobiles appeared on the streets, and by 1914 there was intense public interest in air flight. Modern social organizations, like the Boy Scouts, took root in the major cities. St. Petersburg, Odessa, parts of Moscow, and some of the industrial cities differed only in degree from their European counterparts.
It was the Russian village, still largely unmodernized, if not unchanging, that made Russia backward by European, if not Asian, standards. After 1907 Prime Minister Stolypin pushed his famous plan to create independent farmers, on the model of European peasants, outside the village communities, and some peasants took advantage of the opportunity. Most of them, however, greeted the scheme with relentless hostility, and the numbers that did opt for independent farms were too small to have any substantial effect by the time that war broke out. A more promising change in rural life was the migration of the peasantry to Siberia and the Kazakh steppe of Central Asia. Here the peasants became more independent farmers on their own, without conflict with pre-existing village communities, though the native Kazakhs were not happy with the loss of some of their prime grazing lands. In Siberia the native population was much smaller and such conflicts were few, so that on the eve of the war, Siberia seemed to be coming into its own for the first time, not just as a place of mines and convict labor but as a land of rural settlement, growing industry, and booming towns. The Urals as well was growing rapidly, just beginning to overcome the legacy of the outdated local iron industry of the past. None of these regional shifts, however, were yet extensive enough to change the overall pattern of Russian society: a sea of backward agriculture dotted with larger or smaller islands of modern industry and society.
The large-scale economic changes of the decades between 1861 and 1914 had all sorts of unexpected or at least unplanned effects. The government stuck to the older system of classification by social estate – gentry, merchants, townspeople, and peasants – but social change rendered it increasingly irrelevant. Millions of peasants actually spent most of their lives as urban workers. Businessmen came from all sorts of backgrounds, not just urban families but noble and peasant families. The intelligentsia had representatives of virtually every social group, if townspeople and nobles (often only technically nobles) predominated. Economic development rearranged the ethnic pattern of the empire. St. Petersburg added a Jewish community to its many other ethnic groups, some 35,000 people (officially) in 1910, the largest community outside the Pale. Masses of peasants and townspeople poured into the new industrial cities in the Donbass – Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and many others – producing a multi-ethnic but Russian-speaking area. The Baku oil fields brought thousands of Armenians and Georgians to the largest city in the Azeri provinces.
The lives of women changed, if not to the same degree at all levels of society. For noblewomen, already with property rights greater than those typical of bourgeois Europe, life went on as before. Noblewomen either supported an aristocratic life and the government or military career of their husbands and fathers by an endless round of parties and social occasions, or they managed the estates for absent spouses. Many noblewomen, however, like their male counterparts, took advantage of the new educational opportunities that emerged in the reform era. For the men those opportunities were more places in universities or new sorts of institutions, like the engineering schools. For women the change was much more radical, because starting in 1858, the government began to radically expand the network of secondary schools for girls as part of the general expansion of education. By the 1880s there were already 50,000 girls in the new schools, and they continued to expand into the twentieth century. Even more radical was the appearance of university education for women. Earlier universities were closed to women, but in 1858–1863 there were experiments with opening them. Conservative fears, prompted in part by the nascent revolutionary movement’s advocacy of women’s liberation, led the government to shut the doors. Into the gap stepped the liberal intelligentsia, which started private university courses for young women in 1869. The lecturers were normally university professors who took on the extra duties, often for free, as part of a general commitment to the liberalization of society. The emancipation of women was a major cause to liberals as well as radicals, as both saw the patriarchal family as a mirror of the political autocracy that ruled the country. Finally in 1876 the government authorized “women’s courses” that offered a university training but no degree, other than in certain professions such as teaching and midwifery, deemed suitable for women. Ever inconsistent, the government left open one loophole: foreign degrees were recognized in the Russian Empire, so a woman who received a degree in one of the few foreign institutions (mainly in Switzerland) that admitted women obtained a degree recognized officially in Russia. Ironically, the Russian women at Swiss universities found that there were no Swiss women in the universities, only Russians, Poles, and some young women from Serbia and other Balkan countries.
The new educational opportunities attracted women from well beyond the nobility. The daughters of the intelligentsia, the clergy, and the middle classes joined them in the women’s courses. The transformation of Russian urban society created new professions that women entered and even dominated. In addition to medical work and teaching at various levels in both town and country, office work on the soon-to-be ubiquitous typewriter created a whole new stratum of employed young women from the middle classes. The telephones of the time required manual connections and switchboards, and women found work here. These trends were particularly marked after about 1900 in the larger cities, and this meant that for the first time Russian women of the middle classes were working outside the home.
In the working classes, the proportion of women in the factories grew from about twenty percent in the 1880s to thirty percent on the eve of the war. Most of them worked in textile or other light industries. The rapid growth of the cities meant a huge demand for domestic labor in the form of cooks and maids, most of them inevitably women. Some of these women were already born in the cities, but like the men, most of them were migrants from the villages. In the villages the traditional family patterns persisted, and in areas where out-migration was not important, the lives of peasant women changed little over the course of time. In the cities women workers were more likely to be illiterate than men, were paid less than male counterparts, and endured the unwanted attentions of male supervisors and foremen. In the end, however, working class women had their revenge: it was the women in the bread lines in March 1917, who began the revolution that brought down the monarchy. Once their men joined, the Romanov dynasty came to an end.