Empire Of The Periphery: Russia And The World System

Empire of the Periphery Russia and the World System Boris Kagarlitsky Translated by Renfrey Clarke Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI Kagarlitsky 00 pre iii 30/10/07 11:11:09 First published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Boris Kagarlitsky 2008 This translation © Renfrey Clarke 2008 The right of Boris Kagarlitsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13 ISBN-10 978 0 7453 2682 5 0 7453 2682 X Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in India Kagarlitsky 00 pre iv 30/10/07 11:11:09 Contents Introduction: Topic and Method 1 1. A Land of Cities 26 2. The Thirteenth-Century Decline 45 3. Moscow and Novgorod 60 4. The ‘English Tsar’ 78 5. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century 99 6. Empire of the Periphery 115 7. Peter the Great 138 8. The Eighteenth-Century Expansion 152 9. The Granary of Europe 170 10. The Crimean War and the World System 192 11. The Age of Reforms 200 12. The Flourishing of Russian Capitalism: From Witte to Stolypin 223 13. The Revolutionary Explosion 255 14. The Soviet World 283 15. After 1991: The Peripheral Capitalism of the Restoration Era 304 Conclusion 323 Notes Index 326 356 Kagarlitsky 00 pre v 30/10/07 11:11:09 Introduction: Topic and Method For us, experience of the times does not exist. For us, generations and centuries have passed fruitlessly. To look at us, you might say that the universal law of humanity has been reduced to nothingness. Alone in the world, we have given the world nothing, and have taken nothing from it. To the mass of human ideas, we have added not a single thought. We have not contributed to the advance of human reason in any way, and everything of this advance that we have come by, we have mutilated. This was the bitter observation of the outstanding nineteenth-century Russian thinker Pyotr Chaadaev.1 His pessimism did not prevent Chaadaev from later declaring: I consider our generation fortunate, if we can only recognise this. I think our great advantage is th