Entrepreneurship

Although the role of official printing remained strong into the early 1900s, especially in St. Petersburg, where a third of the city's printing workers were employed in the nine largest governmental printing

[12] Judging by Moscow data in Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy , pp. 152, 188–89.

[13] Sher, Istoriia , p. 35; Bakhtiarov, Slugi pechati , p. 42; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza , p. 45; Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy , pp. 150, 168–69, 186– 90; E[izen], Ocherk istorii perepletnogo dela .

[14] Knizhnyi vestnik 1864, no. 23 (July 31), p. 281; Tipografskii zhurnal 2:21–22 (May 15, 1869), pp. 80–81; Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1879, no. 5 (March 1), p. 38; 1882, no. 8 (April 15), p. 48; Knizhnyi vestnik 1885, no. 10 (May 15), p. 354; 1885, no. 13–14 (July 15), p. 472; 1890, no. 12 (December), p. 495; Obzor pervoi vserossiiskoi vystavki 32 (June 8, 1895), p. 8; Graficheskie iskusstva i bumazhnaia promyshlennost' 1:1 (September 1, 1895), pp. 3–4; 3:9 (September 1898), pp. 129–31; 4:9 (February 1900), p. 146; Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy , p. 228; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza , p. 66; 400 let , p. 371; Leninskii zakaz , p. 20.

[15] In a platen press, the type and paper both sit on flat surfaces and are simply pressed against one another. Flatbed cylinder presses, which long predominated in the production of books, move the type on a flat bed beneath a rotating impression cylinder, which carries the paper. The more complex flatbed presses use multiple cylinders to print in two colors and on both sides of the sheet in a single pass through the press. Rotary presses print from curved plates—in Russia, at that time, mainly metal stereotype molds of composed type—attached to a cylinder. This is the most efficient style of press for fast and long-run presswork and can print in multiple colors and on both sides of the paper. Rotary web presses print on rolls of paper called "webs" that are cut into sheets and often folded automatically.

firms,^[16] most of the expansion and modernization of production in the late nineteenth century was the work of private commercial entrepreneurs. Many of these capitalist printers were non-Russians, often immigrants or their children, who brought to printing the "capital, knowledge, and the spirit of enterprise" that Finance Minister Sergei Witte had hoped foreigners would provide Russian industry.^[17] The technical needs of printing created a particular demand for foreign-trained printers, reflected in their large role. In 1875 in St. Petersburg nearly onequarter (23 percent) of the owners of printing firms were foreign nationals, mostly Germans. There were also "immigrants" from lands that had been annexed as the Russian empire expanded—Germans and others from the Baltic provinces (9 percent in 1875) and Jews from the Pale of Settlement (12 percent in 1881).^[18] In Moscow as well, nonRussians played a disproportionate role as entrepreneurs, though less so than in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg. In 1885, 14 percent of the owners of printing firms were foreign subjects, mostly Germans, with an additional 4 percent born in the Baltic provinces and 2 percent identified as Jews. By contrast, ethnic non-Russians constituted only 5 percent of the general population in Moscow.^[19]

Rudolf Schneider was in many respects typical of these printers of foreign origin. Born in the then-Prussian city of Danzig (Gdansk) in 1834, he was forced by his family's poverty to quit school at the age of fourteen and take a position as an apprentice compositor. After completing his apprenticeship, he set out on his traditional Wanderjahre . Working his way around printing houses in Austria, the Rheinland, France, and Hungary, he arrived in 1858 in St. Petersburg, where he

[16] Calculated from sources as in table 3.

[17] Von Laue, "A Secret Memorandum of Sergei Witte," esp. pp. 68–69. For a general discussion of foreign investment and entrepreneurship in Russia, see McKay, Pioneers for Profit; essays by Fred Carstensen, William Blackwell, and Thomas C. Owen, in Guroff and Carstensen, Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia , pp. 17–18, 59–60, 140–58; Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs , pp. 247–49, 266–67; Gindin, "Russkaia burzhuaziia v period kapitalizma," part 1, pp. 63–71.

[18] Spisok zavedenii pechati v S.-Peterburge (1875); S.-Peterburg po perepisi 1881 goda , vol. 1, part 2, pp. 311–12. The 1875 spisok does not identify foreign-born individuals who adopted Russian citizenship or Baltic-born individuals who legally registered as residents of Moscow or St. Petersburg, though a few of these have been identified from other sources. For comparison, it may be noted that in the general population of the city, individuals identified as other than Orthodox native Russian-speakers comprised only 17% of the total. S.-Peterburg po perepisi 1881 goda , vol. 1, part 1, pp. 242–43.

[19] Torgovo-promyshlennye zavedeniia goroda Moskvy v 1885–1890 gg ., pp. 62– 65; Perepis' Moskvy 1882 goda , vypusk 2, tables, pp. 93–98, 393–94; Pravitel'stvennyi vestnik , August 17 (29), 1883. Again, the percentage of foreign subjects does not include naturalized foreign-born.

found work first as a compositor and then as a production manager and soon managed to purchase his own small printing shop.^[20]

Second-generation immigrants were typically even more successful. For example, Roman Golike's father came to St. Petersburg from the Estonian city of Dorpat (Tartu) in 1837 as a twenty-year-old compositor and worked his way up through the ranks to become manager of the press owned by another immigrant, a shop he was able to buy on credit in 1851. Roman attended the Realschule of the Reformed church in St. Petersburg, a central institution in Petersburg's foreign community,^[21] and completed a part-time apprenticeship in his father's shop; in 1869 he was sent to London and Paris to earn his own living as a compositor. On returning to Russia in 1871, he built up his father's firm into one of the most respected quality-printing houses in the capital.^[22]

Although most immigrant printing entrepreneurs followed this general pattern of upward mobility from skilled worker to shop owner, some established or purchased printing firms as extensions of successful careers in related fields, especially publishing and bookselling. For example, Adolf Marx, the son of a Stettin clock-factory owner, trained as a bookseller in Schwerin and Berlin before coming in 1859 to St. Petersburg, where he built a successful bookselling and publishing business and on this basis founded a large printing house.^[23]

The rapid expansion of printing in the late nineteenth century also created opportunities for skilled workmen to become entrepreneurs. In the 1890s, a foreman complained that in former times only "educated people with means" owned printing shops, whereas now "many are former compositors."^[24] Unfortunately, we know little about most of these workers-turned-entrepreneurs because they tended to own inconspicuous shops and were not usually active in professional organizations. However, the career of one, Ivan Frolov, may suggest both the

[20] Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1882, no. 1–2 (January 1 and 15), pp. 2–3; 1884, no. 12 (June 15), p. 91; Tipografskii zhurnal 1:2 (July 15, 1867), p. 6; Galaktionov, Zhurnaly pechatnogo dela , pp. 3–9.

[21] Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' , vol. 26, p. 633.

[22] Pechatnia R. R. Golike , pp. 1–8; Pechatnoe iskusstvo 1:4 (January 1902), pp. 125–28.

[23] Knigovedenie: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' , p. 334; 400 let , p.380; Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1883, no. 11 (January 1), p. 98.

[24] A. A. Filippov in Novoe vremia , March 22/April 3, 1895, p. 3; also in Vestnik graficheskogo dela 1 (March 14, 1897), p. 3. The early Soviet historians of Petersburg printing agreed:"Before 1905 . . . the owners of typographic, lithographic, binding, and zincographic enterprises for the most part came from among the workers." Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza , p. 34. See also Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy , p. 122; Piatidesiatiletnii iubilei tipografii Ivana Grigor'evicha Chuksina , p. 4.

typical upward climb through the ranks and the distinctive personal attributes needed for such mobility. Born in the central Russian city of Riazan in 1851, Frolov finished a local primary school and began attending a gymnasium, but his family's poverty after his father's death forced him to leave school to seek work. Evidently wishing to practice a craft and perhaps to make use of his literacy, he sacrificed immediate earnings in order to accept an apprenticeship as a compositor. In 1878, he moved his family north to St. Petersburg, where for thirteen years he worked in the same shop, first as a compositor, then as a foreman, production manager, and finally director. Three years before his death at the age of forty-four, he purchased his own small press.^[25] Although native former workers such as Frolov may have operated many printing firms, they owned none of the major enterprises in the industry. Almost all of these were in the hands of non-Russians (generally immigrants or their children), individuals from privileged social ranks, or the state.

Two partial exceptions to this generalization are worth noting. Ivan Sytin, the owner of Russia's largest private printing company at the turn of the century, was the son of a provincial copy clerk (pisar' ) and was educated for only three years in a one-room schoolhouse before he started full-time work as an apprentice to a Moscow merchant specializing in the sale of cheap popular prints (lubki ) and brochures. Ten years later, with the help of this employer, who initially joined him as a partner, and a four-thousand-ruble dowry from his recent marriage, Sytin established a small lithographic printing shop with a half-dozen workers and a single press. Concentrating his initial efforts on meeting the growing demand for simple popular prints and publications for peasants and workers, and profiting especially during the RussoTurkish War by selling vivid maps of the campaign, Sytin was able to expand his operations quickly, adding a bookstore, a typographic shop, and a bindery during the course of the 1880s.

Sytin was from the first convinced that profit depended on modern techniques as well as good marketing. His first lithographic press was mechanized, and when he organized his typographic shop in 1884, steam power was installed from the outset. Sytin also favored modern financial arrangements to sustain expansion. Soon after his business was established, he raised 75,000 rubles by forming a limited partnership (tovarishchestvo na vere ), and in 1893 he raised another

[25] Graficheskie iskusstva i bumazhnaia promyshlennost' 1:10 (June 1896), p. 157.

350,000 rubles by establishing a limited-liability stock corporation (tovarishchestvo na paiakh ). By the turn of the century, his was the largest printing plant in Moscow, and his business included a plant in St. Petersburg and a network of bookstores throughout the country. His shareholders enjoyed a regular dividend of 10 percent on their investment. In later years he would be praised for his business abilities as a "Russian American."^[26]

Another successful printer whose background was neither privileged nor foreign was Petr Soikin, the son of a manumitted serf. While working as an accountant in St. Petersburg in the mid-1880s, he borrowed 800 rubles to purchase a small, unprofitable printing shop. Initially employing six workers on five hand presses, he raised the money for expansion by continuing to work as an accountant—in the daytime for the Baltic railroad and at night for the State Bank. Within a few years, he employed thirty men, many on mechanized presses, and began publishing his own journal, the popular science magazine Priroda i liudi (Nature and People). By 1895, Soikin employed 320 workers in a very profitable business. In 1903 he began construction of a new six-story building with its own electric power station.^[27]

Unlike Sytin and Soikin, most of the founders of large private printing firms came from relatively privileged backgrounds. Many were members of merchant guilds, such as the Glazunovs, who had been booksellers in St. Petersburg since the 1780s.^[28] Many—13 percent at the end of the century—were from the gentry, or had at least earned ranks of nobility through state or other public service.^[29] Members of the nobility had in fact been among the first private printers in Russia after Catherine II relinquished the government's monopoly over printing in the late eighteenth century. Their motivations, how-

[26] Ocherk izdatel'skoi deiatel'nosti t-va I. D. Sytina v Moskve; Miretskii, Pervaia Obraztsovaia tipografiia , pp. 18–22; Dinershtein, I. D. Sytin , pp. 6–26; Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur ; 400 let , pp. 417–18; Aktsionernoe delo v Rossii , vol. 2, vypusk 5, pp. 1207–08; Dmitriev-Mamonov, Ukazatel' deistvuiushchikh v Imperii aktsionernykh predpriiatii , vol. 1, pp. 570–71; Knizhnyi vestnik 1903, no. 16 (May 4), pp. 559–61.

[27] Kratkii ocherk razvitiia i deiatel'nosti tipografii P. P. Soikina , pp. 3–11; Dvadtsatipiatiletie tipografsko-izdatel'skoi deiatel'nosti P. P. Soikina , pp. 3–10; Knizhnyi mir 1910, no. 51 (December 19), pp. 1–2.

[28] Lisovskii, Kratkii ocherk , pp. 7–89; Knigovedenie , pp. 143–44.

[29] Spisok zavedenii pechati v S.-Peterburge (1875 and 1900); Pravitel'stvennyi vestnik , August 14 (26), 1883, and August 17 (29), 1883; Perepis' Moskvy 1882, tables, pp. 38–39; Torgovo-promyshlennye zavedeniia goroda Moskvy v 1885–1890 gg ., pp. 62– 65; S.-Peterburg po perepisi 1900 goda , vypusk 2, pp. 44–45; Spisok fabrik i zavodov , pp. 150–55, 162–67; Pogozhev, Adresnaia kniga , pp. 104–08, 113–15.

ever, were not mainly commercial. In the tradition of Western European "scholar-printers,"^[30] individuals such as Nikolai Novikov, Ivan Krylov, and Ivan Rakhmaninov established publishing and printing firms as extensions of their work as publicists. This tradition was continued into the early twentieth century by gentry printers such as Mikhail Stasiulevich, a professor of history whose publishing and printing firm in St. Petersburg was well known for its contributions to literature and liberal politics.^[31] The appeal of printing for nobles, who typically viewed an industrial occupation, according to the gentry industrialist Vasilii Poletika, as "something rather suspicious,"^[32] was its perception as the most artistic and intellectual of the trades.^[33]

In practice, however, for most noble printers the distinction between intellectual and commercial motives was necessarily blurred. Often having no other source of income, noble entrepreneurs could not disregard the imperatives of profit.^[34] Many in fact effectively combined the roles of Kulturträger and capitalist. Aleksei Suvorin, for example, left government service in the 1850s to pursue an intellectual career, initially as a journalist. In the 1870s, he decided to begin publishing a newspaper, to be called Novoe vremia (New Times). Finding no facilities equipped for the scale and speed of production he had in mind, he established his own plant and imported equipment from Western Europe, including the first web-fed rotary press to be used in Russia. By the time of his death in 1912, Suvorin was the owner of one of the largest and most profitable printing enterprises in the country (as well as an extensive publishing and bookselling business), employing nearly five hundred workers.^[35] But in the tradition of the scholar-printer,

[30] Knigovedenie , pp. 294, 375–76, 436; Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia , 1700–1800 , pp. 111–14, 120–34; Marker describes this group as "literati" or "intellectual publishers." On "scholar-printers" in Western Europe, see Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Cbange , p. 239; idem, "The Early Printer as 'Renaissance Man,'" pp. 6–16; Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius , esp. p. 66.

[31] Knigovedenie , p. 517.

[32] Quoted by Berlin, Russkaia burzhuaziia , pp. 217–18. Poletika himself later embarked on an unsuccessful publishing venture. Bakhtiarov, Slugi pechati , p. 184.

[33] Gary Hamburg identifies book publishing among the perceived "worthy occupations" open to nobles in the late nineteenth century. Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility , pp. 14–15.

[34] Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii , ch. 2; Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility , ch. 1.

[35] Kratkii ocherk izdatel'skoi deiatel'nosti A. S. Suvorina , p. 8; Fabrichno-zavodskie predpriiatiia rossiiskoi imperii (Petrograd, 1914), entry 2307; Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics .

Suvorin thought of himself, "despite his business success, as primarily a man of letters."^[36]

One of Moscow's largest printing enterprises was also established by a gentry entrepreneur, Ivan Kushnerev, the son of a somewhat penurious serf-owner. One year after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, at the age of thirty-five, Kushnerev decided to sell his small estate, leave government service, and set himself up as a publisher in St. Petersburg. After several years without success, he moved to Moscow and redirected his efforts to printing rather than publishing. Borrowing money from a fellow member of the English Club, a traditional gathering place for Moscow's nobility, Kushnerev opened in 1869 a small printing shop in rented rooms with a dozen workers, one hand press, and a single printing machine, and immediately began reinvesting his profits for expansion. In 1876, in need of additional capital for expansion, Kushnerev reorganized his firm into a limited partnership with four partners. Twelve years later, he again restructured the company as a limited-liability corporation. When Kushnerev died in 1896, his company included a large-scale, mechanized printing factory housed in a specially constructed four-story building, with branches in Kiev and St. Petersburg and an annual profit of over 90,000 rubles, relatively high for the printing industry at that time.^[37] Typically for a gentry entrepreneur, however, Kushnerev aspired to be more than a successful capitalist. He remained active, if less than successful, as a publisher and even printed several volumes of his own rather uninspired publicistic writings.^[38]

As the industry became increasingly concentrated and commercialized, ownership began taking new forms. Although some entrepreneurs retained sole or family ownership of their companies, beginning in the 1890s many of the largest firms, seeking capital to expand, invited outside investors to purchase stock. By 1894, three large printing firms in St. Petersburg and five in Moscow had reorganized as limitedliability stock corporations (tovarishchestva na paiakh or aktsionernye obshchestva ), and all of the larger firms established in the 1880s or after were founded as corporations—notably, the enterprises of Iablon-

[36] Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics , p. 179.

[37] Dvadtsatipiatiletie tipografii t-va Kushnerev , pp. 3–18; Leninskii zakaz , pp. 11– 19; Kratkii ocherk razvitiia masterskikh . . . Tovarishchestva I. N. Kushnerev; Fabrika knigi "Krasnyi proletarii," pp. 1–13; Otchet pravleniia I. N. Kushnerev i Ko. v Moskve za 1896 (Moscow, 1897), in TsGIAgM, f. 2316, op. 1, d. 1; 400 let , pp. 412–14; Knigovedenie , pp. 301–02.

[38] Kushnerev, Zemliakam and Sochineniia .

skii in St. Petersburg and Chicherin, Iakovlev, Vasil'ev, and the Russian Printing and Publishing Company (Russkoe tovarishchestvo pechatnogo i izdatel'skogo dela) in Moscow. By 1902, many of the largest private printing firms in St. Petersburg and virtually every major private enterprise in Moscow had been organized as limited-liability stock corporations. With a few hundred to a thousand available shares—the greater diffusion of shares being characteristic of aktsionernye obshchestva and as in other industries more characteristic of St. Petersburg—and totaling from a quarter of a million to over a million rubles of share capital in each firm, the formation of corporations in the 1880s and 1890s infused considerable capital into the industry and further strengthened the largest and most commercially oriented private firms.^[39]

As private entrepreneurship became the dominant form of enterprise in Russian printing in the late nineteenth century, even state printing was affected by the process of commercialization. A few official printing houses were leased to individuals to run as private firms, such as the press of the Ministry of Finance. But even when official firms remained fully in state hands, they were increasingly managed as commercial enterprises, taking in private as well as official orders (as private firms increasingly took in government business), mechanizing production to be more cost-effective, and attending to profits. Although almost all of the directors of state printing firms were hereditary nobles and had usually entered the printing business after many years of state service in other areas, many proved themselves to be effective commercial managers. For example, Prince Boris Borisovich Golitsyn, a member of one of Russia's oldest and most influential aristocratic families and a well-known intellectual, was appointed in 1899 to head the Office for the Manufacture of Government Paper. When he took over, this giant papermaking and printing enterprise, after a forty-year history of expansion and modernization, was facing a financial crisis, and the quality of its work

[39] Aktsionernoe delo v Rossii , vol. 2, vypusk 5, pp. 1192–1211; Dmitriev-Mamonov, Ukazatel' deistvuiushchikh v Imperii aktsionernykh predpriiatii , vol. 1, pp. xxiii–xxiv and passim; Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy , pp. 196–97. On the different patterns of corporate structure in Russian industry generally, specifically the Petersburg industrialists' tendency to sell a relatively large number of less expensive shares while the more traditional Moscow owners preferred to keep closer control of their companies, see Owen, "Entrepreneurship and the Structure of Enterprise," pp. 67– 71. I am grateful to Thomas Owen for demonstrating statistically the applicability of his argument to the printing industry on the basis of his RUSCORP: A Database of Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700–1914 .

was declining. Golitsyn effectively improved both its finances and its technique.^[40]

The history of entrepreneurship in Russian printing in the late nineteenth century included hardship and failure as well as business achievements. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, business failures had become commonplace. One successful employer, perhaps gloating a bit, recalled that in the 1860s it had become "fashionable" to operate a printing firm, leading to an excessively competitive environment in which many enterprises collapsed.^[41] Such failures were especially frequent during periods of economic slowdown, as in the 1880s and again after the turn of the century. Of the 149 private printing firms under the supervision of the Petersburg press inspector in 1875, only 97 still existed in 1883, and only 33 were left by 1900.^[42]

Competition led also to harsh practices to survive, especially by smaller, more economically marginal firms. Owners cut prices to attract orders, used cheaper materials, and, most relevant to the concerns of this study, squeezed workers to produce more for less pay. To sustain lower prices, profit margins were sometimes reduced even to the point of accepting work below cost solely to ruin the competition.^[43] In the view of many contemporaries, competition had produced a "desperate struggle between printing shop owners,"^[44] which, it was feared, was "undermining public confidence and leading to the decay of the printing trade."^[45] The capitalist transformation of the industry was not viewed as progress by many ordinary business owners.

[40] Voznesenskii, Sto let Ekspeditsii zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag , pp. 23– 40; Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' , vol. 9, p. 53; Mikhailovskii, Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag , pp. 33–35; Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar' , vol. 13, p. 917. For other examples, see discussions about A. V. Gavrilov of the Synod press in TsGIA, f. 800, op. 1, dd. 92, 176, 338, 457, and in Gavrilov, Ocherk istorii Sankt-Peterburgskoi sinodal'noi tipografii; A. I. Iakovlev of the State press in Pechatnoe iskusstvo 1:6 (March 1902), p. 186; and S. I. Nedel'kovich of the Naval Ministry press in Graficheskie iskusstva i bumazhnaia promyshlennost' 4:11 (June 1900), p. 179.

[41] Pechatnia R. R. Golike , p. 3.

[42] Spisok zavedenii pechati v S.-Peterburge (1875); Pravitel'stvennyi vestnik , August 14 (26), 1883, p. 3; Spisok zavedenii pechati v S.-Peterburge (1900); Pogozhev, Adresnaia kniga , pp. 113–15.

[43] Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy , pp. 145–47, 185–88, 195; 400 let , p. 367; Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1878, no. 7 (April 15), p. 50; 1881, no. 1 (January 1), p. 1; Russkii kur'er , September 14, 1883, p. 2; Graficheskie iskusstva i bumazhnaia promyshlennost' 2:5 (May 1897), p. 66; Naborshchik 1:1 (October 20, 1902), p. 19; 1:50 (October 12, 1903), p. 749; Russkoe obshchestvo deiatelei pechatnogo dela, Moskovskoe otdelenie [henceforth, RODPD-MO], Kratkii otchet o deiatel'nosti za 1902–3 , p. 4; Bakhtiarov, Slugi pechati , p. 47.

[44] Vestnik graficheskogo dela 1 (March 14, 1897), p. 3.

[45] Trudy pervogo s"ezda , pp. 44–45.