Measurable Power: Railroads, Literacy, and the Crafts Artel—Hierarchy in Disarray in Late Imperial Russia

In this chapter, I propose a way to measure the heretofore unexplained techno-cultural “translation” of the traditional rural non-agricultural production organization—the mutually insuring skilled workers’ cooperative, the artel—into the historically continuous core of industrial trade unions, the institutional harbingers of modernization in pre-1905-revolution Russia. The ratio of spatially mobile literate wage laborers to population, and to working men, introduced in previous chapters, is an explanatory variable for the transition to individualism and rationalism. Peasants’ aforementioned choice of individualistic landholding, in turn, correlates positively with the share of children learning to read in the population, my proxy for the human-capital aspects of the kind of development that creates modernization. The arteli generated non-agricultural peasant income while incentivizing literacy and lowering the costs of collective action. Thus, they paved the way toward constitutional governance by foreshadowing the protection of intellectual property while contractually consolidating and tacitly carrying knowledge of subversive and artisan skills and stimulating effective bottom-up demand for reform. To anchor these propositions in data, I again use zemstvo (rural self-government) statistics for the Penza Province pertaining to the population of literate wage laborers, the distance of village communes from railroad stations, and the ratio of households that engaged in crafts production to households at large. Following Mironov and Gregory and countering Gerschenkron, I argue that the cultural revolutions that occurred were non-violent and were catalyzed by the Tsarist railroads—setting the peasant population in motion, incentivizing the exodus from analphabetism, enhancing skill accumulation, and predating 1905.