Rereading Old Texts: Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia

Abstract

Few personalities loom larger in the historical literature studying late imperial Russia than Sergei Witte, and few of those texts have withstood the vicissitudes of time and fashion more successfully than Theodore Von Laue’s portrayal of the ancien regime’s great industrial modernizer. While the interpretive concerns of historians of Russia have moved beyond the framework of backwardness and industrialization within which Von Laue portrayed the tsarist statesman, among nonspecialist European historians Witte’s name often still remains synonymous with what Von Laue termed the efforts of the autocratic state to industrialize, modernize, and thus overcome the “penalties of backwardness” that rendered the Russian ancien regime archaic in the modern Western world.¹ One need only consider introductory undergraduate surveys of European history and the degree to which Von Laue’s Witte, either directly or implicitly, still occupies a central place in narratives of the Empire’s last decades. When generalists survey early-twentieth-century Europe, Witte, the great industrializer, and more broadly the “Witte system” of state-sponsored industrialization that Von Laue elaborated, remain historiographical fixtures in explaining the revolutionary end-time of the tsarist Empire and the emergence of its Soviet, communist successor. More than three decades after its appearance, Von Laue’s portrayal of Witte and his Russia remains a touchstone in interpreting Russia’s place in European history.