Book Review

In the field of Russian history the topics of business and corporate development have not received due attention, and Thomas C. Owen's work is therefore a welcome addition to an overlooked but important subject area. Owen chooses to concentrate on the corporation as a legally constituted institution rather than as an economic enterprise, and his analysis centers on the quantifiable aspects of Russian corporations such as size of basic capital, price of shares, and their longevity from founding to liquidation. In addition, he statistically tests other attributes including the location of corporate headquarters and operations, and the ethnicity and social status of founders and managers in the tsarist era. The basis for the study is the author's corporate data base in which he includes every corporate charter ever published by the tsarist government beginning in the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725) and continuing until the overthrow of the tsarist system in 1917. One problem in using these charters is that corporate founders were not necessarily the entrepreneurs or managers, and there is no way of telling how active they were after corporate inception. This difficulty especially grows for longer surviving corporations in which the original founders as listed on the charter of incorporation may have passed from the scene. As a result, the collective picture of Russian entrepreneurship may be a good deal murkier than the data base may suggest. Nevertheless, the author's compilation of the data base is a significant achievement, and he makes excellent use of the available information by judiciously employing sound quantitative methods.	1
With the entire corporate population of the Russian empire at his disposal, the author is able to draw a number of well measured conclusions: 1) capitalism in tsarist Russia was weakly developed in comparison to capitalism in Europe and North America, 2) capitalism in Russia was geographically concentrated with over half of the corporations located in St. Petersburg or Moscow, 3) capitalism in Russia remained essentially foreign, and 4) capitalism was resented in Russia.	2
Owen's main conclusion is that tsarist Russia's hostility and distrust toward capitalism reemerged among broad segments of Russian society in the late Soviet era, and as a result in the 1990s "capitalist institutions appeared likely to evolve relatively slowly in the face of attitudes deeply rooted in Russian culture, just as the capitalist systems now prevalent in Japan, India, and Nigeria, for example, owe much to the specific cultural and legal environments of those countries, far from the European birthplace of capitalism" (14). This raises the question of the extent to which Russian corporate capitalism should be considered unique. Owen suggests that two different patterns of corporate enterprise existed in tsarist Russia, a "Western" type built around joint-stock companies and a "Russian" one dominated by share partnerships. He concludes that Russians preferred share partnerships with family owned enterprises, whereas non-Russians preferred joint-stock companies on the French model. In this instance the distinction between "Western" and "Russian" is problematic because it seems to be more a question of style of incorporation than a difference in actual capitalist behavior. Moreover, plenty of firms in the West operated as family owned partnerships, so it is difficult to understand what is distinctly culturally Russian about such enterprises.	3
Owen has effectively arranged his material in five discrete chapters. The first three chapters concern the tsarist period and deal respectively with the major historiographical problems of Russian corporate history, the patterns of corporate formation and survival, and the evolution of the Russian corporate elite. What emerges from these chapters is a collective portrait of the formation and expansion of Russian corporate capitalism. In chapter four the author takes up the subject of Gorbachev's perestroika and the effects of Soviet policy on corporate development. According to Owen, the failure of Gorbachev's economic reforms to lay the grounds for a market-oriented economy was rooted in the anticapitalist attitudes that pervaded Russian society. Although Owen's point is well taken, there is a more obvious reason for Gorbachev's failure to implement market reforms, namely a market economy was not his intent. The driving motive behind Gorbachev's reforms was not the creation of a market economy but rather the streamlining of the middle levels of stifling bureaucratic controls within a planned socialist economy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Gorbachev failed to establish a market economy. Finally, in what is probably the most provocative portion of the work, Owen's fifth chapter draws out some historical continuities between the late imperial and the late Soviet economies and places anticapitalist critiques within a long established tradition of Russian xenophobia.	4
Much of the book concerns the role of state power in retarding capitalist development in Russia. Basing his discussion on a Weberian definition of "modern capitalism," Owen argues that corporations in the tsarist and Gorbachev eras should both be considered capitalist institutions because they were based on the public sale of shares. However, the corporation as a foreign import suffered because its legal essence was incompatible with the Russian political system. The bureaucratic distrust of uncontrolled commercial activity led to the establishment of a high threshold for incorporation, and the tsarist government never did allow for general registration.	5
In this way the state was more of an impediment than a promoter of corporate capitalism in Russia. Owen presents a convincing case, and his interpretation cuts against the older established position that the tsarist state served as the driving positive force behind Russian economic development.	6
Owen is to be commended for providing a ground-breaking study of corporations in Russia. For its comprehensiveness and its approach this work will stand as a seminal study for the history of Russian corporate capitalism. Readers with an interest in Russian history or contemporary business in Russia will find this book invaluable.	7
Jonathan Grant Florida State University, Tallahassee

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