collapsed, textile weaving was never fully mechanized but
still undertaken by hand.
Austria-Hungary was not alone in fearing industry.
Farther east, Russia had an equally absolutist set of
political institutions, forged by Peter the Great, as we saw
earlier in this chapter. Like Austria-Hungary, Russia’s
economic institutions were highly extractive, based on
serfdom, keeping at least half of the population tied to the
land. Serfs had to work for nothing three days a week on
the lands of their lords. They could not move, they lacked
freedom of occupation, and they could be sold at will by
their lord to another lord. The radical philosopher Peter
Kropotkin, one of the founders of modern anarchism, left a
vivid depiction of the way serfdom worked during the reign
of Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled Russia from 1825 until 1855.
He recalled from his childhood
stories of men and women torn from their
families and their villages and sold, lost in
gambling, or exchanged for a couple of
hunting dogs, and transported to some
remote part of Russia … of children taken
from their parents and sold to cruel or
dissolute masters; of flogging “in the stables,”
which occurred every day with unheard of
cruelty; of a girl who found her only salvation
in drowning herself; of an old man who had
grown grey-haired in his master’s service
and at last hanged himself under his master’s
window; and of revolts of serfs, which were
suppressed by Nicholas I’s generals by
flogging to death each tenth or fifth man taken
out of the ranks, and by laying waste the
village … As to the poverty which I saw during
our journeys in certain villages, especially in
those which belonged to the imperial family,
no words would be adequate to describe the
misery to readers who have not seen it.
Exactly as in Austria-Hungary, absolutism didn’t just
create a set of economic institutions that impeded the
prosperity of the society. There was a similar fear of