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<p> This dissertation shows how firm organization affected factory performance in the Russian Empire. The first chapter documents the impact of incorporation on firms' production technology and productivity. The second chapter studies the effect of a change in Russia's commercial code in 1901, a reform that improved the rights of small corporate shareholders. In the third chapter, I show how geography and legal forms of organization determined horizontal and vertical integration in the Russian cotton textile industry. The dataset at the heart of the project allows for a rare empirical study of the effect of organization on production at the factory level.</p><p> <b>Chapter 1: Factory Productivity and the Concession System of Incorporation in Late Imperial Russia, 1894-1908</b> In late Imperial Russia, long-term capital was scarce. Incorporation in the Russian Empire required a time-consuming and expensive Imperial concession, yet over four thousand Russian firms incorporated before 1914. I identify the characteristics of firms that chose to incorporate and measure the gains in productivity and growth in machine power enjoyed by corporations using a newly-constructed panel database of manufacturing enterprises I compiled from Imperial Russian factory censuses conducted in 1894, 1900, and 1908. Factories owned by corporations were larger, more productive, and grew faster. Higher productivity factories were more likely to incorporate, and after incorporating, they added machine power and became even more productive. Results from an instrumental variables regression suggest that selection into incorporation was not determined solely by productivity and could be influenced, for example, by connections to government officials. Comparing two kinds of corporations shows that firms sought not just access to stock markets but the corporate form's full set of capital advantages.</p><p> <b>Chapter 2: Shareholder Rights and Share Capital: The Effect of the 1901 Russian Corporation Reform, 1890-1905</b> The Russian 1901 corporation reform increased the rights of small shareholders and removed bankers from corporations' boards of directors. The reform affected one type of corporation (the A-Corporation) more than another type (called the Share Partnership) because one provision of the law created a loophole for Share Partnerships. I thus apply a differences-in-differences approach, studying the differences in corporations of these groups founded before vs. after the reform. The RUSCORP Database (Owen 1990) provides initial charter information from all Russian corporations and from all surviving Russian corporations in 1905. I find that, in response the reform, A-Corporations increased the par value of their shares, reduced their total capitalization, and reduced the number of shares they issued. The reform increased the cost to the firm of having small shareholders; thus, corporations affected by the reform began to resemble the more closely held Share Partnerships.</p><p> <b>Chapter 3: Vertical and Horizontal Integration in Imperial Russian Cotton Textiles, 1894-1900</b> When do firms produce their own inputs instead of purchasing them on the market? In one explanation firms engage in vertical integration to save the cost of transacting on the market, especially when markets are thinner and therefore price risk is greater (Coase 1937). On the other hand, firms that wish to vertically or horizontally integrate may be unable to do if they face financial constraints, because integration requires additional capital. In the third chapter, I find evidence for a thin markets explanation of integration within the Russian cotton textile industry in 1894 and 1900. The 1894 data provide especially rich information on firms' horizontal and vertical integration: the data list a complete description of each factory's internal activities and final products. Both vertically and horizontally integrated factories and firms were larger in terms of number of workers and tended to be located outside of European Russia, where markets were thinner. Vertically integrated firms were older, had more workers and machine power, and produced more revenue per worker given the same machine power. Corporations produced more revenue per worker than non-corporations, even controlling for vertical integration.</p><p> <b>Data Appendix: Imperial Russian Manufacturing Establishments Database: 1894, 1900, and 1908</b> The dissertation includes an appendix in which I describe the formation of a new database of manufacturing establishments in the Russian Empire based on manufacturing censuses conducted in 1894, 1900, and 1908. The database will allow for new studies of the Russian economy and of factory performance in developing economies. This appendix provides a codebook with variable definitions and a description of the censuses' sampling frame. The database matches factories over time, so I include an analysis comparing matched to unmatched factories. Finally, I describe differences in results that use the enterprise-level data and the aggregate data.</p>

<p> This thesis examines the political work produced by a little-known Russian Realist, Vladimir Makovsky (1846-1920), while he was a member of the nineteenth-century art collective <i>Peredvizhniki.</i> Increasingly recognized for subtle yet insistent opposition to the tsarist regime and the depiction of class distinctions, the work of the <i>Peredvizhniki</i> was for decades ignored by modernist art history as the result of an influential article, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," written by American art critic Clement Greenberg in 1939. In this article, Greenberg suggests the work of Ilya Repin, the most renowned member of the <i>Peredvizhniki</i>, should be regarded not as art, but as "kitsch"--the industrialized mass culture of an urban working class. Even now, scholars who study the <i>Peredvizhniki</i> concern themselves with the social history of the group as a whole, rather than with the merits of specific artworks. Taking a different approach to analyzing the significance of the <i>Peredvizhniki</i> and of Makovsky specifically this thesis harnesses the powerful methodologies devised in the 1970s by art historians T.J. Clark and Michael Fried, two scholars who are largely responsible for reopening the dialogue on the meaning and significance of Realism in the history of modern art.</p>

<p> The Russian Civil War is an incredibly complex topic that is frequently oversimplified to a Red vs White framework, where the Bolshevik forces face a perceived monolithic &lsquo;White&rsquo; opposition. While this conceptualization can be useful, the reality is much more complex; various factions, some controlling far-flung territories or even no territory, formed and broke alliances with each other and fought furiously to achieve their ends. The &lsquo;White&rsquo; forces are frequently presented as an amalgamation of different factions and armies that had differing, sometimes opposing, views. The typical view of the Russian civil war is clearly oversimplified, but recent scholarship attempting to reassess the Civil War has brought new insight and understanding to the conflict. In particular, the designation of certain White elements as &lsquo;warlords&rsquo; has become more common. The warlord argument provides an alternative to the older, more traditional view of monolithic &lsquo;White&rsquo; against &lsquo;Red&rsquo; by showing that not all White commanders fought for the same ends, and many were motivated by selfish desires or goals. Similarly, since warlords tend not to work well together, it helps explain the disunity of the White movement. The warlord paradigm has its flaws, namely that the warlords of the Civil War were not common; in fact, the only commanders which truly qualified for the moniker were in the Far East, and barely participated in the Civil War. The warlord framework proves to be quite useless when applied to individual commanders of the White movement, and therefore a better means of reclassification is required. To that end, the White forces, after careful assessment of whether they are warlords, should instead be classified by new criteria. The result is a new dichotomy within the White movement: Western Whites and Eastern Whites. The dichotomy offered is based on orientation, rather than geography. Western White forces were focused on capturing Western Russia, specifically Moscow and Petrograd, while the Eastern Whites were more interested in consolidating their own power base in the Far East. The Western and Eastern White forces were nominally allies and anti-Bolshevik, but practically had very different goals and worked to achieve different ends. The Western Whites were the remnants of the Tsarist military elites, fighting to restore Russia and defeat Bolshevism, while the Eastern Whites were warlords in the employ of foreign powers primarily concerned with their own selfish ends. The main thesis of this work is that the warlord paradigm does not apply to most White commanders, and should be abandoned in favor of a broader Western/Eastern dichotomy.</p>

Why did the Tsarist Empire opt for different governance strategies in each of the territories of the Western Borderlands (here defined as Poland-Lithuania, the Baltic territories, Finland, and Hetman Ukraine)? The existing political science literature tends to reduce such a question to a distinction between direct and indirect rule, usually developing in the context of a Western European maritime empire. This literature falls short of explaining the Tsarist case and requires the addition of intervening variables concerning the role of local elites and leadership choice. Employing an interdisciplinary literature combining sources from political science, sociology and history, this dissertation develops a structural-institutional approach to explaining patterns of direct and indirect rule that emphasizes the strength and cohesion of local elites, their orientation towards the dominant unit, and the role of leadership choice in the dominant unit. In addition to better accounting for the policy trajectory of the Tsarist Empire, such an explanation can also be applied to other historical and contemporary political systems deciding between centralized and decentralized rule.

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