Search

Merchants and industrialists know that business can be done only when firm foundations of social life exist, when there is confidence in the future, and when firm laws [tverdyi zakon] reign, not arbitrariness. Under the old regime, the most prominent representatives of the commercial-industrial class were opponents of the tsarist system because that system exemplified, above all, the rule of arbitrariness and coercion, the lack of legality and of rational control over the expenditure of state resources, and hindrances to personal initiative and independent action; for freedom is the foremost condition of the development of industry. The enormous strains of the war appear to have exerted two rather different effects on tsarist corporate policy. On the one hand, the government eagerly dismantled German and Austrian corporations in the Russian Empire, sometimes to the detriment of the war effort. On the other hand, some officials, notably Minister of Trade and Industry Vsevolod N. Shakhovskoi, endeavored to relax prewar restrictions on corporations so as to facilitate wartime production. However, close examination of his efforts reveals them to have been ineffectual. When the tsarist regime collapsed in February 1917, its corporate law consisted of a confused tangle of inconsistent regulations, including “temporary” statutes that had remained in effect for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]