Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

part of Moscow. It specifically forbade the opening of any new cotton
or woolen spinning mills and iron foundries. Other industries, such as
weaving and dyeing, had to petition the military governor if they
wanted to open new factories. Eventually cotton spinning was

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explicitly banned. The law was intended to stop any further
concentration of potentially rebellious workers in the city.
Opposition to railways accompanied opposition to industry, exactly
as in Austria-Hungary. Before 1842 there was only one railway in
Russia. This was the Tsarskoe Selo Railway, which ran seventeen
miles from Saint Petersburg to the imperial residencies of Tsarskoe
Selo and Pavlovsk. Just as Kankrin opposed industry, he saw no
reason to promote railways, which he argued would bring a socially
dangerous mobility, noting that “railways do not always result from
natural necessity, but are more an object of artificial need or luxury.
They encourage unnecessary travel from place to place, which is
entirely typical of our time.”
Kankrin turned down numerous bids to build railways, and it was
only in 1851 that a line was built linking Moscow and Saint
Petersburg. Kankrin’s policy was continued by Count Kleinmichel,
who was made head of the main administration of Transport and
Public Buildings. This institution became the main arbiter of railway
construction, and Kleinmichel used it as a platform to discourage
their construction. After 1849 he even used his power to censor
discussion in the newspapers of railway development.

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Map 13 (opposite) shows the consequences of this logic. While
Britain and most of northwest Europe was crisscrossed with railways
in 1870, very few penetrated the vast territory of Russia. The policy
against railways was only reversed after Russia’s conclusive defeat by
British, French, and Ottoman forces in the Crimean War, 1853–1856,
when the backwardness of its transportation network was understood
to be a serious liability for Russian security. There was also little
railway development in Austria-Hungary outside of Austria and the
western parts of the empire, though the 1848 Revolutions had
brought change to these territories, particularly the abolition of
serfdom.