Estates and Freedom of Entrepreneurship in Russia in the Late XIX – early XX centuries (on the Example of Industrial Entrepreneurship of the Peasants of the Middle Volga)
Authors: Makushev Andrey E. 
Published: September 2020

Introduction. In the late XIX – early XX centuries Russian business is getting rid of a number of restrictions, due to which the business environment is becoming more and more democratic. The estate determination of entrepreneurial rights and opportunities gradually receded into the past, paving the way for business to the lowest social and legal classes. In this work, an attempt will be made to study the entrepreneurial activity of the Russian peasantry in the late XIX – early XX centuries, which gradually went to new frontiers, overcoming the level of small-scale production and integrating into large business. The main aspect of the study of the selected object of study is associated with the identification of the influence of the remaining class restrictions on the implementation of entrepreneurial aspirations of peasants in the provinces of the Middle Volga region (Kazan, Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk and Penza). Methods. To solve the problems posed, elements of several techniques were used, thanks to which the object of study was studied from the perspective of the influence of endogenous and exogenous factors. In the work, the historical-legal method has been applied, which allowed peasant entrepreneurship to be examined through the prism of the evolution of legislation related to the determination of the socio-economic format of the life of the population in the conditions of the remaining estate system. The use of modernization theory made it possible to integrate the processes under study into the trend of industrial modernization, considering peasant entrepreneurship as its subprocess. Results. The solution of the tasks was carried out on the basis of specific forms of entrepreneurial activity of peasants in the so-called. “Qualifying” industry, which included only enterprises supervised by factory inspections and having reached a certain level of industrial “maturity”. To obtain the actual material, which became the basis for theoretical generalizations, the forms and results of entrepreneurship of peasants in the indicated industry segment in a sectoral context were studied. In addition, a brief analysis of the socio-legal foundations of the development of Russian entrepreneurship was carried out in the prospect of overcoming the class restrictions of peasants in the implementation of their commercial and business aspirations. Discussion and Conclusion. The above examples convincingly show that the peasantry almost on an equal footing with other classes participated in industrial production, which allows us to talk about the transition of the process of establishing freedom of enterprise in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century not only to the plane of legal declarations (de jure), but also to the plane their practical implementation (“de facto”). An analysis of the social composition of the Middle Volga industrialists at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, where the peasantry played a more significant role, shows that business success was already to a much lesser extent related to class privilege. Achieving very significant results in the industrial business, representatives of the rural class no longer showed such decisive aspirations in raising their social status. The process of erasing the class-legal differences in business is indirectly confirmed by the fact that industrial statistics of the beginning of the 20th century are increasingly starting to ignore the factor of class ownership of industrial enterprises.