Sergei Witte: The Last Statesman of Imperial Russia
Tsarist Minister of Finance, and briefly Prime Minister, Witte was one of the pioneers of Russian industrialization, writes Lionel Kochan.
If there is one statesman who stands out as not only a Russian but also a European figure in the last years of Tsarism it is assuredly Sergei Witte. Not for nothing is the last decade of the nineteenth century known as the ‘Witte period’.
These were the years that saw Russia reach the point of take-off to economic maturity; when railway expansion proceeded at an unprecedented pace, when metallurgy, mineral extraction and urban development did much to change the face of Russia.
Yet was this change too rapid? This is the question mark that hangs over Witte’s career. He was a dedicated supporter of the autocracy. Yet it may well be that his policy did more than anything else to weaken the autocracy he so much revered.
Sergei Yulievitch Witte was born in Tiflis in 1849. On his father’s side the ancestry is obscure, but it certainly had strong attachments with Lutheran Baltic Germans—those Germans who had supplied the Russian Empire with some of its most capable administrators and bureaucrats. Witte’s father, Julius, was a German-trained agricultural expert who entered Russian Government service in the province of Saratov.
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