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the minister of finance, the energetic and capable Witte(1849-1915), who had risen from a junior post on aprovincial railway, was at the same time minister oftransport, commerce, industry and, to a considerableextent, labour.The advance in Russian economic development wasvery striking, but it was, as it had always been, swaddledwith bureaucratic strait-lacing. The whole atmospherestunted the growth of a strong, independent industrialand mercantile class. That class did in fact owe muchto the state, but it was mainly conscious of all the shortcomingsof bureaucracy and tsarism, linked as it stillwas to a large extent with its historic but now rapidlydeclining partner, the landowners, and imbued with amilitary spirit of a kind that did not work in harnesswith modern capitalism. As one of the leading industrialpapers put it (1901): " It is time to realize that Europeanindustry cannot grow in a climate of almost universalilliteracy and ignorance and almost complete absence ofeconomic independence. It is time to realize that thecomplex and delicate mechanism of industrial developmentcannot be administered from one single centre"[St Petersburg].If conservative opinion was thus critical of governmentand administration, liberal and socialist opinion wasviolently antagonistic. The 1905 Revolution challengednot only the working of tsarism but its essential bases.Russia was indeed one of the great states of the world,great in the capacities of her peoples and the magnitudeof her resources. These capacities and these resourceshad been given far too little scope or been far too littleutilized. The Russian state as it had developed during thecourse of four centuries, despite great achievements, wasstill terribly weakened by corruption, arbitrariness, andinefficiency, and the element of force—however necessaryan ingredient in any state—stood out only too nakedly.The conditions of the twentieth-century world demandeda radical transformation of government, if not a radicaldiminution of state power. In such an empire of sucha size any profound and rapid transformation could notfail to be of terrifying complexity and acuteness, if not121