Thread by @kamilkazani

Revolution and the Jews

Literacy rates in European Russia, 1897. Obviously, the data is imperfect. Still, it represents one crucial pattern for understanding the late Russian Empire. That is the wide gap in human capital between the core of empire and its Western borderland.

The most literate regions of Empire are its Lutheran provinces, including Finland, Estonia & Latvia

Then goes, roughly speaking, Poland-Lithuania

Russia proper has only two clusters of high literacy: Moscow & St Petersburg. Surrounded by the vast ocean of illiterate peasantry

This map shows how thin was the civilisation of Russia proper comparatively speaking. We tend to imagine old Russia, as the world of nobility, palaces, balls, and duels. And that is not wrong, because this world really existed, and produced some great works of art and literature

What we forget is how thin it was. The civilisation of Russia proper existed as a patchwork of towns and noble estates surrounded by the vast sea of peasants. The distance between peasantry and the educated class was absolutely surreal

And the better the soil, the worse it was

The great majority of Russians were trapped in the grain robot status with hardly any opportunity of escape. Such opportunities were systematically cut off since the 17th c, through the joint efforts of government and landowning classes.

On the Western border, it was different.

While the economic distance between the rich and the poor could be just as astonishing, cultural & educational distance was narrower. The sea, and proximity to foreign borders produced opportunities that simply did not exist further east.

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