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This chapter traces Russia's financial reforms in the late nineteenth century. It puts the reforms associated with Sergei Witte's tenure as finance minister from 1892 to 1903 in a broader context, and also highlights key strategic errors made during his tenure. As the chapter shows, Witte, more than any other figure in Russia or the West, is associated with the boom in Russian investment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During his tenure as finance minister, Russia adopted the gold standard in 1897 and repeatedly turned to the foreign capital markets for loans to finance an ambitious program of state-led industrialization. His name was similarly associated with the boom in Russian railroad construction, the Trans-Siberian Railway in particular—an association that began in his earliest days while working in the railroad industry, first in the private sector (initially as a lowly conductor to learn the business) and then in government.

This chapter tells of a railroad executive in Ukraine's capital city Kiev, who rose to prominence in the railroad business and dreamt of technology, geographical expanse, and imperial grandeur. Amidst a public life that mixed a potent brew of managerial expertise and proto-technocratic power, Witte experienced his career in a Victorian frame, a world where increasingly intellect, talent, business, and technology bred male professional expertise in the ever larger corporate and governmental organizations that marked the later half of the 19th century. Critical to his life's story was the railroad, that most revolutionary of 19th-century communications technologies that constricted space and abbreviated time. By the 1880s, as the chief operations officer of the Southwestern Railroad, a privately owned but government subsidized joint stock company, Witte oversaw a freight and passenger network that directed the agricultural, mineral, and human resources of New Russia and Ukraine southwards toward the Black Sea, westwards toward the east-central European Danube river valley, northwards toward east central Europe and Great Russia, and eastwards toward the Volga River valley, and the vast spaces of Central Asia and Siberia beyond. That expansive space provided him visions of empire.

This chapter presents a story of a boyhood spent in a family of memoirists and storytellers in Russia's India, the Caucasus. The third son of a family of middling colonial officials, who in the Russian tradition had earned hereditary ennoblement through civil service on the southern and eventually so-called trans-Caucasian frontiers of the empire, Witte was born in 1849. He spent his childhood and adolescence far from the metropolitan centers of St Petersburg and Moscow on a distant imperial border across the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, where in the Russian mind Europe met Asia. He bore the Baltic German surname of a converted Lutheran father, was baptized an Orthodox Christian, but as an adult repeatedly proclaimed his maternal lineage, and claimed his Russian ethnicity, through his grandmother, the daughter of a déclassé branch of an early modern Muscovite aristocratic clan.

This chapter tells of a senior statesman in the Age of Empire, confronting in Russia what perhaps was the first of a series of 20th-century national and social revolutions. Following Russian military defeat in the Russo–Japanese War, and confronted by explosions of political and social protests as its aftermath, Witte sought to salvage, reform, and thus preserve the Russian Empire for the 20th century. It also examines the story of an aged memoirist, in his last years before he died during World War I, pondering, occasionally, the loss of his Victorian faith in the empire's longevity, even legitimacy in a 20th century where ethnicity, ideology, social movements, the nation-state, and the modern diversity of cultural experience challenged the imperial narrative that his life had constructed and his memoirs conveyed. He died suddenly in February 1915, a half-year after the outbreak of what was becoming the Great War.

This introductory chapter discusses Sergei Witte's memoirs. Witte was archly conscious of his personal reputation and was a compulsive keeper of records. He organized a large personal archive of correspondence, state papers, telegrams, legislative draft projects, and various other materials — a record of his adult life. In the last decade of his life, Witte structured, cataloged, and referenced these papers, which he intended as the documentary foundation for his memoirs. Eventually he created a sprawling manuscript of over 3,500 pages, the results of a project he had assembled between the years 1907 and 1912. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The view from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra looks up the broad expanse of avenue that leads toward the Admiralty Spire at the center of imperial St Petersburg, the capital that the first All-Russian Emperor, Peter the Great, erected on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Following Nevsky Prospect from there back to the monastery, whose baroque architecture tied Peter's new European culture to Russia's Orthodox and medieval past, the visitor finds its cemetery, where St Petersburg's city elite honored itself. There, tucked in a small, enclosed courtyard expanse, is to be found a large, granite grey tombstone, which marks the site where Witte was laid to rest on 2 March 1915, seven months after the outbreak of what was becoming the Great War. This chapter considers what can be said about Witte's life story from the perspective of its own end time, only some two years removed from the destruction of the empire that had shaped it.

This chapter traces the Russo-French financial and diplomatic relationship from the start of the Franco-Russian alliance through 1903. The alliance was encouraged by the growing connections between French finance and the Russian government. At the time, Russia was accused abroad of taking advantage of France’s strategic dependence on its only ally to drain French investment capital. At home, the Russian finance minister, Sergei Iulevich Witte, was condemned by many for mortgaging Russia’s geopolitical and economic independence for the sake of a few loans. In reality, the relationship was much more nuanced, in both directions. Russia often found great frustrations garnering the support of the French government and the French press; France often found great frustrations receiving any conformity from the Russian government with either their strategic or commercial interests. By the end of 1903, Russia was becoming much more determined to expand the markets upon which it could rely.

This chapter explores the contributions across the world inspired by Friedrich List. Listian ideas were embraced in many places around the world because they resonated with local concerns and aspirations. In Germany, Gustav Schmoller took a lead role in creating the Association for Social Policy, which began to criticize laissez-faire policies and call for “state welfare,” and supported the new direction of German policy by writing a revisionist history of European mercantilism. The chapter also tackles how Listian ideology impacted Ōkubo Toshimichi, who launched the Japan's state-led industrialization drive in the early 1870s, and Sergei Witte, who summarized List's ideas in a pamphlet published by the Russian finance ministry.

The Conclusion sets the broader context for the key episodes of innovation driven by projectors that have been the subjects of the preceding chapters. It explores the role of diverse enterprisers in the evolution of schools in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century and later. These enterprisers included numerous private teachers, who dominated the educational landscape in Russia well into the nineteenth century, and diverse officials who promoted their personal projects from within the emerging educational bureaucracy. Contrary to the pervasive myth that the “state” has always been and still is the only player in education in Russia, similar dynamics, to some extent, are observed also in the twentieth century and today.