Productive or Extractive Periphery? Russian Poland and Timber Exports to Germany in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Researchers have long puzzled over the clearly paradoxical nature of Russian Poland's trading pattern from the point of view of the centre-periphery model. Located on the Western edge of the Russian Empire, this territory formed a periphery under the tight political domination of Saint Petersburg but, at the same time, it was a quickly developing zone, supplying the Russian heartland with manufactured goods. Challenging the idea of a full redirection of the regional economy towards the Russian market, the article reassesses the territory's foreign trade and shows that extractive activity for Western markets had not completely disappeared. There is certainly at least one notable exception to the standard view: the timber trade, which appears to have followed a separate path compared with other rural goods and was associated with huge social and environmental costs. Made possible both by the increasing pressure from German capital and a series of political decisions by Russian rule, these massive exports were part of a new dynamic, parallel and opposite to this territory's industrialisation: the advance of a resource frontier that made Russian Poland a timber reserve for a Germany that had become the leading industrial power on the continent.