Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/221

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The author of this article is the Editor of the Department of Economics of the new Moscow magazine, "The Problems of Great Russia" and one of Russia's foremost authorities on economics and finance.—Ed.

Fifteen years ago the author of this article had occasion to visit the principal trade and industrial centers of Russia for the purpose of gathering material in an investigation of conditions bearing upon the renewal of the Russian-German commercial treaty. At the request of the then Minister of Finance, S. J. Witte, and his assistant in this Department, W. I. Kovalevsky, I set forth the most important results of this investigation in a report which I submitted to the Minister. In this report I pointed out the necessity of an economic and political rapprochement with England and several other countries, since a rapprochement of this kind would have greatly facilitated the task of concluding an advantageous treaty between Russia and Germany.

Five years later, when our political relations with England reached the height of their animosity, I wrote as follows, in concluding the book mentioned above:

"The next decade after the expiration of the commercial treaties, which were recently concluded under Germany's guidance, will, in my estimation, witness a state of affairs entirely different from that which obtains to-day. The immediate future will show whether or not the leading spirits of Russia and England will realize the problems before them.

"The statesmen of Russia should not, moreover, forget that an economic rapprochement with England will benefit Russia by making difficult, and, for a long time, even impossible, a repetition of the unfortunate events of the kind of the Russo-Japanese War, or a whole series of possible complications in Persia, Afghanistan, Asia Minor, Thibet, etc., which would be no less dangerous to a peaceful development of Russia."