Standard Oil and Yukos in the Context of Early Capitalism in the United States and Russia

Demokratizatsiya, Summer 2008 by Volkov, Vadim

Abstract: The author compares two conflicts between large businesses and the state in the United States and Russia. Although almost one hundred years apart, the Standard Oil and Yukos cases are comparable in so far as they erupted in the context of early capitalism in a weak institutional environment. Both conflicts were shaped by the state's increasingly strong authority.

Keywords: early capitalism, large business, Standard Oil, the state, Yukos

In January 1906, Missouri State Attorney General Herbert S. Hadley began court hearings to prove that the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, and the Republic Oil Company were parts of a single monopolistic conspiracy. He issued one of his thirty-four subpoenas to John D. Rockefeller, the most powerful business tycoon in the United States and the founder of Standard Oil. Rockefeller ignored the subpoena, leaving the agitated press to speculate about his whereabouts. In June, David Watson, the Attorney General of Ohio, announced his resolve to prosecute Standard Oil for violating the state's antitrust law. In November, U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte began prosecution of Standard Oil of New Jersey under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In the same month, the Circuit Court of Missouri opened a lawsuit against Rockefeller and his closest associates to dissolve Standard Oil of New Jersey, the holding company controlling more than sixty other companies. Thus began a massive attack against America's largest oil company and its owners. From November 18 to 20, 1908, Rockefeller gave three days of court testimony. In November 1909, the first court announced its decision to dissolve Standard Oil of New Jersey, which Standard Oil immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 15, 1911, Chief Justice Edward Douglas White announced the final verdict: the Court required Standard Oil to divest itself of all its subsidiaries within six months. It took the federal government, first under President Theodore Roosevelt, and then under President William Howard Taft, more than five years to disassemble what was then the world's biggest oil company.1

On July 2, 2003, Russian law-enforcement authorities arrested billionaire Platon Lebedev, chairman of the Board of Directors of Menatep, the oil giant Yukos's financial center. The General Procuracy charged Lebedev with financial fraud dating back to the 1993-94 privatization of the phosphate-producing plant Apatit, and with tax evasion by Menatep subsidiaries in Tomsk Oblast. On October 25, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos and one of Russia's leading tycoons, was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and theft. In October 2003, the General Procuracy froze 44 percent of Yukos stock (a major part of it belonging to Khodorkovsky and his closest associates). During 2004, Russia's Federal Taxation Ministry filed $27.5 billion in tax claims against Yukos for unpaid taxes and fines. On December 19, to meet the claim on Yukos's main assets, the oil mining company Yuganskneftegaz was auctioned and purchased for $9.35 billion by an unknown company that was later bought by the state oil company Rosneft for less than $30,000. It took the Russian federal authorities one and a half years to assert state control over Yuganskneftegaz, a company that produced 62 percent of all Yukos's oil. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were sentenced to eight years in prison.2

Formally, in both cases, the state attacked the country's largest oil company. The two cases have similar sets of principal players and similar conflicts between the wealthiest and the most powerful; or, more accurately, the conflicts themselves determined who would ultimately become the most powerful (and perhaps also the most wealthy). The events previously outlined are separated by some one hundred years and took place in different countries with dissimilar histories and cultures. Are they comparable? If so, what should be compared? The analogies applicable to the two cases, I argue, derive from the similar political and economic conditions in which they emerged. The comparison highlights structural conditions and historical situations that produced the cases against Standard Oil and Yukos. I refer to these conditions as "early capitalism," a somewhat more neutral substitute for normatively charged terms, such as "wild capitalism" or "primitive capitalist accumulation."3

The comparison is intended to highlight a sociohistorical condition in which individual actors are stronger than institutions. In such a condition, institutions do not have sufficient authority to significantly constrain the actors' pursuit of their private goals or to limit the choice of means to reach these goals. Actors are able to use institutions instrumentally, to create or bend them-and thus adapt them-to serve their own interests. These interests and goals are essentially the accumulation of wealth and power. What is extraordinary about early capitalism is the speed with which actors gain wealth and power and the resulting inequalities.