3 Review(s)

This book presents estimates of the growth of the tsarist economy during the 'industrialization era', 1885-1913. The performance of the tsarist economy is compared with that of Soviet Russia during the plan era and of other industrialized countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its main importance is to provide a frame of reference against which to contrast the Soviet performance. The author finds a stronger performance from the tsarist economy than the literature had led us to suspect, and he disputes several of the established views of economic historians concerning Russian agriculture and the Russian nineteenth-century business cycle.