bolshevism

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Mon Aug 26 10:21:11 PDT 2002



> How did the Russian Empire stand just prior to World War I?
> That would be what Lenin (or an alternative to Lenin) would
> have had to work with.

Chris Doss:
> Certainly not a developed industrial country (though wasn't the largest
> factory in the world in Moscow?).

Well, there's a chart of GNP at http://dmorgan.web.wesleyan.edu/materials/gnp.htm which puts Russia in the same league as Germany and Britain in 1913, with an impressive rate of growth. But I don't know whether the figures are reliable, or what they're composed of.


> I've been intrigued by the socio-economic structure of contemporary Russia,
> which is markedly similar in a lot of ways to pre-1917, though with the
> legacy of industrialization. Industrialized feudalism...

There must have been some industrialization before 1917, because there was an urban proletariat (and middle class) of sufficient size to support effective revolutionary politics and fight off competing parties.

-- Gordon



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