ABSTRACT
The examination of the development of the Russian economy in the nineteenth century is essential to our understanding of the process of change over the whole continent for it unites in a striking manner most of the elements of economic backwardness and the positive barriers to development identified in a less concentrated form in other countries. Russia was a country of immense size, even before the acquisitions of the eighteenth century, with a population no larger than 12–13 million in 1700. Yet such was the pace of population growth over the next two centuries that, despite the expansion of the land area, the pressure on land resources in certain parts of European Russia became acute. It was the country where serfdom lasted longest and where it was found in its harshest form. The crucial periods of Russian development, at the beginning of the eighteenth century and at the end of the nineteenth, were the result of feverish efforts to match the advances of the west. The consequence of this combination of sporadic bursts of development superimposed on a framework of society deeply rooted in the past left in simultaneous existence in Russia social, economic, political and cultural forms which in western Europe seemed to belong to different stages of civilisation and were regarded as incompatible with each other. In Russia elements of a servile feudal and of a capitalist society continued to exist side by side and this anomaly could not help but set up new tensions. That cultural patterns existed which seemed incompatible with modern economic growth elsewhere does not mean that they were to be incompatible in Russia too. However, it did mean that unusual and often drastic measures had to be taken to surmount the difficulties they posed.
