ABSTRACT
The Caucasian economy in pre-Soviet times Whereas most of the Western European countries went through their industrial revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia lagged behind, and its industrialization process was confined to only a few cities. The Russian Empire, including the Caucasus, had a mainly agricultural economy and industry was little developed. As an example, 78 per cent of the GDP of the North Caucasus in 1913 came from agriculture and food processing and only 22 per cent from industry.1 The plains of the North Caucasus were used for grain cultivation, whereas the people who lived in the eastern and mountainous parts focused on animal breeding. In the 25 years before the First World War the amount of land used for agriculture quadrupled, partly because the population increased fourfold in the fifty years before the war.2 The North Caucasus was one of the most advanced agricultural regions in Russia and the centre of livestock breeding; it also exported a huge amount of cereals to Europe. The situation in the South Caucasus was much the same, but industrialization took place far earlier in Baku on account of the oil industry, which started to boom towards the end of the nineteenth century. The remainder of the Caucasus, and also the entire Russian Empire, saw the industrialization process gather momentum from the 1890s onwards. Foreign investment, mainly from Britain, Germany and France, became a driving force in the economy and railway construction enabled the expansion of industry. Despite this, however, massive industrialization did not begin in the Caucasus until the 1930s.
