ABSTRACT
This epilogue presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows very briefly what problems the new regime inherited from the old and how it approached them. It draws some conclusions from the history of the last decades of Imperial Russia which may be relevant to other periods and other lands. Though the military reforms of 1909-14 had made the Russian army a more formidable force than it had been during the war with Japan, they had not raised it to the standard of the German army. The collectivisation of agriculture and the industrial Five Year Plans, whose cost in human wastage and suffering this is no place to discuss, created a new regime in Russia, as different from the regime at the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as the latter had been from the regime of P. A. Stolypin.
