ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Soviet Union has clearly had a tremendous and in key respects unprecedented impact on the railways of Russia that continues to be felt. Traffic on the Imperial Russian and Soviet common-carrier railway networks grew virtually continuously from the Crimean War to 1989. The growth was perhaps most spectacular in the nineteenth century during the development of the core network. The economic crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s affected Russian railway traffic so badly that by 2010 neither the freight nor the passenger turnover had regained the levels of 1990. So, seen from the basic perspective and taken as a whole comprising both collapse and recovery, the post-Soviet traffic crisis could arguably be ranked as the worst in the history of the Russian railways. Some of the key Soviet transport policies like centrally planned inter-modal coordination have disappeared, and some momentous reforms have been instigated.
