ABSTRACT
The theoretical and conceptual ideas of the first development decade (1955–65) placed the emphasis on the government promotion of industry, while neglecting and exploiting agriculture. What was overlooked with this inference by analogy from Soviet experience was, firstly, that the USSR was able to build on the considerable success achieved in industrializing Tsarist Russia to a level which had not been reached in 1955 by any developing country apart from two or three in South America; secondly, developing countries with traditional peasant structures had nothing like the state power or an urban elite so well educated in the humanities and the sciences as the Soviets had employed to cope with capital formation, technical progress and their model of societal organization; thirdly, the inertia of the developing countries’ pre-industrial social and economic structure was underestimated.
