ABSTRACT
In its economic development, as in its geographical position, European Russia in the first decade and a half of the present century was intermediate between the undeveloped lands of Asia and the industrially developed regions of Western and Central Europe. Taking Russian factory industry as a whole, the horse-power per worker was about three fifths of the equivalent figure in England and only a third of that in American industry, but was on a higher level than French and German industry at the time. In general it can be said that industrialisation had as yet touched little more than the hem of Russia’s economic system; even if, where matured forms of industrial Capitalism had taken root, this Capitalism was of a fairly advanced type. Russia had also been an importer of capital from abroad, to an average amount of some 200 million roubles annually in the two decades before the war of 1914.
