ABSTRACT
Russia and Japan, beginning their industrial revolutions at least a half century behind most of the West, had to meet a number of special challenges. They had to acquire Western technical expertise. Both Russia and Japan moved to industrialization in stages. A tentative experimental phase—which Russia had already experienced to an extent before 1870—included larger reforms that helped make way for economic change. A key ingredient in Russia’s early industrial revolution, along with increasingly focused government planning and railway development, was foreign entrepreneurship, from which Russia gained much-needed capital and technical knowledge. The Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war, following on the heels of World War I, dealt a blow to the country’s economy. During the early 1920s Lenin modified his policies through the New Economic Program, which gave some leeway to private business while maintaining government management of the big factories.
