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Soviet Union [USSR] Economic Developments
Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century, Russia's
economy developed more slowly than did that of the major European
nations to its west. The population of Russia was substantially
larger than those of the more developed Western countries, but the
vast majority of the people lived in rural communities and engaged
in relatively primitive agriculture. Industry, in general, had
greater state involvement than in western Europe, but in selected
sectors it was developing with private initiative, some of it
foreign. The population doubled between 1850 and 1900, but it
remained chiefly rural well into the twentieth century. Russia's
population growth rate from 1850 to 1910 was the fastest of all the
major powers except for the United States (see
table 3, Appendix A).
Agriculture, which was technologically underdeveloped, remained
in the hands of former serfs and former state peasants, who
together constituted about four-fifths of the population. Large
estates of more than fifty square kilometers accounted for about 20
percent of all farmland, but for the most part they were not worked
in efficient, large-scale units. Small-scale peasant farming and
the growth of the rural population produced extensive agricultural
development because land was used more for gardens and fields of
grain and less for grazing meadows than it had been in the past
(see
table 4, Appendix A).
Industrial growth was significant, although unsteady, and in
absolute terms it was not extensive. Russia's industrial regions
included Moscow, the central regions of the country, St.
Petersburg, the Baltic cities, Russian Poland, some areas along the
lower Don and Dnepr rivers, and the Ural Mountains. By 1890 Russia
had about 32,000 kilometers of railroads and 1.4 million factory
workers, the majority of them in the textile industry. Between 1860
and 1890, coal production had grown about 1,200 percent to over 6.6
million tons, and iron and steel production had more than doubled
to 2 million tons. The state budget, however, had more than
doubled, and debt expenditures had quadrupled, constituting 28
percent of official expenditures in 1891. Foreign trade was
inadequate to meet the empire's needs, and surpluses sufficient to
cover the debts incurred to finance trade with the West were not
realized until high industrial tariffs were introduced in the
1880s.
Data as of May 1989
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