Problems of Modernization in Russia in the Book by Irina Potkina

Abstract

The author of the article highly appreciates the monograph by I. V. Potkina “On the eve of the catastrophe. The state and economy of Russia in 1914–1917”. The author of the book proposed a new approach to their study, which made it possible to identify features of the formation of the military-economic mobilization model and management of the national economy. I. V. Potkina classified eight main directions of the government’s economic policy. Comparing the ways of regulating the economy of the tsarist and the Provisional Government, the author showed that these were different periods of the formation of the mobilization model, and it was the policy of the Provisional Government that led to the collapse of the economy. As a result, the author of the monograph came to a reasonable conclusion that the economic policy of the tsarist government was in line with the challenges of the time and pan-European trends. The author of the article considers the thesis about the so-called systemic crisis of the autocracy far-fetched. He connects the problems of the country’s development in the late 19th — early 20th centuries with the fact that in 1861–1905 Russia tried to realize its first anti-capitalist utopia — that in the industrial age it is possible to be a “distinctive” great power, that is, to influence the destinies of the world, rejecting everything due to which competitors and opponents have achieved prosperity, primarily, the general civil legal system, the corresponding rights of all strata of the population and complete freedom of entrepreneurship. Only in 1906 did the transition to the rule of law begin.

Keywords:

World War I, state regulation of the economy, modernization, Stolypin’s land reform, agrarian overpopulation crisis