The following reflections have been occasioned by the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. Their purpose is to try to grasp the nature and to gauge the extent of the change between the Russia of today and that of Stalin's time. Naturally, no more can be done within the scope of a brief paper than to indicate some of the areas that may be relevant in this connection and to arrive at some provisional conclusions. In looking for those areas, various curiosities and incongruities of the Moscow Congress may serve as guiding beacons.

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This paper represents an attempt to summarize the first stages of a research project, the completion of which is still remote. Its purpose is to pose one or two basic problems and to indicate the directions along which the answers may lie.It is obvious that in the decades following its political unification Italy's economy remained very backward in relation not only to that of England, but also to the economies of industrially advancing countries on the continent of Europe. Whatever gauge one may choose for the purposes of comparison, be it qualitative descriptions of technological equipment, organizational efficiency, and labor skills in individual enterprises; or scattered quantitative data on relative productivity in certain branches of industry, or the numbers of persons employed in industry; or the density of the country's railroad network; or the standards of literacy of its population, the same conclusion will result.

The main purpose of this paper is to compare the rates of industrial A growth in various periods of Russian history from the middle of the eighties until the end of the interwar period and to describe briefly the specific factors that promoted or obstructed the process of industrialization of the country. While no definitive conclusions are reached, some of the similarities and differences between industrial developments before and after 1914 are pointed out in the last section of this paper. History in the conditional mood is an enticing pastime. However, I have successfully withstood the temptation to concentrate on estimates of the relative level of industrial output that Russia might have attained in the absence of a revolution.

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