Development of Industrial Production in the USSR and the USA (Summing Up the Last Fifty Years)

It is common knowledge that prerevolutionary Russia lagged greatly behind the capitalist countries of Europe and the USA with respect to economic development. It is true that Russian industry had attained a high degree of concentration of production but, nonetheless, prior to the revolution Russia was chiefly an agrarian country and its volume of industrial production was incomparably lower than that of England, Germany, France and, in particular, the United States of America â the country occupying first place in industrial development by the time World War I broke out.