From the Tsarist regime to the Stalinist regime

This chapter is a brief economic history from the abolition of serfdom to the First Five-Year Plan, supposed to catch the reader up to the 1930s. It also delves into Marx and Engels’ views on the mir or obshchina , Marx and Engels’ views on the revolutionary potential of Russia, and the concept of world revolution in Marx, Engels, and Lenin. It demonstrates that the Russian Empire had started to develop capitalist relations of production and that the Revolution, ‘War Communism’, and the NEP did not fundamentally change this development. The international dimension of the revolution failed and as such, in Lenin’s own view, Russia’s fate was capitalist development.