Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. 1964 first edition. Pages in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age but pages are bright. No notes or highlighting. Ex library but with minimal markings. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> When the trains stop that will be the end!’ said Lenin faced with a transport crisis. Certainly for the Bolsheviks it would have been the end although much of Russia at that time would hardly have noticed the difference if in fact the trains had stopped. Lenin’s words would be more true today for there can be few nations so dependant on rail transport as the Soviet Union. But when the Revolution came Russia was only halfway in its progression towards a modern industrial economy. The Crimean War had shown the impossibility of being a world power and at the same time a country politically and economi- cally under-developed. By 1914 this dilemma had been moder- ated but not eliminated. It was left to the Soviet governments to continue the transformation. As in other countries industrialization in tsarist Russia was founded on railway building but this does not mean that exactly the same process occurred as in Europe. And the contrast with North America was even more striking. Perhaps the most significant evidence of this is that in Russia the railways never entered the national consciousness like they did in America. The Trans-Siberian never meant as much to Russians as did the first transcontinental to Americans. Golden spikes (SP)