The Russian Empire of the Tsars, which was overthrown in 1917, and its successor the Soviet Union, which disintegrated in 1991, were by far the largest states in the world, occupying 15 per cent of the world's land surface, nearly a hundred times the area of Great Britain. They embraced every kind of soil and climate, from the permanently frozen Arctic to the Central Asian tropics. Most of the country experiences a harsh continental climate; the main agricultural areas are at the latitude of Canada and the northern United States, and the severe conditions result in a very wide annual variation in yields.

Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries the Russian rulers gradually established their authority over this vast territory from their small initial base in the Moscow region. By 1900 Russians amounted to a little more than half the total population; and other Slavs to a further 20 per cent. More than a hundred non-Slav languages were spoken by the Caucasians, the Turkic and Iranian peoples, the Baits and others who constituted the remaining one-third of the population.

In the course of the first half of the twentieth century the Russian Empire/USSR was transformed from a predominantly agrarian country into a major industrial power. In this economic transformation Russia in many respects followed the path of its predecessors Britain, France, Germany and the United States. But the bumpy Russian road to industrialisation was unique in several important respects.

First, war and revolution, and their social and political consequences, overshadowed and distorted economic development to an extent unprecedented in nineteenth-century Europe.