ИСТИНА

The sustainability of the industrial growth in Russia prior to 1917 is one of the most debatable questions in the context of the Russian Revolution. Is it true that Russia was rapidly going along a promising pathway of economic development, and only occasional factors broke the trend? This paper is intended to test the hypothesis that the Russian industrial policy of the period made an important contribution to growth but diminished consumer welfare and provoked social unrest due to its clear anticompetitive features. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the result of multiple factors including high level of social disturbance in Russia in the early XX century, even before the First World War. The wave of popular discontent emerged in the first decade of the XX century despite high rates of industrial growth, which were comparable to those rates in other large economies or even exceeded them (Gerschenkron, 1947, 1962; Cheremukhin et al., 2013). The industry was supported by the state regulation, which included favoring a high level of industrial concentration, ignoring competition policies de facto, maintaining high trade tariffs (Gerschenkron, 1947, 1962; Crisp, 1976, 1991; Gregory, 1991). It may be argued that those tools contributed to the strengthening of large enterprises but their impact on consumers’ well-being (reflected in the dynamics of wages and prices) and, consequently, on the business environment is debatable. The influence of anticompetitive and pro-competitive effects on the final outcomes of industrial policies has been investigated by many prominent authors, including Dobbin (1994), Aghion et al. (2015), Cole & Ohanian (2004), Gao (1997) for the cases of the USA, the UK, France, Japan under different circumstances. In this paper the industrial policy performance in pre-revolutionary Russia is compared to above-mentioned cases through the lens of market competition and its socioeconomic role.