My own approach to this subject is very much the same as Professor Black's. Imperial Russia, it seems to me, was the prototype of the “underdeveloped society” whose problems are so familiar a theme in our own age. The study of nineteenth-century Russia is the study of a society in process of modernization, and probably the most useful service which non-Russian historians can render is to try to regard this process as a whole, and particularly to differentiate between those aspects of Russia's modernization process which are common to several known historical cases and those which are peculiar to Russia. The following comments on Professor Black's article are offered from this point of view.

The physical setting, rightly stressed by Professor Black at the outset, may be regarded as a peculiarly Russian aspect. Here human and physical geography are closely interrelated.