The identification of the term transition with the passage to market-oriented reforms, of the post Communist economies – now systematically designated as the “transition economies” – may convey the narrow, restricted view that no other major socioeconomic transition has occurred in the past, or could be unfolding anywhere else in the present. Actually, in its general sense, the term transition refers to any passage or progression through an intermediary situation between two different sets of conditions or circumstances. A socioeconomic transition refers hence to the period of transformations through which a country passes while experiencing the impact of newly emerging ownership and production relations.

Since the early 1860s, Russia underwent three major economic transitions that reshaped her socioeconomic structures and property relations. The main questions to be considered with regard to these and to any other conditions are: Which specific factors contribute to the rise of tendencies toward a country's socioeconomic transformation? Which ideas relating to the forms of government, the scope of the state's actions, and the socioeconomic relations confront each other and eventually gain popular interest and support at certain historical moments? How do these ideas, in conjunction with other major factors – such as war losses and the expansion of the popular mistrust in the prevailing socioeconomic framework – bring about vast structural displacements? These are the main problems related not only to the study of Russia's transformations but to the broader question of economic development in general.