This book is about a seemingly irrelevant subject: capitalist institutions in a society composed mostly of illiterate peasants, where industrialization, initiated by an autocratic monarchy, continued after World War I under a regime fervently opposed to capitalist principles. The number of companies founded in the Russian Empire before the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 scarcely surpassed six thousand (including approximately fifteen hundred founded during World War I), and the number of corporations in existence on the eve of the war fell far short of corresponding figures for Britain and France. The number of individuals who deserved to be called capitalist entrepreneurs remained tiny by European standards. Although many aspects of Russian urban history have yet to be clarified, preliminary studies suggest that the vast majority of merchants held to Russian cultural traditions, distrusted secular Western education, and preferred to carry on their businesses in family firms rather than in large, impersonal corporations.

Accordingly, much of the entrepreneurial and managerial elite of the tsarist economy had to be recruited from the slim stratum of Russians or Russified foreigners who had acquired a university or technical education. This process was impeded, moreover, because most members of the landed gentry, the civil and military bureaucracy, and the professions (law, journalism, medicine) evinced strongly anticapitalist attitudes, despite their differences of opinion on other questions.