HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

MOSCOW-UKRAINE ECONOMIC RELATIONS 485the national periphery into a backward agricultural appendage of themetropolis, sometimes, the other way around — into an economicallyinseparable part of the overall capitalistic system, facilitating itscapitalistic development. The latter, for instance, took place withrespect to the Ukraine, which during the 1870s-90s already appeared asone of the principal and leading regions of the Russian capitalisticsystem." Thus the regime determined the order of priority for developingindividual regions according to their political, military, or economicimportance.Although the railroads, the most conspicuous of the governmentprojects, constructed up to 92 percent at government cost (Liashchenko,1948, p. 192), appear to have been intended to promote theempire's economic and political integration, in reality their function wasprimarily military. In the words of a recent researcher, "much of it [therailroad network] was constructed to serve the needs of troop movementsin case of war mobilization or actual war rather than the economicneeds of freight and passenger service" (Kahan, 1967, p. 466). Sometsarist high officials had an even more farreaching vision of the railroads'importance. Witte, an enthusiast of railroad development, is quoted ashaving said that the railroads were essential for the opening of the vastSiberian expanse, the future importance of which was not onlyeconomic, social, and military, but also as a barrier against thepopulation pressure of "the yellow race" (von Laue, 1969, pp. 237-38).If any region was important for the regime, it had to be developed,regardless of which nationality inhabited it. To keep the given regionunder control, the internal security methods of the tsarist regime, latereven more comprehensive under the Soviet successor, were devised.Furthermore, trustworthy individuals, whether Russian or non-Russian, were placed in high political and economic positions to makesure that Moscow's interests would not be jeopardized.This approach toward regional policy has been institutionalizedunder the Soviet regime. It is even argued that the entire Sovietsystem — characterized by comprehensive planning, command approach,and centralization of decision making — came into beingprecisely to develop the huge areas east of the Urals, a task which wasbeyond the capabilities of the market economy (Raupach, 1968,pp. 21-22, 26, 28, 94). This and other geopolitical goals could beachieved through the appropriate spatial distribution of investment,which in the USSR is centrally planned and flowsprimarily through thestate budget.