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There was a big slackening in the rate of constructionafter 1875 until the beginning of the Trans-Siberian in1891 and the great impetus given to railway expansionby the economic policy of Witte. In fifteen years (1891-1905) nearly 20,000 miles of new line were opened, afigure that is probably about the same as the correspondingfigure for the years 1921-39. By the time of the 1917Revolution the total mileage had increased to about52,000, with another 7,000 building. 1The great railway expansion after 1891 was closelybound up with the similar expansion of the metallurgicalindustry, which now, in contrast with the sixties andseventies, supplied a very large part of the railway equipment.After 1891 also the combination of strategic andeconomic needs led to the revolution of communicationsin Asia. This was centred on the Trans-Siberian (seep. 301), but in addition Tashkent by 1905 was joined toEuropean Russia by direct line through Orenburg, andalready twenty years earlier it had been linked with theCaspian (see map 2). On the other hand, the idea ofjoining the cotton fields of Turkestan with the wheatfieldsof Siberia remained only a surveyed project. Itwas left for the Soviet regime to translate the Turk-Sibrailway into actuality (opened in 1930), as also to extendon a large scale the bare minimum of a railway systemin Asia inherited from the imperial regime.The interaction of these four factors—railways, tariffs,foreign investment and state encouragement of Westerncapitalism—combined with the results of the emancipationof the serfs to effect a revolution in Russian economy,both in scale and in technique. Internal and externaltrade increased by leaps and bounds. A new commercial,financial and industrial class began to be formed, partlyby the transformation of the old-style merchants andentrepreneurs, largely by the rise of a new, westernizedbourgeoisie, which by 1914, in extreme cases, would bebuilding palaces such as that which now houses theBritish embassy in Moscow, or buying contemporaryFrench pictures such as now make the Moscow Museum1 Including Finland and Poland: without them the total mileageworked was about 47,000.361