Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

594
V. I. LENIN
sian market. Russian capitalism has thus been drawing the
Caucasus into the sphere of world commodity circulation,
obliterating its local peculiarities—the remnants of ancient
patriarchal isolation—and providing itself with a market
for its factories. A country thinly populated at the
beginning of the post-Reform period, or populated by mountaineers
living outside world economy and even outside
history, has been turning into a land of oil industrialists,
wine merchants, big wheat and tobacco growers, and
165
Mr. Coupon has been ruthlessly divesting the proud moun-
taineer of his picturesque national costume and dressing him
in the livery of a European flunkey (Gleb Uspensky). 166
The process of rapid colonisation in the Caucasus and of the
rapid growth of its agricultural population has been accompanied
by a process (obscured by this growth) of the diversion
of the population from agriculture to industry. The
urban population of the Caucasus increased from 350,000 in
1863 to about 900,000 in 1897 (the total population increased
between 1851 and 1897 by 95%). There is no need to add
that the same thing has taken place and continues in both
Central Asia and Siberia, etc.
Thus, the question naturally arises, where is the borderline
between the home and the foreign market? To take
the political boundaries of the state would be too mechanical
a solution—and would it be a solution? If Central Asia
is the home market and Persia the foreign market, to which
category do Khiva and Bokhara belong? If Siberia is the
home market and China the foreign market, to which
category does Manchuria belong? Such questions are not of
great importance. What is important is that capitalism
cannot exist and develop without constantly expanding the
sphere of its domination, without colonising new countries
and drawing old non-capitalist countries into the whirlpool
of world economy. And this feature of capitalism has
been and continues to be manifested with tremendous force
in post-Reform Russia.
Hence, the process of the formation of a market for
capitalism has two aspects, namely, the development of
capitalism in depth, i.e., the further growth of capitalist
agriculture and industry in the given, definite and enclosed
territory—and the development of capitalism in breadth,