The Chinese and Russian Revolutions, despite many similarities, have culminated in societies with important differences in social organization and patterns of state-guided economic development. This essay argues that these differences in revolutionary outcomes can in significant part be attributed to the influence of differences in the sociopolitical structures and patterns of economic development of the prerevolutionary societies, Romanov Russia and late Imperial China. Old-regime structures helped to shape specific variations in the revolutionary outcomes not merely by surviving, but because they set different limits for successful revolutionary efforts for gaining state power and for using that power once consolidated to promote national development. The essay helps to account sociologically both for differences between broadly similar revolutions and for continuities, despite basic changes, between preand postrevolutionary regimes. From a broad comparative and historical perspective the Russian and Chinese revolutionary transformations-two of the most momentous happenings of the tumultuous twentieth century-seem very similar indeed (Moore, b; Skocpol; Wolf). Both revolutions broke out in huge agrarian empires that had become subject to intense pressures from more industrialized nations abroad. Massive peasant rebellions contributed indispensably to each revolutionary drama. Aristocratic, semi-bureaucratic, and autocratic old regimes gave way to centralized, bureaucratic and mass-mobilizing collectivist regimes, as the revolutionary conflicts led to the expropriation of the traditional state officials and landed upper classes, as well as foreign and domestic capitalists, and brought to the fore in their stead the Bolshevik and Chinese Communist parties. Certainly these similarities in the causes and outcomes of their revolutions are sufficient to mark the national trajectories of modernizing Russia and China as examples of one distinctive developmental pattern in contrast to the diverse alternative paths that have been followed by other countries-routes such as liberal or authoritarian capitalist industrialization or neocolonial dependent development. Nevertheless, as the Chinese Revolution has progressed into its third decade since the consolidation of national political power by the Communists, important contrasts to the Soviet outcomes have become strikingly apparent-differences both of official ideologies and policies and of actual patterns of socioeconomic and political organization. This essay will attempt to show how differences in the Chinese versus Soviet revolutionary outcomes can be attributed in part to effects of differences in the prerevolutionary sociopolitical and economic *In revising an earlier draft of this paper, I have had the benefit of critical comments and suggestions from Barrington Moore, Jr., Betty Moore, Ann Swidler, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Victor Nee, Jim Peck, Kay Trimberger, and Bill Skocpol. Since I have not been wise enough to acceptall of the advice offered to me, I alone am responsible for the problems and inadequacies that remain.
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Dec 1, 1983
Brian F Wallace 
Open Access