Over the long term, the political change wrought by 1917 put the Russian economy on the path of heavy industrialization. While the tsarist state had made industrialization a priority, especially under the aegis of Sergei Witte, the Soviet Union had a much clearer and coherent vision of industrial development than its predecessor. Note though that the Soviet industrialization was only achieved after massive deaths and extreme hardships. The emphasis upon heavy industry coupled with a planned economy also meant that the Soviet economy was slow to innovate and caught flat-footed in its competition with the West during the latter half of the Cold War.

In the short term, both the February and October Revolutions precipitated a near wholesale collapse of the Russian economy. Militant labor unrest meant that industrial factories essentially shut down. Russia's rolling stock system, already strained by wartime use, broke down and became irregular. The tsarist attempts at grain controls, already irregular and arbitrary, disappeared with the collapse of governmental authority. This led to major food shortages and famine.

Sources

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976.