The theory of "modernization from above", as exemplified in the work of Alexander Gerschenkron, focuses on the underlying causes of the economic and political centralization that has characterized Russia since the Middle Ages.  While in Western Europe the economy was the collective creation of a multitude of small entrepreneurs, with varied specializations, methods of work, and financial backings, in Russia it was the creation of the state, and governmental priorities, demands, and dictates have ruled it since the time of Peter the Great.

Gerschenkron relates this to the contrasting timing of modernization processes in the West and East. Modernization started in the West, as a gradual social process, brought about by spontaneous changes in individuals' lives in response to changing opportunities, slowly gaining aggregate momentum until the entrepreneurial class, the bourgeoisie, could finally impose its dictates "from below" on the government itself. In Russia, in contrast, modernization came late, and only as a response to pressures from abroad, from the growing power of the West. The need for economic development was therefore perceived primarily by the state – rather than by any class of the population – as a need for a modern defence industry and its supportive infrastructures.

Russian modernization thus became a consciously formulated, governmentally sponsored project, imposed on the country "from above" by force and against the resistance of the population at large. Conversely, as soon as governmental objectives had been accomplished and no need for modernization remained, the effort was abandoned: indeed, efforts among groups of the population to emulate Western development were seen as potential threats to the state's power monopoly and actively repressed. In 18th century France, the court's splendour was designed to reconcile the nobility with its loss of power; in Prussia, the Junkers were appeased by increased rights over the peasantry. In Russia, "the problem did not exist at all. The Russian state was poor but strong." This was as true of the pre-Petrine boyars as of the mid-nineteenth century Tsars or the "communist" regime headed by Brezhnev.

Russian economic development therefore proceded in sudden, violent "spurts" of activity – as under Peter the Great or under Stalin – followed by long periods of stagnation. During the spurts, development was one-sided and governmental vigilance never relaxed: sectors of the economy with direct or indirect military relevance received attention at the expence of individual consumption, which was curtailed; vast enterprises were constructed in sparcely populated hinterlands (rendering them susceptible to central control but vulnerable to infrastructural disruption); ideologies proclaiming development at all cost were fed to the masses. As the spurt ended, the exhausted population had neither will nor resources to oppose the juggernaut which had uprooted their lives and gathered all the threads of power in its hands, – and the initiative for further modernization, when the need again arose, would therefore once again be with the state.

In short, no social process could attain the necessary momentum to change society spontaneously, gradually, from within, and therefore, as Gerschenkron puts it, "the never-ending cogitations of Marxian historians in Russia about the class nature of the Petrine State... miss the essential fact that the State was not the State of this or that class.  It was the State's State...  It was not class power relations that created the State. The obverse was true: it was the State that created the classes: labor, and even the entrepreneurs." Economic "backwardness" thus produces a vicious circle of violence that no force can oppose.