There were six waves of regionalism in Western Europe and Russia: in the decades of the 1830s, the 1860s, the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1970s and the 1990s. Russian regions were not behind Western European ones but rather went through the same stages of development at the same time or sometimes even earlier, until after the Stalin era, when they did fall behind developments in Western Europe. In the 1990s, there was an upsurge of regionalism in Russia, but Western European regions had pulled ahead in terms of political rights and regional institutions.