The collective volume presented here originates from a workshop organized by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) as part of the 2nd International Political and Economic Congress held in Moscow on 13 May 2015 on the topic »Promoting industrial development in times of economic crisis«. What industrial policy is necessary to release Russia’s manufacturing sector from its paralysis and what role might be played in this by the state and classic development concepts, such as import substitution? No uniform concept of crisis analysis is presented here and the contributions are necessarily pluralist with regard to their explanatory approaches and recommendations. Despite the differences of opinion authors agree on one thing: just waiting for another oil boom does not constitute an economic policy. The current state of the Russian enterprise sector exhibits numerous symptoms of resource misallocation and no improvement is to be expected without radical structural changes.