*My paper uses the context of Late Tsarist Russia to study how elites and foreign entities affect competition in a late-industrializer. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Tsarist Russia was trying to industrialize. During this time it is not clear to what extent monopolies and collusion permeated the Tsarist economy, and if political elites -- the nobility and government officials -- influenced anti-competitive behavior.  Furthermore, foreign actors could have exploited the same legal set-up as elites. The Tsarist Empire was generally capital poor, and it sought out foreign investment. Foreign capital and technology could have been necessary for development, but on the other hand there exists qualitative evidence that foreign entities encouraged anti-competitive actions. Using a detailed dataset on corporate charters, manufacturing censuses, and new information on syndicate agreements, I explore the impact of the presence of political elites, and foreign actors on the formation of collusive agreements and organizations.

**This article establishes a direct proof of the equivalence between two incomplete rankings of distributions of an ordinal attribute. The first ranking is the possibility of going from one distribution to another by a finite sequence of Hammond transfers. The second ranking is the intersection of two dominance criteria introduced by Gravel et al. (Economic Theory, 71 (2021), 33-80), namely the H and ¯H dominance. The proof is an algorithm that provides a series of Hammond transfers, allowing to reach the dominant distribution from the dominated one.