Well, yes, if the Western Country will be industrialized ITTL, it will also be Russified to an extent (as it did, albeit unevenly, when the industrialization finally occurred OTL).
As for the Imperial government allowing industry concentration in Moscow and St Petersburg to continue unabated OTL - well, it is sound free-market approach to allow capital owners to invest where they want to.
So it is- and stressing on peripherial industrial development, as the Soviets did OTL had many ecomomic costs in ineffeciency. But the thing is, OTL's Tsarist Russia didn;t just stand back and let investors make their own choices. They allowed entrenched interests to manuver them into placing restrictions and regulations on industrialists in the borderlands while granting them tax free
Tallinn and Estonia/Latvia in general were favored capital destinations with substantial Russian worker presence even OTL, so Witte will not need to subsidize relocation of industries there (hiring Russians for these jobs will have to be subsidized in some way, though); however, Lithuania, Belarus and the Right-Bank Ukraine are another matter, and making their cities industrialized and Russian-dominated will be hard.
True. I'm expecting Russians to make up a large minority, or even a plurality of Urban population in Estonia and Latvia, and possibly Odessa and southern Ukraine. But Right Bank Ukraine, not to mention Belarus will be a tougher nut to crack. This might spur a Prippet reclamation initiative in order to ensure some Great Russian foothold there in spite of the marginal economic value of it. Lithuania (OTL borders, coatal Lithiania, not the term used at the time which included most of Belarus) is intermediate in terms of industrial/urban development potential.
Interventionism can work for the military-industrial complex, but even there private initiative is generally helpful, and civilian industries predominated in Russia before 1914.
Right. Any intervention outside the millitary industrial complex, and possibly purely extractive indiustries will have to take the form of subsidies to employ a certain quota of workers of the "right" background/locality. Maybe discharged veterans. I can't see Witte favoring a state run and financed textile factory in Minsk for example. Though there is some precedent for that in earlier regimes.
ITTL, an interventionist industrial policy clearly favoring the Western Country can make it more Russian, but it will also slow down the industrial development overall, since it will diminish the capital available for established industrial centers, where it would be put to better use.Of course. When I mentioned "Jews and Catholic peasants" I meant Jewish burgers and Ukrainian/Belarusian/Lithuanian peasants.
Agreed. But I must stress again that:
a. A rudimentry Millitary Industrial complex in the Baltics, Lithuania and Belarus is sound on puely strategic grounds.
b. OTL, this, and private enterprise in the borderlands was actively stifled by established interests (who still could not prevent the Vistula provinces from taking off in the Textile industry).
You can therefore expect friction between financially minded Witte, his less grounded tsar and millitary interests as regards state intervention in industrial development in the borderlands (as occured OTL over the strategic railway placement) but even fully sound financial and strategic principles will result in more industrial devlpment than OTL.
Some "younger sons" will leave for Siberia ITTL. However, it will be hard to attract so many of them that a labour deficit emerges.
Spending three years hammering a patch of Siberian steppe into productive farmland after being shipped there by the government is a considerable inducement. seems like a waste to go back home to a disputed inheritance when you have a farm you already worked on ripe for the taking and comrades you have grown used to as future neighbors (of course, that's the idylic version. realistically conditions on the Siberian settlements will be such that conscripts will flee back to Europe as soon as their service is done.)
In any event, it's a matter of quantitative difference rather than a qualitative revolution. Consider it less a question of creating a labor deficiet as reducing the local labor surplas.
It dos not matter that much, though - the Western Country peasants were very attached to rural conditions OTL, and they were more eager to migrate to the Far East (or the New World, in the Lithuanian case) than to cities in their homelands, even when there was a lot of jobs in these cities. For example, Ukrainian peasants had to travel just 1,000 kilometres or so to get to the coal mines of the Donbas, but 10,000 kilometres to get to the Maritime Province on the Pacific. Most of those willing to migrate still chose the latter destination.
I didn't know that. You have numbers or links?
Therefore, an industrialized Belarusian/Ukrainian/Lithuanian city will still be heavily populated by Russian immigrants ITTL (just as you predict), even if agrarian overpopulation persists around it.
My impression was that Ukrainian peasants were beginning to crowd into Kiev and other Ukrainian cities starting at around 1902 or so (as were native Balts into Historically German cities in Estonia/Latvia). Any links/numbers you have showing otherwise will be welcome.
BTW, there were no recognized Uniates in the Russian Empire in the 1890s, as their church was ordered to go Orthodox in 1839 (with one remaining diocese in Kholm (part of the Russian Kingdom of Poland, so treated more cautiously at first) being forcibly suppressed in 1875, some people were even killed on that latter occasion).
I know, but as you say...
Many of these ex-Uniates clung to their faith, especially in the Kholm diocese, even though they were listed as Orthodox by the authorities.
Sons from those families, if known to the authorities, are more likely to find an opportunity to make a better future for themsleves in SIberia in Witte's "special" work brigades.
When allowed to officially go back to Catholicism (but only Latin rite, not their ancestral Greek rite) in 1905, quite a few of them did so. Will your reforming Tsar allow these people to practice their faith freely earlier?
I'm thinking no.
Giving up on forcibly converting alien Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and Armenians is one thing. They aren't family. But the Uniate church is viewed as a Catholic-Polish-Austrian serpant in the nest of Orthodoxy which must be crushed for the good of the wayward sons and to prevent them from corrupting others.
Even if the Tsar were inclined to recognise them the community is too small and seemingly succesfully supressed so that the benifits are too small, and the political price Vs the Church, conservative ministers, etc, too high to justify it. Likewise, the independence of the Orthodox Georgian church is unlikely to be restored.
Also, any more enlightned, or at least realistic, nationalities policy is not going to treat Ukrainians and Belarussians in the same way as Poles and Armenians. the latter can be viewed as unaasimiliable aliens- the former are lost children who need to be brought back into the fold.
Old believers fall somewhere in the middle between these extremes. They may win tolerance, but not recognition.
