I didn't say that the Balkans were desert, but rather that Scandinavia has cold and heavy soils which is exactly where agricultural technology had room to grow 1500-1800, unlike the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, which had already been heavily cultivated nearly to their preindustrial maximum. The Balkans were a warzone between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, so of course they did not see the same kind of growth as other parts of Europe. The cold climate of the Little Ice Age certainly hurt European agriculture, but New World crops and new techniques arrived at the same time that increased productivity and cutting down forests allowed the cultivation of more land.
I wouldn't put it all down to climatic factors either, but mismanagement alone can't be the sole cause. Russian Empire was probably even more mismanaged, as during the eighteenth century, there were no fewer than forty-four pretenders in Russia.
With a single exception of Pugachev, these pretenders were not causing any serious trouble. Well, one can add so-called "Princess Tarakanova" but the trouble she caused was outside Russian borders (and had been dealt with in a rather nasty way by "Alexan" Orlov).
However, putting aside the pretenders, mismanagement was an endemic problem in the Russian Empire stretching all the way to 1917. When Peter I decided to issue a decree according to which a person who stole a sum big enough to buy a piece of a rope should be hanged, his "Attorney General" (Procurator of a Senate) told him in public: "You'll find yourself without the subjects because all of us here are stealing". And the most glorious (in the terms of acquisitions, international influence, etc.) reign of the XVIII, time of Catherine II, was an epitome of mismanagement and corruption and it is not just about the exaggerated stories of Potemkin villages. When Paul I became an emperor, the #1 item in his "program" was to establish a strict order in a military and civic administration. He tried really hard but had neither brain nor tools needed for accomplishing this task. By the time of Nicholas I corruption was so endemic that (a) Nicholas told his son Alexander that they are probably the only two persons in the empire who are not taking the bribes and (b) his Minister of Justice gave a bribe to his own subordinate for preparing an official document confirming minister's daughter (absolutely legal) marriage. Famous poet of the XIX, A.K. Tolstoy, wrote a satiric poem on the Russian history where reign of each monarch, starting with Rurik, was concluded with a comment "and there still was no order".
So, yes, a country can survive seemingly successfully with a high degree of mismanagement and even with a very backward agriculture (by 1914 many of the Russian peasants still did not have modern ploughs), with a very slow introduction of the new cultures (potato had been forcibly introduced only during the reign of Nicholas I), with the regular famines and with a relatively limited expansion of the agricultural territories.