CH: Russia Heaven on Earth

The biggest problem with this is that Russia's always been bloody huge and pre-modern institutions on a large scale, developed with modern technology inevitably end up being not too nice. Perhaps finagle the PODs so that Russia develops starting on Veliki Novgorodian lines, that is as a collection of aristocracies that becomes a somewhat inverted version of the USA (that is always feuding amongst itself over identity, bizarrely factionalized in very specialized ways, obsessed with military power but avoiding large-scale bloody wars, and rising because everybody else decides to conveniently self-destruct while proclaiming this testament to the inherent strength and power of its institutions just because :p).

But wasn't such size a rather large advantage for the United States in regards to things like resources? To be fair, Russia isn't quite as isolated, and I guess being so old doesn't help things.
 
But wasn't such size a rather large advantage for the United States in regards to things like resources? To be fair, Russia isn't quite as isolated, and I guess being so old doesn't help things.

The size? No. A lot of that size is as uninhabited as Russia's (see: Great Plains, Great Basin). Russia's problem was its resources were more inaccessible and the sheer span of the empire prohibited a lot of development of that intermediary level essential to a fully functional state system. It might be worth reflecting that Russia made the most progress in this area under the Soviet Union, whose very bureaucratic system was the one that came closest to filling this vacuum (and closest and actually doing so even then weren't the same thing).
 
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