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I realize that this is something of a NOOB-WI, but it’s still a fascinating question. What would Russia look like if it somehow avoided communist rule and (just as importantly) the Civil War? I have no clue how to make this happen (WWI suspended indefinitely? Kerensky’s government holds on somehow? ASBs make it happen to spare me the intellectual exercise of coming up with a real POD?) and I imagine that the circumstances of the divergence would matter a great deal…but I digress.

There are two main points here. The first is that the Russian Civil War was immensely destructive. Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers points out that Russian manufacturing and production in 1920 was12.8% of what it had been in 1913, and only recovered to its 1913 baseline in 1926. Given that the Russian industrial sector had averaged 5-8% growth per year between 1890 and 1913 (though from a ridiculously low baseline…) it isn’t hard to see those thirteen years as a vast lost opportunity.

The second is that communist rule in Russia was not really all that effective in industrializing Russia. To be sure, they were good at some things (education stands out) but overall the results weren’t all that impressive relative to their means. According to Niall Ferguson (who should be taken with more than a grain of salt, because any given bit of anything he’s written in the last ten years has a 50:50 chance of having been written by a graduate student working as his research assistant while he was off doing a TV special or something), between 1929 and 1937 “when allowances are made for idiosyncratic pricing conventions, real GNP growth was closer to 3-4.9% per annum while per capita consumption rose by no more than 1.9% and perhaps by as little as 0.6% per annum” which (leaving aside the issue of intentionally killing millions of people and imprisoning as much as 15% of the population in Gulags) isn’t all that impressive compared to the growth of, say, modern China.

So, I guess the point I’m trying to get to is this—what would Russia look like if it somehow avoided the Civil War and then Communist rule?
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