What If Russia Industrialized in the Late 1800's?

Russia was a strong empire but backward in many retrospects. What if they were a fully industrialized nation by the 1880's or so?

(I tried to search for this, but my computer doesn't want to let me for some reason)
 
Would that win them the war with Japan in the early 1900's?

Would full industrialization prelaunch the Russian Revolution or butterfly it away?

Maybe a better performance by Russia in WW1?
 
Well, Russia was starting to become industrialised from about the mid 1880s. Big growth in the railway network, the beginning of rural-urban migration, the rise of industrial complexes in several big cities, in Poland and in Donbas...

Assuming that there is a recognisable Russian Empire (so, post-Petrine PoD at the earliest) you could create some of the necessary conditions (serfdom dismantled, foreign capital, and so on) a decade or two before you got them IOTL, but this would only mean Russia would be in the 1880s where she was in the 1910s industrially speaking. And this will all mean no recognisable Russo-Japanese war (which, by the way, was not a Japanese walkover as people sometimes imagine) or WW1.

As for whether there's a revolution, well, all industrialising countries worried about revolutions: it was a function of industrialisation being really, really horrible. In Russia you had the volatile cocktail of that and a peasantry unsatisfied with the regime, but there's not much you can do about that. The revolution wasn't inevitable anyway, so maybe Russia has a revolution, maybe it doesn't: the choice is just moved forward in time.
 
Czar Alexander II was attempting reforms and modernization. I believe this was successful in many ways, if memory serves, but he ran into some troubles. The population of Russia was large and expanding at a rate many times that of other European nations, and there was also problems in funding.

I've had the thought that if Russia held onto Alaska and found it's resources in Alexander's time, then that could alleviate the problems in funding.
 
Czar Alexander II was attempting reforms and modernization. I believe this was successful in many ways, if memory serves, but he ran into some troubles. The population of Russia was large and expanding at a rate many times that of other European nations, and there was also problems in funding.

I've had the thought that if Russia held onto Alaska and found it's resources in Alexander's time, then that could alleviate the problems in funding.

I've always been dubious about Alaska. So the Russians hang on to it until somebody discovers the gold - where do you get prospectors? Russia has enormous empty spaces of its own to fill up, and a population far more rooted and socially immobile than in America (what does a peasant whose dug up a pile of gold do?) and who would probably rather have land, since they've always wanted land.

So where would you get prospectors? The USA, one would imagine: they were never shy about crossing borders. And if the Russians prevent anyone immigrating, well, not much to mine.

Anyway, Alexander II was trying to update Russia's institutions, sign on the Poles, and set up a suitably bourgeois state for the 1860s but that doesn't mean the country was ripe for an industrial revolution.
 
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If they can break the power of the nobles which was already weakened by the abolition of serfdom then you might be able to industrialize russia.
 
What if the Czar owned the factories, and provided better wages within the factory? He'd have to restrict housing nearby (to allow for enough workers to live close enough to the factory), and encourage longer-term hiring (so people don't work for a short time, then head back to the farm).

Nice of social challlenges there. People are used to owning land, and they won't have that. People are also used to moving around on the farms for labor wherever it is needed, vs staying in a single location for a factory.

By having the Czar owning the equipment (since he is the one that buys them) means the workers just have to be trained. By providing higher wages, the workers are loyal to him, and want to keep their jobs. Encouraging the skilled workers to stay is a key, to make sure you don't lose your experienced personnel, and it encourages a new social order so new workers get into the new community being formed at the factory, rather than the farm mentality.

The key is the workers are loyal to the Czar or his hired managers, rather than hereditary nobles. If the managers try to form a new aristocracy, the Czar will fire them.
 
What if the Czar owned the factories, and provided better wages within the factory? He'd have to restrict housing nearby (to allow for enough workers to live close enough to the factory), and encourage longer-term hiring (so people don't work for a short time, then head back to the farm).

Nice of social challlenges there. People are used to owning land, and they won't have that. People are also used to moving around on the farms for labor wherever it is needed, vs staying in a single location for a factory.

By having the Czar owning the equipment (since he is the one that buys them) means the workers just have to be trained. By providing higher wages, the workers are loyal to him, and want to keep their jobs. Encouraging the skilled workers to stay is a key, to make sure you don't lose your experienced personnel, and it encourages a new social order so new workers get into the new community being formed at the factory, rather than the farm mentality.

The key is the workers are loyal to the Czar or his hired managers, rather than hereditary nobles. If the managers try to form a new aristocracy, the Czar will fire them.

The problem with the top level industrialization is that it happened several times in Russian history. Russia's modernizer czars were quite fond of building sizable royal owned industries in order to better compete with the west, usually for military provisioning. Vast sums of money and lives would be sacrificed in order to create a half-hazard system of ironworks, shipyards, or foundries which would eventually do an adequate job of meeting the demands of the day. When the Czar who patronized said industry died, it would be forgotten, and the industries sold or passed off to someone else. Said industries without direct patronage would become completely obsolete within a generation. The same process would be repeated the next time a modernizer czar assumed office.

That withstanding, industrialization had several additional problems. Russia's feudal economy slowed the development of a domestic market for small scale manufactured goods. Serfdom, and endemic illiteracy robbed Russia of a skilled workforce, and forced it to import usually German craftsmen to manage their cottage industries. Russia despite being vast in scale, has traditionally had a miserable transportation. Russia was also an agrarian nation for most of its history, lacking the urban surplus population which fueled industrial development elsewhere.

Another problem with is adopting the industrial model is sociological. The Serfs were used to an essentially feudal economic system. They owed their masters labor and the obligations of tradition, however they considered themselves to be the owners of the land they toiled upon. The industrial labor was an alien system to them. They weren't used to wage labor, a clock orientated working day, and the repetition required for assembly-line labor. Said problems are often mentioned when describing the pitfalls of early soviet industrialization a century later.
 
The answer to this question depends on the degree of industrialization which we presume to be undergone. If we can say that the Russian Empire grows to an industrial level comparable to the other major European powers, then the inevitable result is to be a heightened pace of dialectical advancement in regards to the nations historical progression. This would basically mean that the contradictory forces of class would be in a particularly inflamed position during the height of the first world war, and that the Bolshevik revolution would be based upon much more fitting economic preconditions. The Tsarist government was simply not equipped with the necessary structure to control any of the additional political discontent which stems from industrialization, and it's fair to say that it would become overwhelmed far more easily by the Bolshevik revolution.

Of course, Russia may fair better in the first world war, but I think that this performance would more or less be overshadowed by domestic political developments.
 
The Bolshevik Revolution was basically a coup against a weakened provisional government.

The revolution you want to avoid is the first one in 1917, or even better the 1905 one which broke the myth of the Tsar as a father figure when his troops fired on demonstrators

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
I've always been dubious about Alaska. So the Russians hang on to it until somebody discovers the gold - where do you get prospectors? Russia has enormous empty spaces of its own to fill up, and a population far more rooted and socially immobile than in America (what does a peasant whose dug up a pile of gold do?) and who would probably rather have land, since they've always wanted land.

So where would you get prospectors? The USA, one would imagine: they were never shy about crossing borders. And if the Russians prevent anyone immigrating, well, not much to mine.

Well, Siberia got plenty of immigrants in OTL, no?
 
The South American countries proved that you can take in thousands of immigrants from 1st world nations without losing sovereignty. That it went screwy in Mexico need only be the exception that proves the rule. I don't really see the USA or Britain trying to muscle in on Russia

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
The South American countries proved that you can take in thousands of immigrants from 1st world nations without losing sovereignty. That it went screwy in Mexico need only be the exception that proves the rule. I don't really see the USA or Britain trying to muscle in on Russia

Best Regards
Grey Wolf


Instead of them muscling in on Russia is their any chance for them to invest in Russia?
 
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