Active industrial development in Russia started after assassination of AII so it is rather hard to see how authoritarian regime was inhibiting it. Of course, with the late start, Russia was still laggining behind by 1914 but if WWI was avoided situation could change within years because rate of development was quite high. BTW, since 1905 Russia politically was a constitution monarchy and truly capitalist economy kicked in well before this so I’m afraid that your spiel about “autocratic fear” is not going to work unless, of course, you can produce some facts backing it up.
WI: Austria doesn't interfere against Russia in the Crimean War
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Active industrial development in Russia started after assassination of AII so it is rather hard to see how authoritarian regime was inhibiting it. Of course, with the late start, Russia was still laggining behind by 1914 but if WWI was avoided situation could change within years because rate of development was quite high. BTW, since 1905 Russia politically was a constitution monarchy and truly capitalist economy kicked in well before this so I’m afraid that your spiel about “autocratic fear” is not going to work unless, of course, you can produce some facts backing it up.
Schemas like that one are nice but not too meaningful, especially taking into an account that during the late XIX Russia had explosive growth of population. Downturn was due to the economic crisis partially caused by the war of 1877 - 78 and huge accumulated debt. An additional factor was policy of the low import tariffs introduced by AII with the downturn results showing even before the war (iron production fell by 25%, cotton production - 3.5 times, budget deficit reached 162M, unpaid obligations to the railroad companies - 580M, course of the credit ruble fall to 0.617 of the gold one, etc.).I found this chart on Wikipedia which shows the GDP per capita in Europe:
For comparison, between 1859 and 1879 (AII) production of iron increased only by 67% while in 29 years after his death it increased by 487%. In 1881 (end of the reign of AII) Minister of Interior described Russian economic situation as disastrous: manufacturing of all types had been systematically killed by the cheap imports. It took government of AIII few years to deal with the consequences of the crisis.
Let’s get some details.
Between 1881 and 1894 balance of the bank operations grew by 98% and credit grew from 900M to over 1,708M. Individual savings (money placed into the banks) grew from less than 10M in 1881 to over 329M in 1894 (growth 33 times).
Of course, Russia was behind but its economy was growing even if the results were not showing immediately. General map of the industrial development by the 1890s (grey lines - state owned railroads, pink - privately owned).
Coal production (millions tons):
Oil production (millions tons)
Steel and cast iron production
Internal market grew from 2.4 billions rubles in 1873 to 11 - 12 billions in 1900 and, finally, in 1893 the budget deficit was gone: state income exceeded expenses by 100 millions. Starting from 1893 the railroads had been built at the rate of 2,700 km per year and by 1899 60,000 km of the railroads had been built (measure by 1,000 sq.km hardly meaningful taking into an account huge uninhabited territories in Russian Asia).
It can be argued that the main problem was stress on the light industry (textile) and not the heavy one but in 1990s production of the heavy industry increased 3 fold.