Without WWI, when would Russia's economy and military have surpassed Germany's?

with 400 million people in its border Russia

If Europe avoided all the major wars of the 20th Century, the population of Russia would be in the 600 million-1 billion range today. Probably around about 800 million.

Not only did lots of Russians die between 1914 and 1950, the Soviet push to urbanize Russia turned it into a 3rd world country with 1st world demographics. That had a huge impact.

It's worth noting that Russia would be hard-pressed to support such a population on her current resource base. The country could end up in a high-population low-development trap.

I simply don't think that overthrowing tsar or giving power to the Duma would help Russian economic growth in no-WWI situation. At best, you'd get decades of oligarchs and corruption, an earlier Yeltsin era (which would still be better than post-Qing China did - no warlords), at worst, situation would deteriorate into some insane far left not too different from Bolsheviks taking power, except they'd do it through elections, not coup.

Has anyone said that overthrowing the Tsar would help? (Overthrowing the Tsar and replacing him with someone better might help - but the actual overthrow step would be regressive.)

And in the long run, the Duma is getting more power like it or not.

Denekin, Wrangel, Boldyrev, Kappel, Kornilov, Kolchak, Alexiev, Yudenich et al were all pro military and communications/logistics modernisation so, even in a worst case scenario of a military dictatorship, industrialisation would continue.

Being pro-modernization and effectively modernizing are two different things.

Not to mention being more integrated in the world economy from 1917 onwards (no defaulted debts or lack of diplomatic recognition so they could buy in as well as build).

Overall this is a good thing, but it does mean that Russia won't develop alot of the resources it did in OTL. Russia has plenty of resources, but they are mostly lower grade or harder to get to compared to, say, the resources of the USA. So the country would be less developed in some ways because they'd be importing materials from abroad.

Also, while the Russians will be able to access foreign capital, they'll still be repaying foreign debts and will have to satisfy the demands of the owners of the capital. This will lead to more efficiency than OTL's Soviet soft-budget accounting, but it will also lead to slower growth.

So better overall, but not better in all ways.

Possibly yes they surpassed Russia for a given year or years but over the twenty five year span? And had they comparable mineral and population resources to continue to grow almost as rapidly over the next twenty five?

Austria-Hungary had a pretty impressive range of resources all in close proximity to each other. The dual monarchy was pretty messed up after the mid-19th Century, but if you have a PoD that addresses the dire weakness of the government and its balkanized politics, the Hapsburg Empire would have enormous potential.

When trying to project it forward we have to look at the system they used. If, as others have posited, the best way for it to continue its expansion is to change the system of governance (a tacit admission the previous system was unsuited) the Russian example of OTL points to Civil War and a decade or so of stagnation or recessions. This doesn't bode well. If the Russian Tsarist system is to continue and produce further industrialisation and expansion, it requires systematic changes I believe OTL proves it incapable of making.

Tsarism had many weaknesses, but I don't see any reason why it was any worse than, say, the government of Mexico or Brazil. Tsarism would either perform adequately or it would fall and be replaced by something that would have to do better in order to survive.

fasquardon
 
And in the long run, the Duma is getting more power like it or not.
Duma never held primary power in Russia.
It didn't hold power after February revolution, when it had to share power with local city soviets (Dual Power), not under Bolsheviks when nominal legislature was subordinated to Politburo, not under Yeltisin when most deputies were financed and steered by oligarchs as Duma gave legal fig-leaf cover to their robbery, and not right now as its Putin's rubber-stamp.

Tsarism had many weaknesses, but I don't see any reason why it was any worse than, say, the government of Mexico or Brazil. Tsarism would either perform adequately or it would fall and be replaced by something that would have to do better in order to survive.
No world war means that, at worst, high economic growth that Russia enjoyed slows down as she narrows gap between her and more modern industrial nations. And that's under assumption that no reform at all will take place. OTL system was capable of reform, as ministers like Witte and Stolypin had proven.
 
Duma never held primary power in Russia.

True. So?

Russia is still far more democratic than it was under the Tsars and far, far, far more democratic than it was under Stalin.

Educated populations produce a certain pressure to get a voice in the halls of power. That process is hardly smooth and it hardly implies that countries will reach set levels of democracy at set levels of development. But the trend over century-long spans of time is pretty clear.

Certainly what won't happen is that a Tsarism that survives another century should look like the Tsarism of 1914 when the year is 2014.

fasquardon
 
Certainly what won't happen is that a Tsarism that survives another century should look like the Tsarism of 1914 when the year is 2014.
Yes, but it doesn't have to look the way people often wishfully think it ought to look, assuming an "UK but with more vodka, bears, and beards".
It could also be militarist police state, it could be aristocratic-plutocratic oligarchy, it could even be Orthodox equivalent of Wahhabi State.
 
If Europe avoided all the major wars of the 20th Century, the population of Russia would be in the 600 million-1 billion range today. Probably around about 800 million.

Not only did lots of Russians die between 1914 and 1950, the Soviet push to urbanize Russia turned it into a 3rd world country with 1st world demographics. That had a huge impact.

It's worth noting that Russia would be hard-pressed to support such a population on her current resource base. The country could end up in a high-population low-development trap.
Ukraine/South Russia is some of the best farming land on the world, it has a huge output even today despite horrific production inefficiency, lack of investment and corruption of officials.
 

RousseauX

Donor
If Europe avoided all the major wars of the 20th Century, the population of Russia would be in the 600 million-1 billion range today. Probably around about 800 million.
This requires very straight forward projection based on population growth on par with what Russia had in 1900, the problem is that fertility rates decline if Russia gets richer: you aren't gonna get 4x today's population
 

RousseauX

Donor
Again, I haven't said it doesn't have the potential for growth, just that I would be unable to exhibit the growth required to overtake Germany. All that you've said points to weaknesses in the system of governance that would have to be addressed for Russia to seriously be competitive with Germany's economy. The system requires stability to produce continued growth though, surely?
Russia's economy > Germany's economy at any point Russia's per capita income hits 42% of German's per capita income

Countries with shittier governments beats out ones with better governments all the time in cases where the former has more population.

You are fundamentally confused about the per capita income (which actually does require revolutionary institutional changes to get to German levels) and GDP in absolute terms (which doesn't).
Purely by otl experience. The other absolutist nations that had successfully industrialised didn't experience the strife Russia did. IMO that is due to the Tsarist system (or the conditions in Russia) as opposed to absolutism per se.
No, it's very situational due to the consequences of WWI
 

RousseauX

Donor
@Stenz

to put it in simpler terms, Mexico has a bigger economy than the Netherlands which should really be making you think about why this is
 
This requires very straight forward projection based on population growth on par with what Russia had in 1900, the problem is that fertility rates decline if Russia gets richer: you aren't gonna get 4x today's population
Agreed, plus factor in increasing availability of condoms post WWI and the Pill (post 1960 OTL, possibly earlier in a TL without the two World Wars). Plus some emigration with a less repressive regime.
 

RousseauX

Donor
@Stenz

The core problem with your argument is that if Russia just keeps what it was doing between 1860-1914 it will eventually beat Germany

The assertion you end up making literally ends up being it's impossible for Russia to do what they actually did do otl
 

RousseauX

Donor
@Stenz

actually come to think of it before I posted that book page at you from google books you probably would have argued very very hard there's no way Russia's industry could have grown faster than germany's 1860-1914 because the tsar only cared about farming and peasants and weren't smart enough to manage industrialization or some shit like that
 

Deleted member 94680

@Stenz

actually come to think of it before I posted that book page at you from google books you probably would have argued very very hard there's no way Russia's industry could have grown faster than germany's 1860-1914 because the tsar only cared about farming and peasants and weren't smart enough to manage industrialization or some shit like that

Again with the crystal ball predictions.

I don't know why you're being so aggressive about this, we simply disagree. OTL Russia surpassed Germany's economy after the restrictions and difficulties of WWI and WWII. This question asks what would happen in the absence of WWI (and by implication, WWII). I have (repeatedly) been contending that Tsarist Russia would not be able to surpass Imerialist Germany. I believe that Tsarist Russia was structurally incapable of allowing Russia to achieve its potential, without making drastic changes it was systematically incapable of making.

I'm leaving this thread now, as I don't think it's worth getting abusive over.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
It's worth noting that Russia would be hard-pressed to support such a population on her current resource base. The country could end up in a high-population low-development trap.
Doesn't Russia have a lot of resources, though (especially if it keeps Ukraine and other parts of the Russian Empire)?
 
I have (repeatedly) been contending that Tsarist Russia would not be able to surpass Imerialist Germany. I believe that Tsarist Russia was structurally incapable of allowing Russia to achieve its potential, without making drastic changes it was systematically incapable of making.

This is IMHO a pretty strange view to take as it sets up Tsarist Russia as a very rare case in human history - a society that is absolutely incapable of reform and growth beyond a certain very low level. And this despite the fact that the very same society saw a lot of change and reform as it was already in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Nobody is saying that further change and reform in a no-WWI Russia would be easy, Russia will face many problems going into the 20s and 30s, but it also has huge potential - the kind of potential that IOTL made the USSR be able to grow into an industrial and military giant, even after suffering both a devastating civil war and massively brutal Nazi invasion, and having an ineffective and repressive economic system besides.

As I see it, the Tsarist government will either reform or it will fall. If the Tsarist government paralyzes politically, unable to address the economic and social changes the nation is going through, it will suffer a revolution of sorts, violent or not, at some point. It might not need to be a Communist revolution, it might just be a palace coup of a young reform-minded royal removing a Tsar standing in the way of progress and keeping Russia down. Evolution or revolution, without WWI Russia would develop and grow into a major economic power that most likely surpasses Germany in most relevant categories with flying colors by the late 1930s at the very latest, and assuming no major European war follows later ITTL, will be generally much more affluent than the USSR was IOTL.
 
Note: Since we're talking about a Russian Empire WI, when I say "Russia" in this post I mean "the area of land inside the borders of 1914 Imperial Russia".

Doesn't Russia have a lot of resources, though (especially if it keeps Ukraine and other parts of the Russian Empire)?

Yes and no.

Russia has lots of resources in absolute terms. However, those resources are often of relatively poor quality, in inaccessible places (like the middle of permafrost hell - aka "Siberia") or just really spread out (like Russia's farmland).

The resources in convenient locations (in the West of the country) weren't particularly plentiful and were mostly exhausted by the 70s.

And even in Western Russia, raw materials needed more rail miles to be put to use. The Eastern USA is a fantastic place to build an industrial complex - all the major resources needed, fertile farmland, good internal waterways, lots of coastline and a dense population that is fairly close to the resources. In contrast, Western Russia has a less dense population, and their resources were less conveniently located. So for a given amount of final output, US goods had less rail-miles needed than the same Russian goods did, meaning Russian agriculture and industry could never be as efficient as American industry and agriculture assuming both had the same technology.

And those increased costs all along the supply chain mean more wealth has to be spent on maintaining the supply chain itself, leaving less to support people.

Ukraine/South Russia is some of the best farming land on the world, it has a huge output even today despite horrific production inefficiency, lack of investment and corruption of officials.

That amazing farmland forms a tiny proportion of Russia's overall land area. Overall, Russia is far less fertile than the US or China and far, far less fertile than Western Europe. Average conditions in Russia and the Ukraine are more comparable to North and South Dakota (fertile but cold and dry US states) than they are to conditions in Pennsylvania. Worse, the Russian/Soviet climate is much more variable, leading to higher variation between good and bad years.

If you compare Soviet farming with American farming (most of which also suffers for lack of investment and has serious, serious problems with resource exhaustion), it's clear that if you transplanted American farmers and American farm support institutions (like Agricultural universities) to the Russian environment it would be more efficient in terms of inputs and would likely achieve slightly higher overall outputs, but it wouldn't have allowed the Soviets to be self sufficient in agricultural products. Simply put, the way the Communist planners wanted their people to eat in the 1980s (like contemporary British people), no industrial agriculture system could have made the Soviets self sufficient.

For the Soviets to be self sufficient they needed to accept that meat couldn't form a major part of the diet and nor could wheat.

Yes, but it doesn't have to look the way people often wishfully think it ought to look, assuming an "UK but with more vodka, bears, and beards".
It could also be militarist police state, it could be aristocratic-plutocratic oligarchy, it could even be Orthodox equivalent of Wahhabi State.

I agree there, that said, to be fair there are alot of ways to be more democratic than Tsarist Russia and not look like Britain.

Modern Iran and China are more democratic than Russia was in 1914 and they're not exactly "UK but with more X, Y and Z".

This requires very straight forward projection based on population growth on par with what Russia had in 1900, the problem is that fertility rates decline if Russia gets richer: you aren't gonna get 4x today's population

That IS with declining fertility. In fact, it is assuming fertility declined like a normal developing country (say Brazil or Mexico).

A straight line projection would lead to a population well over 1 billion.

Agreed, plus factor in increasing availability of condoms post WWI and the Pill (post 1960 OTL, possibly earlier in a TL without the two World Wars). Plus some emigration with a less repressive regime.

Fun fact: contraception doesn't have much impact on fertility rates.

The big killers of population growth are urbanization and education (particularly the widespread availability of university level education). And this is why a Tsarist Russia is likely to see significantly more population growth - the Soviets had a serious fetish for packing people in cities and for educating them.

fasquardon
 
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[snip] That IS with declining fertility. In fact, it is assuming fertility declined like a normal developing country (say Brazil or Mexico).

A straight line projection would lead to a population well over 1 billion. [snip]

The big killers of population growth are urbanization and education (particularly the widespread availability of university level education). And this is why a Tsarist Russia is likely to see significantly more population growth - the Soviets had a serious fetish for packing people in cities and for educating them.

It is interesting that you are at once telling about the serious limitations of the Russian agriculture, talking about huge population growth and then saying that this Russia would not see as much urbanization and education than the USSR.

As I see it, the limitations of Russian agriculture, together with industrialization, would almost necessarily contribute to heavy urbanization, though maybe a bit later than IOTL. It would be the industrial population in the growing cities and towns that would grow absolutely and comparatively more than the agricultural population. There is, after all, only so much agricultural expansion Russia can take, the best farmlands already being under cultivation in 1914 - compare to Brazil, for example, which still today has a vast "reserve" of underdeveloped fertile agricultural land. So, urbanization would start to increase significantly already by the 1930s and 40s, productivity and wages would grow much faster in the factories than in the countryside, where it would take longer for mechanization to take hold. And with industrialization and this growing flight to the cities, driven ITTL more by supply and demand than in the USSR, the rise in literacy and education would be pretty much inevitable (industrial workers, foremen and engineers can't do without education like peasants), which would in turn start bringing down fertility in the urban areas. This would not be a "normal developing country" like Brazil or Mexico, which have been billed late industrializers, but Russia ITTL would be a late second-generation industrializer, beating Brazil or Mexico by several decades in becoming a modern industrial society.

To put this all together, I think we could expect Russia ITTL see most its population growth by the 1950s, by which fertility would have started coming down due to increased urbanization and education in a industrial society. Maybe a growth from circa 150 million to 300million by 1940 and then a further, slower growth to around 400 million by the 2010s. This would already be a bigger growth than what the US saw in the same time period, even while having much more immigration than Russia would, and having more fertile farmland to tap to feed its people, so IMO it is hard to see how it would be realistic to get much more than 450 million people in the Russian empire by the present day.
 
then saying that this Russia would not see as much urbanization and education than the USSR.

Well, to be clear, Russia urbanizing more slowly does not mean they won't urbanize. Indeed, a non-Bolshevik Russia may overtake the Soviets in terms of urbanization - so it might start slower, but speed up and overtake the Soviets so the Empire had a more urban population by the modern day. The same could happen to education (particularly since the collapse of the USSR hit the Russian education system pretty hard).

As I see it, the limitations of Russian agriculture, together with industrialization, would almost necessarily contribute to heavy urbanization, though maybe a bit later than IOTL. It would be the industrial population in the growing cities and towns that would grow absolutely and comparatively more than the agricultural population. There is, after all, only so much agricultural expansion Russia can take, the best farmlands already being under cultivation in 1914 - compare to Brazil, for example, which still today has a vast "reserve" of underdeveloped fertile agricultural land. So, urbanization would start to increase significantly already by the 1930s and 40s, productivity and wages would grow much faster in the factories than in the countryside, where it would take longer for mechanization to take hold. And with industrialization and this growing flight to the cities, driven ITTL more by supply and demand than in the USSR, the rise in literacy and education would be pretty much inevitable (industrial workers, foremen and engineers can't do without education like peasants), which would in turn start bringing down fertility in the urban areas. This would not be a "normal developing country" like Brazil or Mexico, which have been billed late industrializers, but Russia ITTL would be a late second-generation industrializer, beating Brazil or Mexico by several decades in becoming a modern industrial society.

All good points, and I think you paint a very plausible picture of how things could go if Russia gets lucky.

I have to admit, I'd not thought about the impact opening up new lands had on South American demography. Though I wonder if Mexico, for example, has added much agricultural land - certainly they haven't since 1965. And countries like Chile, Venezuela and Colombia have less agricultural land now than they did in 1965 (and all these countries have higher populations than they did in 1965 - in 1965 Mexico had 45 million people, today 122 million but agricultural acreage has risen from 10% of the land area to only 11% today).

On the other hand, Russia could easily end up with a regime who spends a good portion of resources supporting the peasant communes, meaning the rural population is kept artificially high for the sake of political peace and no farmer has the large acres that would make industrial farming techniques worthwhile. As a result, Russia might end up like India - their agricultural sector deeply inefficient, their villages overpopulated and the state spending large portions of the budget keeping the status quo going.

Or the country could urbanize enough that peasant sons could move to the cities for a few years to work and send money back home so the family could import food (a similar thing happens in some developing countries today) - again, the rural population is kept over-sized only this time it is individual actors subsidizing the rural population, not the state.

Or the poor education of Russians in the 19th century bites the country in the rear when some crisis comes along there aren't enough educated people to provide robust solutions - so instead Russia ends up with a brittle political system and well intentioned but ultimately inefficient economic policy - only a different brittle and inefficient system than that of the Bolsheviks of OTL. (So I'm sure some will disagree, but I do think that if Argentina had a better education system around the turn of the 20th Century, it would have avoided much of the damage they suffered at the hands of Peronism and if Russians had better educations in the late 19th Century, they'd have gotten through the chaos in the wake of WW1 in better shape.)

So yes, I think it is possible Russia might reach the modern day with "only" 450 million in population, but I really doubt it. Too much can go wrong and if history tells us one thing, as countries develop, lots of things go wrong.

fasquardon
 
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