Russian Empire industrial development was fine. Labor productivity in the industrial part of the economy was on par with French industry and only a bit behind Britain.
ideas.repec.org/p/hig/wpaper/1… x.com/FirstOccidenta…
In absolute terms, the industrial portion of the Russian economy was the fourth largest in the world, behind only the US, Germany, and UK.
GDP/capita and other labor productivity stats just look bad because Russia also had 100 million+ extremely low productivity illiterate peasants
But this would have naturally resolved itself with increased education + urbanization, as was already happening and happened in every other similarly industrialized country at the time (most of Southern Europe and Japan).
What the Soviets did was force tens of millions of people from the low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity industrial sectors. However, in doing so, they ruined Russian demography and the productivity of both sectors relative to Western state-of-the-art.
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