Thread by @austrosillyism

But shortly before the February Revolution Tsarist reforms led by people like Witte and Stolypin led to drastic industrialisation. Metallurgy and mining increased 84%. metalworking 79%, textiles 46%, electrical power 83% and woollens 56%. Light industries like sugar, cotton, low-growth tobacco etc. also showed growth. The railroad boom in the 1890s also helped bolster the process of industrialisation and began to recover before the War...
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Output-wise Russia began at half the level of the US, 80% the UK and Germany, and only slightly below France. By 1913 output was well above France and comparable to Germany and the UK, and only really lagged behind the US. Overall growth levels were similar to the UK, Germany, Italy, etc. but slower than that of the US, Canada, Scandinavia etc. Per-capita product was comparable to Germany, the United States and Canada whom were mostly in the "late" stages of industrialisation.

Although Russian income inequality is often stated as extremely drastic, it turns out that it was not terrible for the time or even the present-day. The Gini Coefficient of 0,362 was lower than Victorian England at the time and is comparable to nations like Latvia and the UK today, and the income share of the top 1 & 5% was lower than comparable European/Scandinavian nations at the time.

The idea of a despondent peasant class, wherein the peasantry lived primarily in subsistence, also does not seem to be universally accurate. For instance, in the Voschchazhnikovo area there are no references to increased mortality, and foreigners remarked that grain prices were cheaper and more available. In the Volga region there are evidence of local markets which had more than 140 items for sale. In Voschchazkhniovo markets offered needles, linen, tobacco, paper and other consumer goods. In addition, only about the bottom 25% actually lived in wooden huts-the majority in these rural areas had two-story stone houses.

The idea of limited labour mobility and low land productivity due to the mir commune system (commonly referred to as the agrarian crises) is also reductionist. The Stolypin reforms, which allowed exits from the mir commune and the enclosure/privatisation of previous communes. This drove increases in land productivity as communes and farmers adjusted for economic changes. There were also examples of entrepreneurship within the Black Earth South and Baltic regions and examples of significant immigration from rural to urban region evidenced via. passports. Nominal rural wages also increased during this time in both Moscow and St.Petersburg.

I want to conclude my revisionism by arguing that Soviet industrialisation was also imbalanced and to an extent illusory. Soviet industrialisation favoured heavy industry disproportionately at the extent of light industry, which lowered the growth rate of non-agricultural consumption.

Total factor productivity in Soviet Russia was also continuously lower than that of the Tsarists, particularly in the agricultural sector. As Davies argues, this was because of re-collectivisation, by disrupting crop rotation, and by the fall of draught animals and loss of entrepreneurship caused by dekulakisation. Also, in the industrial sector, extremely ambitious production targets caused expansion of industrial output and labour allocation, but this lowered labour productivity overall.

I do not want to argue that the Tsarist economy was perfect. It had extreme structural flaws and barriers-of-entry that prevented it from fully flourishing; for instance, the massive channeling of money towards rail networks, the protectionism on foodstuffs, the export-oriented industrial policy, state-supported cartelisation on oil, steel, iron and coal that allowed them to set price controls, and low levels of human capital.

But the standard narrative that Tsarist Russia was stagnant and pre-industrial, that agrarianism prevented industrialisation, that labour markets were inflexible, that land communes failed to develop, that rural citizens were extensively impoverished etc. is at best overly simplistic.

Sources:
Industrial Expansion in Tsarist Russia, 1908-14 by Peter Gatrell
The Industrialisation of Russia, 1700-1914 by M.E. Falkus
Before command : an economic history of Russia by Paul R. Gregory
The rural/urban wage gap in the industrialisation of Russia, 1884–1910 by Leonid Borodkin, Brigitte Granville And Carol Scott Leonard
Tracy Dennison and Steven Nafziger, Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia
The Stolypin Reform and Agricultural Productivity in Late Imperial Russia Paul Castañeda, Dower University of Wisconsin-Madison
Russian Inequality on the Eve of Revolution, Peter H. Lindert, Steven Nafziger
WAS STALIN NECESSARY FOR RUSSIA'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT? Anton Cheremukhin