I can honestly see the Central Asia as kinda a new Russian heartland with many living in present day Kazakhstan and majority in the Northern areas.
Russia's potential
- Thread starter KING OF EGYPT
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Or, Central Asia could become Russia's Sun Belt, by having a lot of booming cities driven by technological and industrial growth, and a demand for a nice climate.
Not necessarily just ethnic Russians. If the Russians play their cards right I could see Central Asia becoming a major destination of international emigration. The terms would be something like "You have to learn Russian, but if you do, there is a lot of cheap real estate you could have." There is a high risk though, that Russian racism would preclude non-negligible immigration from outside Europe, which could lead to the squandering of some developmental potential.
I think there's a very narrow but plausible window for Russia to come out of the 20th century as a global superpower on-par with the US of today. Say the February Revolution still goes down and knocks out the Tsar but instead of the October revolution you get a messy civil war between the Whites and a broader, more multipolar and less vanguard-y socialist coalition that ends with the latter victorious and implementing a reasonably democratic government focused on managing the transition through capitalism to "true socialism" that orthodox Marxism said was needed. Then you can get a government that's just socialist enough to break the power of the aristocracy, conservative peasantry, and foreign investors, invest in the educational and industrial infrastructure necessary to develop and modernize Russia, and universalist enough to tie the minorities together better, while also being democratic and capitalist enough that it can engage better with the global economy and diplomacy, and doesn't get trapped into the authoritarian single-party corrupt command economy hellscape of the OTL USSR.
Definitely a tightrope to walk that'd require a good deal of luck, but that sort of alt-"USSR" that manages to modernize with far less death and devastation than the OTL USSR and comes through an alt-WWII with less of a body-count and far warmer relations with the WAllies would be extremely well placed to grow into a stronger, less diplomatically, culturally, and economically isolated, and more sustainable superpower than OTL's USSR. Without a Cold War to keep the US armed to the teeth and active on the world stage they would by default become the premier military power (though probably not naval power) of the globe. Economy wise Russia will always have some trouble with its geographic isolation and dependence on resource extraction, but with less damage from the Revolution, WWII, and a badly run command-style economy followed by a worse managed privatization I'd expect their economy to grow to a size that's at least on par or greater than the US, though probably not on a per-capita basis. It'd have its internal political and economic issues especially in the Caucuses and Central Asia, would never enjoy the period of hyperpower status that the US did in the 90's, and will eventually be challenged by the rising Asian powers, but I could see Russia basically spending a good century as the biggest cornerstone of the international economic and political order.
Definitely a tightrope to walk that'd require a good deal of luck, but that sort of alt-"USSR" that manages to modernize with far less death and devastation than the OTL USSR and comes through an alt-WWII with less of a body-count and far warmer relations with the WAllies would be extremely well placed to grow into a stronger, less diplomatically, culturally, and economically isolated, and more sustainable superpower than OTL's USSR. Without a Cold War to keep the US armed to the teeth and active on the world stage they would by default become the premier military power (though probably not naval power) of the globe. Economy wise Russia will always have some trouble with its geographic isolation and dependence on resource extraction, but with less damage from the Revolution, WWII, and a badly run command-style economy followed by a worse managed privatization I'd expect their economy to grow to a size that's at least on par or greater than the US, though probably not on a per-capita basis. It'd have its internal political and economic issues especially in the Caucuses and Central Asia, would never enjoy the period of hyperpower status that the US did in the 90's, and will eventually be challenged by the rising Asian powers, but I could see Russia basically spending a good century as the biggest cornerstone of the international economic and political order.
Without the USSR as we know it the Hitler regime would be butterflied away, because the fear of communism contributed to the acceptance of the Nazi Party in Germany.
Without the Nazis I don't think there would be anything comparable to WWII in Europe. Poland, Britain and France didn't want war in 1939 and a non-Nazi Germany probably wouldn't want either. Even a parahistorical right-wing German strongman, Notler, leader of the Notzis, if you will, highly likely wouldn't be a geopolitical gambler comparable to Hitler and would challenge the Versailles-based order without overplaying his hand.
This kind of assumes that the “Whites” were diehard monarchists which most of them were not. The whole movement started as a self-preservation reaction to the wholesale slaughter of the officers, and not only, by the Bolsheviks-led “revolution masses”. If the Provisional Government managed to stay in power and put its act together, there would be no RCW, at least in its OTL scope.
Errr.. putting aside the fact that “aristocracy” had very little power even before wwi, breaking the second group on the list would mean a policy going against majority of the population. Which was what the Bolsheviks did after the RCW.
The comprehensive educational program had been in place well before wwi and it already was quite successful.
And the money and technology would come from where? The Soviets did use the foreign investors, whom they later cheated but your socialists would do what?
Sorry, this sounds as a set of the abstract and pretty much meaningless cliches with all problems being solved by the facts of being “democratic” and “capitalist”. The global economy did not care too much about Imperial Russia not being democratic and it was pretty much “integrated” by 1914. Did not help too much even with the closest allies like France and Britain. “Integration” of the Russian economy of that period meant it being an exporter of food and raw materials and importer of the manufactured goods. The “democratic” partners had their own interests (and those of their population) and the last thing they needed was a competitor in the areas where they were strong.
Honestly, Russian political development under the late Czars was not that different from what we saw in much of Europe just a half century behind. If Russia had avoided WWI, the Duma would likely have slowly increased its power until the Czars were mostly figureheads by the mid century. Russia would suffer somewhat from the resource trap, but would likely do better then countries like Brazil if for no other reason for its integration into the European markets and investments, and the necessarity of domestic industrial product for military-political reasons. Russia would likely see increased separatism troubles, but the core regions like Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan would likely be mostly stable. I could easily see Russia decide let fringe region get increased autonomy, and de facto simply ending up as just part of the Russian interest sphere.
Russia are unlikely to rival American GDP per capita, but I could easily see a modern Russia with a GDP per capita of $40K and 400 million inhabitants.
Russia are unlikely to rival American GDP per capita, but I could easily see a modern Russia with a GDP per capita of $40K and 400 million inhabitants.
That scenario would need hellish lot of good luck. You should at least remove Bolsheviks and not sure how it could happen that late.
IMO better ways would are either prevent WW1 completely or end that already before February Revolution ratherly to Entente victory. And already before WW1 Russian economy was rising and people begun to become more aware over several issues. It would be just inevitable that Russia would had become if not outright democracy at least somehow democracy with weak tsar and viable capitalist system with well-fare society. Only stop here was Nicholas II but he won't be here forever. He was actually unpopular even among other Romanovs.
Yeah it'd take a lot of luck for history to go down similar enough rails to WWII, but is not impossible. It happened once after all, and the internal German communist movement is still strong and radical enough to be a bugbear. Some sort of revisionist right-wing authoritarian government of postwar Germany is pretty likely, and all it takes to spark off another world war with people like that in power is a confluence of time, idiots and mistakes .
I don't see how this logic tracks.
I would very much disagree with this assessment of how the White movement started, yes it was a reaction to the Bolshevik takeover and dissolution of the Provisional government, but not a unified or ideologically homogenous movement or triggered solely as an act of self-preservation to Bolshevik atrocities.
Which is a lot to ask given how dysfunctional it was. Probably the best opportunity for something like this to happen would be a Kornilov affair gone hot in a political environment minus Lenin, something like what was done as in "A Day in October"
I find this very hard to swallow in a nation ruled by an autocratic Tsar where most high ranking officials were nobility. Also, the peasantry were not a homogenous mass either; there were divisions with geography, age, etc... What needed to be broken was the more traditional peasant villages where the village elders retained an iron grip on social and political power and the old systems of manual communal farming were still in place.
There's successful, and then there's having a public education system. Yes Imperial Russia was increasing its literacy, but this was more in spite of the Tsarist system than because of it.
Maybe from not having as awful a civil war and destructive internal economic policies?
Is it abstract and rosy? Sure, but that doesn't mean that it's not a route that Russia could travel down. There was considerable interest by the West into investing in the USSR manufacturing and markets in OTL, I don't find it unimaginable that a less insane Socialist government of Russia could do a much better job of attracting foreign investment and building a better industrial economy than the one Stalin did. I feel like you're also taking far too rosy a view of the Whites and Imperial Russia and being far too hostile to the possibility that the right sort of left-wing government could take Russia down a better path than it did OTL.
Oh absolutely, I think it'd require a pre-WWI POD to the Russian SDLP that eliminates Lenin and prevents the Bolshevik-Menshevik split and changes the character of the Russian Left... without majorly affecting the course of events up to WWI and the February revolution. Its definitely one of the less probable paths for events to take, but I could see it happening if all the pieces fall into place.
As I tried to make clear in my original post, this isn't a likely or probable scenario to happen to Russia and would require a lot of luck, but I don't think it's outside of the realm of possibility. Crazy shit can and does happen in history, and OTL Russia rolled a lot of snake eyes but was still a global superpower for almost fifty years. It doesn't seem implausible to me that there's a path where Russia rolls some sixes instead and comes out doing much better economically, politically, and diplomatically than it did OTL.
Warning
Well, this is your problem.
I did not wrote a single word about it being ideologically unified, etc. Of course, self-preservation was not the only reason but the normal people tend to put it high in their set of the priorities. Quite a few of the participants did not give a blip about the Provisional Government, which they despised.
I did not say that the chance was great. Notice “IF”. But, at least initially, it was reasonably good. Then it screwed up pretty much everything.
If you have swallowing problems, go to doctor. In a meantime, don’t change the terminology. You wrote “break the power of the aristocracy”. There was a big difference between “aristocracy” and “nobility” and I expected that you know the subject you are writing about.
Again, who said that they were? But even by the Bolsheviks terminology the peasants were generally a conservative class except for the lowest layer (poorest peasants and farm hands). And by 1914 that lowest group was a minority. Majority were “middle class”. So what are you objecting against?
Unless you can produce numeric breakdown of “conservative” vs. “progressive” peasants by these categories, this is just a hot air.
This is what Stolypin reform was about and it hit a fundamental problem: majority of the Russian peasants did not want to get out of the communal model. Probably this may change in few decades of a dedicated policy of encouraging the individual farming but forcibly “breaking” it was quite problematic both ideologically and practically because it would require a thorough cadaster and tremendous effort in breaking a communal land into the reasonably equal quality farms.
Are you saying that the Russian Empire did not have a public education system? Wow!
No kidding. The rest is along the same lines and I’m not interested.
prani
Banned
Majority of People do not stick to tradition because it is tradition but because it was advantageous to them, the old system of common filed system of the Mirs provided much need security social, economic and other security needed for a civilized life....you can break these systems only expanding state capacity to police, provide civic services, education, healthcare, assistance in agriculture like subsidies, transportations and communication, electrification, maintaining property records, expand markets, providing credit etc etc.
To do that you need to Industrialize and urbanize so that you have people shift from rural to urban areas which serves the twin purpose of relieving the population pressure on agriculture which will break the hold on old these old institutions, the system of common field is quite stubborn and it survived even in the German empire even though that country industrialized by the late 19th century. So if you just issue a proclamation abolishing Mirs nothing would come off it, things would stay the same unless the Russian state takes on those duties.
In so far as the steps taken by the imperial Russian government was opening up of Siberia because Imperial Russia was poor (relatively speaking), its industries were concentrated around extraction of raw materials and turning it into intermediate goods and agricultural products and the economy concentrated around exports of those goods, in this sense Imperial Russia is not that different from modern Russia.
What Stolypin agrarian reforms did was open up vast expanse of forest steppe in Siberia and northern central asia for the surplus and more entrepreneurial peasant population with a hope that these peasants would be loyal subjects of the Tsar, expand agricultural production thereby increase per capita income and to alleviate the population pressure on land in European Russia this was the next best thing to the one I suggested in the 1st paragraph something which was impossible for Russia to do given its level of development.
Europe as a whole? Probably not. The U.S.? Possibly, but it's still difficult. Until the Cold War, Russia had the population necessary to compete with the United States. The key is to have a combination of a lot of people and a highly skilled workforce. It's about education. That's what made the United States such a juggernaut by World War 1 and 2. They had a lot of men to draw on and a lot of expertise in various fields. If you can manage that, we could be looking at the 21st Century being Russian.
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All true and don’t forget certain “nuances” on the top of a general picture you outlined:
1. On the communal level land ownership (which community owns what) was quite often not a clearcut issue by the historical reasons going back to at least XVIII century. In an absence of a comprehensive land cadaster ( and failed attempts to create one) and Russian system of the inheritance, there were countless litigation cases related to the ownership of a specific piece of land. The reform of AII could not and did not resolve these issues and they were dumped upon the rural communities with a resulting “transfer” of many cases from the courts to the regular physical fighting between the communities.
2. While Stolypin’s laws provided an individual peasant with a right to have his own contiguous parcel of land out of the communal land, enforced application of the new system to the whole communities would inevitably involve #1 with the government (and communities) not having the adequate legal material to resolve the claims.
3. On the undisputed communal land the field area(s) had been on the annual basis redistributed between the community members based upon the current membership and “fairness”. Fairness principle meant that each member gets an equal share based upon the assessed quality of the land and, because the land quality in the communal possession was usually varied, each member was ending up with a set of the narrow (sometimes few meters wide) non-adjacent strips sometimes located few kilometers from each other. A 100% switch from this system to one of the individual farms while maintaining at least semblance of fairness would be extremely difficult and this was about just the fields. Add to this undivided areas of the pastures, water sources, woods, etc. How would you distribute all of them? The American model was simply inapplicable to most of the European Russia.
4. Besides Stolypin’s model there was an idea promoted by a popular Austrian economist (forgot the name) who preached switch to the big state-sponsored agricultural entities which, AFAIK, were somewhat similar to the later Soviet “collective farms” or even “sovkhozes” (state-owed farms) in the terms of the whole community jointly working on the land and then distributing product according to the merits. The obvious argument in favor of that model was an ability to deploy the modern equipment and progressive technologies on the big fields. IIRC, there were already some agricultural cooperatives prior to wwi.
5. In strictly practical terms, Russian Empire did not need more peasants. It needed more industrial workers and the capitalists with “state view” like Ryabushinsky had been preaching move “from field to plant”. Within this framework the farmers or big agricultural enterprises were useful due to a noticeably higher productivity but for the peasants to go from the communities to the factories there had to be meaningful stimulus (higher income, social benefits) and while the numbers of industrial workers kept growing, majority stuck with the community by the reasons you listed: almost guaranteed minimal degree of a social support and certain degree of an independence.
6. RE already was a very attractive place for the foreign investments with the predictable results: by 1913 over 60% of the business operations had been conducted by 6 major banks controlled by the French capital. Add to the picture British, French and German capital and it is easy to figure out who was controlling most of the Russian industry and what were the expected results. “Produgol” and “Prodametal” had been controlling most of the Russian coal and iron production and were under the French control, oil: “Mazut” was controlled by Rothschild, “Branobel” by Nobel family, 97% of the wagons were produced by the syndicate “Prodwagon” controlled initially by the Dutch and German and then by French capital, etc. And, if anything, the dependencies were getting greater. For example, in the 1910s Kokovtsev arranged for the 700,000,000 rubles railroad construction loan in France in addition to the numerous earlier loans. So how much more “friendlier” environment one could get? But, with all these investments, the strategically critical industries like production of the engines for cars and planes had been almost absent and the same goes for the “trifles” like transmissions, ignitions, etc. At best, there was a possibility to arrange very expensive licenses for the Russian production. There is absolutely no reason to expect that with some kind of a “democratic” government the foreign capitalists would start unselfishly promoting Russian industrial development. In OTL the Soviets managed to rebuilt their industry almost from the scratch by inviting the foreign companies to build industrial plants in the SU (ideological differences seemingly were not a problem) but: (a) prior to this they unilaterally cancelled all imperial debts and (b) after the plants had been built they screwed the foreign investors. In the case of a honest cooperation with the “democratic” government neither (a) nor (b) would be possible and Russia would proceed from 60-70% dependency to 80-90%.
I don't know about full potential, but when I tried to build my own scenario (mild CP victory in WW1, no RCW, no Soviet Union and no WW2), I personally settled on these numbers for the Russia of ATL2022:
| # | Country | Population | GDP(PPP)($) | GDP(PPP)/Capita($) | GDP($) | GDP/Capita($) | Area(km2) | Pop. Density(/km2) | Non-prim. sect.(%) | Tier | Status | Power Index | Region |
| 3. | Russia | 440 000 000 | 17 600 000 000 000 | 40 000 | 9 900 000 000 000 | 22 500 | 22 265 106 | 19,76 | 95,3 | A - Superpower | G8, G20 | 135,61 | Europe |
My apologies for the long delay in responding to this, I had to hunt in the attic for some 34 year old notes from my university days on the economics of synthetic rubbers. Later synthetic rubbers are actually superior to natural rubber in terms of their resistance to oils and other compounds and are also more resistant to oxydising agents. However this probably wouldn't have been as true of the early synthetic rubbers produced by Lebedev (or perhaps in a less industrialised Tsarist Russia these were less obvious, but I doubt that -Russia wasn't that unindustrialised and had shipyards, motor works and aircraft factories). The first synthetic rubber that I can clearly identify as possessing these advantages in neoprene which was developed by DuPont in 1931. I am not clear, but presume that Sovprene (created by Soviet researchers in 1940) would have possessed similar advantages?
However, OTL the Czarist regime neither possessed a modern mechanised army, was allied to one of the world's two greatest rubber producers an (British Empire)d enjoyed normal diplomatic relations with the other which was a neutral power (Empire of the Netherlands). With the US either a reasonably pro-Entente neutral (up to 1917), or an ally and Japan a British ally there was little prospect of interdiction of supplies arriving at Port Arthur or Vladivostok. As such, it is unsurprising that synthetic rubber remained a laboratory curiosity as it was not a military priority.
A TL where either the Russian Empire still remained part of the Dreikaiserbund and hence the Central Powers or where Britain allied with the Central Powers might see an incentive for much earlier development of synthetic rubber. A WW1 where Turkey remained neutral might see even less interwar development work than OTL. And a Russia without Azerbaijan might have less oil to spare until the Siberian oilfields are discovered and exploited.
In terms of the inherent advantages of synthetic rubber in aircraft and tank engines, the point at which these start to confer a key performance advantage are the (OTL) high performance turboprops of the mid to late 1940s (Hawker Tempest and Fury, presumably the Lavochkin La-9 and 11) and the Black Prince, Centurion, Pershing and Josef Stalin tanks.
Obviously some PODs will advance and retard technical and scientific development, as will each TL's Russia's foreign and military policy and external threats and alliances.
On the point of the price of rubber in 1923/4, the world price per pound of natural rubber was around thirty US cents . I am not quite clear if this was the price per short (US) ton or Imperial (UK) ton? The former is 2,000 pounds, the latter 2,240. However in either case in looks like rubber was fetching over one gold rouble a pound. This, I suspect, is far more than 30-35 US cents. I suspect that OTL the USSR price may have been inflated by effective trade sanctions following the repudiation of foreign debts and a consequent inability for traders to get insurance, make use of factoring services etc. for which they would naturally charge a stiff premium.