While the trope of Russian backwardness is a common one and one Russianists hate, the idea that Russia was a modernizing society with an emerging capitalist class, still less a middle class, is also off the mark. While it is true that there was a large boom in economic growth, this was largely due to the state-sponsored programs. This meant economic growth was much more constrained to those sectors the late-nineteenth century state found important- railways, heavy industry related to military, etc.- and while this created a strata of white-collar individuals, it it not create a middle-class in the sense of those in the West. In his magisterial Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia, Alfred Rieber note that the late imperial period's capitalist class lacked three traits common in Western polities:

• There was no clear ideology that animated these men such as free-trade of the UK or the corporatism that characterized Central European industrialism. In short, Russian entrepreneurs did not really see themselves as part of a larger movement.

• One of the reasons for this lack of any sense of purpose was the that the imperial state provided little to no mechanisms for unified organization. The reams of social history produced on late imperial elites backs Rieber's assertion up; Russian entrepreneurs may have been able to make unprecedented amounts of money, but this meant little in terms of actual political and social power. The soslovie estate system, while cracking under modern pressures, further helped retard organization of this new elite.

• Finally, Rieber notes there was a lack of will among entrepreneurs to change this situation. This was partly a result of the immense geographic size of Russia and internal ethnic divisions which made acted as vertical divisions within the empire's social structure and made it hard to develop a class-based form of identity. The state's use of the soslovie system and the intertwining of the bureaucracy with industrial development further prevented Russia's entrepreneurs to think that they could change the situation.

The political structure of the empire itself was also not very conducive to either free(ish) markets or with the potential of social upstarts succeeding in it. Stolypin's attempts to transform the peasant commune into a freeholders (a bet on the strong and sober) not only illustrates the cardinal role of the state in Russian economic life- the main mechanism for this transformation was the Peasant Land Bank- but also the inherent hostility of the imperial apparatus to such changes. Stolypin's peasant reforms gave his enemies further ammunition to push him from power as Nicholas II was already not that fond of his minister and his ideas. Yet even as tsardom tried to retard or claw back the political and social changes of modernity, it often created them. As Stephen Kotkin memorably put it in volume one of his biography of Stalin:

The autocracy’s core problem was not that it fell under political assault, or that authoritarianism was ipso facto incompatible with modernity, but that Russia’s autocracy was deliberately archaic. Tsarism choked on the very modernity that it desperately needed and, to an extent, pursued in order to compete as a great power.

Whether Witte's developmentalism or Stolypin's attempts to shore up a conservative order, the state was one of the driving engines of Russia's capitalist growth. And the empire's political structure by design could not and would not stomach the consequences of its actions.

The idea that 1917 somehow interrupted Russia's upwards trajectory was a minor one made during the Cold War, especially among emigres. Alexander Gerschenkron for example argued that Russia was entering a period of modern capitalism before war and revolution interrupted it. These estimates though tend to run afoul of two factors. One, the political structure of the empire was not one that could have accommodated these changes. The 1905 Revolution resulted in a compromise that pleased few and there was little sign after 1905 that something had fundamentally changed. As Dominic Lieven put it in one of his LSE lectures, it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesize a situation in which the Bolsheviks could have seized power without a world war, but it is near impossible to envision any scenario where they would have kept it.

Second, while the late imperial boom was certainly quite real, it is a tricky proposition to posit that it could have been sustained to transform Russia into something like Germany or another Western economy. For one thing, the sheer size and diversity of Russia was a major challenge. The Urals region has a bounty of natural resources, especially iron, but was so remote in 1900 that private investment in this region was nearly impossible. The same could be said of other major concerns; underdevelopment meant that the state orders were vital for any major industrial concern. Added to this, the late-tsarist political structure could never really figure out or resolve its nationalities problem. Ethnic Great Russians consisted of about 40% of the empire's total population and tended to be underrepresented among the new men of Russia's industrial age. Many of these men came from ethnic or religious groups which were not privelaged by the soslovie system such as Old Believers or Jews. The aforementioned political structure was also a major hurdle to make a peaceful transition to a prosperous and stable polity. While there are some economists who are confident that the growth rates were possible, most notably Paul Gregory, their models tend to be outliers for Russianists. As Robert Allen's From Farm to Factory put it:

One thing is clear: the nineteenth-century sources of growth had run their course, and the most important had reversed direction. The prime mover behind the agricultural expansion had been the rise in the price of wheat. After World War I, wheat prices collapsed, and the expansion of wheat acreage ceased around the globe. During the Depression of the 1930s, wheat prices hit rock bottom, and land was falling out of cultivation. Stalin is infamous for offering Soviet peasants low prices for grain, but it is none too clear that prices in the Ukraine were any lower than prices in Saskatchewan at the same time. If capitalism had continued in Russia, the wheat boom would have ended there, just as it did in Canada, Australia, and Argentina. Income growth slowed dramatically in these countries and the same fate awaited Russia.

For Allen, the hypothetical Russia sans 1917 or 1914 was much more akin to Argentina or India than to Germany. A good many Russianists such as R. W. Davies- or at least those who dabble in counterfactuals- tend to concur.