The short answer is that Russia under the last few decades of the Imperial tsarist regime was more developed than commonly assumed. The longer answer is complicated.

I’ll preface by saying that while my focus is Russian history, I am not an economic historian.

However, I’ll do my best to lend some brief perspectives as to why 1) perceptions of Imperial Russia’s economy became so distorted, which is thoroughly integrated with 2) why Imperial Russia was wealthier than thought.

For starters, as you said yourself, Russia in the latter half of the 1800s had massive population growth - most keenly felt by rural peasants, where sharing land with more people became burdensome. It also had a far larger population, large amount of arable land, and natural resources - even though many, like oil and gas, were untapped in 1880.

Doubtful figures

Examining Russia’s economy in 1880 is challenging - and I would be skeptical of their accuracy. For starters, it wasn’t clear exactly how many people lived in the Russian empire at the time, which had just reached the peak of its territorial expansion.

The first and only Imperial population census was only completed in 1897 - although censuses had been made on a city-level beforehand.

Reasons for this include the relatively small size of the Imperial government’s administrative apparatus, and the natural difficulties of governing the world’s largest territory - with much land, like Siberia, being extremely sparsely populated.

In any case, Russia in 1897 had around 125 million people, putting it on a par with Japan today. This dwarfed the populations of the other three great European powers, Germany, (52 million), France, (close to 40 million), and the UK (37 million).

Looking at the statistics given in another, we can thus conclude Russia’s total GDP per person (if we want to count GNP and GDP as the same, for our approximate purposes - I stand corrected if not) was over three times lower than the UK’s.

This figure, given Russia’s relative lack of heavy industry and processed goods at the time, seems like it would be more or less accurate.

Transformation

A note on the times we’re talking about: Russia’s modernisation can be considered to have began in 1861, when serfdom was abolished. Yet the 1880s and onwards were something of a threshold decade, after which its development of heavy industry - as opposed to mainly artisanal or small-scale production, really began in earnest.

Transformation was seen mainly in coal and iron mining, metallurgical enterprises, oil production and refining - aided by the growth of Russia’s railways, which were state-owned.

Consumer goods saw less progress, marking the beginning of a pattern carried over the the Soviet Union, which prioritised heavy industry over all else.

Another pattern that would be repeated in the 1930s during Stalin’s era of collectivized farming and industrialisation was the relative falling-behind of agriculture, which after the 1861 emancipation grew only a little faster than the population increase.

By the 1890s, ME Falkus writes in The Industrialisation of Russia - 1700-1914, “the rate of industrial production exceeded 8 percent annually, a figure unequalled by any other advanced nation at that period.”

Poor but rich

So, why, you might ask, despite such rapid growing industry, for several decades before the revolution, is Imperial Russia still seen as being so undeveloped?

To explain this paradox, Leon Trotsky notes in his History of the Russian Revolution the ‘peculiarities’ of pre-revolutionary Russia’s development.

“At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them.

Small enterprises, involving less than 100 workers, employed in the United States, in 1914, 35 per cent of the total of industrial workers, but in Russia 17.8 per cent. The two countries had an approximately identical relative quantity of enterprises involving 100 to 1000 workers.

But the giant enterprises, above 1000 workers each, employed in the United States 17.8 per cent of the workers and in Russia 41.4 per cent! For the most important industrial districts the latter percentage is still higher: for the Petrograd district 44.4 per cent, for the Moscow district even 57.3 per cent.

We get a like result if we compared Russian with British or German industry. This fact – first established by the author in 1908 – hardly accords with the banal idea of the economic backwardness of Russia. However, it does not disprove this backwardness, but dialectically completes it.”

End of Part 1