In order to appreciate the geopolitical and economic platform called Russia we must go back in history to the nodal points when the Russian empire took its familiar shape. The first such point is found at the dawn of modern era, somewhere between 1500 or 1550. If we polled the contemporary political experts regarding the direction of their world, they would concur above all on the spectacular emergence of new empires across the vast landmass between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These imagined experts might hardly mention the Protestant Reformation in the far northwestern extension of Eurasia, perhaps not even the recent discovery of the Americas. Ming China was surely the world’s manufacturing and demographic giant. Shortly after 1500 the Mughals imposed their imperial rule in the inherently fractitious India. At the very same time the Safavis were ascendant in Iran, the Ottoman Turks forcefully reclaimed the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, while the Spanish Hapsburgs appeared on their way to establishing a Catholic empire in the West. For almost everyone, the terrible Middle Ages were at last over. The renewed order and prosperity had been secured by the extensive empires and in turn strengthened by a whole range of important innovations: more efficient agrarian and artisanal techniques, bureaucratic taxation, the official conservative religions, and, not in the least, the new big guns.
Russia was a distant outlier in this larger picture. This proved, however, an advantage of sorts. The fledgling empire of the Tsars was protected by sheer geographical distance from its stronger rivals in the west and south, the Germans and Turks. The firearms in the meantime reversed the secular imbalance between nomadic cavalries and sedentary agriculturalists. Securing the Slavic ploughmen against Tatar rovers in the vast fertile lands in the steppe provided sixteenth-century Russia with vastly increased manpower and tribute flows. In its scope and nature, the Russian expansion became comparable only to Spain’s. The Cossacks, armed frontiersmen, followed by regular garrisons, traversed the steppe in directions exactly countering the erstwhile nomadic invasions. Soon Russia found itself bordering on China.
It is not so wondrous that in the sixteenth century Russia became an empire along with the many gunpowder empires of its generation; it is more wondrous that in 1900 Russia was still an expanding great power. After all, neither China nor India and Iran, not even Turkey or Spain, could by 1900 preserve their splendid positions. The reason for this massive decline of the rest was obviously related to what had emerged in the intervening centuries from the far West. Spain’s impressive bid for the Catholic restoration of Western Roman Empire ran headlong into the collective resistance of lesser kingdoms, principalities, independent cantons, and city leagues of northwestern Europe. Had the Hapsburg monarchy crushed this resistance, the Protestant Reformation would have remained in the historical record as yet another heresy, while the anti-Hapsburg princes and merchants would be considered seditious feudal warlords and seaborne pirates. Of course, the actual course of events awarded a perfectly livable stalemate to the capitalist alliance of Protestant states interlaced by the cosmopolitan merchant networks. It was this military and ideological stalemate rather than the Protestantism in itself that secured the survival of the first capitalist states like the Netherlands and England.
Peter the Great launched his absolutist reformation of Russia only a couple generations after capitalism’s breakthrough in the West. The incredible Tsar Peter, who worked in disguise as apprentice carpenter at the Amsterdam shipyards and probably met Isaac Newton in London, was determined to learn from the best. Holland remained Peter’s first and most ardent love. To appreciate the power of this hegemonic example one might notice that the flag of Russia is a slightly modified Dutch flag, and the canals of Sankt Pietersburg (the original Dutch spelling) have no other reason than Peter’s ferocious belief that a modern capital must have canals like Amsterdam.
Similar reforms by emulation were attempted by many contemporary statesmen: Portugal’s Marquês de Pombal, Austria’s Emperor Joseph, and, for that matter, Alexander Hamilton in the United States. The rate of success seems to rapidly recede as we move outside the western core. Even Spain eventually lost its imperial possessions and fell into isolation behind the Pyrenees. India, China, and Iran failed outright and slid into foreign dependency. The proudly libertarian and aristocratic Poland-Lithuania, once the biggest European country, disappeared in partitions. The glorious cavalry of Polish feudal szlachta was doomed in the new epoch when wars were won by qualitatively more expensive navies, standing armies, and artilleries. The Ottoman Turks gathered force for their Tanzimat reforms a whole century after Petrine Russia, by which time it was too late to shed Turkey’s reputation as the “sick man” of Europe. The impressive Albanian Muhammad Ali, the rogue warlord of Egypt, who in 1810–1840 began building his own navy, gun foundries, and modern bureaucracy, comes close to the example of Peter the Great. But the absolutist modernizer of Egypt was soon checked by the British, decidedly unwilling to see a regional power rise in the Middle East astride the projected Suez route to India.
Among the nonwestern states only Japan in the course of its Meiji Restoration after 1868 managed to become a serious force in the military-industrial geopolitics of the age. This odd pairing, Petrine Russia in one century and Meiji Japan in another, possibly suggests a clue. These two very different outliers shared in common an ideological duality of intense national pride with deep-seated insecurity, caused by humiliating confrontations with superior Western forces. Such dualistic perception of their place in the world could be an enabling but not sufficient condition because it was scarcely unique to Japan and Russia. The embattled empires had to gather institutional capacity and finances to act on their anxious sense of backwardness and vulnerability. The relative isolation of Russia and Japan from foreign trade penetration and military pressures afforded both states the breathing space to build up their capabilities and engage in contemporary arms races. The tremendous costs of imperial modernizing burdened mainly the peasants. They had to supply their states with increased taxes, many more laborers on state projects, and army recruits. Coercing the peasants, however, was still not enough. The absolutist reformers had to discipline, re-educate, reward and inspire their own elites by essentially conscripting them wholesale into the state service as military officers and bureaucrats.
This developmentalist pattern was based on the intensive centralization of coercion and territorial expansion bringing in new resources, subject populations, and imperial glories. The standard theory of neoclassical economics extols Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and private enterprise with secure property rights as the road to modernity. But there obviously was a different way of staying in the running among the contemporary leading states. The alternative coercive strategy compensated for the relative dearth of capitalist resources by turning the state itself into major entrepreneur and fostering modern industries and institutions by decree. Little wonder then that both Japanese and Russian modernizers seeking to emulate the Western advantages typically preferred Germanic examples. The Russian empire since the times of Peter and Catherine the Great had actually imported scores of underemployed German aristocrats and artisans as a developmental boost. This was the peculiar kind of geopolitical platform that the Bolsheviks had seized in 1917.