We don't have a slave class! Just...lots of uneducated peasants. We do have capitalism, with major production of consumer goods (such as cars, tractors, some clothing) in Novgorod and Poland, which we sell throughout Europe. As mentioned earlier, Russia also sells grain and agricultural products to Europe as well, and is the primary exporter of foodstuffs to Japan. There is a lot of disposable income for the nobles, as well as our middle class (which is not very large, but still present). And Germany only united 20-30 years ago, and has fought a number of devastating wars. Most of Japan's resources (food, oil, rubber) are for internal use within the Empire and many of their American trading partners have been supplanted by Brazil and the US remnant states. As for the UK, they're colonies have been slipping away one by one for the past few decades.
Setting aside the uncertainty over the size of Russia's population and its agricultural production yield, all of which have recently been debated, the simple fact of the matter is agriculture isn't a big source of export earnings and has never propelled anyone to major power status by itself, so no matter how much Russia exports, this can be discounted for the purposes of considering why Russia is economically powerful. Essentially it has to be driven by the exports of finished goods and services. We can discount the latter because Russia's middle class and specialist pool are tiny, as admitted. So Russia has to be an export-driven economy, akin to China since the 1980s or Japan since the 1960, particularly as its own population is too poor to buy any of these finished goods (or anything, really) to sustain growth. The question is: where are these going, and under what international regime?
The interesting thing about export-driven economies is they work best (read: only) under international regimes of globalization. In real life, what might be called the First Age of Globalization occurred from ~1850-1918, underwritten by the British Empire, and the Second Age of Globalization (which we are currently in) began in 1945, underwritten by the US, although it took
quite awhile to match the First Age in terms of imports (and thus, exports), and was structurally different (there are more institutions and structures, e.g., Bretton Woods, the WTO, the IMF, etc.) than the First. Now, so what? Well, the so-what is this: globalization historically happens under the guidance of a hegemon (i.e., the UK and US) which has the power to implement it, and which benefits from it. This is sufficiently the case that it remains unclear whether globalization can persist in a non-hegemonic environment (like the future) or that it would arise without one (since it never has). Absent a hegemon to herd the cats, globalization seems to collapse into tariffs and protectionism as individual nation-states defect for their own gain, promoting self-sufficiency and self-determinism. It's a sort of large-scale Prisoner's Dilemma. One big global economy breaks into a bunch of smaller local ones with only limited interaction.
So what does this mean for CI? Well, let's go back to the question: who is Russia exporting so many finished goods to that it has such a large and robust economy despite a backwards economy and poor socioeconomic conditions? I don't know. CI has never really had a hegemonic power (that I can see), and seems almost the textbook definition of a zero-sum, multipolar world, where defection rules and cooperation is done only with a dagger close at hand, as nations gear up to try and vie for being top dog, akin to the actual 1930s and 1940s. One would expect high tariffs on imports, significant protectionist barriers to foster domestic industry and safeguard it from more developed foreign rivals (notice how basically every single country develops its own weapons/vehicles or at least
wants to), and so on. So this goes back to the question:
who is Russia exporting to?
In addition, even if these lax circumstances exist in terms of international trade, there has to be a market for the finished goods in question. The two primary success stories of export driven growth noted earlier, China and Japan, both had a market to export to with an insatiable appetite and a seemingly boundless confidence in assuming ever more debt to spend: the United States. The American proclivity to spend versus save is well-noted as being abnormal and absent it, even with globalized conditions, the meteoric economic rise of these nations wouldn't have occurred so easily or quickly. So not only does Russia need favorable international conditions to get where it is, but also needs a buyer who really likes its products. This ignores things like transport costs (shipping things around is expensive) and the lack of developed infrastructure for doing it (modern LNG carriers, oil tankers, container cargo carriers, etc., are all far off in the future).
It might indeed be possible to have an effectively feudal nation compete in a globalized marketplace. But how has CI approximated real-life globalized conditions without seemingly any of the factors that caused globalization to occur in real life? Who is buying Russia's goods? What are they exporting anyway that uneducated and untrained serfs can make them with a low failure rate acceptable for the international market?
Russia's economy is actually pitifully small when you look at the size of the population, even assuming lesser numbers than luckymoose initially postulated. If you look at the examples nuke postulated.
Due to the fact that those people are serfs, sure. The question is why its economy is even as large as it is, as per above.
I've already mentioned that Russia has spent the last 30+ years undergoing painful mechanization of agriculture, which by its nature has phased out large elements of serfdom. Furthermore, for those unwilling or unable to recall, Novgorod (one of the two main states behind the formation of Russia) was a far more Western-style state than Moscowy. There is plenty of industry in Russia, there's plenty of resources in Russia, and overall, plenty of reason why Russia has as much EP as it does. Does the economic system make it stable? No, but it does give it a lot of power behind its punches.
A transition from slave agriculture to slave industrialization still leaves industry localized (primarily to Novgorod, which was apparently brain-drained after the takeover; see also: immigration to Vinland, et al.) and underdeveloped and still begs the question what this industry is making, for whom, and how. There's also the question of where the capital is coming from and how efficient it is given the tendency for rent-seeking behavior.
Germany is suffering the worst of the European nations from the recession, dealing with constant undermining and competition from the French states, a resurgent economy in Spain (sort of), constant flow of cheap goods from places like Argentina, Brazil, and Russia. It's a miracle they have any sort of economic relevance at all.
Has Germany just abandoned all pretense of border control and economic regulation that it can influenced by the shattered remnants of a state which are on average the size of West Virginia, and roughly as prosperous, or that it can't control its own ports and customs?
I just love this country so much
