Article 5 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’
Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’, ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’, ‘Furnaces Across the Mountains’, and ‘What Did Exist in the Principalities’.
I. Nevyansk, the Winter of 1725
The leaning tower of the Demidov factory in Nevyansk, in the central Urals, rose fifty-seven metres above an artificial pond covered in ice as thick as a man’s arm. It was 27 January 1725. In St. Petersburg, three thousand kilometres away as the crow flies, Tsar Peter I of Russia had died five days earlier, at the age of fifty-two, in a modestly furnished room of the Winter Palace, tormented by a urinary infection that German doctors had been unable to stop. The news had reached Nevyansk the day before, brought by a courier who had travelled for twenty-three days with relay horses along the Moscow–Kazan–Perm–Ekaterinburg road.
Nikita Demidov, the patriarch of the family—seventy-two years old, his hands still strong, the eyes of a man who had seen it all—listened to the news in a room lit by a single whale-oil lamp. He did not speak for a long time. His son, Akinfy—forty-seven years old, more brutal than his father, more unscrupulous, but also more calculating—waited for the most important word.
‘What do we do with the Admiralty order?’ he finally asked.
Nikita remained silent a while longer. The order was for two hundred tonnes of rolled iron, which were to be dispatched in the spring by sledge convoy to Nizhny Novgorod, then by barge down the Volga to Astrakhan, and from there by ship to St. Petersburg. From there, it would be shipped on merchant vessels to Amsterdam, where the Dutch Admiralty needed good iron for brigs and frigates. The contract had been signed directly with the late Tsar two years earlier. Half the sum had been paid in advance—funds that had arrived in Nevyansk in sealed sacks, escorted by Cossacks.
‘We send it,’ Nikita said at last. ‘Contracts do not die with men. Contracts die with money.’
Beneath the leaning tower of the factory, in a cellar that would give rise to a legend—it is said that Demidov later drowned falsified accounting ledgers there, and, according to some versions, even a few silent servants who knew too much—the iron furnaces operated at temperatures that Râmnic, Bucharest, and Iași could not have imagined. Through the windows, the snow glittered, and beneath the snow, the ceaseless movement of people continued. Six thousand souls, the entire factory settlement. A hell of iron and ice. And beneath the ice, hundreds of millions of puds of ore that, in the coming decades, would flow to Amsterdam and London.
By 1780—fifty-five years after that January day—peasant Russia, seemingly backward, was exporting more iron to European markets than James Watt’s England.
How? By what mechanism? At what human cost? And, for the Romanian reader: why could serfdom-ridden Russia, with a system far more brutal than that of Moldavia and Wallachia, achieve what the Principalities could not?
This is the subject of the present article. A comparative exercise that does not defend Tsarist Russia—on the contrary, it exposes its brutality—but which forces us to understand that the absence of industrialisation in our lands cannot be explained by ‘human underdevelopment.’ It is explained by geopolitics, by imperial scale, by coherent political will, and by the brutal willingness to use people as a resource convertible into tonnes of iron.
II. Peter the Great: Forced Modernisation from Above
Without Peter I, there would have been no metallurgical Urals. This statement—which might seem like a historical simplification—is defensible. The Urals did, it is true, have iron ore for over a millennium: local communities, mostly Tatar and Mordvin, had been modestly extracting iron since the 14th century. But the transformation into a world-scale metallurgical complex began in the 1690–1700 decade, under the direct impulse of the Tsar.
Peter was a unique case in the history of modernisation. At nineteen, he had a technological obsession that his contemporaries considered either madness or regal indecency. He wanted to build ships—and he built them with his own hands, in improvised shipyards at Voronezh and later in St. Petersburg. He wanted to understand surgery—and he practised tooth extractions on patient courtiers who did not dare refuse him. He wanted to see for himself how the West worked—and in 1697, at the age of twenty-five, he set off on a ‘Grand Embassy’ through Western Europe. The journey, which lasted eighteen months, took him through Riga, Königsberg, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Vienna. In Amsterdam, he worked for four months as a naval carpenter, under a false name—though everyone knew who he was—at the shipyards of the Dutch East India Company. In London, he inspected the Deptford shipyards, the Woolwich Arsenal, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and the Tower Mint (where he was personally received by the Mint’s director, one Isaac Newton, with whom he reportedly had a conversation about the thermal expansion coefficient of brass).
From this journey, he returned with a systematic obsession. Russia had to be Westernised—but Westernised with Western technology. The state had to be strengthened—but strengthened through institutions modelled after Swedish, German, and Dutch ones. The economy had to be developed—but developed through state-controlled manufactories.
And where state capital did not suffice, Russia had something else in abundance: endless lands and people who could be rearranged like pieces on a chessboard. The serfs were not just agricultural labour. They could be assigned—in Russian, pripisnye, ‘attached’—to a factory, a mine, a smelter. When Peter signed a decree ‘attaching’ three thousand peasant families to the Demidov factory in Nevyansk, they became, overnight, industrial workers. With one difference compared to English industrial workers: they could not leave. They could not change employers. They could not refuse. They were the inseparable property of the factory, like its installations.
A necessary comparison. In England of the same era, the factory worker (even if exploited to the physical limit) could, in principle, leave. He could seek another job. He could negotiate his wage. This mobility—imperfect, but real—is what economists call the ‘labour market.’ It allows adaptation, competition, innovation. In Peter’s Russia, the industrial labour market did not exist. Instead, there was assignment by decree.
A paradox. The Russian system, clearly inferior from an ethical perspective, functioned economically in the medium term. Why? Because it allowed the rapid mobilisation of vast human resources for specific industrial tasks. A Russian entrepreneur who received ‘attached’ three thousand peasants did not have to invest in recruiting labour, did not have to pay competitive wages, did not have to attract masters with attractive conditions. He only had to feed those people—at subsistence minimum—and put them to work. The cost of labour in 18th-century Russian industry was, in real terms, the lowest in Europe.
And when the cost of labour is the lowest in Europe, and the iron ore is among the richest in Europe (the Urals had deposits with 65–70% iron content, compared to 35–45% in British ores), the result is a production cost for Russian iron that cannot be matched. Not by England. Not by Sweden (though Sweden held on until 1750). Not by France. Not by anyone.
Between 1720 and 1780, Russia became the world’s largest iron exporter.
III. The Urals: Geology Meets Geopolitics
The Urals, like the Banat, is a case where geological history met concrete political decisions to produce industrialisation. Without political decisions, geology remains latent (as it did in our lands, where the Jiu Valley’s coal waited until 1840). Without geology, political decisions would have had no wealth to extract. The combination of the two explains the Urals.
Geology. The Ural Mountains are an ancient tectonic collision zone, among the richest in metallic ores on the planet. High-grade magnetite iron deposits—60–70% pure metal—can be found at the surface or at shallow depths. Copper deposits—particularly malachite and azurite, extracted on a large scale beginning in the 18th century. Gold. Platinum. Silver. Semi-precious stones—emeralds, topazes, amethysts. A geological paradise that had waited, for millennia, for someone to put it to work.
Geopolitics. The Urals came under definitive Russian control in the 16th century, under Ivan the Terrible (the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in 1552 opened the way, and the Stroganov expeditions of the 1580s consolidated control). For a century and a half, exploitation was modest—local miners, Tatars and Mordvins, produced iron for weapons and tools, but on a village scale, not industrially.
The turning point came in 1697. Peter I, already preparing for war with Sweden (for control of the Baltic), understood that Russia was desperately dependent on Swedish iron imports—for arms, for ships, for everything. A strategic dependence that was unacceptable on the eve of war. He sent German geologists and metallurgists to the Urals, with orders to identify exploitable deposits. Their report, written in 1699, was spectacular: ‘iron ore of quality equal to or superior to Swedish ore, at the surface, in practically unlimited quantities.’
From 1701, the Russian state opened the first state metallurgical factories in the Urals: Kamenskoje-Uralskoje and Nevyansk. The results, under pure state administration, were mediocre. In 1702, Peter made an unusual decision: he transferred the Nevyansk factory to a private entrepreneur from Tula, Nikita Antufyev—a former blacksmith who had risen through talent and the luck of having personally met the Tsar. Antufyev received not only the factory but also thousands of ‘attached’ peasants, plus the right to explore and open other factories throughout the Urals, with direct authorisation from the Tsar.
Antufyev changed his name to Demidov. Thus was born one of the greatest industrial dynasties in European history.
IV. The Demidov Family: Russian Entrepreneurship in Its Brutal Form
Nikita Demidov (formerly Antufyev)—born in 1656, died in 1725—was a man whose biography sounds like the Russian novel Dostoevsky never wrote. The son of a simple blacksmith from Tula, he had learned the trade from childhood. At 19, he was making locks. At 25, hunting rifles for Muscovite boyars. At 30, muskets for the Tsarist army. When Peter I, the young Tsar with technological obsessions, inspected his workshop in Tula in 1696, he was surprised that Antufyev’s muskets were of better quality than those imported from Holland. ‘What do they pay you?’ the Tsar asked. ‘Enough not to complain,’ Antufyev replied. ‘Your commissioner will double your pay. And in two years, I’ll send you to the Urals.’
Two years later, Antufyev-Demidov was in the Urals. He received the Nevyansk factory with 300 peasant families ‘attached’ and authorisation to expand. He expanded. At his death in 1725, his industrial empire comprised fifteen factories, approximately 20,000 ‘attached’ workers (with families, meaning 60,000–70,000 souls in total), a network of navigable rivers under his control, his own roads, his own armed forces (Cossacks for security, which the Russian state did not permit just anyone), and his own internal currency (Demidov tokens, which could only be exchanged at Demidov shops—a system known in English as the ‘truck system’).
His son, Akinfy—whom we mentioned in the opening as taking over the empire in 1725—took things to an almost imperial scale. At his death in 1745, he controlled over thirty factories, approximately 80,000 ‘attached’ workers (meaning 250,000–300,000 souls), and was, by some estimates, wealthier than some small German states of the same era. He produced 40% of all Russian iron. And Russia, at that time, produced about 30–35% of the world’s iron.
40% of 30–35% is 12–14% of global production. Concentrated in a single family. In 1745.
Methods. This is where the article becomes difficult. The Demidovs were not, in any sense of the word, decent people. They were brutally efficient. Beatings were administered daily, as a form of discipline. Runaway workers were hunted by the ‘Demidov bat’ (special units trained to recover escaped workers) and, upon return, had their ears cut off as a warning. Ten-year-old children worked in smelting operations, often dying of lung disease within three or four years. The mortality rate in Demidov settlements was, it is estimated, double that of rural Russia—already high.
The legend of the leaning tower of Nevyansk—which we invoked in the opening—says that Akinfy, caught at one point counterfeiting coins in the factory cellars, flooded the cellars when Tsarist commissioners approached. In the water were left the counterfeit coins. In some versions of the legend, so were a few servants who knew too much. There is no documentary evidence for the coin counterfeiting—but there is indirect evidence that the Demidov factories’ accounting system was, at the very least, dubious. An imperial investigation by Catherine the Great in 1774 uncovered accounting frauds that exceeded, at Nevyansk alone, the equivalent of two million roubles—a sum that would have covered the Russian military budget for six months of war.
The Demidov family paid a fine, avoided prosecution, and carried on.
A necessary contrast. Compare this brutally efficient entrepreneurship with that of the Moldavian or Wallachian boyar of the same era. The boyar had estates, he had serf peasants, he sometimes had considerable liquid capital (a Ghica, a Rosetti, a Cantacuzino could have annual incomes equivalent to 200,000 piasters). But he did not have imperial authorisation to open a factory. He could not ‘attach’ peasants to a plant—those who were serfs were agricultural serfs, not industrial ones. He could not recruit his own armed forces. He could not issue internal currency. He could not, in essence, do what the Demidovs did.
Phanariotism did not allow this—because Phanariotism itself depended on a system where resources went to Constantinople, not to Râmnic or Ploiești. A Romanian boyar who wanted to create a ‘Wallachian Demidov’ would have been, in the best case, ignored. In the worst, deposed or poisoned.
V. Factory Serfdom: The Human Cost of the Model
This is the moment to explicitly name what Russian industrialisation produced. A system that social historians call, with a precise but technical term, factory serfdom. In Russian: possessionnaya krest'yane (‘possessed peasants’) and pripisnye krest'yane (‘attached peasants’).
The legal difference, important. Traditional agricultural serfs were tied to the land. They could be sold or transferred along with the estate. But they could not be uprooted from their village to be sent to work elsewhere—at least not in principle. Factory serfs, on the other hand, were tied to the industrial installation. They were sold with the factory, transferred with it. They lived in factory settlements built as extensions of the plant—barracks in essence, with a semi-military discipline regime.
Numbers. In 1780, throughout the metallurgical Urals, it is estimated that approximately 200,000 ‘attached peasants’ worked as industrial labourers. With their families, a population of around 700,000 souls depended directly on industry—the largest worker concentration in pre-Industrial Revolution Europe. By comparison, Arkwright’s England had, at the same time, approximately 100,000 industrial workers (in textiles, mines, metallurgy). Russia had twice as many—but under incomparable conditions.
Living conditions. We will not idealise. The English workers of Cottonopolis lived, themselves, in conditions that Dickens described in Hard Times and Oliver Twist—insanitary slums, twelve- to sixteen-hour shifts, six-year-old children at spinning machines, catastrophic infant mortality. But they had one freedom: they could, in principle, leave. They could change employers. They could, in extreme cases, emigrate to America. The Demidov workers could not. They were property.
Life in the Nevyansk settlement, 1780—a reconstruction based on Tsarist inspectors’ reports and the later memoirs of political exiles sent there. The day began at four in the morning, with a bell rung at the top of the leaning tower. Workers received a ration of black bread (about 800 grams) and a measure of kvas (a weak drink made from fermented bread). Work began at five—sixteen hours at the furnace, the forge, the rolling mill, the ore extraction. Lunch break: thirty minutes. Dinner at nine in the evening: thin cabbage soup, sometimes with pieces of pork. At ten o’clock, the lamps were extinguished.
On Sundays, work was reduced—six hours in the morning. In the afternoon, compulsory liturgy at the settlement’s chapel. Those who did not attend the liturgy received thirty lashes. Major holidays—Easter, Christmas, the settlement’s patron saint day—were the days when people could drink vodka. The vodka was distributed by the factory, at a fixed price, paid with Demidov tokens. It could not be bought from anyone else.
The annual mortality rate in the Ural settlements was estimated at 5–6% per year—three times higher than in Russian agricultural villages of the same period. A worker ‘attached’ at twenty years of age had, statistically, a life expectancy of less than twenty more years—that is, he rarely reached forty.
And yet, the system worked. It produced iron. It produced profit. It produced, in Amsterdam, ship anchors and frigate cannons. It produced, in London, steel for the bow springs of British aristocracy’s luxury carriages.
In other words, it produced what the Principalities did not.
In a good year, a single Demidov settlement exported more iron than the entire Balkan region—Ottoman Bulgaria, Ottoman Serbia, Ottoman Greece, the Romanian Principalities—combined.
VI. The 1780 Paradox: Peasant Russia Exports More Iron Than Industrial England
This is where the numbers come in. They are surprising numbers. Here they are.
Approximate annual iron production in 1780:
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Russia: 130,000–140,000 tonnes
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Sweden: 50,000 tonnes
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England: 60,000–70,000 tonnes
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France: 40,000 tonnes
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All German states combined: 35,000 tonnes
Russia thus produced more than England and Sweden combined. And about three times more than France. And Russia’s exports—for much of the Russian iron went directly to European markets—reached over 60,000 tonnes annually. England, in the same period, was a net importer of iron (from Sweden and Russia). It did not export. England’s trade deficit in iron in 1780 was one of the British government’s major economic concerns.
The paradox. Peasant Russia, apparently backward, apparently lost in its endless steppe, apparently incapable of modernity—was the world leader in metallurgy. Paradigmatic England, with its Cottonopolis, its Watt, its banks and patents, imported Russian iron.
How to explain this?
The first explanation—the simplest and, in large part, correct—is that of comparative costs. Russia had rich ore, charcoal in enormous quantities (the forests of the Urals seemed endless), and quasi-free labour. England had poorer ore, its forests were already depleted in the 18th century (England made the transition to coke from coal precisely for this reason—Abraham Darby’s innovation at Coalbrookdale in 1709), and its labour, though exploited, was free and demanded wages. Russian iron was, quite simply, cheaper.
The second explanation—more subtle—is that of specialisation. Russia produced pig iron and medium-quality rolled iron. England, in the 1780s, specialised in the production of high-quality iron for precision machines (Watt’s steam engines required pipes and parts with tolerances that few other countries could achieve). So England imported Russian iron for ‘bulk,’ and reserved its own production for ‘high-end.’ It was an international division of labour that Ricardo would theorise only thirty years later.
The third explanation—the structural one—is that of imperial scale. Russia had a territory of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres with rich metallic resources. It had a centralised state capable of mobilising labour and capital on an imperial scale. It had a Tsar (Peter initially, then his successors) who understood that industry was a matter of national security, not economic taste. It had, therefore, what the Principalities did not have and could not have: coherent political will sustained on an imperial scale.
And, of course, it had what we do not want to repeat: serfdom. It was the binder of the entire scheme. Without factory serfdom, Russian iron would have cost three or four times more. It would have been uncompetitive. The entire system would have failed.
VII. Why Russia, and Not the Principalities?
We come to the central question. Russia was, like the Principalities, an agrarian-peasant society. Russia was, like the Principalities, far behind the West institutionally. Russia was, unlike the Principalities, with far more extreme serfdom. And yet Russia industrialised. And the Principalities did not. Why?
Cause 1: Imperial scale. Russia was an imperial state. It had the Urals. It had the Volga. It had the Baltic after 1721. It had a potential internal market of millions of consumers. The Principalities were two small vassal-tributary states, with a total area of about 100,000 km² (less than the industrial Urals), with a total population of about 2 million. The scale for serious industry was lacking.
Cause 2: Military sovereignty. Russia defended its own territory with its own army. The Principalities did not—their territory was a theatre of war for external troops (Ottoman, Russian, Austrian). A Russian entrepreneur who invested in a furnace in Nevyansk in 1725 knew that his factory would still be there in 1750 and 1800. A Romanian boyar who might have invested in a furnace in Câmpulung in 1780 could not predict whether the furnace would still be there in 1795 (when, in reality, Pazvantoğlu’s raid from Vidin devastated western Oltenia).
Cause 3: Coherent political elite. Russia, however institutionally criticisable, had a political elite (the Tsar plus high dignitaries) that looked to the West with consistent technological envy for a century, from Peter to Catherine. The Principalities had Phanariote elites that changed every two to three years, with personal objectives of recovering the initial investment in their reign. The generational coherence of a century that Russia had, the Principalities did not.
Cause 4: Ownership of land and subsoil. A Russian entrepreneur who received imperial authorisation for a mine also received the land, the subsoil, and the people on the land. He could act like a small state within a state. A Romanian boyar did not have automatic rights over the subsoil—which in theory belonged to the prince, who belonged to the Porte, which could decide anything at any time. Legal uncertainty was, time and again, a barrier to long-term investment.
Cause 5: Access to European markets. Russia had, after 1721, the port of St. Petersburg. Russian iron could reach Amsterdam in three weeks of sailing. The Principalities had the Danube, but the Danube was controlled downstream by the Ottomans, who taxed everything that passed and could block circulation during political periods. A hypothetical iron produced in Câmpulung would have had to cross the fortifications at Giurgiu, Turnu, Brăila. At what cost? With what probability?
Five causes. All structural. All irreducible to individual will. And the conclusion of this comparison is important for our series: Russia did not industrialise because it was ‘more capable’ than us. It industrialised because it was an empire with imperial resources. And we did not industrialise because we were two vassal-tributary principalities without the necessary scale and tools.
It is not a question of human talent. It is a question of political dimension.
VIII. The Trap of Extractive Modernisation
The Russian model produced, until the 1830s, the world’s largest metallurgical industry. Then it went into relative decline. And this decline deserves to be understood, because it summarises the strategic trap of any extractive modernisation.
What happened, essentially, between 1830 and 1860? England made the major technological transition from charcoal to metallurgical coke. A furnace that used coke could produce iron at higher temperatures, with three times the productivity, at 40–50% lower cost per tonne. In twenty years, England completely renewed its metallurgical capacity. British production exploded from 400,000 tonnes in 1830 to 3,500,000 tonnes in 1860.
Russia, in the same interval, remained with charcoal. Why? Because the factory serfdom system had been optimised for charcoal. The ‘attached’ workers cut the forests of the Urals, burned the charcoal, carried it to the factories. The system worked. The transition to coke would have required a complete reorganisation: new coal mines (Russia did not have bituminous coal mines in the Urals, which was a charcoal area; the good coal was in the Donbas, 2,000 kilometres away), rail transport (which did not exist), skilled workers to operate coke ovens (which required technical training), mobile private capital (which was locked in serf-based factories).
Russia could not make the transition. Or, more precisely: it could not make it in time. It only did so after 1861 (when Alexander II abolished serfdom), and even then with a thirty-year delay compared to England.
The consequence. In 1830, Russia was the world’s leading iron producer. In 1860, it was fourth (after England, France, the German states). In 1900, it was fifth. In 1913, on the eve of the world war, Russia produced about 4.6 million tonnes of iron—a large figure, but below Germany (17 million), England (10 million), France, and the United States.
The conclusion of this experience is brutal: extractive modernisation based on quasi-free labour loses its competitiveness the moment other competitors innovate technologically. And the competitors that innovate technologically do so precisely because their labour is expensive—so they have an incentive to invest in machines that replace people. The ‘cheap labour’ model traps innovation in a dead end. It is a trap that is not easily escaped.
Russia paid for this trap with a century of lagging behind. Not in absolute terms—it remained a major industrial producer. In relative terms—it lost its lead, then its rank, then its model status.
IX. The Long Shadow: From Nevyansk to Magnitogorsk to 2026
The Demidov model—large industry, coercive labour, central planning, bulk industrial exports—did not die with the abolition of serfdom in 1861. It survived. It took new forms. And these forms deserve to be mentioned briefly, because they define, to this day, a distinct Russian economic culture.
Sovietisation, 1929–1932. Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan, with the construction of gigantic industrial complexes at Magnitogorsk (southern Urals), Kuzneck (Siberia), Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine). The model was strikingly similar to Demidov’s: forced mobilisation of millions of workers (many of them deported as ‘kulaks’), central planning, quantified production targets, semi-military discipline. The results—spectacular in the short term. Soviet steel production rose from 4 million tonnes in 1928 to 18 million tonnes in 1940. A rate that even surpassed the American rate in the same period.
The human cost. Estimates of mortality in the Soviet industrial settlements of the 1930s are controversial, but the consensus suggests 3–5 million excess deaths in the three major industrial zones alone—Urals, Kuzneck, Dnepropetrovsk. A colossal human price, paid for an accelerated industrialisation that, in turn, would create the Soviet capacity to resist the Nazi aggression of 1941–45.
Contemporary reflections. Today’s Russia—the Russia of 2026—inherits this tradition. It exports gas, oil, steel, aluminium, fertilisers—bulk industrial goods, produced in immense complexes (Norilsk, Magnitogorsk, Novokuznetsk), with disciplined but non-innovative labour. It has top-tier engineering talent (physicists, mathematicians, excellent programmers)—but it does not have an entrepreneurial ecosystem that turns talent into global products.
The Demidov model lives on, camouflaged. It is an economic culture in which the state plans, large companies execute, and the small entrepreneur has no place. A culture in which the ‘Ural question’ was more important than the ‘innovation question.’ In which pig iron mattered more than the clockmaker on Cizmarilor Street.
X. Conclusion: Two Models, Two Traps
In this article, we have compared the Russian model of modernisation—brutally efficient, extractive, imperial—with the absence of a similar modernisation in the Principalities. The conclusion is not a glorification of the Russian model. It is the exact opposite.
If we were to choose, ex post, between the ‘Demidov model’ and the ‘Phanariote model,’ it is not a clear choice as to which would be the lesser evil. The Demidov model produces industry, but with a monstrous human cost and a path dependence that leads, a hundred and fifty years later, to Stalinist Magnitogorsk. The Phanariote model produces no industry at all, but preserves, in its own flawed way, a form of pre-modern social continuity that will make possible the compressed modernisation after 1859 (Cuza, Carol, the Polytechnic School, interwar industrialists).
Perhaps—and this is a hypothesis that economic historians discuss, but without definitive resolution—perhaps the absence of the ‘Demidov model’ in the Principalities was, in the very long term, a hidden stroke of luck. We did not have factory serfdom. We did not have industrial settlements with 5% annual mortality. We did not have an economic culture based on coercive mobilisation. And all of this made it possible that, when modernisation came—late, but it came—it came as inclusive modernisation, not as extractive modernisation.
But this is a luxury of posterity. In 1780, the gap was a gap. In 1830, the gap was larger. And peasant Russia, however brutal, had made its place on the industrial map of the world. The Principalities had not.
Conclusion in Three Questions.
First: What does Russia teach us about modernisation? That it can be done from the top down, with coherent political will, with mobilised imperial resources, with a high human cost. It can be done—and, in certain epochs, it was done. But at what price.
Second: What does Russia teach us about the limits of extractive modernisation? That extractivism loses its competitiveness when competitors innovate technologically. That the comparative advantage of low costs is a long-term trap. That being ‘cheap’ today means being ‘obsolete’ tomorrow.
Third—for the contemporary reader. Which companies, which economies, which cultures in 2026 risk the ‘Demidov trap’? Those that rely on cheap labour to produce services or goods that others produce with higher costs—but also with better technology. Those that export bulk (whether software, textiles, auto components) without investing in the higher value chain. Those that, in 2026, play the role of Demidov’s Urals in a global economy approaching a new technological leap—that of artificial intelligence.
A leaning tower in Nevyansk, fifty-seven metres above a pond of ice. Beneath it, the settlement with six thousand souls. Beneath the settlement, the cellars with legends. An entire empire in sealed sacks of iron, bound for Amsterdam.
And further south, three thousand kilometres away, a printing press printing the Menaion for the Month of December. Thirty sheets per hour. With two apprentices.
Two worlds. Both imperfect. Both real.
Selected Bibliography
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Wikipedia EN, Demidov family: en.wikipedia.org.
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Wikipedia EN, Nevyansk Tower: en.wikipedia.org.
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Wikipedia EN, Serfdom in Russia: en.wikipedia.org.
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Wikipedia EN, Possessional peasants: en.wikipedia.org.
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Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, 1962—the classic chapter on Russian modernisation.
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Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917, St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
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Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) (Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps, 1500–2010), Polirom, 2010: archive.org.
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Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, Princeton University Press, 2003.
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Wikipedia EN, Industrialization in the Russian Empire: en.wikipedia.org.
*The next article in the series: ‘Constantinople: Not Just Suzerain, but Civilisational Centre’—Selim III, the Nizam-ı Cedid reforms, the Janissaries, the Sultan’s Great Library, Jewish and Armenian doctors. What the city from which the Principalities received their rulers was like—and what was the crisis of this city in 1780. Coming in two weeks.*