> That's quite an understatement, the Russian empire did not do any industrial revolution at all, it was a mostly undeveloped agricultural wasteland. They did

> That's quite an understatement, the Russian empire did not do any industrial revolution at all, it was a mostly undeveloped agricultural wasteland. They did have factories. In fact, factories in Petrograd were one of the hotbeds of revolutionary mind. Railroad in more densely populated areas. Electric power plants did exist here and there. St Petersburg or Moscow were rather similar to cities of similar size in the West. Countryside was just too sparsely populated to do anything with it. > But none of them succeeded to the extent of the Soviet Union at that time Succeeded by what measure? GDP? Satisfaction of citizens? Soviet Union had abnormally large amount of people working in agriculture all the way till the fall. Consumer industry never even came close to West. Sure, if you focus on military alone and put oppressive state apparatus behind it, with a lot of natural resources, you can have a damn sweet army. But the rest will crumble. And it did. > transform it into a global superpower Russia was already a super power. Purely by sheer size and manpower. They had some great minds in science in arts as well. The 19th century super powers fell in first half of 20th century thanks to the raise of national identities and human rights. Making vast colonies too expensive to maintain in all sorts of ways. This gave birth to 2 superpowers that ruled the world in 2nd half of 20th century. USA avoided the fall because they were built on freedom and humanity (to certain extent, obviously) to begin with. USSR just avoided all of that thanks to totalitarian regime.