Why Is Russia Not Rich?

farmland, oil, gas, iron, aluminum, and a labor force of 70 million people. So what

happened? Why is Russia Not Rich? Chapter 1: Early Russia - Serfdom

and the Commune (1547-1800) The country of Russia started

out here in Eastern Europe. This land was first unified by the Mongols. Slowly over time the

Russians would ally themselves with different Mongol clans in order to gain more land, power,

and influence. Eventually the Russians became more powerful than the Mongols.

And in 1547 Russia became an independent country under the leadership of Moscow.

With the Mongols gone it became a lot easier for a person to move from one

part of Russia to another. And this was a problem. Because Russia was incredibly big,

so if a peasant did not like their lord they could move to another part of this new gigantic country.

As a result a lord could lose their workforce, without enough workers the lord can’t live off

of the taxes they provide. Those taxes paid for the military. And if this happened on a

region close to the border of Russia, then you suddenly had a region without the protection of

an army. This left Russia vulnerable and the nobility powerless. And so they implemented

a new system called Serfdom. The way serfdom works is that peasants became serfs. A serf

was assigned a plot of land and was forced to work and live on that land for the rest of their lives,

when they die their children will have to work the land afterwards. A lord could then buy and sell

land in order to buy and sell serfs, could force a serf to perform any work the lord demanded,

and a serf wasn’t even allowed to marry without the lord’s permission. In short,

serfdom was just another form of slavery. But this system kept the Russian elites in power,

the Russian leader could give more land and serfs to people who served the government,

and it allowed the government to move serfs into siberia to in order to colonize the region.

But serfdom also kept people poor: a serf did not get to keep the food they produced,

so there was no need to ever grow more food than you needed to survive. It’s not that

they were lazy, it’s that they didn’t care. It was a problem of motivation:

If a peasant works their ass off and their landlord ships a few more crates of produce,

they don’t see a single extra rouble. So where’s the motivation?

But over the centuries other countries had abolished serfdom and their independent

farmers had slowly developed better agricultural techniques and produced more food. Eventually

countries began producing more food than they needed to eat themselves. And farmers began

moving into cities. For most of human history 99% of people working on farms, but thanks to

innovation that became 98%. As a result, just reducing the amount of farmers by 1 percentage

point meant you had twice the amount of people who could work outside of agriculture. And those

people began working as craftspeople in workshops. When steam engines were invented those workshops

were turned into factories. Factories produce a large number of goods. And in order to earn

money those factories produced things everybody wanted to buy such as steel products or clothing.

But in order to actually sell the large amount of goods you were making, you needed a large amount

of people with enough money to afford the things you were making. And people in Western Europe had

that money because farmers produced enough food they could sell some of it for profit.