>>7751
>I'm looking for a few good source materials and apologists for the Russian Empire
Most of the information I get is in Russian. These pages are in Russian too, but lot of what they cite are from English sources if you're willing to research them yourself:
https://sputnikipogrom.com/history/empire-economics/86685/ee-1/#.XQI8UxYzbiw
https://sputnikipogrom.com/history/empire-economics/86872/ee-2/#.XQI8WBYzbiw
You could also maybe run it through Google Translate and see what you get.
>attribution of industrialization only to Soviets
The commies as usual took credit for something they didn't do and claimed the Empire's achievements as their own. The economy was industrializing rapidly before the civil war, but when everyone got back to work again after the war, the Soviet government paraded this as some kind of miracle of communism, that a country at peace is economically better off than a country when it was fighting in World War 1 and a civil war.
Also, even if we assume that Russia wouldn't have industrialized at all, why would this necessarily be a bad thing? Finland didn't industrialize until the 70s and they were always wealthier than us. Other countries also industrialized without having to murder and enslave their population.The whole industrialization thing sort of makes sense if you're looking at society from the top-down like some sort of farm full of cattle with unrealized potential and that everyone is dependent on the government in order to live a good life, but if you look at society from the bottom-up and assume that people should be free to earn money and live how they want without the government's help or hindrance (as was pretty much the case in the 20th century empire after Stolypin's reforms) it doesn't really matter if the country is industrialized or not, it just means there's a lot of open jobs, not enough labour, and the people who build factories to solve this problem would earn a lot of money and make products a lot cheaper, hence why a lot of factories were being built regardless of whether the government was involved or not.
If we had to explain it in terms of how it is in the 21st century, it's like how modern bolsheviks are accusing our countries of being backwards and stagnant because we don't have the robots and AI and automation like east Asian countries do "and that's why we're being over-taken by China", while at the same time saying that capitalists would use this technology to "steal everyone's jobs" if we had it here, so it's necessary for commies to come to power and run the robots and AI themselves so that they can redistribute the resources "fairly" to everyone and achieve "luxury space communism" or some shit, as if this utopian bullshit worked the first time during the first industrialization.
>My pov is that industrialization was partially forestalled because infrastructure and rough terrain made access to wealth difficult and infrastructure was more important for the Russian Empire.
This is a popular misconception, but wealth isn't something that is "accessed" or fought over, it is something that's generated. The argument that "the climate isn't right" or the "terrain isn't right" has been beaten to death here in Russia and only communists and vatniks use it to justify how shitty the country was even after all the favours that they and Putin did for us.