How successful was Russian industrialisation at modernising Russia before 1905?

Russian industrialisation was both successful and unsuccessful at modernising Russia, both for a number of ways.
On the one hand, it was successful. Factories experienced rapid growth, especially those in St Petersburg, Moscow, Baku and the Ukraine. This provided extra jobs for the society and by 1900 over half of the industrial workforce was employed in such factories. Another thing that rose dramatically was the production of coal, iron and oil, from 1898-1913, Russia had the highest national product growth. Both of these things showed that the industrialisation of Russia was successful, the production of these materials meant foreign investors were more interested in the country. It meant favourable changes in foreign markets; the increased foreign earnings meant they could bring in the latest machines and expertise. Also, the foreign experts guided the bourgeoisie and so growth was seen in these, they could sustain Russia’s industrialisation.
Another way that industrialisation was a success was the growth of the railways. They helped many different problems that Russia had been experiencing before industrialisation, for example communication and exploitation of raw materials. The railway also helped strengthen the military as it enables supplies to be transported around Russia. The railway, as well as factories, introduced more jobs for the Russian society and it became a major employer, with the amount of people working on the railway over the 25 year gap from 1865-1890 increasing by over 8 times, from 30,000 to 250,000.
Migration of workers was also successful. The railway meant journey times were reduced dramatically and the population of places along the track increased and so did production.
Although all of these ways are favouring that industrialisation worked to modernise Russia, there are also limitations to each of these points. In the production of its products, Russia still lagged behind the other countries, and the National Product figures were misleading. Although the factories were becoming a main employer for society and Russia had started to make a lot of its own resources, they neglected light engineering tasks such as machine tool production; this meant they still had to rely on foreign imports for such goods.
Another issue was with the foreign investors. As there was so much new interest from them, Russia became too reliant and ended up depending on them more than they needed which led them into billions of roubles worth of debt. From 1861 the rate of debt was 1.25 roubles, but after industrialisation and the interest from the foreign investors, Russia had run up a debt of 8 billion roubles. Servicing this debt took 20% of the yearly budget.
Another thing that wasn’t as successful as made out was the railway. For a large length of time the railway was only a single track, it lacked the branching tracks to lead to further parts of Siberia and other parts of the country, this is possibly because they did not have the money to enhance the railway further, and were using the foreign investments on other things. This meant the population was not widely spread and places were overpopulated; this lead to poor living conditions in towns and cities which proceeded to create more unease in society.
It is fair to say that the military was improved by the railway and by the industrialisation of Russia, but it was not all as strong as made out. The railway helped transport goods through the world wars, but before that there were still problems with transport of both the goods and the military themselves. There were also problems that were not addressed, such as training.
A main problem with the industrialisation was that they largely ignored the peasants. They did not help them, if anything they made their lives harder and adding more problems onto the ones they already had.

In conclusion, I believe that the industrialisation of Russia both helped and hindered them modernising. I believe that the argument is siding more towards being unsuccessful, as each positive point had a negative surrounding it for example unreliable statistics or unease of society.