Why did Russia develop differently from other late medieval European states?

Answer 1

A Vastly complex question which can be answered as follows:

Russia did not not develop the way other medieval European states did because, inter alia, it did not experience the following:

1) the Reformation - it remained an essentially monlithic Orthodox country which did not challenge Medieval notions of God, of church and state, and man's individual responsibility in seeking his Creator, and in reading The Bible;

2) the Renaissance & a/k/a Enlightenment at least not to the same degree as the European states farther to the west;

3) the influx of scholars from Byzantium:

The other European states benefited from the competition, trade, intellectual, military etc. [which ended abruptly in 1453 with the Fall of Byzantium] between a Greek East and a Latin West, Russia remained a sect of isolates to the north/far north of Byzantium, and essentially oriental, backward and inward looking. With the fall of Constantinople, many/most of their intellectual and religious scholars fled west (not east and north) to Russia, though some did. They brought to the West 1300 years of knowledge of Classicism, most significantly, knowledge of Greek, the seeds of a neo-classical re-examination of logic and languages and faith.

In the late Medieval period, Russia remained consumed with throwing off the "Tatar Yoke," the Islamicized descendents of Ghengis Kahn; and later expelling the Ottoman Turks from what is south and south-west Russia - a process which did not end until 1923-24, when in the wake of WWI, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and its successor state, the Turkish Republic, abolished both the Caliphate, and the Sultanate -- a process of revolution and secularization which, simultaneously left Russia an atheist, repressive and backward state for an additional 70 plus years.