I think there was also a lot of misunderstanding in the West how things could go. Having easily accessible strong rights systems outside of Russia but a weak one inside combined certainly in expected ways - derailing ideas of how these things would form inside Russia as a necessity.

They killed the very people who would have made it work a few decades earlier. However motivated ...

The countries that were prosperous in 1724 were the ones that had highly developed trade networks and a market full of not-very-constrained individual players.

It is precisely by mimicking them that capitalism spread into other nations and pushed out various previous feudal forms, even though the local nobles fought back against the tide for decades and centuries, sometimes managing to stop it for a while.

If you take a historical map of Europe in the 18th century and mark various instances of liberalizing legislation on it, you can see the spread quite nicely. It is almost like an ink blotch spreading on a table.

The places that resisted the new ideas the most (the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire) and managed to keep their old feudal norms deep into the 19th century were the ones that ended up on the bottom, and had to speedrun industrialization and development in the 20th century under top-down reformers like Lenin and Ataturk.

Singapore? Korea? Israel? Norway?

Germany? Didn't even exist in 1724 and the area was heavily destroyed by the 30 year war the century before. But depends what you mean by "laissez-faire capitalism".

Singapore

> Can you give an example of a country that started poor, adopted laissez-faire capitalism, and became a prosperous nation?

Most of Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s, average wages were ~30 USD per month, that is, less than dollar a day. Now they are rapidly catching up with Western Europe.

Laissez-faire capitalism wasn't a choice, but the only responsible option left when you have no meaningful national economy. People were told that the state budget is empty and there's no money to hand out, and that they have to find a way to survive on their own. And they did.