The establishment is hostile to these Old Believers. The Old Believers retreat into self-imposed isolation. But some badly treated minorities just do badly. It can go either way. Too much challenge, as in Greenland, or too little, as in 18th-century China, and you get stagnation.
Landes takes a too simple view of the inevitability of what happened.
What happened happened, so it must have been. His main intellectual tool is hindsight. The same with South Korea vs. Turkey, Indonesia vs. Nigeria. I don't think so. Most economists and historians in 1945 thought Germany would take 50 years to recover.