Blobbing in itself does not cause bad tech. Taking terrible provinces and not building province improvements coupled with no trading/bad trading practices leads to poor tech. As Russia, you are hard pressed to avoid this but your provinces have absurdly high manpower and expansion routes are many. The natural thing to do is go full Russian on your neighbours and crush them under your many, many armies. Give each 3 men a single gun and ration them ten bullets a week.