14 - Economic and demographic change: Russia’s age of economic extremes

Summary

The enduring fascination with Russia’s twentieth-century economic history has its roots in the politics of revolution. For the Bolshevik leadership, the events of 1917–18 presaged the foundation of a more equitable, humane and modern economic and social order, one that would hold out hope to millions of oppressed and impoverished people within and beyond Russia’s borders. For the Bolsheviks’ opponents, the revolution was destructive and barbaric, reversing a half-century of prior economic progress under the tsarist regime, for the sake of what seemed to many of them to be dubious social and economic goals. These sharply polarised opinions have, to a greater or lesser extent, coloured the way in which later generations have assessed the aspirations and the performance of the Russian economy during the twentieth century. When Stalin launched an extraordinarily ambitious programme of economic modernisation and social change upon the Soviet Union after 1928, jettisoning traditional forms of agricultural organisation and cementing a system of central economic planning, the controversy between enthusiasts and sceptics only deepened. The enthusiasts pointed to rapid economic growth and dramatic technological change during the 1930s, contrasting this with the prolonged depression in the capitalist West. Victory in the war against Nazism seemed to them to have validated the Stalinist industrial revolution. For their part, the sceptics questioned the magnitude of economic growth, drew attention to systemic deficiencies and highlighted the widespread terror and population losses.