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CHAPTER XIV - Economic and social policy in the USSR, 1917–41

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
R. W. Davies
Edited by
Peter Mathias  and
Sidney Pollard
R. W. Davies
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

The background: objectives and environment

Soviet policy throughout the inter-war years was dominated by the unprecedented endeavour to construct a radically new social and economic order, using the economic and political power of the state and the authority of the Bolshevik, or Communist, Party. Soviet economic and social policy – in the sense of the management and allocation of resources by government for economic and social purposes – was subordinate to the wider goal of establishing and consolidating a new type of society. By 1936, with the adoption of the Stalin constitution, this task had been accomplished. But the outcome was ambiguous: the new society was in many respects radically different from the vague and optimistic notions about the socialist future held by Marx and Engels and by their Russian successor Lenin.

Soviet policy is discussed in this chapter against this background. The main issues examined are the successes and difficulties of Soviet policy in attempting to reach the long-term objectives, and the modifications of objectives and policy which resulted from the mutual impact of policy and economic environment. Special attention is devoted to those ‘moments of choice’, or of apparent choice, when the course of policy changed substantially.

Marx and Engels, in their scattered comments on the nature of the society which would be established after the conquest of political power by the proletariat (the wage-earning working class), anticipated that the factories, the land, and the other means of production would be transferred into social ownership.

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The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire , pp. 984 - 1047
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

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