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Testing Early Soviet Economic Alternatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Holland Hunter  and
Janusz M. Szyrmer
Holland Hunter
Affiliation:
Haverford College
Janusz M. Szyrmer
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

This paper focuses on four issues concerning Soviet economic prospects debated in the 1920s. The first had been posed by Lenin in the summer of 1917 in Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia, where he explained confidently" … that expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in the enormous development of the productive forces of human society. But how rapidly this development will proceed … we do not and cannot know." In mid-September he added the well-known warning:

The result of the revolution has been that the political system of Russia has in a few months caught up with that of the advanced countries. But that is not enough. The war is inexorable: it puts the alternative with ruthless severity: either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically as well.

Type
1989 Moscow Historians Conference
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 253 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. SES-8720986 and by the Haverford College Faculty Research Fund. It was reviewed in a workshop at the Center for Soviet and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and in seminars at the universities of Novosibirsk and Leningrad.

1. English translation, ed. Wheatcroft, S. G. and Davies, R. W., Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy 1928-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Mainly from Gosplan SSSR, Kontrol'nye tsifry narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR za 1929/30 gg. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo planovoe khoziaistvo, 1930).

3. For further detail, see Holland Hunter and Janusz M. Szyrmer, Faulty Foundations: Soviet Economic Policies, 1928-1940 (Princeton University Press, in press), chapter 3 and appendix A.

4. See Hunter, Holland, “Soviet Agriculture with and without Collectivization, 1928-1940,” Slavic Review 47 (Summer 1988): 203–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar