Czarist growth: Soviet growth in historical perspective

Western empirical research on the planned socialist economies was initiated, in large part, by the pioneering work of Abram Bergson and his associates. Bergson's own recalculations of Soviet national income have served as the model for other researchers, who have extended this line of inquiry to Eastern Europe and to China. This empirical work has allowed economists to deal with the issue of the relative efficiency of planned socialism and to define the characteristics of the socialist model of economic development.

To this point it has been difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate Soviet economic development in proper historical perspective, for relatively little is known of the economy that the Bolsheviks inherited from their czarist predecessors in 1917. The extant evaluations of Soviet economic growth and structural change are usually cast in terms of comparisons with the early (pre-Five-Year-Plan) Soviet period or with the historical or cross-sectional growth experiences of capitalist countries. Bergson's own calculations, for example, begin in 1928 on the eve of the First Five Year Plan; Kuznets's evaluation of Soviet growth rests upon comparisons with the industrialized West.

Lacking are comparisons of economic growth and structural change during the Soviet era with the late czarist era. Such comparisons are important for two reasons: The first is the need to determine the long-term growth rate during the late czarist era, in order to establish whether growth accelerated following the initiation of centralized planning.