Economy and Power in the Soviet Union, 1917–39

Abstract

The ongoing crisis of global economic system has once again rendered visible power of economy to structure everyday human existence. From budgetary shortfalls to state austerity programs, concerns over monetary stability to persistent structural unemployment, present crisis has reasserted primacy of economic at global and local levels. It has also resuscitated a language about economy--including anxiety over devaluation, speculation, nationalization, socialization, and austerity--that seemingly had been consigned to dustbin of history. The rediscovery of power of economy is, of course, a surprising development only in most nearsighted and localized of historical perspectives. Systemic economic disequilibrium and specter of market-dictated restructuring have long been familiar to those who study late Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasian world. From stagnation of late Brezhnev era, to failed restructuring of perestroika, crises of 1989-91, and upheaval wrought by Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, economic crisis has been a recurring and well-documented phenomenon in former Soviet territories. That economic crisis has also been a persistent feature of what used to be called First World during same period is no less significant a phenomenon for historians of Soviet Union. (1) Indeed, synchronicity of crises in Western and Soviet spheres--most noticeably, during transsystemic stagflation crisis of 1970s that ushered in both Reaganism and Gorbachevism--suggests persistent interconnections that bind together economic systems even in context of heated geopolitical opposition. The articles collected in this forum aim to reconsider role played by economy in Soviet interwar period. They examine relationship between economic crisis and establishment of system of Stalinism. Aware of limitations of economic history produced during ascendant period of Soviet history--most notably, constricted and frequently deterministic appropriation of economy in traditional Marxist historiography--we do not intend simply to return to earlier traditions. Rather, we seek to engage with what William H. Sewell has recently called the historical study of economic by considering anew relationship between economic change and contemporaneous transformations in society, culture, law, and politics. (2) We re-embrace study of economic life in Soviet context, arguing that turn to Stalinism at end of 1920s was structured fundamentally by onset of global crisis in capitalist economic system, of which Soviet Union remained a firmly ensconced, if thoroughly ambivalent part. (3) Aside from early political struggles over party leadership, few subjects attracted as much sustained historical attention during formative period of Soviet historiography in West as nature and function of Soviet economy. The period spanning late 1920s through mid-1970s witnessed publication of foundational monographs on Soviet economy and economic policy by Maurice Dobb, Colin Clark, Solomon Schwarz, Abram Bergson, Naum Jasny, Alexander Erlich, Alec Nove, and R. W. Davies, to name but a few. (4) E. H. Carr's field-defining opus, while not explicitly a work of economic history, nevertheless placed economy at center of a total history of USSR. (5) Regardless of ideological and political divisions, pioneering generations of Sovietologists more or less accepted ascendancy of economy as a structuring reality of Soviet historical development. It would be difficult to overstate contribution of these founding generations of economists; indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that they by and large established field of Soviet history. Their framing concerns included role played by party in construction of economic policy, intraparty disputes over trajectory of economic policy, origins and consequences of collectivization and establishment of mass institutions of production and consumption, and discussion over inevitability of development of Stalinist planned economy. …