Soviet economic development, 1928–1965

Abstract

Soviet economic growth in these years falls into four distinct periods: (1) the pre-war industrialisation drive, 1928–41; (2) the Second World War, 1941–5; (3) post-war recovery, 1946–50; (4) post-war expansion, 1950–65. The pre-war industrialisation drive, 1928–1941 The figures for GNP as a whole do not reveal the most striking feature of Soviet economic development: the extraordinarily rapid development of industry, and particularly of capital goods, in contrast to the poor performance of agriculture. As table 10 (p. 82) shows, according to a Western estimate industrial output trebled between 1928 and 1940, increasing by nearly 10 per cent a year. These developments led industry to be concentrated into much larger units than in the Tsarist period. While one-third of industrial production came from small-scale industry in 1913, by 1937 the proportion had fallen to only 6 per cent (Kaufman 1962, p. 58). The expansion of capital goods industries and the advance of their technology were very uneven. The pressure for more output in conditions in which unskilled labour was relatively abundant resulted in the employment of much more labour per unit of output, particularly in auxiliary processes, than in the major Western industrial countries. This was a kind of dual technology, and was well described as ‘a labour-intensive variant of capitalintensive technology’. How far were these developments dependent on foreign technical know-how and the import of foreign technology? During the early 1930s many foreign firms and individuals provided technical assistance to the major capital projects; and several thousand engineers and industrial workers were employed in design institutes, on capital projects and in factories.