Navarro
Well-known member
Latter-day Communists and apologists for the USSR like to repeat the claim that Stalin, and the October Revolution in general, caused Russia's massive industrial growth in the 1930s and its status as a technological and military rival to the USA in the mid-20th century. Some have even gone so far as to argue that the genocidal killing of millions and totalitarian repression of life under communism were justified by this increase in industrial capacity. Thankfully, due to recent economic research actually analysing the factors in play, this has been soundly debunked.
Would Russia have industrialized without Stalin?
The question, "Was Stalin necessary?," posed in a recent paper, by economists Anton Cheremukhin of the Dallas Fed, Mikhail Golosov of Princeton, Sergei Guriev of…
foreignpolicy.com
The question, “Was Stalin necessary?,” posed in a recent paper, by economists Anton Cheremukhin of the Dallas Fed, Mikhail Golosov of Princeton, Sergei Guriev of the New Economic School in Moscow, and Aleh Tsyvinski of Yale, seems a bit tasteless at first. Obviously, nothing could make the 20th century’s greatest mass murderer “necessary.”
But considering Russia’s growth from a largely agrarian economic backwater into an industrialized power that was competing with the United States and putting humans into space in just a little over four decades, it’s worth considering whether the same result could have occurred had he never come along. The authors attempt to do this by developing a counterfactual model of how the Russian economy might have developed if it had continued on the same path it was on prior to 1918.
The authors point out that the Russian economy was not exactly stagnant in the late Tsarist period. Efforts to industrialize the country had begun with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and accerated in the early 20th century with the reforms undertaken by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, which included the adoption of a gold standard, investments in railroads, and the encouragement of exports. GDP per capita grew at around 1.91 percent between 1885 and 1913.
Economic productivity was decimated by World War I and the revolution, and only returned to pre-revolutionary levels by around 1928, following the limited market reforms of Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
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The authors run a counterfactual simulation of economic growth under “Tsarist” conditions, as well as comparing Russian performance to that of Japan — which had similar economic conditions prior to 1918:
...The Tsarist economy, even in our conservative version assuming that it would not experience any decline in frictions, would have achieved a rather similar structure of the economy and the levels of production as Stalin’s economy. However, this structural transformation would be achieved at a significant cost in terms of economic welfare measured in consumption equivalents. The short-run (1928-1940) costs of Stalin’s policies are very significant for an economy in a peaceful period. Our comparison with Japan leads to astonishingly larger welfare costs of Stalin’s policies.
The paper is a good reminder that just because terror coincided with industrialization in Stalin’s Soviet Union, one was not a precondition for the other. Obviously, even had the Bolsheviks never come onto the scene, it’s hard to imagine that the Tsarist status quo would have continued indefinitely without disruption. The paper doesn’t get into how some sort of non-Tsarist, non-Stalinist system might have fared.
And of course, taking a step back from the economics, the obvious answer to the question of whether a 16.5 lifetime gain in consumption levels makes 20 million deaths “necessary” is ‘no.’
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