Chapter 1
SOVIET DEVELOPMENT IN WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The twentieth century was brief: it began with the Russian revolution of 1917 and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991. Other events were important, of course--Hitler's rise to power, world war, the dissolution of the European empires, America's world hegemony--but these developments were powerfully influenced by the economic growth and political challenge of the USSR. With the end of communist rule and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world has entered a new era.
Death requires a postmortem, and the death of a country is no exception. The Soviet Union was a great social experiment with political, social, demographic, and economic dimensions. This book focuses on the economic issues--socialized ownership, investment strategy, agricultural organization, the growth of income, and consumption. What worked? What failed? And why? What lessons does Soviet history have to teach?
Discussion of Soviet economic performance has often been highly judgmental even when the underlying research has been dispassionately social-scientific. This was inevitable since political and intellectual life in the twentieth century was dominated by the contest between capitalism and socialism. Until Stalin's barbarities were exposed in the 1950s, the Soviet Union was the paradigm of socialism, and, even after that, there were few alternative examples of "actually existing socialism" to contemplate. Perhaps especially for the dreamers of a "better, truer" socialism, it is important to perform the autopsy on the last attempt.
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