I suppose I would be remiss in not mentioning that yesterday marked the centenary of the October Revolution (in the Old Style calendar; in the New Style November 7). The Bolshevik Revolution was a thoroughgoing disaster for Russia. Tens of millions of Russians died needlessly and it set Russia’s development back by 70 years.
And the disaster is ongoing. When a country’s institutions are torn down as thoroughly as the Soviets tore Russia’s institutions down, they aren’t replaced overnight. The only institutions left standing when the Communist Party collapsed were the military, the KGB, organized crime, and the last vestiges of the Orthodox Church.
Those are the institutions ruling and sustaining Russia today.
I’d say the outcome of the Revolution varies from mixed to tragic depending on how one looks at it. Material wealth improved rapidly until the 1970s as did health care, and educational attainment, particularly among women became world-class. Conditions would probably have been even better had the country not felt a need to devote 18% of its GDP to the military.
On the other hand were the mass executions, deliberate famines and prisons which characterized the oppression they rebelled against and chose to adopt into their ruling methodology. To me this is the tragedy, that they never transcended the brutality of the Old Order but recreated it wrapped in a red flag.
Progress was being made albeit slowly under the Tsar and your opinion of what actually happened under the Soviets is incorrect. Material progress was largely misrepresented. Agricultural production practically collapsed. As is the case now with China huge sums were spent on useless investments. Just as one small example railroad building essentially stopped for decades. The North-South trunk routes that existed when the Soviet Union collapsed were the same as under the Tsar and in lousy repair.
Military technology did pretty well, though.
Are there any plausible counterfactuals about what a non-Soviet Russia would have looked like? Following the overthrow of the Tsar what are the other alternatives? Enlightened feudalism that avoids modernization? It’s not hard to imagine it a completely subjugated Nazi colony had the Soviets not been in power.
In the 30 years following the Bolshevik takeover GDP per capita increased almost not at all. The Soviet Union experienced a post-war boom which I presume is what Ben is referring to. Compare that with the U. S. experience between 1920 and 1970. Even with the Great Depression our growth so far outstripped Russia’s that there’s really no comparison. Building the world’s largest dam across the world’s slowest river is a sign of brute force not scientific government. The Soviet scientific government which still has its admirers today was basically just one dumb mistake after another. Yes, they transferred relatively unproductive agricultural resources to industrial production which goosed GDP a little. Agricultural production declined and people starved.
This is the critical point: any attempted justification of the Soviet government is like praising Mussolini because he made the trains run on time.
Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time. It’s just a myth. The Soviets did take power after the old regime fell. That’s not a myth. They were brutal mass-murderers, but that’s not unique to communism. Look at the Europeans in the New World, for example. And saying that they set Russia back begs the question of what Russia would have been doing had it not been run by Bolsheviks.
Robert C. Allen makes a persuasive case that economic progress after the Revolution was quite good.
Oh yeah, the Revolution was great for Russia.
About the only positive thing that might be said is that the rapid and forced industrialization (thanks to the destruction of the Kulaks and collectivization) made the USSR better prepared to face the Nazis than it might have been otherwise. But even that is a pretty weak when one considers that collectivization killed about 4 million more Russians than the Nazis did.
Well, Russia would not have had 10% of its population murdered by its own government, for starters.
I’m not terribly knowledgeable about Soviet history, and have generally tended to view history as accurate only once its participants have passed away and we can talk truth without offense to person or kin.
I do remember one of my favorite professors in college who taught introduction to political philosophy said in his opening remarks that he was a Marxist and he welcomed all views and looked forward to discussions of mutual respect. And given that the Wall had just been torn down this was an unusual introduction and it came across as eccentric. But he was respectful and engaged in a way that encouraged mutuality, and while it was more a class on classic political philosophy (Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc.), he never, ever, ever and ever conceded that the Soviet Union was Marxist.
Hmmm, “accurate” is too strong a word; I hereby revise history and pronounce that for real history to take place someone or some people must die, leaving it for someone else to make sense of it all.
Was it Stalin and communism that beat the Nazis or the things that beat Napoleon; namely Winter, the vastness of Russia and the heroic resistance of the Russian people?
That’s like saying had in Earth-2 the Bolshevik Revolution in Germany not taken place, 6 million Germans would not have been murdered by their own government.
Somebody had to be in charge in Russia. The Soviets were terrible. But what was the alternative? Following the war, the aristocracy collapsed, whether socially in France (e.g. Proust’s Guermantes) or as actual rulers, i.e. the Hapsburgs or the Romanovs. What else was there?
CuriousOnlooker,
Stalin nearly lost the war for Russia. He and HItler could have been in competition in bad ideas for their side.
My feeling is that Stalin did establish a state ruthless enough to liquidate millions and win a civil war conclusively. Very few Russian exiles had serious dreams of a restoration. God knows there was cause to overthrow him following the German invasion, but it didn’t happen. I can imagine an interwar Russian state that was weak and blundering, and which would have collapsed within weeks of the invasion.
PD,
The USSR was definitely not Marxist, except in the most theoretical sense.
Curious,
That is still a subject of much debate. I tend to think it was all three, plus a few other factors (1930’s industrialization, lend-lease, Stalin finally realizing he should leave military operations to skilled professionals to name three).
MM,
Well, it’s pretty much impossible to determine who would have come out on top in a certain post-war political struggle had the Whites won the civil war. BTW Stalin did not win the civil war – if anyone deserves credit it is Trotsky.
And really, this all an academic debate as we know definitively that the Soviet communist system could not compete with western democracy and what gains it did make came from massive sacrifices and government oppression. It is not a system that should be defended.
Who is defending it?
Allen’s analysis is that from 1928-1970 Soviet economic growth was faster than in Western Europe and North America at 5.2 – 5.8% excluding, obviously, the years of WWII when the country was being destroyed by the Germans. Estimates that Tsarist Russia would have grown faster almost exclusively focus on the years 1885-1913 when the global market for wheat exports was surging.
And from 1917, the year of the revolution, to 1928 the economy collapsed, declining far below its condition under the Tsar. Failing to consider the entire period is cherrypicking.
The economy then recovered to about what it was under the Tsar (as I said above), beginning to grow again after the war. It then grew from a very low base so it’s not surprising that it grew faster than North America or Western Europe.
But it grew, as I also said, by moving relatively unproductive resources from agriculture to manufacturing without sustaining the agricultural base.
Watching people attempt to make the economic case for the Soviet Union leaves one slack jawed………
A quick read depicting real economic life in the East, from a once true believer later implanted as a KGB spy in the West is available in “Deep Under Cover.”
And from 1917, the year of the revolution, to 1928 the economy collapsed, declining far below its condition under the Tsar. Failing to consider the entire period is cherrypicking.
It’s impossible to compare the period from 1917 to 1928 because the Western countries entered a sustained economic slump during this period and then experienced a massive contraction which was not replicated in the Soviet Union. The data are too volatile.
The economy then recovered to about what it was under the Tsar (as I said above), beginning to grow again after the war. It then grew from a very low base so it’s not surprising that it grew faster than North America or Western Europe.
But it grew, as I also said, by moving relatively unproductive resources from agriculture to manufacturing without sustaining the agricultural base.
Allen’s analysis concludesavailable calories from farming grew from 1600 per capita in 1917 to 3200 per capita in 1970.
Here’s a helpful link on the Russian economy in the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s in Russian but you can probably read the infographics with a little effort. The second section is here.
What it says, basically, is that the Russian economy was growing nicely throughout the late
Tsarist period, that workers’ wages were rising, and that the general welfare of the Russian people was improving.
This infographic on industrial production is interesting:
That ended with the revolution and it took the economy nearly 30 years to recover to where it had been at the time of the revolution. After the war, as you note, things began to improve but they began to improve from a very low base.
This infographic on railway construction supports the observation I made in another comment:
This article on progress in education in late Tsarist Russia is interesting, too.
The source used above, Argumenti i Fakti is considered fairly reliable as Russian sources go.
As no one appears willing to read the book:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnTbDhDjvdk
Let’s summarize the difference of opinion, Ben. Your position is that when you average Russia’s economic growth over the 70 years from 1917 to 1987, Russia did pretty well. My position is that during the first 30 years after the revolution the Russian economy lurched from disaster to disaster and most of the growth you note took place in the 25 year period from 1945 to 1970, after which economic problems returned. I conclude that Russia would have been better off today had it merely continued down the reform path of the late Tsarist period and without murdering tens of millions of Russians. You cannot delink the murders and repression from Soviet economic development as you wish to do.
BTW, Ben, Allen’s research supports my point on wages in the late Tsarist period (they rose) but he’s just wrong on industrial production during that period. He needs to consider more data. It’s around but it’s hard to come by.
This might be a good point for me to mention that back when I was studying to be a Russia/Soviet analyst my area of interest was the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods. I suspect I’m the only person who frequents The Glittering Eye who’s had offers to have his papers published (specifically, papers about the revolution and the civil war) and received job offers as a Soviet analyst.
Dr. Allen is a specialist in the English industrial revolution and I see no evidence in his CV that he reads or speaks Russian.
Here’s a summary of Allen’s work on this:
A Reassessment of the Soviet Industrial Revolution
Here is some analysis:
The Soviet Union: GDP growth | Nintil
To me there are some glaring flaws in Allen’s understanding of history. Additionally, some of the data he relies on is modeled (or remodeled) and not empirical. I think it’s also a problem to use per-capita figures for things like consumption in the 1930’s considering the lack of any decent census figures until 1937, not to mention all the deaths in the prior decade due to the famine, collectivization and the terror. I’m also not sure how one accounts for the the approximately 18 million people who were slave laborers in the Gulag system over a 20 year period. The Gulags were the primary source of productivity in a few industries like mining and logging until the 1950’s.
Umm, our gracious host, you’ve said you were something of a dancer. Did you have an offer from the Bolshoi, too?
Nah, never into classical dance. Stage dancing only. Ballroom, tap. Like that.