Economic Overview

Abstract

The ukrainian economy has long been regarded as the backbone of the Soviet industrial empire. In addition to its well known importance to the Soviet agricultural economy, the republic’s natural resources, particularly iron ore and coal, ensured that it would play a key role in Stalin’s plans for industrialization in the 1930s. It was in Ukraine, in 1935 that the Donbass miner Aleksei Stakhanov achieved the improbable feat of hewing Ioz tons of coal in a single shift, thereby helping to initiate the official movement named after him, “Stakhanovism” (see Chapter Six). In many ways, Stakhanovism is symptomatic of many of the problems facing the economy today: the ruthless and quasi-colonial exploitation of nonrenewable resources for the all-Union economy; the emphasis upon quantity rather than quality; the selfless performance of the workers and their apparent willingness to make sacrifices for the good of the country. Past industrialization has signified that at the beginning of the 1990s decade, when Ukraine starts on the road of economic sovereignty (and perhaps political sovereignty), it is facing the ultimate paradox that upon gaining control over the nation’s natural resources, it lacks sufficient resources to survive alone.