The Soviet Union during the Great Depression: The Autarky Model

Abstract

The Great Depression affected the industrialized powers at different times and in different ways. Some suffered steep, others small, production declines; some recovered slowly, others more quickly. Despite these differences, no major industrialized market economy escaped significant economic losses from the Great Depression/Slump of the 1920s and 1930s. Other studies in this collection examine the experiences during the Great Depression of economies that belonged to the global trading and monetary systems, trying to isolate its causes — monetary, exchange rate, trade restrictions, technology shocks, and so on. The Soviet Union represents the sole example of a planned socialist economy, bent no less on autarky. Having created an administrative-command system designed to insulate the domestic economy from demand and external shocks and independent of international capital flows, the Soviet economy experienced rapid economic growth and industrial transformation during the very period when other economies were stagnating. Moreover, the Soviet Union was the sole case of a country that followed a deliberate development strategy, executed by administrative actions rather than markets, to oversee its rapid industrialization. It was this exceptional Soviet experience that lent it much of its appeal in the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe and more so in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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