The Economy to 1977

Abstract

For half a century Soviet industrialisation has been protected from the three exogenous influences which dogged Count Witte in the 1890s and Lenin and Trotsky in the 1920s. The economic mechanism set up during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) sought to minimise the effect of wide fluctuations in the grain harvest by closing the farms from the state-managed sector; the variability of foreign demand and its effects on the means to import were shut off by withdrawal into virtual autarky; and changes in external prices were isolated from domestic prices by manipulation of the monopoly of foreign trade. The variations which hit the Soviet Union in the Ninth Five-Year Plan, 1971–5, were so wide under all three heads as to confront the authorities with the severest economic crisis since those of 1932 (famine in the wake of collectivisation) and 1942 (German occupation of the principal Soviet industrial centres).