The Development of the Agro-industrial Complex in the USSR

Abstract

Several stages may be identified in the economic development of the USSR which differ significantly from each other in terms of the nature of the interrelationship between the rates of industrial and agricultural growth, the impact on the general rates of economic development, and the utilisation of the productive and social potentials. Four stages may be distinguished:

• 1. Before the socialist revolution. Leaving aside periods of conflict and war and their aftermath, the country’s economy was predominantly dependent on agriculture, which was at the stage of simple cooperation of labour, with some manufacture. It did not provide adequate momentum for development and general economic growth. Agricultural development was insulated from industrial development, partly because of the high share of subsistence agriculture.

• 2. The years 1925–39. This was the stage characterised by an increasingly larger impact of industry upon general economic development, the conversion of the economy to the basis of socialist principles, and industrialisation, all of which affected the national growth rates. The rates of agricultural development were overtaken by those for industry due to the creation of the sectors for production of industrial inputs and for further indirect and complex production processes. At the same time, the dependence of agriculture on industrial development increased because of its transition to the use of machines and the establishment of a system of large-scale socialist agricultural production.