(Specifying “post-NEP” since think the war communism economy and the NEP should be viewed as it’s own thing)
Trying to get into the real fine details regarding the Soviet economy - either the total period from Stalin to Gorbachev, or segments of that period. Really want to understand what went wrong, and what went right.
The problem I’m having is when I go to the bourgeois economic historians, they unsurprisingly shit on the economy under Stalin (or rather, emphasize the unsustainability of it long term) and praise Khrushchev and Gorbachev. Obviously that’s a biased route I’m not interested in going down.
However, whenever I go in the opposite direction, I feel like I’m reading sources that are maybe a bit too uncritical of the Stalin era economic policies. And you know what, maybe Stalin did actually get everything about the economy right. I’m open to that possibility. Obviously the track record is there. But idk, I haven’t found one source yet who has sufficiently shown their work on that (that I’m sure is due to me not finding the right sources yet). Like, when it comes to economic history, I don’t feel an overwhelming need to defend Stalin or criticize Khrushchev and Brezhnev, just trying to find a sober analysis from a Marxian source. I have a background in econ so I would feel comfortable handling something that’s a bit more technical, if such a resource exists.
Any suggestions welcome!
Also look into the books be R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft.
Yeah they are high on my list.
For the Soviet economy under Stalin, there’s a recent Russian economics book called Growth Crystal that deals with it. The full thing hasn’t been translated into English, but a PDF summary has:
https://crystalbook.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/growth-crystal-ENG.pdf
The full version of the book in Russian is available for free on the website too.
Even if you claim that a lot of the arguments from the book were too uncritical about Stalin, the nice thing about this book is that a lot of the primary sources referenced can be directly accessible through istmat.org (short for Historical Materialism), a website run by volunteers dedicated to digitizing materials from the Soviet archive (by the way, the guy who started the project was a communist who went to fight in the DPR until he was killed in a car accident in 2020).
You can actually cross-reference with the data from the Soviet archive, which I think is pretty cool. I’ve dug out a few reports to verify a couple of the claims, but I can only wish that my Russian is good enough to be able to utilize the full potential of such wealth of materials and information.
This Growth Crystal summary is great, pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Hope the full book gets translated into English one day, though.
For anyone who would like to learn about this topic, but is not looking for a deep technical dive: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Socialism_betrayed:behind_the_collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union(2004)
In August, we finally got an official English translation of Losurdo’s Stalin book. I feel like reading that and then Socialism Betrayed would be a great 1-2 combo (even if the Losurdo book isn’t really about Stalin’s economy).
I just started Losurdo’s Stalin book last weekend. Looking at the table of contents, it doesn’t include a lot of information focused on the fine details of the Soviet economy, even if it has the same level of detail as “Socialism Betrayed” I’ll be learning something.
