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The Economic Costs of the GULag Archipelago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Holland Hunter
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Extract

Professor Rosefielde makes at least two important points: some official Soviet physical output series really were (and are) exaggerated, and output expansion in the 1930s was not based on a surplus extracted from agriculture. But his valiant efforts lack a sense of proportion, and his exaggerated claims weaken his case.

His version of the “standard theory,” for example, appears to confuse intentions with actuality. It seems to me that informed Western consensus about events between 1928 and 1940 runs as follows: Soviet output increases were obtained through very large increments of labor and fixed capital, without much contribution from technological progress.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 588 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1980

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References

1. See Holland Hunter and Everett J. Rutan, III, “Testing Soviet Economic Policies, 1928-1940,” July 1980, report supported by a grant from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research.

2. Skepticism concerning the “surplus” extractable through collectivization has been expressed for many years. It is cogently argued in Z. M., Fallenbuchl, “Collectivization and Economic Development,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 33, no. 1 (February 1967): 1–15Google Scholar, which reviews collectivization experience in several countries. Fallenbuchl cites papers from 1962 and 1964 by the Polish economist J. Tepicht. Subsequent analyses by Barsov, Millar, and others have confirmed these doubts.

3. See Tsentral'noe upravlenie narodno-khoziastvennogo ucheta SSSR, Sotsialisticheskoe stroitel'stvo SSSR (Moscow, 1936), pp. 3-18, 508.

4. G regory, Grossman, Soviet Statistics of Physical Output of Industrial Commodities: Their Compilation and Quality (Princeton, 1960), p. 61–63.Google Scholar

5. Galler, Meyer and Marquess, Harlan E., Soviet Prison Camp Speech: A Survivor's Glossary (Madison, Wise, 1972), p. 192.Google Scholar

6. Berliner, Joseph S., Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 160–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Simon, Kuznets, “A Comparative Appraisal,” in Bergson, Abram and Kuznets, Simon, eds., Economic Trends in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 333–72 Google Scholar, especially pp. 368-71.