ABSTRACT
The despair of poverty is hard to imagine for those who have never suffered it. A decade after the conclusion of the Great War the era of the Great Depression began, reducing millions of people in the advanced Western world to the levels of grinding poverty suffered throughout the twentieth century by humanity in Asia, South America and Africa. The peoples living in the empires of the West now fell even below the barest subsistence levels as the price they could obtain for their raw materials dropped precipitously. Their economies were dependent on the demand of the West. Whatever befell the industrialised West, the effects on the poor of what we now call the Third World were even more catastrophic. At the time only one country appeared immune – the Soviet Union, where industrial production increased. It was a persuasive argument to some that communism provided the only solution to the periodic booms and depressions that bedevilled the trade cycle. But in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s state planning actually imposed hardships as great as, and greater than, anything happening in the West.
