ABSTRACT
Within the USSR itself, a considerable degree of selfsufficiency in basic, often bulky, products, such as building materials and vegetables, was encouraged at a local level. Regional specialisation, the ‘international’ division of labour, was, however, also encouraged and, in the case of some products, unavoidable. Thus, for example, more than
half of Soviet oil output came from the single region of West Siberia in the 1980s, almost half of the pig-iron was smelted in the eastern Ukraine, and most of the textiles were manufactured in the Centre region. Similarly, some primary products were obtained from very small areas, for example tea mainly from Georgia, diamonds from the Yakut ASSR in Siberia, and cotton from the oases of the Central Asian republics. Thus the various republics and regions of the USSR were economically highly interdependent, much of the flow of goods being handled by the rail network or on inland waterways and coastal shipping links. Each year an average of one tonne of goods per inhabitant was carried some 10,000 km (6,200 miles).
