ABSTRACT
The Soviet economic system was developed in order to serve certain purposes, notably the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. Despite a justifiable degree of scepticism concerning exaggerated official claims—of which more will be said in the Appendix—the achievements of the system are indeed impressive. Despite great difficulties, big errors, much suffering and cruelty, and a destructive war, the USSR today is second only to the United States and is publicly challenging America to an economic race, claiming that American per capita production figures can be reached by 1970. Once again, a certain scepticism about the actual figures should not detract from our appreciation of the magnitude of the achievement. Yet the economy seems to be suffering from a number of major inefficiencies, it has been allocating resources irrationally; or such, at least, would be the conclusions legitimately drawn from the data presented in many of the preceding chapters. It may be asked: is there not an inconsistency here? If the USSR has indeed succeeded in overcoming many serious obstacles to growth, has built up its economic might so rapidly, then perhaps its policies and its economic structure were not, after all, so very irrational? Surely the system did possess features which contributed to rapid growth in the Soviet setting? Perhaps the weaknesses and distortions analysed in earlier chapters are the obverse side of methods of industrialization which have, or had, a rationality of their own? Did we not, perhaps, adopt implicitly standards of judgment too 'western', too narrowly economic, to form a sound basis for assessing the performance of the Soviet system? These are serious questions, and the criticism which they contain does have a certain validity. Unless we appreciate this, we shall be in imminent danger of falling into the error of regarding essential features of the Soviet economic system merely as aberrations, or as the projection into the economic field of power-seeking megalomania of particular leaders. A particularly useful corrective is to examine those features of the system which arose as a response to problems of development as such. This task is facilitated by the growing literature on development, produced by western economists who have studied how to overcome obstacles to industrialization in underdeveloped countries outside the Soviet bloc.
