The first 35 years of Soviet living standards: Secular growth and conjunctural crises in a time of famines

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Abstract

This article investigates welfare and living standards in the Soviet Union during the great crises of the first 35 years of Soviet power, during which the USSR experienced 5 major famines. It reviews the classic literature on traditional measures of Soviet consumption and recent critiques of them. It discusses the nature of welfare and welfare indicators, the reliability of Soviet statistical indicators on welfare, and it charts the dimensions of the groups in Soviet society that were most vulnerable to these welfare crises. A range of welfare indicators covering nutrition, mortality and stature are critically examined both regarding their immediate and long-term consequences and the groups affected.

Introduction

This article investigates welfare and living standards in the Soviet Union during the great crises of the first 35 years of Soviet power. This was an extraordinary period in which critical welfare crises covered more than half of these years,1 and where there were at least 5 major famines. Because these crises and famines were associated with major political events, (revolutions, wars, collectivization) there has been a tendency to view them as separate individual events, and to ignore their common aspects. At the time attempts were made to distort the record and to conceal the scale and nature of these famines. Very little information was publicly available about these famines until the archives were opened. However, considerable materials were gathered at the time and preserved in the archives together with reports and other documents indicating the nature of the internal struggles over statistical evaluations. These materials are now available. This article makes a critical analysis of the whole range of data on welfare over this period, including those from previously closed Soviet archives.

The first part of the article begins with a review of the classic literature on traditional measures of Soviet welfare, and recent critiques of them. These works estimated the growth of real wages and household consumption for the whole of the Soviet population between a selected number of relatively favorable years. While this approach did produce results that corrected some of the excessive claims of the Soviet government at the time, it under-estimated the complexity of the situation which the USSR faced, the many crises through which Soviet society was passing, and the fractured nature of society as regards the welfare entitlements of different groups.

The second part of the article discusses the nature of welfare, the overall reliability of Soviet statistical indicators and provides a survey of the most vulnerable groups in society, who were most likely to face the most severe entitlements crises.

The third and major part of the article surveys a range of welfare related indicators that capture crisis developments for society as a whole, and wherever possible for separate groups within society. All of these indicators are treated critically with an exposition of the politics around them, the extent of political distortions and a general assessment of their reliability.

Section snippets

Early classics: Bergson, Chapman and Gregory

In the 1950s, Abraham Bergson and his team (including Janet Chapman) carried out a major US research effort to analyse the ‘real’ nature of Soviet economic growth as distinct from the ‘unreal’ claims that were being made by Soviet officials at the time.2 Janet Chapman’s early (1954) estimates of Soviet real wages argued that contrary to the Soviet claims of growth, that

The nature of welfare

Welfare can be considered in two ways. One approach is based on the presumption that increases in the supply of consumer goods and services, automatically increases welfare. The other approach is to presume that greater longevity and in stature are consequences of improved welfare. The first of these approaches sees welfare as a more or less immediate consequence of economic activity directed towards increasing the supply of consumer goods, while the latter sees welfare as the consequences of a

Indicators of crisis in welfare levels

Below we will consider a range of different types of welfare indicators. Nutritional data provide a direct indicator of immediate welfare levels. Data on mortality and stature are generally more complex and provide indirect indicators, which give an indication of welfare over a length of time. However, in extreme cases (famines) mortality data can also provide a more direct and immediate indicator of these crises.

Censuses

After the Revolution a census was carried out in 1920 and it was proposed that others would be carried out at regular ten year periods. However, 1920 was in the middle of the civil war, and by the mid 1920s it was clear that a mid term census was required. Popov, the first Director of TsSU gained more unpopularity with the political leadership by arguing that serious planning required a firm statistical basis, but he was eventually allowed to plan a mid-term census. This was initially scheduled

What did these mortality data show?

The following graph is based on the table of data prepared by the French demographer Biraben (1976) pp. 441–478. It provides a very clear indication of the dynamic of Soviet demography in this period as a move along the lines of a demographic transition (from high mortality and natality in the 1890s to relatively low mortality and natality in the 1960s), but with the interruption of three major mortality crises in 1914–1923, 1928–1933 and 1941–1947 (Fig. 4).

Subsequent work, following the

Conclusions

This paper has argued that the Soviet Union experienced three major welfare crises in the first half of the twentieth century as it progressed towards sustained higher welfare in the second half of the twentieth century, and that the statistical record of this progression is remarkably good, given the severity of the crises and the various political problems of the times. The paper argues the importance of understanding the political context in which certain adjustments to figures were made, in

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    I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for providing support for this project, and to R.W. Davies and Tony Phillips for reading the drafts and offering advice.

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