Despite a Century of Turbulence, Russia Today Ranks in the Global Economy where It Did in 1917, Razuvayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 7 – The October Revolution, the 102^nd anniversary of which many mark today, turned out to be “a zigzag of history,” financial analyst Aleksandr Rzuvayev says, with Russia’s economic ranking despite all the country’s ups and downs now standing at exactly the same place in world rankings that it did a century ago, between fifth and sixth place.

            How people evaluate the Bolshevik coup d’etat depends on their political preferences, but it is useful to consider the changes in the trajectory of economic growth at various points since 1917 to put that event in context, the analyst writes in Nezavisimaya gazeta (ng.ru/blogs/razuvaev/kommunisticheskiy-eksperiment-v-tsifrakh-v-globalnoy-ekonomike-pozitsi.php).

            After the revolution, the financial analyst continues, the Russian economy fell in 1921 by 48 percent compared to 1913. Between 1922 and 1928, as a result of NEP, the economy grew and in the latter year, the Russian economy exceeded that of 1913 by “almost 10 percent.”  

            The Soviet Union’s system of planning allowed the country to create heavy industry and a military-industrial complex, but “to compare the USSR and the capitalist economies of the West is very complicated.”  Many goods in a planned economy had no real prices, there was virtually no service sector, and the ruble was not convertible. Moreover, Russia supported the other republics and many foreign countries.

            It is no surprise that “at the end of the 1980s, the idea of rejecting communism and getting rid of the republics began to dominate both in society and in the upper reaches of the Russian authorities.” Gorbachev made the situation worse by his inflationary policies that led to mass shortages.

            The result of these feelings, of the fact that capitalism defeated socialism in providing a good life for those living under it, was “the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1991 and the restoration of capitalism.” The transition as hard and in the early 1990s, Russia’s GDP fell 40 percent, and hyperinflation wiped out almost all savings.

            But beginning in 1999 with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin and the rise in oil prices, the country’s GDP rose again, with industrial production exceeding Soviet figures, the ruble becoming a hard currency, and the Russian economy rising to the same place on the international scale as  it had before all this began.