Lately catching up with Andrei Markevich and Mark Harrison on Russian/Soviet national income from 1913 to 1928, I’m impressed at the authors’ readiness to dirty their hands filling in the yawning chasm between our available benchmarks for a society transformed in the interim by war, revolution and chaos. I’m less than entirely convinced though by some of their choices in an exploration necessarily hedged to some extent by assumptions in the absence of comprehensive data.
It’s a huge topic, covering the economy of a nearly tenth of the world over a period of traumatic political & social upheaval and rebuilding, complicated by statistical uncerainties throughout and by the legacy of past manipulation and politicisation. Harrison and Markevich try to get to the truth by stripping the economy down to its nuts & bolts, with output series for key sectors weighted according to Falkus’s estimates and brought into line with Gregory’s 1913 national income figure by means of a further allowance for services.
For the most part the data are derived from existing production series, with interpolations for years for which firm figures are missing. Strictly the approach yields an index of gross output rather than value added, but it’s a tried & tested method that underlies most pre-20th-century estimates and for most countries remains the best we have. The resulting totals persuasively flesh out our hitherto sketchy impressions, broadly supporting the accepted picture: aggregate net national income for the territory of the interwar USSR fell by three-fifths in 1913-19, regaining its pre-war level in 1926/27, but income per head remained below the 1913 peak into the Plan era.
The calculation however involves some questionable assumptions which leave open the possibility that the drop may have been rather less precipitous and subsequent recovery more complete (though by no means complete in per capita terms).
First, in addressing the question of population, the authors rightly seek to correct the official population returns for what has long been known to be an ongoing cumulative overstatement arising principally from failure to deduct internal migrants from the estimated population of their former place of residence, while adding them to that of their new location. Deducting Finland and Poland from the population total for the "censused" part of the Empire, they then deduct a “compromise” 5½% to correct the official data, observing that this corresponds fairly closely to the findings of R I Sifman, though the resulting 152m for mid-1913 in fact falls short of Sifman's implied total by upwards of a million.
The authors’ next step is to arrive at a population for the interwar USSR by excising the areas lost after the Revolution: the later Baltic republics, western Belarus & Ukraine, Bessarabia and smaller areas of Transcaucasia. Here, Markevich & Harrison arrive at 19.7 million for the population of the ceded territories, concluding that the interwar USSR area contained 134.6 million people in 1913. But the figure for the lost provinces is inflated by the erroneous inclusion of Podolia, which instead remained a part of Ukraine throughout the USSR’s existence.
Deducting Poland and the corrected estimate for the lost territories from Sifman’s Empire total (which already omits Finland) and adding Khiva & Bukhara (not covered by the Imperial returns) yields a 1913 population of not 134 million but just under 140 million for the USSR area, very close in fact to Lorimer’s 1945 finding which put the ceded provinces at only 14.9 million in January 1914. The result underlines the unwisdom of applying a blanket correction factor across the Empire: while Szulc finds a 7% overcount in Poland, the interwar USSR included the principal receiving areas for internal migrants, so it requires a smaller adjustment than the Empire as a whole or even its non-Polish part. The error doesn’t affect the constant-area national income figure, but it threatens to distort the implied per capita trend.
One assumption that does affect the national income total relates to agriculture, where the authors accept Gosplan’s later upward revisions of pre-Revolutionary crop output. The modification has been widely questioned, as Markevich & Harrison acknowledge, but they propose its retention for 1913-19 in order to being the earlier data into line with the returns for the 1920s. They may be correct in so doing, but most sources retain the unadjusted returns. The Soviet authorities themselves seem later to have abandoned the correction, though this might be dismissed as an attempt to play down relative Soviet underachievement. Naum Jasny, among Soviet agricultural performance’s fiercest critics, seems to have found the original Imperial data satisfactory. The net impact could be to understate 1920s national income by 5% relative to 1913.
The paper’s assumptions don’t all point in the direction of higher pre-revolutionary per capita output. On the perennial question of product quality, the authors make no downward adjustment to Soviet output, observing that while some doubtless fell below pre-revolutionary standards, other sectors shared to some extent in wider technical advance - which might be read as a polite way of noting that the Russia of 1913 was itself hardly famed for cutting-edge finery.
An error that doesn't affect the constant-area national income trend but instead overstates the "Empire" series is the authors' application of the Falkus/Gregory aggregates for the Empire to their own "Empire excluding Poland and Finland". Falkus and Gregory indeed exclude Finland, as did the contemporary imperial returns - but they include Congress Poland, representing nearly a tenth of the total in the truncated form used by Markevich & Harrison (ie following Kholm gubernia's detachment in 1912). The smaller Empire on which the latter base their income figures may have reached the higher income total, but the estimates cited in the paper suggest something lower than the authors' findings. Happily the error doesn't affect the USSR series, which the authors base on Falkus's own Empire-to-Union conversion, itself a good deal more reliable than Gregory's.
All in all it’s a worthwhile effort, let down by some decidedly rickety & inconsistent population estimates and inattention to geographical coverage which could overstate the 1913 Soviet-area per capita income by as much as 4% relative to the 1920s, in addition to a possible far greater over-statement of pre-Revolutionary crop output and high figures for the old Empire. Markevich & Harrison are to be commended for tackling a too long neglected topic, but it remains one which would benefit from closer investigation.
