Russia’s Real National Income: The Great War, Civil War, and Recovery, 1913 to 1928

Abstract

We are working towards filling the last remaining gap in the historical national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century. The gap includes the GreatWar (1914 to 1917), the Bolshevik Revolution, the CivilWar andWar Communism (1918 to 1921), and postwar recovery under the New Economic Policy of a mixed economy (1921 to 1928). Our work builds on our predecessors and also returns to a number of original sources. We find that the economic performance of the Russian Empire in wartime was somewhat better than previously thought; that of War Communism was correspondingly worse. We confirm the persistence of losses associated with the Civil War into the postwar period, or the failure of the New Economic Policy to achieve full recovery, or some mixture of both.We conclude that the GreatWar and CivilWar produced the deepest economic trauma of Russia’s troubled twentieth century.Civil War, GDP, Russia, Soviet Union,World War I