Content area
This dissertation explores the origins and implications of the Soviet leadership’s shift toward a national autarkic orientation in the 1920s and 1930s. Through an analysis of party economists — Bolsheviks trained by the party to manage the Soviet economy —my dissertation argues that this period witnessed the emergence of a specific form of economic thought and practice: Stalinist economics. Contrary to the prevailing view that Stalinism was a variant of Marxism, I demonstrate that Stalinist economics was rooted in the tradition of statist and autarkic thought pioneered by 19th-century German economist Friedrich List. Stalinist economists rejected approaches from Oppositionist Soviet economists that located the Soviet economy in the world division of labor. Instead, Stalinist economists proceeded from the conception that the Soviet state as an isolated entity could build “socialism in one country.” Paradoxically, this approach became dominant in the mid-1920s, precisely as the Soviet Union was being reintegrated into the world capitalist economy. Ultimately, the contradiction between the growing integration of the world economy in the 20th century and the prevalence of autarkic conceptions resulted in economic policies that undermined the very foundations of the Soviet economic system.Based on extensive archival research, my dissertation details the intersection between the development of Soviet economics and the inner-party struggle of the 1920s and the transformation of economics into a propaganda tool of state policy in the early 1930s. My quantitative analysis of the fate of over 150 leading party economists shows that, during the Great Terror of the late 1930s, all party economists who continued to challenge Stalinist economics from the standpoint of internationalist Marxist economics were, without exception, murdered. The majority of those who survived adhered to the principles of national autarky and played a significant role in Soviet economics well into the 1960s, determining what was understood as Marxist economics globally. By contrast, the intellectual and theoretical legacy of Marxist economists murdered during the Terror remained inaccessible for several generations.