In 1913, Imperial Russia was the least developed of the European powers. By 1940 the USSR had become, to a large extent, a modern industrial state. The employment share of agriculture had declined from three quarters in 1913 to one half in 1940; its contribution to national income had shrunk from one half to a mere 30 per cent. The product of industry, construction, and transport had doubled and tripled. Most striking of all was the fact that these great changes had been compressed into a single decade of intense activity, under the first and second five-year plans (1928–37); in the same decade, the advanced capitalist economies had suffered the worst depression of modern times.

There was a debit side to the Soviet achievement. The era had begun with a catastrophic foreign war which had ripped apart the fabric of the old regime. World war (1914–7), the two revolutions of 1917, and civil war (1918–21) had merged into a single process which left Soviet Russia, in 1921, traumatised and exhausted from years of bloody fighting and institutional upheaval, now entering a disastrous famine. The economy was still recovering when Stalin's policies of mass collectivisation of peasant farming, forced industrialisation, and sweeping purges of government and society imposed fresh burdens. Inter-war economic development was crisisridden, not by the demand deficiency and trade wars which fettered the market economies at this time, but by periodic overcommitment and overstrain of supply, culminating in sharp slowdowns of economic expansion in 1931–2 and 1937–40.