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Great War, Civil War, and Recovery: Russia's National Income, 1913 to 1928

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2011

Andrei Markevich  and
Mark Harrison
Andrei Markevich*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, New Economic School, Suite 1721, Nakhimovskii Prospekt 47, 117418 Moscow, Russia; and Associate Fellow of the Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected].
Mark Harrison*
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Economics and CAGE, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom; and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom; and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6010. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

The last remaining gap in the national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century, 1913 to 1928, includes the Great War, the Civil War, and postwar recovery. Filling this gap, we find that the Russian economy did somewhat better in the Great War than was previously thought; in the Civil War it did correspondingly worse; war losses persisted into peacetime, and were not fully restored under the New Economic Policy. We compare this experience across regions and over time. The Great War and Civil War produced the deepest economic trauma of Russia's troubled twentieth century.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , 13 September 2011 , pp. 672 - 703
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2011

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SUPPLEMENTARY DATA

An Appendix, including a review of previous estimates, supplementary data, and further discussion, with Tables A1 to A39, is available at http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/publications/abstract.htm?id=2.