Andrei Markevich

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

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.

Quality, Experience, and Monopoly: The Soviet Market for Weapons under Stalin

Monopoly is a particular problem in markets where experience goods are traded, since the consumer cannot respond to bad experiences by switching repeat purchases to another supplier. New evidence shows how the defence ministry as buyer in the Soviet market for military goods responded to this problem by investing in an evaluation of quality prior to purchase, by showing reluctance to buy, and by exploiting the available non-market means to influence the defence industry as supplier. The effectiveness of these stratagems was limited by the defence industrys counteractions and because the buyer had no choice but to come to a compromise with the supplier.

The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century

Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.

Land Tenure and Productivity in Agriculture: The Case of the Stolypin Reform in Late Imperial Russia

We study the effect of changes in land tenure, launched by the 1906 Stolypin reform, on agricultural productivity in late Imperial Russia. The reform allowed peasants to obtain land titles and consolidate separated land strips into single allotments. Our estimations suggest that the net effect of the reform on land productivity was positive, mainly due to land consolidations. We argue and present evidence that land consolidations enabled peasants to make independent production decisions from the village commune and take advantage of readily accessible technological advancements. In contrast, the titling component of the reform decreased land productivity in the short-run, arguably because of transaction costs.

Quantity Versus Quality in the Soviet Market for Weapons

Military market places display obvious inefficiencies under most arrangements, but the Soviet defense market was unusual for its degree of monopoly, exclusive relationships, intensely scrutinized (in its formative years) by a harsh dictator. This provided the setting for quality versus quantity in the delivery of weapons to the government. The paper discusses the power of the industrial contractor over the defense buyer in terms of a hold-up problem. The typical use that the contractor made of this power was to default on quality. The defense ministry’s counter-action took the form of deploying agents through industry with the authority to verify quality and reject substandard goods. The final compromise restored quality at the expense of quantity. Being illicit, it had to be hidden from the dictator.

Labor Misallocation and Mass Mobilization: Russian Agriculture during the Great War

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment of military draftees in Russia during World War I to examine the effects of a massive, negative labor shock on agricultural production. Employing a novel district-level panel dataset, we find that mass mobilization produces a dramatic decrease in cultivated area. Surprisingly, farms with communal land tenure exhibit greater resilience to the labor shock than private farms. The resilience stems from peasants reallocating labor in favor of the commune because of the increased attractiveness of its nonmarket access to land and social insurance. Our results support an institutional explanation of factor misallocation in agriculture.

Democratic Support for the Bolshevik Revolution: An Empirical Investigation of 1917 Constituent Assembly Elections

We analyse the stability of democracy in agrarian societies by exploring cross-district variation in Russian citizens’ preferences in 1917 Constituent Assembly elections. After plurality eluded the Bolsheviks, they introduced a dictatorship of the proletariat, which they claimed was necessary until the industrial worker became the median voter. We find that i) proletarians voted pro-Bolshevik; ii) citizens rewarded Bolsheviks for redistributive policies that were antagonistic to the Bolsheviks’ long-run development program but were strategically chosen to bolster peasant support; iii) surprisingly, these same policies fuelled proletariat support. The Bolshevik promise of democracy after industrialisation thus already lacked credibility in 1917.

Repressions and Punishment Under Stalin: Evidence from the Soviet Archives

This chapter explores patterns of repressions and punishment under Stalin using two unique datasets extracted from the Soviet archives. First, I study the profile of the Great terror at one of Soviet industrial ministries, the chief administration of metallurgy. I find that the probability of arrest was higher for party members, high-rank officials, ethnic minorities, and employees with higher education in 1937. Second, my analysis of plan fulfilment by industrial ministries during the postwar years shows that penalties were negatively correlated with production achievements. I discuss these findings in the light of political and economic explanations of Soviet repressive policy.

Economic Development of the Late Russian Empire in a Regional Perspective

This paper analyzes the relative impacts of geographical and institutional factors on the economic development of the late Russian empire. I reconstruct gross regional products and labor productivity for all provinces of the empire around 1900 for the first time. My estimates highlight substantial heterogeneity within a middle-income country. I show that both natural advantages – sea access, mineral resources, land abundance – and institutions, in particular the legacy of serfdom, account for the observed variation. I also provide evidence that market potential and specialization externalities played a role.

Russia’s home front, 1914-1922 : the economy

This paper describes the main trends of the Russian economy through the Great War (1914 to 1917), Civil War (1918 to 1921), and postwar famine (1921 to 1922) for the general reader. During its Great War mobilization the Russian economy declined, but no more than other continental economies under similar pressures. In contrast, the Civil War inflicted the greatest economic trauma that Russians suffered in the course of the twentieth century. The paper identifies the main shocks in each period evaluates the relative contributions of circumstances and policy, and sums up their historical significance.