To complete the record of Russian long-term growth, national income estimates linking 1913 with 1928 are required. Although one could, with great effort, compile benchmark estimates for a number of years intermediate between 1913 and 1928, the costs appear to outweigh the benefits of such calculations. This period witnessed the ravages of World War I, the revolution and civil war, and then the economic recovery from these traumatic political events during the 1920s. The official Soviet figures (Table 5.1) testify to these upheavals. An investigation of the impacts of these political events upon economic output would be an interesting project, but its relationship to the task at hand, assessing tsarist and Soviet long-term growth performance, may be remote. For this reason, I have chosen to deal with only two benchmarks: 1913, the last year of “normal” economic activity before World War I, and 1928, the initial year of the five-year-plan era.

The principal reason for interest in 1913 and 1928 comparisons is the need to determine the relative starting point of Soviet forced industrialization. The Soviet and Western literatures appear to be in general agreement that the Soviet economy had completed (or nearly completed) its recovery from the losses of war and civil war by the mid-1920s and argue that massive infusions of capital were required to generate rapid long-term growth.