An Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 1917-1991 (Penguin Economics)

by Alec Nove

Release Date: May, 1993

Edition: Paperback

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Dated Book relying on old statistics?

Questionable statistics?: 13% of a crop destroyed is quoted, when the actual figures were probably much higher--some say 90% of a crop rotted. Who is to say? This is why nobody will ever definitively write the economic history of the USSR. At best educated guesses. But the author tries.

However, an economic history as opposed to a political history is for the USSR a distorted picture of what happened, because of the bad data problem mentioned above. Hence the three stars.

The Best-Available One-Volume Economic History of the USSR

Nove's history, already widely acclaimed (I had it as assigned reading at Cambridge), is updated in this "final" edition, completed just after the collapse of the USSR. It is extremely readable, just over 400 pages long, and gives a truly outstanding overview -- for the academic and the lay reader alike -- of the rise and fall of the Russian economy, from just before World War I until Gorbachev's resignation. Nove, one of the finest scholars in the field, makes full use of the then newly-opened Soviet archives to add to and refine what was already a brilliant work, and captures herein the first-ever scholarly assessment of the extraordinary Soviet experiment as a whole.

Alec Nove was Professor of Economics at the University of Glasgow from 1963 to 1982, subsequently becoming Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Fellow.