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in
the postwar period the capitalist world confronted the soviet system
with a powerful economic challenge. in the late 1940s and early
1950s, the leading industrialized countries of the west entered the
era of a scientific and technological revolution. this opened a
period of rapid transition to a new, postindustrial, stage of
development. as the technological revolution advanced, it was
becoming more and more obvious that the inherent characteristics of
the soviet economic model stood in the way of technological
progress. with the only exception of the military-industrial
complex, the latest scientific and technological achievements were
slow to enter into production on a nationwide scale.
overcentralization, the absence of competition, and a lack of
self-interest, motivation, and material incentives at all structural
levels of the economy were the main impediments to technological
progress. |
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during the war, overcentralization and planning, as the chief
underlying principles of the soviet economic system, had been developed
to the utmost. in the extreme conditions of war they stood the soviet
union in good stead, allowing to redeploy the country抯 industrial
capacity to the safety of the eastern regions and to concentrate all
available economic resources for the attainment of victory. but the
retaining of that system after the war was hardly justified
economically. |
nevertheless, the soviet government
continued to pump huge resources into the military-industrial
complex and the development of new types of weapons. in 1949 the
ussr successfully tested the atomic bomb, and in 1953 it overtook
the united states in the development of nuclear weapons by being the
first to test the hydrogen bomb. in the early 1950s direct military
expenditures accounted for 25 percent of the soviet budget. heavy
industry was the next priority, second only to the defense sector,
with machine-building, metallurgy, and energy generation allocated
the biggest share of state investment.
as a
result of the regime抯 obsession with continued expansion of the
ussr抯 military and heavy industrial capabilities, soviet
agriculture, the light and food industries, and the services sector
were severely underfunded. particularly desperate was the plight of
the peasants. agricultural production had been seriously undercut by
the war and the severe drought of 1946. the wages the peasants
received in collective farms were a pittance.
the
villagers survived mainly thanks to the minute patches of land that
had been left to them by the state for their individual use as
household plots. these privately owned allotments were a concession
that stalin had been obliged to make to the collectivized peasants
in the 1930s in the face of violent and widespread resistance to
collectivization. during the war, when the state抯 grip on
agriculture had somewhat relaxed, the peasants had been able to chip
off strips of the collectivized field to augment their private
plots. in 1946?7 this creeping privatization was uncovered, and the
strips were reconfiscated. yet the miniature individual plots,
amounting to some 3 percent of all cultivated land, remained the key
element of the subsistence economy in the village and also supplied
agricultural produce to peasant markets in the cities. peasants?
household plots were also used to support privately owned livestock.
overall, they produced nearly half of all soviet meat, milk, and
green vegetables. by contrast, the work on collective and state
farms was, by and large, performed carelessly and inefficiently. by
the early 1950s state-controlled agricultural production had managed
to reach its prewar level only to enter a period of drawn-out
stagnation.
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