Accumulation and Labor Coercion under Late Stalinism

The archives tell us that Stalin was obsessed with accumulation, which is hardly a surprise. One of the great stylized facts about the Soviet economy under Stalin was the sharp increase in its accumulation rate, accompanied by the fierce repression of private consumption. Between 1928 and 1937 Stalin shifted nearly 30 per cent of Soviet GNP out of private consumption into investment and government purchases; the investment rate doubled (Bergson, 1961: 217, 237). More generally, investment rates in socialist countries were consistently higher than in capitalist countries of comparable size and income levels (Kuznets, 1963: 352–57). Olson (1993) argued that a self-interested proprietary dictator or sedentary bandit who settles on and monopolizes a territory would maximize his rent through time by taxing heavily and reinvesting the surplus…

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